The Triple Option - Mack Brown & Urban Meyer Get BRUTALLY Honest About NIL, Arch Manning & Texas Football

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Arch Manning, the Texas Longhorns, NIL and the future of college football headline this episode of The Triple Option. Urban Meyer and Rob Stone break down the biggest questions in the sport: Will the SEC leave the NCAA? What's next for Michigan? Texas or Ohio State — who's better? And can artificial intelligence actually change college football? College Football Hall of Famer Mack Brown stops by to talk the future of the game, NIL, the transfer portal, and what this season holds for Arch Manning and the Longhorns. Urban and Rob react to Greg Sankey's SEC Media Day comments and Michigan AD Warde Manuel stepping down at year's end. Then Jon Zimmerman and Devin Pinkston of Tracker Sports AI join to reveal how artificial intelligence is reshaping the future of college football. 🏈 In this episode: • Will the SEC break away from the NCAA? Greg Sankey decoded • Michigan's next move after Warde Manuel steps down • Texas vs. Ohio State — who's the better team? • Mack Brown on NIL, the transfer portal & fixing college football • Arch Manning & the Longhorns' 2026 outlook • How AI is changing college football (Tracker Sports AI) Chapters 00:00 Show Start 02:32 SEC and the NCAA Headed for a Split 08:14 Michigan's AD Steps Down1 18:19 Mack Brown, College Football HOF '18 47:31 Jon Zimmerman and Devin Pinkston, Tracker Sports AI New episodes of The Triple Option drop every Wednesday. Make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube and following on all podcast platforms. Also make sure you’re locked in on social @3XOptionShow on all platforms for highlight moments, bonus content, and to engage with the guys and the TO community. (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tripleoptionshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)   The Triple Option is presented by Wendy’s. Try Wendy's® $1 Small Classic Frosty for a Limited Time. https://m-wendys.app.link/gm-dollar-frosty-audio-radio Thank you to our additional sponsors NHTSA - Speeding Catches up With You. Paid for by NHTSA. ⁠https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding Ka'Chava - Go to https://Kachava.com and use code TTO for 15% off your first order #CollegeFootball #ArchManning #MackBrown #UrbanMeyer #NIL #TexasFootball #Longhorns #CFB #SEC #TransferPortal #TripleOption #Michigan #Wolverines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Austin is great, but maybe not so much in the summertime. When I got to Texas, I asked the doctors, it was so hot for summer workouts. And I said, I am so worried about these players dying. Doctors said, they grew up here. We're worried about you dying because you didn't grow up here. And they were right. Light it. Welcome to another edition of the Triple Option, presented by Wendy's and their $1, small, classic, frosty, limited time.

Only get it while it is hot. Get it while it's hot out there. Urban Meyer, Rob Stone, hold on, hold on, hold on. Coach, we got a lot to talk about this week, but where are you and what is happening in the background of this room? I'm in, I was speaking. This is a great start. Oh, I'm in a resort, Caesar's Resort here in Reno, beautiful property, some type of suite, and then there's like a hot tub or something right now. A hot tub in your living room, bedroom area? Right in the suite.

Not, I'm not going to use it, but it's all good. I'm sure it's totally clean. What's that? I'm sure it's totally clean, but you know, you might want to throw a little more chlorine in there. Is it heart-shaped? I'm not even going over there, Robbins. I'm staying in this half of the room. No, it's all good.

It's all good. I've been to Reno many a time with my bowling work. I never got a sweet quite. like that. And I think that would... I'll bet you never will. Yes. I think my time in Reno now is like the gateway to Tahoe and hopefully a little ski break here. All right. Today we're going to talk about the change atop the athletic pedestal at the University of Michigan. SEC Commissioner Coach Greg Sanky had an interesting brief little line. We'll get into that.

And how about our guest today? Really interesting collection. We're joined, of course, by the Hall of Fame, the legend. Mac Brack, one of our favorites. We're going to talk to him about the biggest issues facing college football. He's also going to get us ready for Texas' football season. We're also going to look into AI's role in the game with the creators of a fascinating new technology. Remember, rate, subscribe, send us questions. We are across social media at 3X option show, a new episode's coming your way on YouTube. And wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so, coach, if the hot tub is ready, we're ready to talk college football. And there are 38 days until we have games. on any given Saturday. A weird question kind of arrived just the other day. Will the SEC continue to be a part of the NCAA? This is the time of the season where a lot of the conferences coach get together. You know all about it. SEC Commissioner Greg Shanky addressed the media at those SEC days was asked if the

conversations around the SEC leaving the NCAA are real. and he said they are very real and he does not believe that they are a leverage point. Okay, so he didn't exactly shove it off to the side. He tried to downplay it, but he also dropped us a little egg right there, Coach. So you've been to these meetings, whether it's Big Ten or SEC. You've sat in them and you've had real meaningful, hard, challenging conversations. In the end, though, who's kind of running these conversations? and what does what Greg Sanky said really mean in the world of college football right now?

Well, I've had experiences of four conferences. You know, I have the Mac Conference early in my career, then the Mountain West Conference with Utah. Then obviously, the SEC and then the Big Ten. And behind the scenes, it's pretty intense. You know, the commissioner, obviously dependent on what kind of personality of that guy is. But Sanky's a very powerful guy, very smart guy. Greg Sanky and are good friends. And I've known him.

He was the assistant commissioner, back. in the day. So there's talking points that are very clear from the presidents, from the ADs, and from the to the coaches, because the coaches most of the time are the spokesmen of their schools, along with the players. So they get the company line that very rarely do you see a coach stray from that because if they're going to stray from that, you do that in the meetings. And the meetings are intense. I mean, there's, there's, I've seen very intense. I've seen people raise your voices, you know, a tough language about are we doing the right thing? So my feeling when I heard Greg Sanky say this is, this is not new. This has been around, I'd say minimum of two years,

that you've heard the possibility of, you know, the two power conferences right now are the Big Ten SEC. Could they leave the NCAA when you start talking about the financial burdens that we keep hearing about? I don't know if I believe that anymore. I'm a little bit like Jay Billis when he said, You know, like, you know, this has been, we've been hearing it, we've been hearing us for 100 years. Well, we'll never survive, never survive. And of course they do. They survive. So I would say the probability of the FCC leaving solo is 0.0 chance.

Solo. That's the big word, solo. But if they've got a partner. Do I believe that Fatiti and Sankey, along with the presidents, and is there a conversation about the two leaving? absolutely there is. That's 100. The conversation, I'm going to say, is 100%. Them actually leaving, I would say it's minimal.

Is there leverage? There's always leverage when you have conversations like this. Of course there is. They can say it's not. I think Coach Smart said that it's not about leverage, which is fine. But is there reality that the Big Ten and SEC have had conversation about going on their own? And the answer is yes. That's the two super leagues.

They would obviously get more teams involved. College sports, as we know, would change dramatically. Yet it would be a financial windfall for those two conferences. Is it what you would want as a college football fan? No. No, no. No, of course not. Again, I think at the end of the day, that won't happen.

But again, this is times that are completely uncharted. Right now, if this bill does not pass and we go through another cycle with no antitrust exemption where every rule is litigated and quite honestly they lose in litigation where, you know, you find a friendly judge in the state of Mississippi or some other area that I, and as fiscally it continues to mushroom out of control, I would say that I don't believe it's going to happen. But in our lifetime, there's never been a greater chance of it happening. How much longer do we have to wait to find out if this legislation can happen? And I'm not talking like, hey, Rob, we need a two-week window. More of, hey, we can get through the world we're in right now for another two, five, seven years. Or do you think that ending of an actual decision is closer? Well, whenever you get the Congress involved, and I was fortunate enough to sit in those meetings.

And I've actually had a phone call last week. And the phone call I had was extremely positive. I think this, the bill's going to pass. Senator Cantwell and Cruz are working together on this thing. They think it's going to pass. But then I also, if this does not happen by August, and this is new to me, is the world shuts down. Everybody gets ready for the elections in November.

So that gets pushed to the back of the train here. And then everybody worries about just getting reelected, which is, and that you know what, because there's going to be so many political shifts after the midterms. Yeah. Crazy. We're talking about this. Right. Almost every other week.

And, you know, we've got Mack Brown on a little bit later. We're going to discuss similar type topics with him. All right, let's transition to Ann Arbor. And this will be Ward Manuel's final football season as the athletic director at the University of Michigan. He's going to step down at the end of the calendar year. that was just announced. All kinds of issues have been going on in that athletic department the last couple years. Late 2025, member Michigan hired that law firm to investigate all the situations around Sharon Moore, and then it turned into kind of like the broader operation as a whole. Those findings

they were released just the other day found that misconduct was not widespread in the department, but in regard to Ward Manuel, it found that he, quote, demonstrated important leadership strengths, particularly his commitment to student athletes. At the same time, it identified failures to quickly and effectively act on allegations of wrongdoing by athletic department employees. They have had so much success the last couple years, right? I mean, obviously the college football national title a couple years ago, men's college basketball won at all just a few months ago.

The men's ice hockey program has been elite for years and they excel at so many other sports. and it's all under Ward manual's, you know, view and his leadership. But everything kind of comes down to the football program in this situation. It feels like to me at least you buy that. Absolutely. This is all caused by repeated issues over and over. So I guess the question, there's two things you look at, number one, how does Kyle Whittingham move forward because he has to and it has to happen fast?

And that's the guy that hired him, right? That's the guy that hired him. So you're going to have a new AD come in. You have a president, obviously, that supports Kyle. But who knows if you stubble your toe a few times and you get an AD, you know, that forgets about the turmoil that he took over. So that's number one. And the most important, how do they move forward?

I've had some conversations with Coach Wood. I'm just going to keep that between us because he's one of my closest friends out there a guy that I respect as much as anyone in the profession. So our conversation is more about on the field, but he has shared with me some of the things he's dealt with. That's number one. Number two, you know, what this era, what in the history of the history books will go down as what?

You know, it's arguably the most successful. I heard this, that the three-year run in the Wolverine football program, the best ever. And you're talking about the winning in this program in college football history. So the best ever yet, someone said they have 12 guys off that staff that are either gone in trouble, banished, suspended, not allowed to come back. I don't know all that. I don't know, but I saw the number 12 and you're like, so number one, they got the right guy at charge.

He's in a, he's in a very unique situation. with a new AD coming in. That's not a comfortable situation at all. I'm sure he'll be involved in the hiring of that. That's only fair to him. And number two is what will this era go down? As it's you won basketball and football. Basketball just recently.

And the AD gets let go because of that, yet the report comes out, well, he really didn't do anything wrong. So I know what's happening in Ann Arbor. They want this to go away as fast as possible and focus on playing some football. You mentioned 12. I just want to clarify that from the year 2021 to 2023, Michigan football, and you mentioned the great run that they had. But 12 members of those staffs and the athletic

director have now been forced out amid scandal or sanction for rules violations. This is Connor Stallions. This is Jim Harbaugh and issues that he had, offensive coordinators, very un-Michigan-like. And frankly, none of this should happen in any athletic department. You know, the question I have, the question I have, Rob was doing it. And I wish it would come out or someone to ask that question in the media. The one thing that I read and I had to reread it several times is when the NCAA

came in and got involved that they were told either through I heard it in a lawsuit from the assistant coach. The president, the AD and the head football coach said do not comply. Do not do not cooperate. I'll

be honest with I'd never heard that before. I don't know what that means and I can't imagine that just goes away. And if that's the case, how is anybody supposed to do their job? Right? If somebody's coming in to investigate, you can't have a proper investigation. It goes to some of your points, coach, like, when you lie, you're done, you're out. And then, well, who's saying you're done and you're out if you're lying to us or subverting the truth? And I hate, like, I have a lot of respect for Michigan and things that they've done in the past and they

continue to do. And I know a lot of kids in my community or student athletes there. and I want them to succeed, but this has been an ugly stain on this university for years now, and it's not going to go away because the AD went away, right? This is going to take another year to two years to three years for them to kind of get the reputation back, even when they are still performing at an absolute elite level on all spectrums of the sporting scene in Ann Ar. Well, we're talking about sports, so remember Coach Whittanyam comes out of the shoot 7-0 or 8-0, and people are going to forget. Everybody's got head stunts.

They have a new basketball coach. The new basketball coach gets, you know, catches fire. So again, you win, all good, you lose. They'll keep coming back to this. If you win, you won't hear about this again, I would imagine. Yeah. We're going to see Coach Winningham, week two. The Sooners come in town.

We're probably going to talk about that one in just a moment. That was never cutting corners brought to you by Wendy's $1. Small Classic Frosty. limited time only get it while it's hot coming up next we're joined by one of the real legends and great human beings in all of college football the hall of famer mac brown sits down with us on the triple option presented by wendies light it summer's better with the frosty in your hand and this summer wendies is giving you a sweet deal on your fave summertime treat for a limited time you can now get a small classic frosty for only one dollar that's right all it takes is one

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Paid for by NHTSA. Welcome back to the Triple Option, presented by Wendy's Rob Stowe. We now have not one but two Hall of Fame head coaches this week on the show, Urban Meyer, and the great Mack Brown, former national champion-winning head coach with Texas. And now you can find Mac on The Stampede, a podcast on the Texas Longhorns, hosted by Coach Brown, Vince Young, and Bob Balloo on YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, follow them on social at the Stampede U.T. And coach joining us from the beautiful hills of North Carolina this summer.

Like, Austin is great, but maybe not so much in the summertime, right? Well, and the summer starts in May. I mean, that's it. And then the summer's over the middle of October. So that's when you go back. Coach is going through that in Florida right now. Yes. And, Ervin, when I, Rob, thanks for having me on first.

When I got to Texas, I asked the doctors, it was so hot for summer workouts. And I said, I am so worried about these players dying. Doctors said, they grew up here. We're worried about you dying because you didn't grow up here. And they were right. So good to see you, my friend, one of my favorite people on the planet. It's impossible not to love Coach Brown, Urban. So how about this?

I don't know Mac Brown. I know the name, of course. And I get hired. I've told the story, but I think it's good to get this out again. And so I take the Florida job and never. I don't think I even met Mac Brown. I just knew who he was. And we lose a couple games of Florida.

And I was a stranger and a strange land, man. I'm in the SEC and I'm used to Utah and Bowling Green. And I walk into my radio show and they boo you. I mean, it's like, where the hell am I? And so Max said he saw a press conference and he saw that glazed eye look on me. And it was, I think it was after the LSU game, I come walking in. I remember walking in a house, and my phone rings on like a Thursday. And he said, Coach, I got your number.

This is MacRow. And you don't want to answer the phone. He lost a game if you're at Florida or Texas. Yeah. And he said, he asked a very simple question that was a complex answer. How you doing? And that went for an hour. And he became my go-to.

And here's a neat thing, Rob. I did the same thing on Marcus Freeman. and I'm not going to say the other coaches, but when I saw Marcus Freeman lose early in his career, one of those games, I saw that look that I had when I was at Florida. Like, where the hell am I and what am I doing? I need some help here.

And so, Mack, you taught me, and I love you to death. You're a great friend. Same here, my friend. And I love who you are and what you do and all you've accomplished. And every time I'm around you, it makes my life better. So President Trump, I was with him and Coach Saban, and we started, we played golf, and then we talked about this college football,

and President Trump was, we need to go back to the way it was. And we kept saying that ship has sailed. But then I kept saying, we need to get Mac Brown on this commission, you know, just the way you look at things. And we went to the White House. You were out of town.

You weren't unable to go to the White House, but you were on those calls with me. And it's disheartening to a degree about the politics of our country right now, about, you know, this has nothing to do, right left. liberal, whatever it is,

this has to do with the right thing about the fabric of our country to me is team sports. I know you feel the same way. And I don't want this whole dialogue to be about that, but I gotta get, where are we?

Is this going to get fixed? I know we're all, the NIL, we're all in agreement. We're on agreement on eligibility, five for five, and then also the transfer portal one and then one free one when you graduate one,

you know, two total unless there's another circumstance. I want to get your opinion. What's going to happen? I think, Urban, it's so bad that it's going to get fixed. And Condoleez, I said on one of our calls that it didn't happen overnight, so it may not get fixed tomorrow. But there's a bucket that we need to fix now.

And it's affecting kids and fans and our game and who we are. And then there's this bucket that's going to take longer. Because I see that all those things. things you said are easy fixes, and they'll really, really help us. The transfer portal, the age eligibility limits, the fees for agents on kids to be like the NFL. I think we can fix the calendar. That can be fixed and needs to be fixed, but I think we can fix it. And not everybody agrees. When you and I were on those committees with the AFCA, it was hard to get all, you get that many head coaches, you get 68 head coaches from Power 4 schools in a room that have got a lot of opinions

and they've run their own meetings. It's not real easy to get them all to agree. But when they agree, it's easier to get things done. And the two that I thought are so hard, the media rights are hard because you've got the ones that have a lot of money and you've got the ones that don't. And it's been that way forever. But when the conferences all gave the equal amounts of money, it was distributed it equally. Everybody thought that was okay, but I remember Urban and Rob, we were at Texas and we were going to the Pact 12. And I think we were within five minutes of going to the Pact 12. We were looking at recruiting areas. We were looking at what it would do for travel. What about classes? How many would you miss? Would you play Washington? Pack 12, Texas. We were gone.

And I'm sitting there watching TV and I think it's already done and I see on TV that, ESPN comes on and says, it was Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and we were gone out of the Big 12th. And then all of a sudden they say, Texas has decided to stay. I didn't know it. I saw it on ESPN, and it's because we had a Longhorn Network that gave us $200 million. And then all of a sudden Oklahoma and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State stayed. And then Missouri and Texas A&M got mad because the money was not distributed equally, and then they left to go to the SEC. So it's really an interesting dilemma. I talked to Cody Campbell when he first started this stuff.

He's chairman of the board at Texas Tech. Do you vote for Tech what's best for Texas Tech, or do you vote for what's best for college football when you're on this committee? It's really hard. I was the president of the AFCA, and I was head coach at Texas. There were 17 board members. Gary Patterson was one of them before we started. He said, Coach, let me ask you.

you a question. We're going to vote on a lot of things today. Are you going to vote for what's best for Texas? Are you going to vote for what's best for college football? That's a good question. And then you have to vote for what's best for college football. So as I see this bill, and I'm so excited that, and thank you, Urban for helping me get on there, when you look at media rights, that's the first one that's really hard for people to distribute. Am I going to say it's okay for Texas to get more money than somebody else that doesn't make as much in the league. Even last year, the ACC adopted a new revenue distribution. We're the ones that have the most visibility and win the most games get the most money.

Is that going to work? That's what happened in the Big 12 when we had the split. And that's not what's best for college football. It's not best for college football, but it's best for Texas. Correct. It's best for Ohio State. They're making a whole lot of money. and if you've got $7 billion or what you've got $7 billion for the Big 10 and $10 billion for the SEC,

then the Big 12 and the ACC don't make near as much, you don't have enough money to keep your staff. It hurts you with your booster money because you have to get more to get your NIL. It affects you all over the place, and it's just hard to keep up. So I think that's number one, number two. What do you do with collectives? I've talked to a lot of students, student athletes. We've had some in our meetings. And again, it's very, very hard for a young lady who's getting very, very little money out of refshare to say that 75% should go to football.

It's really hard for the football players to say, oh, we ought to give a whole lot to the Olympic sports. So again, we've got some conflicts as we go through. So what do you do to make it fair? all of us agree that guys and the young ladies should be getting money. If we'd been smarter 10, 15 years ago and given a stipend to the scholarship, and if we had added to $150,000, $200,000 as a reward when you get your degree, we wouldn't be here. We'd be in a great place.

But like you told President Trump, that's over. That's done. So now how do we get some fairness? How do we keep some parity like the NFL with out just saying you can't have a collective? Because I don't think you can say you can't have a collective. And we had Coach Schaefer, the women's basketball coach at Texas on our podcast. And he said once, I'm really worried about women's basketball because even in our league, there's three or four that are paying a lot of money still, but some have just quit.

And you can see that in the women's final four. I mean, these scores are 90 to 40. So we're losing our parity, and I think we're going to see that happening in college football unless we can grasp this thing and figure out because when we started NIL, we didn't think about the consequences. We didn't think about the consequences of tampering. We didn't think about the consequences of the transfer portal. We didn't think about the consequences of money.

When's it stopped? You get a $50 million roster? When's it stop? It does it. It's not sustainable. And my friends are saying, I'm going to get my caller ID blocked. So I don't answer calls anymore, man. I'm tired of the basketball coach calls me.

The baseball coach calls it. I need $500,000 for this kid this weekend. And it's just not going away. Now, the opposite side of that, Mac, is that you and I never had the luxury of Texas in Ohio State and Florida to coach that 22-year-old. They were gone. We had them 17, 18, 19, and they're gone to the NFL. You watch these teams, these older, you saw the Wolverines do with the Buckeyes,

and then last year, obviously, Indiana with an incredible year. I think Oregon, they're the old team this year, it looks like. Can you imagine, I mean, the negative's negative, but more kids are graduating. Right now you're seeing the quality of product on the field, I think is phenomenal. I don't see the mistake. You know, 23-year-olds don't make the same mistakes. year old makes. And I see that with Signetti's team. I saw that with the Buckeyes when they made that great run and that the Wolverine team was unbelievable because they didn't make mistakes.

And then you started looking at the roster saying, damn, they're 23 years old. They've been in college for four years already. So the positives are there. The playoffs, I love the playoffs. I wish they were there when I was coaching because that keeps your good players playing. You know, back in our era, the BCS era, you're out of it. A lot of good players didn't go to bowl games. A lot of good players, you know, all they're thinking about after the junior, and I don't blame them. They're going to go instead of eating peanut butter to sandwiches. They're going to go the NFL and make money. So there are, do you see the positives as well as I see?

I see a lot of positives. These playoff games are unbelievable. You know, I wish we would put group of five, group of six in their own playoff league and take them out and get the 12 best teams, let them play. And that's what's best for the fans. It's what's most fair for the coaches. I wish we had a better criteria of strength of schedule or who should be in those 12 teams. How do you figure out the strength of schedule?

How do we get that across the board? I agree with you. It's a big problem. And a lot of your football coach, Sark, was talking about it on the triple option just the other day. How do we figure out what a win versus somebody in the ACC compares to win versus somebody in the SEC? Yeah. And our national championship year in 2005, we played at Ohio State the second game. I thought Ohio State, USC, and Texas were the three best teams.

We win that game 25-22. If we lose that game, Jim Tressel in Ohio State probably played USC for the national championship. That's what Urban's talking about. Back then, if you lose one early, you're out, man. You're dead. And that's not the way it is anymore. But Sark and I've had a lot of conversations about, and I'm not just using a name here, but are you better off playing El Paso winning by a lot?

You still have 105,000 people there. You still make all your money and you get in the playoff. Or do you play Ohio State, which is best for TV? It's best for the fans. The kids like it the best. The coaches love it the most. It's best for college football. It's best for college football.

But if you get beat, then you don't get in. I'd say no. I'd say no. I'm going to go meet with Gene Smith and say get them off our schedule. I agree completely, coach. Which breaks my heart. What is best? Rob, we say what's best for college football?

what's best to win the national championship? Correct. What's best to get to the playoffs? Save your damn job. Those are different conversations, right? The best for college football is not the same as what gets us to the national championship game. It's two different avenues with two different responses. And I get it.

So, like, what question is going to end up winning? Right. Like, if we could all get on the same page, what's best for college football, I think we can do some damage. But, boy, that's a lot of heavy lifting coach. But it is. And I live in a box. My little box is a world where I want things to be very clear. And so I would want the committee to say, here are the seven things that the teams that do the best are going to be in the playoffs. That's me. That's my life. I don't like gray.

I want facts. I want research. I want it done. And I want to be told exactly what is expected of me. and then if you got that, then you've got a chance to get it done. Because you can tell your staff, you can tell your team, here's what we have to do. Here's what we have to do. Coach Royal was the best, Rob, when I came back to Texas, I said, you haven't been very good. You got money, you got players, you got facilities. Why haven't you been very good?

And he said, it's like this state's so big. And you got all these people and you got media and he said, everybody hates you that plays against you. He says, it's like a box of BBs have been dropped and those BBs scattered all over the room. Your job is to get the BBs back in the box. And if you get the BBs back in the box, man, it's a powerful place. And that's what you've got to do.

Then it's the brand. It's powerful as a unit. I saw that. I understood that. That made it very clear to me what we had to do with our lettermen, with our top boosters, with our fan base. They weren't even wearing orange in the stadium.

So we said, okay, they were coming late. They were leaving early. And I said, okay, let's don't act like we've got the best fan base in the country. And you don't even show up. Come on, man. You got to get back in the box. You got to help me. And that's what we've got to do with this committee.

Urban said it best. We can't play politics. This is our game. This is about these kids. It's about mental health. It's about graduation. It's about a game that we're passionate about and we've loved forever, we can't just sit here and let it die.

And it's growing in so many wonderful ways, like Urban said, but we've got some cancer on there. We've got to cut out. We've got to get rid of the negatives, and we've got to be strong enough to tell each other, that's not best, so let's figure out what is best. If it's not best to have 50 million in a collective, what is best? What do we do?

Come on, man. What do we do? If we've got a system where every time somebody makes a rule, they just sue and there's no rule makers. What do we do? We can't just sit here and say that's okay. We can't do that. We've got to get those BBs back in the box. That's what we've got to do.

Love hearing that. And unfortunately, that's going to take, that's going to be a lot of people on their hands and knees looking under in dirty corners trying to pull out that one missing BB, right? But the word BB, that really, really matters. I appreciate the fight that both of you guys have done to try to make the sport that we love so much, even grander, even better. Let's get on the field for a second. With your podcast, The Stampede, I know you guys are talking a lot about college football and where this UT team is. Fair to say that they're probably going to be the number one ranked team when that preseason poll comes out? I think so.

I'm not a preseason guy because I think it's just publicity and it's stuff to talk about. but it doesn't matter. You hadn't proved anything yet. They were number one last year. Correct. Or number two, whatever, them in Ohio State. Are they better this year than last year? I think so.

They were really young on offense last year. They were young in the offensive blind. They weren't proven at running back. They were young at wide receiver. Arch had played, he'd started two games. We had him the number one draft choice. We had him winning the Housman, and we had him leaving after the last game

after they won the national championship, he started two games against bad teams. It was very unfair. And then you add the name to the back of his jersey. That's more unfair. And then you add him going to defending national champ, Ohio State, in the opening game. I mean, you couldn't put more things stacked against this young guy to start the season. And then, and then, Mac, you'll watch. I'm sorry, I want to interrupt real quick, but I was shocked when I was there for the game.

as you were, and then I went back and watched it, and the best thing a quarterback can have is open receivers. He didn't have them. I even asked Sark that, and you will not see the progress from a young quarterback, because he's still young, unless, and they got better during the year. Of course they did, but they are still not, if they get Texas receivers, and I think they got some, but if they play like Texas receivers, now you're going to see Archmanney really glow.

Yeah. And Urban, when he started running the ball, he runs better than either of his uncles. He runs like his granddad. And I played against his granddad. And his granddad could really run. But when he started running the ball, then it changed everything because they had to get different pass lanes. But the offensive line's got to get better. They were not good enough in the offensive line to run the ball last year.

And you know it better than anybody. If you can't run the ball, you're not going to win all the games. Because you can't out pass everybody. And they got this receiver named Cam Coleman that came in from Auburn, and he's a big, tall, fast, pretty guy. So they've got some receivers now that make it work. They've got two new running backs, one from Arizona State, one from NC State. But they've got to run the ball better, and they've got to give him more protection.

And I think that's the key to them. The P.K. did a great job as defensive coordinator for Texas. Will Must champs coming in. Will spirited. I had him for three years. He's tough. He'll stir him up. And I think they've got to beat Georgia in their minds.

Georgia is Georgia. And Georgia's the one that everybody's got to beat. And Will and Kirby are best friends. They played together. They've grown up together. Will knows everything about their offense and everything about their defense. So if you're going to bring in a guy to try to stir it up to beat Georgia, Will would be your guy.

What's your thoughts on Texas in the SEC? Is it settled in your mind yet? It's still hard for me to see that. Coach, I walked into the media day at any ACC. I'm at North Carolina. I walk up, I sit down. My first question is, what do you think about Texas going to the SEC? I had no clue.

I said, you're kidding. They said, no. Texie just went to the SEC, and I said, I don't believe that. They said, well, it's true. It's true. And at the time, I didn't think they should. Now, I think they should because of money. You got money.

If you've got money, you've got a chance. It doesn't mean you're going to win. You still got to get the right players. You've got to do your evaluation properly. You've got to develop them. But without money, you've got no chance to keep your staff or get the best staff. You've got no chance to keep your players because those agents are going to, they're going to move. So I think now it's best they go.

And sorry, Rob, but Urban, they got tired of going to camp. Kansas State and Oklahoma State. And, you know, they love these new trips. They're so excited about going to LSU and going to Tennessee next year. And it's new places. When we were thinking about the Pact 12, they said, oh, we get to go to L.A. And we get to go to San Francisco and Seattle. And that's going to be a lot better than Stillwater in Lubbock.

So I think that's happened a little bit with the SEC as well. All right. I'm going to turn it over to Rob. My last question, because I love this. Mac and I used to talk a lot. and I still tell people this all the time. Other than players, and at times I'd even say more important than some,

that damn coaching staff, if you get the right coaching staff, and I know, Mac, you feel exactly the same way I do. When you lose your, when you lose a great player, Rob, it's almost like you know that's going to happen at some point. So what do you do when you're recruiting behind them because at some point, Vince Young,

it breaks your art when he leaves, but you know that's happening. When that coach leaves, and you replace them with a lesser coach, that's what makes your chest hurt. Talk to us about, like, how important that assistant coaches. And if you get the wrong one, it's even worse. You get a snake, you've had it now.

He'll stir up the whole thing and make it bad. I asked the lost Dodds when he was an athletic director coach one time, how hard's your job? He said, when you're doing yours, mine's easy. And that's the way I feel about every assistant coach. That's crazy. I used to tell the guys, if I'm having to coach your position,

why in the heck did I hire you? You need to keep them out of my office. You need to be talking to the parents. If you can't handle 10, how do you want to be a head coach? And you can handle 120. You need to recruit your position? Coach your position, man.

Do your job. And we would make them, and I got a lot of this from Urban too, but we'd make them, give me five things that you, your players have to do before you're going to let them play. I want them in order. I want them to be prioritized. And I want you to use it on the field. So I'm standing there and running back drops the ball and he's a fumbler. I'm going to say that's why you're not playing. Don't come see me,

man. Hold on the ball. What does a receiver need to do? Give me these five things in order. What is an offensive line that need to do? You're not doing that. And practice them. And practice them. And I always said, I don't want to hear what you say you're doing. I want to see it. I want to see it. Coach Parcells. Rob, you join us. I'm just sitting back. Do you see the stupid grin on my face for this whole conversation? But then you get to Kyle, you know, I go to Kyle Whitton and Ham, we both love. You know how many times I went to Kyle and said, you know, I don't really, you know, do you need to do, not once. I never worried about the linebackers or the defense, the kids go to class, the behaving off the field. You know why?

Because he ran it. And that's why he became a great head coach. And there's other, you know, We all have had them where you're like, my God. I mean, how hard is this? Do you job. Yeah. I used to go and tell a guy, if I'm talking, why are you on me all the time? Because you're not doing your job. You feel bad?

I said, yeah, I feel bad. I hired you. And you're not going to be doing that job much longer at this rate. No, no, 100%. All right, coach. Let's play a quick game here. Give me the universities that Texas football should be playing against every year, in conference or out of conference. Who needs to be on that Texas

schedule every year? It's got to be Oklahoma, Texas, A&M, and Arkansas, because that's history. And then I would probably add LSU because LSU's always recruited in the state and Texas has always recruited Louisiana. You might add Alabama, but that would be it. The Sark talk, I love Joy McGuire. He's one of my best friends. I knew him when I was recruiting Cedar Hill High School. when he was a head coach. So I've known him that long. If I'm Texas, I don't talk about Texas Tech and I don't play them. Can't win that one.

Yeah, agreed. We all agreed with that one. I love, hey, Texas, Arkansas. Yeah, I'm with you. Bring that one back. History. That's a fun one. Yeah, I agree.

And guess what? It's probably good for college football, too, again, as we go back to that. Absolutely. Go back to that point. I want to conclude with this, because I'm really curious about this, coach. Have you gotten over how things finished and challenged? Chapel Hill. Yeah, you know, Rob, it's a great question. I learned and Urban's got a great wife and Shelly and I've got a great wife and Sally and your wife is so important in coaching because

very few people understand what you're going through. Very few people understand that life because they're not the head coach, even the assistants, really don't understand. So when we got through at Chapel Hill, Sally said a few things. What a wonderful six years we had. We touched so many lives. We changed some lives. We'd save some lives. And we even had the young man die of cancer at our last year. And we had to help the parents and the family and the whole kids. So you feel like that's really important. But Sally always said, you always get better. You don't get better. So I've never been bitter a day in my life. I just don't, I don't live that way. And then the other thing she said is success is always the best revenge. Go do something to help people. Don't

don't sit around and talk bad about others. And that's just, I'm having so much fun speaking to corporations about leadership and communication. I'm having so much fun helping young coaches like Urban must talk about. I go back to Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno and Lou Holtz. And I mean, Bo Schembeckler, Coach Royal, you go back to so many great coaches. that helped me so much. And I mean, I'd just call and they'd call me back like they were my buddy or new me and try to help me.

And so I want to be in that stage now. So if somebody's got a question, call me. Call me and I'll answer it. And that's so I am, I'm healthy. My family's healthy. I love my friends. I love and am passionate about this game. And I'm finally at a point as I've watched Durbin.

We don't have to have coach speak anymore. We don't work for anybody. we don't have an alumni base we don't have moms mad at us we don't have ice good coaches mad at us we actually say what we think for the first time of our lives and that's pretty refreshing that's what i wanted to hear from you about how you got let go at chapel hill let them know what you think man you handled that as exactly how i thought you would on a side note you're allowed to be a little bitter i'm a little bitter i'm mad i'm mad for you the way it went down and what has gone on since then and it it really bothered me because i know what

type of human being you are and how much you and your family invested in that university, not once but twice. Well, thank you. And it's still loved the place and hated. They got beat last night and baseball. They are last month, as we're not sure when we're going to. Right. Oklahoma beat them. We know that. Oklahoma beat them. And did a good job. Oklahoma had a great year. Coach Stoops is happy somewhere and probably celebrating somewhere with somebody. No question. Mack Brown, you're the best, man. Always great to thank you for uplifting us.

Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do for college football. And enjoy that summer in that mountain, man. I hope the weather warms up a little bit in the morning for you, so you can get out and play some more golf. Well, thank you both. I love you, Urban, and I'm going to keep trying to get my golf as good as he is. Good luck with that, man. Urban's playing a lot, coach.

Urban's playing a lot. He's Mac Brown. You guys can hear him on the Stampede podcast all about the University of Texas. around the hall of favor. Thanks so much, Coach. Thank you guys. Lydid. The Scotia Momentum Visa Infinite Plus card

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Shell locations, conditions and limits apply. Actual value may be lower. Visit shell.ca.ca slash loyalty for full details. Welcome back to the triple option. Now it's time for this moment presented by Nitsa. Speeding Catch is up with you, paid for, by our. our great partners at NHTSA. This is going to be an interesting conversation, coach. You ready for this? Artificial intelligence is everywhere. You know it. I know it. And college football is no difference. We're now joined by two of the men behind Tracker Sports AI, the CEO, John Zimmerman, the CTO, Devin Pinkston. Gentlemen, welcome in. Coach, the floor of your is yours. But take us back to a pre-AI time, please. Sure. AI is coming everywhere. Not that I have any interest.

in it, but that's neither here nor there. So going back to late 90s, I got hired at Notre Dame by Lou Holtz, and that was back in the VHS tape. And one of the biggest transitions that happened in sports was something called digital video. And of course, everybody resisted. Every coach had about 400, 500 VHS tapes all through their office that was categorized by this. You simply said, okay, grab me that one up there. And so they came in with digital video, and it really changed the game. amount of research and the offenses went like this, the defenses went like that because the information you had was phenomenal. And then something analytics started surfacing and I was somewhat resistant to that as well. But I was also smart enough that, Rob, that I would hire

young people and tech people because I understood the value. So there's no doubt it's coming. The question I have for these two guys is, you know, what exactly does your platform run do and why does college football need it? Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to join you guys. And coach, that is still a prevailing thought of the teams that we've met with. They still have that old guard thought of, well, how can AI help me with identifying formations and helping with football? And I think it's a little bit like when the internet came, right? Those brick and mortar stores were still a little hesitant to jump into the internet, but then they realized, hey, this isn't going away.

And AI isn't going away. Devin and I found out very quickly that it might be one of the best use cases for AI because of all the manual tasks that staff have to go through because of all the data that is out there now and then sprinkle in the whole transfer portal that got condensed. And the NIL, right, you have all this bespoke data. And if you are able to take a AI model that is trained on first party data and that's the important piece, right, that it's not just going out to the Internet and utilize. in chat GPT or Claude and pulling in mountains and mountains of information. If it's trained on first party data or the team's data, you can really turn the process into an extremely efficient process. And at the end of the day, what we've told teams and organizations is,

look, we're not trying to remove anybody's job here. We're trying to provide better information at speed so you guys can make decisions at scale. And that's really what AI is allowing programs to do. And coach, it's about getting these guys back to what you guys do best is coaching up the kids, right? It's taking and condensing that time sifting through footage, time on eight, nine, ten different websites looking at roster information and background information. AI can synthesize that very quickly so that you guys can spend time now where it's outside. I want to get down and nitty and gritty and how you're actually changing,

football. So let's say, let's throw out a hypothetical. A coach, a staff is looking at a potential transfer portal out there, player. What is it that you guys are looking at scrubbing on the field and off the field that can help that program make a more educated decision? Yeah, I think, well, you know, one of the big pieces is, you know, we're constantly looking through social media, hard to reach places, right? So whether it's, you know, players accounts, programs accounts, right? Hey, what's the room in all out there? Are there comments? How are people interact? What is the sentiment when people write about a potential player that is actually going into the portal or potentially going in there, right? So you really start getting an idea about what is their character, you know, what is their moral fabric, right?

Not just on the field, what stats, right? Everyone can grab that, but hey, who are they? Let's start drawing a picture of them. Do they fit the mold of the program that they're going to go into? And what info are you finding or what info are you looking for that's out there on social media? You find a lot of, you know, one of the few core aspects that a lot of programs have been very interested in is their character, right? Hey, who are they? How do they interact with fans? A tough situation happens. They've had a bad game.

They've had an injury. How do they react to that if they see negative feedback online and, you know, how common that is? And you start seeing, you know, who they are, right? Do they do, you know, public service, right? Are they out there helping coach other kids or they out there spending their time to be a better person, right? There's another big focus that we see in there. Are they a transfer risk? It's another piece, right?

You know, if you look at the history of players, right, you know, even when they go back to high school, a lot of people are on social media. They're writing, oh, I might be taking my programs to X, right? Any program. And if we see recurrences of that, okay, well, maybe it's a flight risk of a player that we don't want to go invest money into, perhaps, right? So we really start understanding who they are. And you couple that with local news sources, right? So not just going on the big public ones that are out there, but the actual local ones, the ones that are relative, the reporters that can probably know their families. They know their coaches.

They know the player. You're going to get a more accurate representation of who that is. And then you go, you know, the extra mile and you start looking at game film and doing. envision over that, right, and how they play, right? Are they going to be reliable, right? Are they going to be an injury risk if they come in, right? Do they give up on plays, right? We really start drawing a full 360 of, hey, who is this person? Should we go invest? Are we underinvesting if we try to bring them? And maybe we really prioritize it. We see that a lot. You know, it's amazing to me as I'm listening to a talk is the last probably 10 years of my

career in college, it went from the majority of conversation, Bill Belichick or Pete Carroll, whoever it would, would come in my office and we talk about the player. You know, we talk about, you know, skill set, how he understands offense, defense, et cetera. You know, last five, six years, we had zero conversation about that. It was all about social media, how they handle money, how they handle relationships. Why would I? Because they already had the access to the on-the-th century. field performance. Now they need to dig in. So I get it, man. I'm not comfortable with all that

stuff, but I get it. But I want to throw this at you is that this happened in sports performance analytics. And it's called information overload and where you get paralyzed, where you as a coach, decision maker, play caller, or on the other side of the ledger, you have to make decisions where you take the guy or not. I think the success of the information. that you and AI will provide will be up to the person that will be able to disseminate where it's overload versus efficiency. And is there a model out there that you witnessed so far

where you're like, okay, you're giving me this survey? I can't, you can't utilize this much information. I'll give example, sports reformance. It got to the point where we really shouldn't practice because all this analytics is telling you it's too much work. You're like, bullshit. It's not too much work. So have you seen a, are you knee deep any yet where there's some, maybe you can't give a name,

but the difference between overload and efficiency. What I was going to say is kind of goes back to the point we were talking about earlier, right, separating that signal from noise where you get just too much, right? And it's one of those things where you just walk away from it because it's just too much as you see it. You can't distill it down to what's actually valuable to go make a decision off of, right? And that's, you know, one of the core pieces that we do. and I will give you an example, actually. I can't name the program,

but it's one of the most popular coaches of all time. You know, and when they're looking at players that they're evaluating, whether it's the portal, it's just make an example, a tight end. They're looking at different programs. They're looking at the portal. You know, should we go invest in it? And it could be down to just two players.

And this is a rough quote, but they spend a week arguing about one player. And it's actually the reverse. They don't have the simple details just given to them. to go make that decision off of. They have a load of it, right? But at the same time, it's just so much that they go right past it

and they revert back to going into manual, watching film, making their own conclusions as opposed to having it come to them with precise stats, who they are in terms of their character, right? And then being able to make an informed decision right from there. And I would add that the time that you now, that coaches now have to make these decisions that's so condensed that what we're trying to do

is just make, as you said, coach, it more efficient. Gather all the data, have it in a dashboard. You can click on whatever you want. The information's there. But at the end of the day, you have to go with your gut. You guys have seen enough footage, enough people, enough players to understand if this guy fits the mode. And one of the things with our vision model that I think is super interesting is,

it gathers all the data, right? You don't need to worry about the top end speed, the burst, all the height, the jumping ability. Now you can look at, hey, does this player get it? Does he take time off on a play? If he's a cornerback on the far end of a play, is he jogging to the ball? Or is he busting his butt going after it? Right.

You can't hide anymore with the technology. So you have the ability to kind of take a step back and say, what kind of player is because all the data is there? And we can surface that efficient. John, have coaches asked you to assist them in play calling? That's the big step forward that is starting to happen when, and it's happening on the pro level, but the college level, they don't have the infrastructure to develop that. And Devin can talk more about the technology that we build on the vision model.

But yes, we've had one school dump an entire year's worth of footage. into our vision model so that the AI can label and deem certain plays, whether or not how many yards were gained, what the coverage looked like, where were the spacing and positioning of the players, so that you would do with any other use of AI in terms of making predictive analytics,

you can do it over the course of all the different plays. So that is a coming feature that everybody is asking for. It's not there yet, but on a big picture, there's the ability to draw some pretty good conclusions based on coverage in play. When you go into some of these coaches' offices, what are the questions they tend to ask, if they even ask questions, and what are some of the more unique responses they've given to you when you go in and discuss what you guys can do with them at Tracker Sports AI? I'll address the second one first because we went through the entire platform, demonstrated all the capabilities, and this is a prominent team in the Big Ten.

And their main question was, are the other two prominent teams in the Big Ten using this technology? That was the main question because of the competitive advantage. A lot of the questions revolve around the quickness. One of the ones that really stood out to me was we met with a special teams group. I believe there were three or four coaches. And they told us the process that they go through breaking down special teams footage from the time the game ends on a Saturday. And they're going through everything until Tuesday night.

And then Wednesday they're presenting the package for the special team players. And they asked us, how quick could AI do what we just did? And our engineers sat there and went through everything and said, well, if we have all that film and the template of what you want to put it in, we could do it in about 15, 20 minutes. Just make sure none of our bosses ask you to try and create some AI broadcasters, right? Can you do that for me, John, Devin? Just stay away from that field.

Just hang out, hang out with what you're doing at tracker sports AI. Fascinating conversation, guys. We appreciate it. Thank you for the intel. We're going to be looking to see where AI starts sneaking its way into college football more and more this season. That does it for this week's edition of the Triple Option. Follow, subscribe, rate us on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, as well as across social media.

We are at 3X-Option show. Submit your questions in the comments, have them answer on the show. And as always, thanks to our wonderful sponsors. Wendy's Kachava and Nizza. We'll see you next time on the Triple Option. That sound? It means summer's biggest event is here.

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