← Josh Pate's College Football Show
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. It's a really weird, fun time of year here on the Pace State campus. I know that in 99.9% of your personal lives right now there's a fair amount of college basketball being mixed in. Yeah, you may be paying attention to spring football practice, but spring is about, about to have sprung all over the country. A lot going on, man. We've had like a busy time here. All the stuff we're going to do in the fall, you meet about during the spring. So it's been a busy time. It's been a very, very, very, very hectic time. But in the best of ways, we're jam packed. We're high atop a lively. Wow, do I mean lively downtown Nashville, Tennessee on this Thursday, March 19th, the year of our Lord 2026. And you know what FanDuel did in the midst of all this, Jesse? They dropped odds to win conferences on us. And you got SEC, you got Big Tent, you got ACC, Big 12, they're all out there. I'm fresh off the road so I'm just getting to talk to you guys about this for the first time. I've got some thoughts as you would expect one to have. I've got, I've got to expect you have thoughts on this as well. FanDuel does not ask me how I think the odds should be listed. I may have listed the odds a little bit differently. I will talk to you about that. I'll give you some good old fashioned behind the scenes nuggets, a little bit of an observational report on our road trip down to Atlanta to meet with Georgia Tech and Brent Key and then down to Auburn to meet with Alex Goelish and the Tigers there. We got truth about Mario Cristobal on the show tonight. It shouldn't be breaking news. It's stuff that we've said for like five years now or better part of five years. But I'll talk about that. I'll talk about the Georgia Mood Tracker. It is the middle of college football season. As far as I'm concerned. They're watching us in Columbus, Ohio. Fresno, California, Birmingham, Alabama, Roanoke, Virginia. Thank you so much. I know a lot of you may be new around here. So you wonder like what's the speaker series? What's this thing you did with Brent Key and Alex Goelish? We do it every spring. I'll probably go to somewhere between 15 and 20 Camp I, which if you're new around here, is the plural of campus. And I'll sit down with a bunch of head coaches. We got two more big ones next week and you know, like a dozen or so after that. And they're just long form sit downs. They're really fun. It's my favorite thing I think that we do all year. So expect that to continue. We'll be back on the road next week. But next week is for next week. This is for now. FanDuel has released the odds to win conferences and I'm looking at the Big Ten right now and I was thinking about my confidence meter. I was telling Jesse, how should we go about this? I don't want to just randomly say one thing per team. I want to talk about my confidence that team X or team Y or team Z could win this conference. So with the Big Ten, Ohio State, yes, I have no doubt about that. Oregon, I have no doubt about that. I almost, I don't want to be disrespectful to Ryan Day and Dan Lanning. I'm not going to waste a whole lot of time talking about him on here. Ohio State's biggest hurdle, yes, they have to replace some production, but the schedule is the thing first and foremost that a lot of people are going to talk about with Ohio State. Because I think you know as well as I do that if Bradley put this graphic up here and it was Penn State schedule that Ohio State was playing, there'd be a slam dunk favorite to do this, that and the other. So Ohio State, I got no doubt they can win the conference. I've got them at a 10 on the confidence scale. Likewise with Oregon, you can talk all you want to with Ohio State about replacing this or that or Oregon, what are they going to do about this offensive line? Everybody's got questions. There is no yeah, but when it comes to questions in spring ball because everyone's got him. So until you show me this perfect team out there, I am not knocking your potential ability to win the Big Ten just because you've got to replace fill in the blank on the O line because I know what you have outside of that. I know you got Decori and Moore coming back. I know you got Evan Stewart coming back. I know who's throwing them the ball if everyone's healthy up there. Like I got so few questions about Oregon relative to the rest of the Big Ten. So I've got them at a 10 as well. So Ohio State and Oregon, 10 out of 10 on my confidence level that they can win the Big Ten. This is not a prediction they will. It's just confidence rating that they can. All right. Now, with Indiana, there were two very, very opposed schools of thought in my mind. There was the one school that remembers how wrong I was, how frequently I was wrong about Indiana last year. And that school of thought is, no, no, no, no. Just pick them to win every game. Salvage yourself, save yourself. And then there's the other school of thought that says, nope, wipe the slate clean. Whatever happened in 2025 is a distant memory. It's not. But whatever happened back then is a distant memory. You've got to judge this team on the surface for who they are and what they could be. And we compromised. And I think I put Indiana at a 9 on the confidence scale that they could win the Big Ten. Couple of questions that I have. Small questions in the grand scheme of things. Well, I don't know if this is a small question. So Fernando Mendoza goes off to the NFL. Josh Hoover comes in, and they went and they identified him pretty quickly. Quarterback at tcu. They plucked him. They brought him to Bloomington. I'm sure he'll do fine. All right, is he going to do as good as Fernando Mendoza did, both in terms of the stat sheet and the leadership piece? Is it just going to be this one for one, plug and replace? Seldom does it work that way. Now, sometimes the guy who comes in is better than the guy who left. In this case, it's going to be tough to be better than the Heisman Trophy winner, number one overall draft pick, quarterback position. However, that's not necessarily the way football works. It doesn't always have to be a perfect one for one trade off. So let's say Josh Hoover comes in, cuts down on his interception rate, which they're going to count on him to do, cuts down on that. But he's like, I don't know, 85% of the player that Fernando Mendoza was. Well, then you just got to get a little bit more and elsewhere. So then I look at the wide receiver position, and I think about Cooper and SWAT being gone, and, you know, we got Becker still there, but also we bring in Nick Marsh. Is that an equal tradeoff? Do I get a little bit more, a little bit less? I just look around the. The totality of this roster, and I wonder if this transfer class patches all the holes. Now, the follow up to that, if we were debating is you could say, hey, Indiana wasn't winning by just scraping by last year like they. They dominated a lot of the competition. So what if in totality, this team is only 90% of what it was? Is that not still good enough to win the Big Ten. Yeah, it would be. That's why I put them at a nine in my confidence that they can win it. And also, we've never had to talk about this with Indiana and I hesitate talking about it now. But the whole concept of the consequences of success, which is a phrase that we use on this show a lot, that whole batch of issues that only winners ever discover that you have to deal with. Who knows, man, maybe Indiana's magic and they're just immune to all that. But because this is future facing, I still have to factor that into the equation. So I'm going to put a 9 on Indiana. All right. Then we get down to the next tier. So Penn State, everybody's going to talk about Penn State schedule. Me too, because the schedule is the most workable out of any of the contending teams in the Big Ten. If you, if you want to know what conference expansion has done to this sport, look no further than Penn State and Ohio State having the same over under win total at FanDuel of 9 and a half. These are not apples to apples quality of teams. But because Ohio State plays such a disproportionately tougher schedule than Penn State, FanDuel said, nine and a half. Slap the sticker on both of them. Roll it off the assembly line. Well, because of that schedule, I got to kind of artificially enhance Penn State's confidence rating here a little bit. So I put them all the way up at an eight that they can win the Big Ten. A lot of it's scheduling based. Also, let's look beyond the schedule because schedulers don't play games, teams do. The team that they're going to put on the field this fall, this roster, they did lose some guys. They kept kind of a core base, the Penn State roster. They imported the top two layers of the Iowa State roster and that also comes with a quarterback offensive coordinator combo. So you've got one of those situations. This is kind of happening more and more in college football of head coach comes in, but he also sort of brings his guys with him and that includes in this case, quarterback offensive coordinator. So no one's having to learn new systems at the quarterback position at least. And also they could be a downhill momentum candidate Bradley throw their schedule back up for a second. So if you're listening on podcast, there's out of schedule, out of conference schedule is terrible. And then their first two conference opponents are Wisconsin and Northwestern. So they don't play a game that outside of being a Penn State fan, the rest of the world will probably pay much attention to until usc and that's the second week of October. So they've had time to iron a lot of the wrinkles out and they go USC and then at Michigan back to back and the rest of their schedule guys, Purdue, Washington, Minnesota, Rutgers, Maryland. So look, if you merely win the games you're favored to win, they are a two loss team in conference. They may be favored against usc, but if they just split those usc, Michigan games there and win the rest of the way, they're going to go to Indianapolis in all likelihood, at which point you got to win four quarters. So I'm going to put an eight on Penn State. I bumped it down to a six for Michigan. But I readily admit to you if we did nothing more than switch to Michigan and Penn State schedules, the confidence ratings would switch here. So a lot of this is schedule based. That's just the way of college football. Now I put a six on the confidence meter that Michigan can win the Big Ten. The mystery around the offense, not to mention the mystery around a new coaching staff coming in, that has a lot to do with this. It's probably. What would you say, Jesse? A B to a B plus level roster compared to your Ohio State or your Oregons? Not, not a poverty roster. Maybe a little bit off the pace of those top two, but that's okay. Like Michigan has won games before being described like that. But I just think about when I bring Kyle Whittingham in and then I bring the rest of his staff in, is it a lightning caught in the bottle immediately sort of thing? Does it take a couple of years? I mean, Bryce Underwood, the quarterback there is the first sort of glaring example in the nil era of conversation that sounds like it does. Meaning when you used to get a five star quarterback, it used to still make perfect sense to say, well, all right, two or three years down the road, that's when we may win a national title with him. And unless he's an extreme outlier. But now since you pay so much money for him, you talk about them like they're, you know, rookies in the NFL or they're free agent acquisitions in the NFL. They're just supposed to boom, produce immediately. Why? Because we paid them X amount of dollars. Well now Bryce Underwood is in his second year, so especially when it comes to him, they're going to talk about him like that. I don't know. I think that there is a world where if they're really good in one possession games, if they're really good at sort of Tightening the knots that were really loose there with the previous staff. There may be some easy wins. I don't mean on the field. There may be some easy wins in terms of progress and then those manifest themselves on the field. I'm going to put them at a six. I did the same thing with usc. I put USC at a six on the confidence meter to win the league as well. Now, I could say it like this. I could say if USC is good enough to make the Big Ten title game, well, that means that they were good enough on the line of scrimmage to weather an extremely tough schedule. That means Maiva came through as a third year quarterback. That means Lincoln Riley handled the pressure. That probably means this top rated recruiting class per the on three and Rivals recruiting rankings. That means that that class probably included several immediate contributors. And if they're good enough to make the conference title game, well, I'll make it a 9 or a 10 that they could win it. But that's not this game. This game starts from week one and it wonders are they even good enough to navigate the schedule and get to Indianapolis. And the schedule I don't want to just gloss over, this is like the antithesis of what Penn State plays because the schedule includes Oregon. It includes obviously a trip to Penn State. There's Washington right there in the middle of those. Ohio State's on this schedule. And if you can't see this, if you're not watching on YouTube right now, USC plays Oregon, Washington, Penn State, Wisconsin, Ohio State at Indiana. They're all back to, back to back. There is a bye. I think there are two bye week. So there's a buy thrown in there. Yeah. Between Penn State and Wisconsin, Right? Yeah. Still though, all of those games just boom, boom, boom, one after the other. So I'm nervous about it, but I still maintain what I've said. They got to make the playoff this year. They got to be right there in that conversation. There was nobody else in the Big Ten that I looked at as having really high confidence that they can win the league. Washington, I would put it like a three. You know, Jet Fish, I've got faith in him. Damon Williams is still the quarterback there. Not necessarily by free choice, free will, but he is still the quarterback there. Iowa is kind of always in the mix, but never able to be further than just in the mix. I put them at a two. So that's a look sort of at the fanduel odds right now to win the Big Ten. Be interesting once we get kind of halfway through fall camp to see what the vibes are out of a place like Indiana or a place like Washington for that matter. The vibes right now in the Pate State Store are that we're open and you can come and you can basically purchase anything you want to. Patstatematerial.com right now is there. It's on the world Wide web. Most of you have access to it. If you're watching this show, a lot of you are still in cold weather season. Many, many more of you are in short sleeve weather. It doesn't matter because we got something for everyone there. Patestatematerial.com New designs up. If you bought something like, oh, I don't know, September of last year, you may want to pay another visit because there's a lot of stuff there that you didn't see in the fall. Just a little quick infomercial. All right. As I was talking about moments ago that odds came out for the Big Ten courtesy of FanDuel. That's what I was talking about moments ago. Well, that's not a good endpoint for Bradley here. Here's a good endpoint. FanDuel has also come out with odds to win the SEC this upcoming year. And this is is a little bit different ball game than looking at the Big Ten. Cause in the Big Ten, I look at Ohio State, I look at Oregon 10 out of 10 I got, I dropped my phone. The I Josh is a casualty. It's on the ground now. I've got no doubt that Ohio State and Oregon can win the Big Ten. I did not look anywhere in the odds to win the SEC and immediately say give me a ten on that team. Now I got a couple of nine and a halfs. Texas and Georgia are nine and a halfs. On the confidence meter that they can win the conference. I'll probably get no pushback on rating Georgia nine and a half. I will get some pushback on rating Texas 9 1/2 because there is a not so small contingent of the college football public that believes something is impossible until it's done. So Texas hasn't done it and therefore it's impossible for Texas to do it. You cannot rate them the same as Georgia. Well, I can because I think they may have the best roster in the league has to get done this year. There's a ton of there's just immense pressure on Sark and so you'd have to explain your logic on Texas. I don't have to explain believing in Kirby, smarter Georgia, but they both return quarterbacks. They got, they have attrition they always will. But they got a good nucleus of a roster coming back. Virtually the entire staff at Georgia returns. I would say maybe staff upgrades a little bit at Texas. So they're good. They're nine and a halfs on the confidence meter. The bigger debate internally, when we were looking at the conference odds, is, okay, when we get beyond Texas and Georgia, how do we handle these other teams? LSU, for example. I put LSU at an 8 on the confidence meter to be able to win the sec. Remember, the this is not. If they get there, what are the odds? What's the confidence level? Well, of course, if they're in Atlanta, it's a 10 that they could win at all. But I've got to look at this thing from spring. I've got to understand, or I've got to at least have a good educated guess on how good Sam Levitt can be this year. Coming off injury, didn't have his fastball last year, figuratively or literally. But is that just all washed away? Is the memory of that wiped clean when I see him with this supporting cast and Lane Kiffin as his head coach? Maybe so, maybe so. That's why it's all the way up there at an 8. The talent roster certainly is there to compete for and win a conference title. It's got to come together. It's no different than going crazy at the grocery store and getting all the ingredients and groceries you could ever need. And then you come home and the bags are like hooked around your fingers, and then you. Oh, you unload them on the countertop and you get the feeling back in your fingers, and then, voila, there it is. There's your meal. No, actually, it's nothing but ingredients and groceries on the countertop. You've still got to do the right thing with them, which is no small task for some of us. So Lane Kiffin's got to do the thing with them. Could be taken out of context in many different ways down the road, but people clip the show for all sorts of different per pie, plural of purpose, the wide receiver room. Is that thing going to pan out the way it needs to be. Blake Baker may be able to win them games. American hero defensive coordinator at lsu, Blake Baker. So, yeah, I don't doubt that if they. If they need to win 16 to 10, they may be able to do that. I put an 8 on LSU with hopes that I can revisit that before Halloween. Texas A and M was just a little bit down to me from lsu. I put him in a seven and a half because of the volatility of the offense. First off, there's a lot of churn on this offensive line. Secondly, even if the offensive line is as good or better than it was last year, and that's certainly not a given, then I've got the whole Marcel Reed of it all and I've got knowing what his ceiling is, knowing what his floor is, knowing that I saw his floor too much late in the season, bunch of multi interception games. I've just got to trust Mike Elko on replacing these players though. I've got to trust that the Mike Elko evaluation and development has to come through. If you're listening on podcast, I have my eyes closed. That's me hoping. That's me praying that it works out there because if the rest of it works out and it just falls on quarterback, well then the other thing that's going to get talked about during the season is he promoted from within both coordinator positions. So you're talking to a guy who's got a lot of trust in Mike Elko's eye for talent, both roster and staff. But I can still doubt a little bit because I don't have my hands on it day to day. So I put a seven and a half on my confidence that A and M can do it. I put a 7 on Alabama. So Alabama just a little notch slightly below that of Texas A and M when it comes to my confidence only because they couldn't run the ball to save their lives last year and now they're overhauling their offensive line, complete with a new offensive line coach. They will also start a new quarterback and there is a world where Alabama is a better team than they were last year. There certainly is. They got a lot of really good players there. We just don't know much about them, including at the quarterback position, including at the offensive line spots, because we really haven't seen, in most cases we haven't seen them at all and in many more cases we haven't seen much of them at all. So it also is the level of play in their defensive front there that it needs to be. Over the course of a year. You lose guys like James Smith and Quay Russo to Ohio State and you can tell me all you want to those aren't big losses. I know what depth means at this level. Those are losses. They 100%. I don't even care if they weren't going to start for you, and they may have, but I don't even care if they weren't going to start. I can promise you if they are integral Role players at Ohio State, they would have been at Alabama. So I just, I think along those lines. And if all those questions get answered, Bama would be a 10. But they're still questions because it's spring, so they are a seven. The next bucket was sort of the six or slightly less crowd. I put Oklahoma in this group. I put Ole Miss in this group. I put Tennessee in this group. Admittedly, if you tell me Trinidad Chambliss is starting for Ole Miss. So he, he makes it out of spring practice and summer workouts and the courtroom and he is on the field for fall camp. Yeah, I'd have Ole Miss higher than a six, but I've got to bake all of what we know into the equation right now. Tennessee, I said the other day, kind of feels like they'd be a year away, but who knows, Maybe they're just a year ahead of schedule. And Oklahoma again running the ball again, needing to level up an offensive line, making sure John Mattier is 100%. And then what does it mean for John Mattier to be 100%? How much fall off is there defensively? We don't expect a ton, but maybe a little bit. But in the aggregate, is that a better team than they were last year? Who knows? And then Florida, like Missouri, Auburn, South Carolina. I couldn't go higher than a two. Too many questions. Too many questions. So two is not zero, but. But two is pretty low. They're watching us in Macon, Georgia, San Angelo, Texas. Is that Seattle? Yeah, Seattle, Washington tuned in. Appreciate you guys so much. Let's roll on. We're ping ponging around. It's that kind of show. There's no breaking news tonight, at least that I know of. And my phone fell off, so I'm not going to get any breaking news. If it does happen, do you think there'll be any new contenders in the ACC or the Big 12 this year? I mean, legit contenders to win these leagues? Because it wasn't too long ago when we looked at the Big 12 that it could be anyone's ballgame. And now just a couple of years later, if you look at the fanduel odds to win the league, it's Texas Tech at minus 115 to win the league. And the next closest is Utah at +700. And then Brigham Young at +750. And then if you really want your mind blown, you go down to Houston. That's next in line. That's plus 1800. Plus 1800. That is the odds for the fourth best team in the Big 12. You'd have to go down to number eight in the odds to win the SEC to get to 1800. Just to give you an idea of how much the identities of those two conferences have flipped over the past couple of years, the ACC's sort of similar. Miami is minus 135 to win the ACC. SMU is next at plus 700. Louisville's next at plus 1100. So I'm just sitting here asking myself, clearly, Miami is the favorite. Clearly Texas Tech is the favorite in those respective conferences. Can I make a case for anyone else? Could I really work my nerves up to put money behind anyone else? Now, I will tell you what many of you are yelling at your phone or your. Or your tablet or your laptop, your TV right now, and that is Miami is that overwhelming a favorite when they've never even played for the ACC title, at least in recent memory. Maybe. I don't know how long it's been. Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. Miami played for a national title last year. Didn't play for a conference title in the acc, by the way, think about the specific prop bet and the odds that we would have had with Fanduel last year if they let us cook that up. An ACC team is not going to play for the conference title, but will play for the national title. You say that in the Big Ten or the sec, that's one thing, because Texas could just mess around early and lose, but get their act together. Ohio State had just done it in the Big Ten the year before, but to think an ACC team was going to be good enough to make a run to a national title, but they weren't going to be good enough to make it to their own conference title game. That would have blown minds. But yeah, Miami is that big an odds on favorite, as is Texas tech. Texas Tech's 2025, is that going to be the new norm? Is that what we're really saying? You lose David Bailey and Lee Hunter, Romello Heights gone. Rodriguez is gone. We're just going to seamlessly backfill like that every year. Yeah, that's. That's what FanDuel is saying. Or if they're not saying that, they're saying that you could make a whole lot of money if you can prove otherwise. That's kind of what they're saying. So in the acc, I'm thinking about who it would be if it's not Miami. And I know SMU is number two in the odds, but I actually thought maybe Louisville was the team that made the most sense to be the shark fin offshore that sort of catches us off guard. And it's because they got Lincoln Kynholz in the transfer portal. And I'm thinking about the unknown. I'm thinking about what we call upside of unknown. So the upside of what could be from a guy that reportedly pushed Julian Saen to the limit in the quarterback battle at Ohio State last year. If I'm getting him to transfer to Louisville under a bona fide quarterback whisperer in the head coach there in Jeff Braum and also Jeff Braum's a guy in Louisville is a program that has proven we know how to work the portal. We really get how this new age of college football works. They've got an excellent track record there. They're hungry. They haven't really accomplished anything of note at that level. So there's certainly no complacency or anything like that. There's no Miami or Virginia Tech or Clemson on their schedule. And those are three of the top four teams in the odds for the top five, at least. Maybe it's Louisville. Maybe it would be them in the Big 12. You just go to the state of Utah in the Big 12. To me, if you're telling me Texas Tech is not going to win it come December, I'm telling you, you're probably wrong. But if they don't win it, I know Utah's there, new staff there. Well, new head coach, not necessarily new, just promoting upward. But I think Brigham Young would be the one that won it. They're at plus 750 odds. But I think about Kehlani Sitaki, who had an offer to leave and chose to stay and what that can do to the moral fiber and the. I don't know, just the energy level of a program. And then also Bartmire rather, being back and knowing that you had two shots at Texas Tech last year and it ended up not being competitive either time. And just sitting on that for months and months and months that can do something to a program, that can do something to your competitive spirit and your competitive character. Who knows, Maybe they get another shot next year and it ends up the exact same. But nothing stays the same in this sport. You either get better or you get worse every day. You're not just staying the same coach speak. But maybe Brigham Young is that Team Houston, if not them. I'm skipping over Utah. I'm not skipping over Utah. I acknowledge them, but outside of them, I would think BYU Houston. I know it's not rocket science because they're next in the Odds. What about Baylor? Baylor's down there a little ways. Baylor's at plus 2200. What if DJ Lagway somehow becomes the player that certain people thought that he would be a year ago? What if DJ Lagway ends up being the best quarterback in the Big 12 this year? What if going to play for Dave Aranda in Waco, Texas was what DJ Lagway needed all along? Also Oklahoma State is it plus 3500? Look, if you got an extra $10 that you could bear to part with, I don't know that it would be the stupidest thing in the world to just roll the dice. $10 worth of dice, at least on Oklahoma State. Maybe Eric Morris bringing a critical chunk of his roster up I35 to Stillwater. Maybe that's the secret ingredient. Maybe it just all comes together there. I don't know. Move on. We were talking so much about teams here, we could talk about players for a little while. The other day I was doing a mailbag and someone asked this right here, Walter from Hughesville, Maryland, who are some players that should level up in 2026 and become big time impact players in the sport? So Bryce Underwood is where I've got to start here. I mean, Bryce Underwood is one of the most important players in the Big Ten and college football because he determines whether there's going to be another player at the head table, player in team. He will determine whether Michigan's at that head table or not. And came in last year, sort of was what it was. In year one, they were 107th in pass yards per game. And against Oklahoma he was 9 of 24. Against Ohio State he was 8 of 18. Now against Texas in the bowl game, that was a crazy bowl game, by the way. He was 23 of 42 for 199, but he had three picks. So there's a lot of leveling up to do here and he's just got to do it. You got a new head coach, new offensive coordinator and Jason Beck. You got to do it. And they play Oklahoma and Iowa in their first four weeks of the season. He's got Andrew Marsh to throw the ball to, but Jamie French comes in, J.J. buchanan comes in out of the portal. So they tried to get him some help, but Bryce Underwood's got a level up this year. Charlie Becker I speak about with a different tone. Charlie Becker was a superstar for Indiana second half of the season last year. They trusted that kid implicitly. He was their go to guy in many cases after not really showing up a whole Lot in the first half of the year, first five games for Indiana, he had seven catches. In the Penn State game alone, he had seven catches for 118. And then you saw what he did in their big games, the back half of the season. But now Cooper and Suratt are gone and they brought in Nick Marsh. And Nick Marsh is going to get a lot of headline. Like people are going to ask, oh, who's going to fill the void, so to speak, at Indiana. And people are going to point out Nick Marsh, as they should. Charlie Becker's the guy there, but that's just it, he's got to be the guy. He was a guy last year and I don't say that disrespectfully, but I mean, if you look at his numbers, he was a guy. He was third on that production chart. But he has number one potential. Absolutely does. Got no doubt. Terrifies me if I'm a defensive coordinator. So I would look for Charlie Becker to level up, at least statistically. If he just maintains the level of play he did at the end of the year, he'll level up statistically. Marcel Reed's got to be this guy. Marcel Reed at Texas A and M in the highest of high moments last year was electric. And when he levels up, it doesn't need to mean that his best has to be any better. I just need to see far less of his worst. He needs to level up his floor. That's what he needs to do. Because he had two interceptions in four of his final six games. And when you talk about the other aspects of this team, when you talk about offensive line maybe not being as good, him needing to shoulder a little bit more of the load while also cutting down on erratic play, that will determine whether Texas A and M is a playoff caliber team this year. And he's got a strong receiver core but no touchdowns and eight sacks against Texas and Miami, that's a problem. They will not get where they want to go. If that's the case again this year, there's another guy that is not unknown. Damon Wilson out of Missouri. Damon Wilson transferred to Miami and this is not a no name guy. He had nine sacks last year, so he's a premier edge rusher. But see, that's my question. They're losing Bane and they're losing Mazador and you're bringing in an impact guy kind of in the spirit that they've done before. You're bringing in an impact guy in Damon Wilson. But the thing about Bane and Mazador, they had 22 sacks they had over 100 tackles as well combined like they were. They were forces. They were surefire 3 down guys. I wonder if Damon Wilson is a premier pass rusher or he is a premier football player. How does he look against the run? How does he look when they try and make him earn the right to rush the passer on first and second down? Don't know. I don't think Mario and them take him if they don't think he has it in him. But that's kind of the part of his game that he has to level up and you know, above and beyond just that, you think about the reputation that you have to live up to when you're walking in the door down there now and the identity of physicality that place has that forces you to level up your game. He's got to do that. And I look at Ohio State too. I was going to say Bo Jackson but he was over a thousand yard rusher last year. I think he'll be an integral piece but he's not a level up guy. He's. He's doing a good job. I think Brandon Ennis needs to level up. Brandon Ennis. The good news is he's fully capable of leveling up. He is the next in a long string of legit five star talent they've had at receiver. But sometimes you got to wait your turn at Ohio State. Well, this is the moment. 2026 is the year that if he is what many people, including me think he is, that production will ramp up, it'll scale up, cross from Jeremiah Smith, perfect Runway for him, perfect situation. It's not a first year quarterback there anymore. He's. He had 271 receiving yards last year. There's no reason he can't triple that minimum this year. And if they're going to be ultimately what they need to be in that room, it'll be because of him. If Jeremiah Smith ultimately becomes the well he already is, he's not becoming anything. But if this year he continues an upward trajectory, it'll be because guys like Brandon Ennis did their job. Sometimes it takes until a senior year. That's okay when you're as loaded as they are. Let's move it along. Man, I hate to. First off, the phone fell. Secondly, I didn't bring my water in here. No one's helping me. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. It's ironic that the next question. No, no, I'm good. I don't want to complain. I don't really want you to do anything about it. If you do something about It. I can't complain anymore. How ironic that Kenny asked the question that he asked here. Kenny from Lake Worth, Florida, really picking up what I'm putting down. He said, a lot of people assume because you talk about college football for a living, your job is easy. What's the hardest part of your job that a fan doesn't realize? Thank you, Kenny. Thank you. Well, first off, Kenny, a lot of bad stuff happens, and then no one lifts a finger to do anything. Here I am partially dehydrated. I'm uninformed. My phone's on the ground. My water's on the ground. Nobody's doing anything. Yeah, my mom. Yeah, Mom. No one's coming to help me. But more realistically, or I guess more seriously. Not that that wasn't serious, but more seriously, Kenny, as you know, if you've watched the show for a long time, I've had real jobs in my life, so I don't think of any of this as hard. But I guess, relatively speaking, if you were going to say something's hard, and I guess the schedule and responsibility is hard because we removed ourselves from the corporate media world. So there's no safety net. There is no. If we don't get it done, someone else will pick up the slack. It's all on us to do everything. It's on us to do production. It's on us to make sure equipment's working. It's on us to make sure the studio is running properly. Graphics packages, elements, sales, like, all of that. We just had meetings about this today. We've got to do it all. But we do it that. Cause we do it that way because we want to do it that way. So that's not hard. Well, it's preferable, I guess it's hard, but it's preferable. Hard is the preference, Jesse. That's what I'm trying to say. All caps, immunity. And then the other part. Now, I will say this. All right, so the one lesson maybe that people can take away. Think about what you love to do for a living. For instance, I love to do this for a living. So this is all I've ever wanted to do. So I'm sort of in a sweet spot professionally. There is this thing that happens sometimes where you think you love something, and in an ideal world, you do what you love for a living, but then you get a job doing that thing for a living, and you find out the hard way, no, I didn't love it. I only liked it. And doing what you merely like for a living is a surefire way to make you hate the thing you like. Because there is a lot of work that comes along with doing anything professionally at a high level, just the way it is. But if you love it, that's okay. It doesn't make you love it any less. But if I only liked college football and then I got a job doing it for a living, I would grow to despise college football because. Because of a lot of the extra things that come along with it. But since I love it, I'm immune from that. But the other thing, if there is, it's all relative. But if there is one other difficult thing when we're in the fall, it's a seven day a week job. It's just a ton of hours, no complaints. Certainly no complaints. I would much rather spend 14 hours a day doing this than 9 hours a day doing what I used to do for a living. However, on a random Tuesday in November when we're like 11 weeks in doing that, there is a time in August where I tell the staff your next off day will be the week of Thanksgiving. So you are going to work seven days a week through Thanksgiving week. Then it'll be that way again through Christmas. So you just kind of understand that's part of the job. So you'll get into like early November and you've gone seven days a week working, I don't know, 80 to 120 hours or something like that. Again doing what you love. The part about it that sucks sometimes is your day starts at 5:36 at the latest and you're working, working, working all day. You take a little bit of time to go get a workout in, then you come back and you're working. You're in the office by that point, you're working, you're putting together a Show and you're 14 hours into your day once the show happens where theoretically you're supposed to be at your best. And I know a lot of you, when you do your job the way you do it, you frontload your day so you can be your sharpest at like a 10:00am meeting or an 11:00am conference call. And that's just not the way it happens because of the way we do the show when we do the show. So you get 14 hours into your workday and then you have to do your show and you have to be at your best. I guess if I were going to say that's the hardest part of the job, that's it. The travel. Yeah, that's never all that fun. But there's no hard Part of this, relatively speaking, there's no hard part of this. And if anyone thinks there is, let me take you down to Columbus, Georgia, for a summer and let me just throw you in the back of that fabric warehouse, especially during market times, which are its own animal, and then check back in after summer's over and see how hard this is. It's not hard. Let's move along. Just got off the road from the first two stops of the Pate State Speaker Series. We sat down with Brent Key and at Georgia Tech, we tried to make that happen for two years. We finally worked it out. I said, you're going to be first on the tour this year. And he's like, all right, all right, I'll do it. So we went down there, and then 24 hours later, we were sitting down in Auburn with Alex Goelish, new head coach there at Auburn. And I always like to come back and give as much as I can a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. First things first. Okay, it was 80 degrees last week in Atlanta. Earlier this week, it was 80 degrees. And then we get down there and it is 37 degrees. They practice in the morning. I went down there, I watched practice before we did the sit down with Brent, and I asked Mike Flynn down there. I said, mike, is he going full psycho mode? Is he going to do an outdoor practice or is he going to have it indoor? And it was like, hey, look, there may be some outdoor periods, but it's largely going to be indoor. And you may say, man, that sounds kind of soft. 1,000% it is. I'm not on that team. I don't need to be hardened. I didn't want to wear three or four layers either. So I went over there. I was wearing one long sleeve layer, and that's mainly just to walk to the facility because I'm going to be indoors. Well, here's the bad news. Yeah, there was a lot of the practice that was indoors, but all the garage doors were open, so it was in the 30s. And the indoor Brent Keys and short sleeves, he's cut from a different cloth than me. I don't know what else to tell you. We played different positions in college, and so that was that. And I don't want. I do want people to feel sorry for me, but I just want it to be noted, okay, if the nose was a little red during the sit down, it's only because I was still thawing out. But the first thing that stood out watching Georgia Tech practice is they are way, way bigger defensively. Specifically up front, they're way bigger than they were last year. So I know Brent's probably talked about that a lot and we made a concerted effort to do this. He talked about it when he did the sit down with us. But they are bigger. Fernando Mendoza's brother is one guy in the quarterback competition down there. If you were to put odds out on it, he'd probably, I guess, be the favorite to win it. You can see the tools are there. You can see it. It's spring ball. So there's a lot that is still in the process of working itself out. Decision making reads functioning in the offense. Like if fans were to watch a spring practice, you would freak out and think you're going 120 during one series and then you think 3 and 9, we are screwed the very next series. That's what spring practice looks like. That's oftentimes why they don't want media watching a whole lot of that stuff. Because in the wrong context, the spring practice can either massively inflate or deflate expectations. Here's what's funny. So Brent is a very hands on guy by his nature. He wants his hands on everything. And it's so funny to stand there and watch practice with a guy who is a hands on guy who has committed himself to remaining a little bit more hands off during that day because you can never fully take it out of him. And so there'll be, I mean there'll be a guy lining up in the neutral zone over here and he's mid sentence with you at level three on the decibel meter and then it's level 30 right in your ear because he's got to yell 30 yards across the field while the music's blaring and then he's right back checked in. But that's always funny. But here's, here's the thing. When you watch them on the defensive line, I'm not saying they got a full like rotation of future first rounders, there are higher quality players on that defensive line. But also when you walk in the building, a lot of new faces. And I think it would strike someone who comes from the normal corporate world because in the normal corporate world when you're starting to achieve at a higher level, like Georgia Tech had a nine win season last year, that's the best they've been in a decade. You would think, oh, alright, let's make sure we build a fence around everybody, let's keep all these staffers. And Brent was like, no, I kind of want to flush the building and there's so many new faces there. So after seeing that, when we were walking around the building, I asked him about it and if you haven't watched the whole sit down, here's a little small taste of what he had to say. To a certain extent, when you tasted a version of what you ultimately want to have last year, the outside world would think you do everything you can to keep everything about that together and then just climb one more rung the next year. But I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you went maybe a little bit different angle here of no, I want a lot of new faces in the building. With new faces comes what?
- [44:28]
B
Continuity breeds complacency in every walk of life in an organization. Think about the times in January. We've already done it this way. We've already done this. We don't need to do A, B, C, we can start at D. What about that freshman? I thought we did an absolute poor, poor job of developing freshmen last year. From January through the season, we had players that played for the first time in November. They should have been playing in September. Alright, well, why is that? When you go back and look at it. But when you have a lot of people together for one year, two years, three years, just because they know it in that room doesn't mean that freshman that walks in the door knows it. So that's the approach I took. That's one of the tweaks to the organization. That's one of the things I learned through failure, that we have to be better at doing. We have to do better. We took all our stuff that we normally do in June and we moved it up to January with the players. We walked in the. I pulled my notes from the very first day of being the head coach. I tweaked them and we started out our first staff meeting with that. Right. We're rebuilding playbooks. Right. Everything started from scratch. So now when you walk around the building, it's not like you've been in somewhere for a while, but there's that freshness and that newness that a new staff always has, that energy of a new staff. You know, when a brand new head coach comes in, everyone's all excited. Well, we have that now again. But now I realize, and I see back my time in Alabama, how every January, February, there was always this buzz of new life because we always started back at A.
- [46:08]
A
Yeah, I appreciate the comments, by the way, we got from a lot of Georgia Tech fans. Just talking about how open he was. I mean that's by design. That's kind of how we want to format it. But he was very cooperative with that. Yeah, he means every word he says there. It was a really good sit down. I strongly encourage you guys to go watch that one. And the Alex Goelish episode, which we recorded the very next day. It's the first time I've been on campus since he got hired. He's been there a little over three and a half months now. It was so crazy. When coaches get hired, obviously they get hired in November or December and there are a million different things going on. And by the time you get to spring practice, you feel like they've been there for a while. He hasn't coached a game. He's several months away from coaching a game. But there are always so many stories. Because if you imagine taking a job, what the Saturday or Sunday after the regular season concludes, and then your national signing day is 96 hours later, and then you've got the transfer portal window coming open. Oh, by the way, you're also having to hire a staff. You're having to meet people, learn names, learn where you live, how to get to work, a million different things. By the time you get to spring practice, you got a stack of stories that you can tell. So we probably spent like 30 minutes talking about that before we even went and sat down to talk on camera. And he was really good, man. I strongly believe this is one of the best sit downs we've done over several years now. We were going to go about 30 minutes. We ended up going 45 minutes. But I always wonder about these coaches that sort of level up. A coach that was at the G5 level who takes the Auburn job. I always wonder about the orbit of these big programs and how it affects coaches. So like, I've talked to. I've talked to Alex several times about this, about the orbit of Auburn, and Auburn's got some perception about it. Some of it's true, some of it's false. Like, I think people run down Auburn a little bit because they've just heard stuff, but they don't personally know. Like, they'll always say, oh, you know this. And that happens at Auburn. Well, how do you know? You read it on a message board. Your cousin said that, so you just repeated it. Or do you have actual functional working knowledge of what's happened at Auburn behind the scenes? I'm not saying that nothing negative has ever happened. I'm saying, do you personally have the ability to vouch for it? Well, the perception is when you go Take one of these jobs, all the big time donors, they call you up or they walk into your office and they shake hands, they meet you and then they say, now, here's how much money I give per year. Now here's what I expect in return for that. And I'm always interested because some of that does happen. I'm always interested about whether a coach has the gravitas, for lack of a better term, because the kiddos are listening, after all, to walk in a door and to be able to say, I want your support, I need your support. However, we are running my plan, we're running my process here. And if that's a problem for you, all due respect, you and your check can hit that door right there. And despite the fact that Alex Goelish has never had a job of this caliber before, my suspicion, my strong instinct is he does possess that ability. And in time, if one possesses that ability and one is a good enough football coach, then one will win at Auburn. I think Alex Goelish will win at Auburn. So you need to be careful. The one thing that I always have to tell myself in spring is you need to be careful because you go on these campuses, camp, I, plural of campus, and you can fall in love really quick. I've been victim of this in the past. So, hey, I think the world of both of those guys. I gotta be careful. Gotta be careful. We are the Etch A Sketch board. We swipe left or swipe right, however you work in Etch A Sketch and it's a clean slate. We start building our opinion of teams. They had had one spring practice at the time that we were at Auburn the other day. I mean, not even Goelish was prepared to really talk at great length about his team because he doesn't know what kind of team he has yet. And so it doesn't matter if I think the world of someone. I love the staff they put together. I love this and that. Okay? Take that for what it is and nothing more. All right. That is one Jenga block in a huge tower of many blocks that it's going to take to build a 10 and 2 team if you're going to be that good. But it was really fun. We'll be on the road again next week and I'll always. I'll give you what I can, as much as I can. And then some of it I just, I lock it and I put it in my pocket until December. And then we break out stories once the season's over, move along, telling a lot of truth. On the show lately. The Truth Teller series continues tonight. One of our most popular segments every spring, because we just point our finger at someone or something or a program or a topic, and we just try and tell the truth about it. And guess where the spinner landed tonight? The spinner landed on Mario Cristobal. Not even Miami, just Mario. Let's tell the truth about Mario Cristobal. After coming in several years ago, after losing to the likes of Middle Tennessee State and Duke at home, and after going to the transfer portal. And then he eventually brings in Cam Ward, and things get better. But, oh, critical mistakes and decision making cost him games. And they. They throw away potential because then defensively, they're terrible. Last year, after all that, then they finally get it right on both sides of the ball this past year, Couple of hiccups during the regular season, but then they get it right. They make the playoff. They win one game, they win two games, they go all the way to the national championship. What's the truth about Mario Cristobal? Well, to me, the truth is the same today as it was when he took the job. It's just that the resume's changed. The old Wikipedia page looks different today. And I went back and I watched our shows from the day he was hired, the weeks and months following his hiring, and I was pretty adamant about the same stuff that I'm adamant about now. He is the perfect choice to lead Miami Football. It was never going to happen overnight. I mean, it was a pretty bleak situation that they inherited down there. And I thought in many cases, to do what he was going to want to do, they were going to have to put the car in reverse before they were even able to go forward. But he is the poster child for the cannot versus have not crowd. Cause Mario has had no shortage of detractors, and he's had no shortage of haters. And by proxy, we've been in the same boat because I've been pretty steadfast that I thought he'd win at Miami over time. And when he went five and seven the first year, whew, they were out in force. And then when he went seven and six the second year, they were out in force. And what's crazy if you just look on paper is you would think they shut up in year three because they went 10 and three. Actually, they didn't, because they had Cam Ward and still lost too many games. And they did not make the playoff. And so that year was viewed as a failure. And then this past year, finally they make the national title game. And so, like, a lot of people, turn down the volume a little bit. But you know as well as I do that if you were telling me or you were just telling anyone who would listen, Mario's not that guy. You may still have that doubt in your mind even after they went to the national title game. And the problem that I've always had with it is I was never thinking he was going to automatically do something in year one. Year two. You could say the same thing about Lanning at Oregon. You could say the same thing about Sark at Texas. I'm not comparing the coaches, I'm comparing the situations. If I think Sark's going to win a national title at Texas or Dan Lanning's going to do it at Oregon, I could mean that in year eight or year two. Like, I just think it's going to happen. Well, if I thought Mario was going to win at Miami, obviously it was because I thought he was going to put together the kind of talent roster that could do it. And I thought that talent roster was going to buy into a certain way of playing football. Both of those things have clearly happened. And then thirdly, and this is just kind of a bonus, I thought it would happen either way. But it's kind of a bonus that he's come along in this era where Miami can flex a pretty unique muscle down there to use the transfer portal to their advantage at the quarterback position specifically. So they're doing all those things. So they're winning now and they'll win in the future. But the thing I always noticed and I always kind of understood, anytime folks were hating on Mario Cristobal or they were hating on Miami, or if those are interchangeable in your mind, that's fine. A lot of the doubt or a lot of the hate thrown his way is just because he's a disruptor. He kind of walked in and he disrupted South Florida. There were a lot of programs out there that had gotten really used to going into South Florida and just taking the players. And then Mario comes in. And it's not that kids didn't leave South Florida, but it's a lot harder to get them to leave South Florida. But also it's two way street, because now he can go take kids from you that are already on your roster who have been there for a few years. And hey, all's fair. Turnabout's fair play. But that's disrupting the ecosystem of college football. The ecosystem of college football had gotten used to Miami sucking and Miami not really mattering. And it was happy with that. Alabama was happy with that. Florida State was happy with that. Ohio State was happy with that. And that's not the case anymore. That's what disruption is. So Mario's a disruptor, but also Miami at its best, historically has been a disruptor. And they are both those things again. So part of the doubt out there, part of the people picking him apart and them apart, up until five minutes ago saying, oh, he'll never do this or that, part of it was just hope. Now, I will grant you there are some people who legitimately think that Mario will never win or he would never win at Miami or Miami would never be back. And they thought that just cause they thought that whether they were right or wrong, it was just logic based to them. And they thought that. But there's this other group that never really knew for sure. They were just hoping and they were dressing their hope up as prediction. They were dressing their hope up as logic. Mario will never do this or that. There. Here's my reasoning. Are you really just hoping you're right? Turns out you weren't, but you were hoping you were right. But he runs Miami the way other coaches would love to run their programs, but frankly, I think are afraid to. Now, maybe in some cases they just don't possess the ability to. Certainly most places cannot acquire the kind of talent that they acquire at Miami. So that greatly cuts down on the potential programs that could ever do what Miami's doing. But then there's this other aspect of the level of physicality that is the bedrock of their program. I've watched it many times in practice down there. Their practices are more physical than their games are, if you can believe that, specifically on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you're watching them fall, it's brutality. And then you get through that and your reward is the game on Saturday. And everybody wants to do that. And most people are just afraid to practice that way because of injury concerns and because of the lack of depth that you have. And you just don't think you can afford to practice that way. But they do. And they didn't pay a price for it last year. In fact, they reaped the reward from it last year. And I just think there's a lot of. I don't know if envy is the right word. Maybe it is. I think there's a lot of professional envy that they have the resources they have and it affords them the ability to operate the way they do. And then outside the ecosystem of coaching, just in the general college football public sphere, I just think a lot of people hate Miami. That's totally fine. Hate is welcome in the world of college football. That's why college football is different from real life. We don't want hate on the streets. But hate in this world is totally fine if you hate Miami. I'm not trying to convince you to stop. I'm just convincing you that your hate exists for a reason that was born probably a generation ago. And now that's kind of being repeated or maybe duplicated now kind of in a new world format, but it's being duplicated now. Tell you what else is happening right now. Not that we'll be covering it, but March Madness is happening right now. Now that's not all, because that wouldn't be a headline. The headline is over at FanDuel right now. They're just giving away bonus bets. You don't even have to do anything special to unlock it other than going to your bonus tab and unlocking it. And what that looks like is there is money just sitting there. You didn't do a thing to earn it other than signing up. And you don't have to be a new sign up. You could have been a member for 10 years. It's there. Go to your bonus tab. There it is. All you have to do is go use that money that is sitting in your account to bet on an NCAA tournament game. That's it. Go win the game. My advice is to win. Always. My advice is to win the bets that you place and then that money's yours. You notice the pregnant pause there? It's because there's nothing else to say. So, yeah, we got a lot of odds. I mean, we've talked about them on the show tonight. You could go, you could go easily bet these odds to win the conferences if you want to. And I would encourage that sort of behavior. But in the meantime, if you just want to go bet a second round game, if you got some Sweet 16 action in mind, then by all means do it. But use your bonus bet that they've dropped in.
- [59:36]
C
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- [60:21]
A
Lastly, on this Thursday evening, the Mood Tracker is back. The Mood Tracker is not meant to talk about how I feel about anything. The Mood Tracker is meant to talk about how you feel, in this case, how Georgia fans feel about their team right now. I would categorize the Georgia fans mentality, their mood towards their team right now as just processing. Not necessarily processing as in, oh, I'm trying to get something figured out, processing in terms of that's your existence. You get process preached to you over and over again by the head coach of that program. There is a clearly defined process that Georgia football has come to be known by for a long time. It's worked. They're always in the mix. But as a fam, you look at the last couple of years and you were good enough to be in the playoff, not good enough to win the national title. But think about those last two years, because this is kind of where the perception gets away from us a little bit. And not even if you're a Georgia fan, just, I'll put you on hold for a second. The perception about Georgia is, well, they're kind of down now. Down relative to what the teams they put on the field that won a couple of national titles. Yeah. If you want to sell me that, they're down a little bit relative to that. Okay. I'd also ask you look at the rest of the sport. No one has that kind of depth really anymore. But let's just focus on Georgia. Think about the last two years. Let me tell you what's been completely whitewashed from history. The fact that when they lost to Notre Dame in the playoff last year, their quarterback was out for the season. Carson Beck was out for the year. So they had to insert a new starter. That starter was Gunnar Stockton, and he did all he could. They didn't win. And, and then this last year, they ran into Trinidad Chambliss in the playoff. These are not. It's not a down program. It's a program that was good enough to win the league, a program that was good enough to make the playoff with a first round bye, and then that was it. You'd love to have been a little bit better, but that was it. But the point is, there's nothing broken with Georgia football. There's no major overhaul that has to happen with Georgia football. They got the best winning percentage in the sport the last five years. So there's nothing major that has to be fixed. Gunner Stockton's back this year, good roster, really good staff continuity. And so you've got a lot of things that you can depend on if you're Kirby smart. If you're a Georgia fan, you bring it all back and you gear up and you wind up and you, you deal your fastball again and you hope it's good enough. That that's kind of processing as a Georgia fan. The fundamental shift in the SEC also hasn't happened around Georgia. That's why I don't buy any of this. Well, they're down. They're down relative to greatness and relative to elite depth that doesn't exist anymore anywhere. And Texas hasn't taken advantage of it. Alabama hasn't taken advantage of it. See, if Georgia were down and then Sark and Texas just took the league by the throat, that'd be a problem. But Georgia has still owned Texas even in this process of quote unquote being down. Bama. They beat Georgia last year in the regular season, but then Georgia got him back times 10 in the SEC title game. So no one has risen up to take the throne or anything like that. Georgia's not fallen distantly to fourth or fifth place or even second place. And lastly, this is more Kirby. Kirby was really quick to understand how much the landscape was changing. Like he kind of got it. I remember two years ago we were down there and he was talking about how one of the hidden challenges of being in Georgia is what they had accomplished and then trying to make sure people understood that kind of stuff's not going to happen anymore. You could win a national title. Yes, but you're not going to have rosters that look like that anymore at Georgia or anywhere else. And if he was a brand new head coach in the door or they had been losing, it'd be one thing, but they had gotten used to winning. And so it's one thing if he can see it, but can the entire fan base see it? That was going to be a challenge. I understand it and I think to some degree it still is a challenge. That the floor is not ten and two for you anymore. The floor in these places. No one wants to hear this, but like if Georgia's on the wrong side of some one possession games, you could go 7 and 5, you go 8 and 4 and not be terrible just because that's the way the landscape has changed. That's not just with Georgia, that's Texas. That's Bama, that's anyone in this conference. That's Texas A and M. Anybody's like that now he gets it. And he's going to have them in the best position they can possibly be in because that's, that's what being a high level head coach is and that's what leading the high level program is. It's just processing. They've, they've just, for the last couple of years, after making platinum albums, they've been reduced to merely producing a couple of gold albums. That's the net result of the fall off at Georgia. People have suffered far worse and survived. That's our show for tonight. We appreciate it so much. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel and if you haven't already, please do. If you have. Thank you. If you think you have, check and make sure that you have. And that's it. And that's all. We'll be back Sunday night. Until then, for director Bradley producer Jesse I'm Josh Bateman. Enjoy your weekend and God bless.
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