← The Right Time with Bomani Jones
The Right Time with Bomani Jones
Steven Godfrey on Transfer Portal Problems, Lane Kiffin LSU-Ole Miss Madness, Nick Saban Concerns | 01.07
01:09:28
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Foreign.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Right Time, A Wave original. My name is Bomani Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. It is the time of week where we have a guest join us. We have had him before. I think this is the first time he's been like a full on actual factual guest, which is my fault. Check him out on the podcast. Split Zone Duo talking college football. Stephen Godfrey. How are you, sir?
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I'm good, man. I'm all over this year. Yeah, I've been. I've been doing too much. But I'm glad. I'm glad we could talk because as we were joking before we turned the mics on, we tend to have these conversations and, you know, our. Our corporate media friends tend to. To, you know, do that thing and they start clenching up where we start classifying the business of college football for what it is. Yeah.
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B
You are one of my favorite CD underbelly guys.
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Right?
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I love it. Fascinated. You know, college football wise, we traffic in similar circles, right? The old SB Nation circle, which is people fascinated by the madness of this more than anything else. Like, wait a minute, how is this real life, right? Like, how is this actually a thing that does make money, though? It's a very important distinction. I always say college sports exist to make money, not to make profits. Those are not the same thing.
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Absolutely. In fact, yeah, I think the genesis of my professional reputation was I was sitting in an editorial meeting with our mutual friend Spencer hall, and he was asking me about something that was happening. I told him something that wasn't known yet, and he said, well, how'd you know that? I said, oh, well, you know, this bag man told me, and he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He goes, let's talk about that. And so we kind of. We kind of broke the. We broke the cardinal. The rule, man. You never talk about those people, right? Everybody knew about those people. And this is like circa 2013, you know, when we were still all kids, were still love of the game. And I love your facilities and all this stuff. In fact, I can kick it off for you. I got dragged yesterday because I mentioned that these kids committing to Texas Tech, bo. They might be doing it for the money. All right? They might be doing it for the money because. Exactly. Here's where I want to go with this. Cincinnati has quarterback Brendan Sorsby. We've got this really weird valuation going on in quarterback playing college football, right? Fernando Mendoza is probably going to be number one pick, go to the Raiders, right? Cam Ward last year goes to Titans after starting at incarnate word, right? Unrecruited out of high school in Texas. So we got this strange phenomenon going on, but that, that doesn't bother me so much because quarterback evaluation's always been weird, but the money being pumped in is wild. So this kid's leaving the University of Cincinnati, he's talking to lsu, he's talking to Texas Tech. He ends up settling on Texas Tech. We think it's $5 million. Okay. Certain individuals in the larger media structure are who maybe work for entities that have big fat TV contracts with some of these teams and conferences. They portray this commitment as, you know what, hey, Bomani, he fell in love with the great facilities and the culture at Texas Tech. To which I just simply retweeted and posted. I said it was the money. And look, I have no problem with what's going on in Lubbock. In fact, I think it's a fascinating change in college sports because I'm sure, you know, you're going to ask me about Ole Miss and Indiana and all these schools that have kind of redefined the game, right? That's all fine, but we still need to call the thing what it is, okay? And what it is is that nobody really goes to Lubbock, Texas, all due respect, and says, I'm in love. Right? Nobody, nobody goes to Lubbock, Texas and just says, oh, my God. One, Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Two, you know what I love here? The culture. I love the ping pong table in the locker room, man. All that is done. We don't have to talk like that anymore. And so I find it fascinating that we're still being made to talk like that. Let's just say that the kid got a $5 million hard offer from Texas Tech and he's going to play a season of football for $5 billion. There's nothing wrong with that, right?
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Well, also, in a world now where we got 3,4000 kids in the transfer portal, these are people throwing it out there in many cases. Not though, not all. See if I can get a raise, right? See if I can get a little bump in money. And I do think it's important to note, and this is a big part of why it was so important to me do receive compensation and why it's important that we get to this revenue sharing era where it's not just tied to this money laundering of, you know, we're giving you this for endorsements. I don't see these casts in no commercials. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, that's not that, that, like, like that's, that's. We're still telling that lie. Even if we start with the lie of, you know, they're doing it for the love or anything else. Nil itself has become a lie. Like, I never dreamed that it would turn into what it was because I was like, these kids don't really have that much value as endorsers to justify the money. And then it was like, endorsers.
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So I call that the Spence. That is probably the Spencer Rattler experiment, because it feels like 10 years ago. But when Spencer Rattler got the, got the Nil bag the first time from Oklahoma, it was all still sort of routed in a clean way, which is that he was going to do. He was going to come on and, you know, shill for a car dealership or something like that. Do you, hey, do you remember how quaint and funny. Do you remember dicoldis Crawford from Nebraska.
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With the air conditioner?
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Commercial air conditioner. We're all like, damn, that's hilarious. Wow, this is funny. This isn't hurting anybody, right? We're all good here. This is the modern game. They, they look, they dispense with that endorsement crap in like five seconds, all right? This is just straight up what it is, which is pay for play, right?
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And so everybody dips their toe in. They try to figure out they can get a little more money somewhere else. Long run, it's probably not going to prove to be good for the majority of the players, but most of them have a short term window on being able to get generally any money, let alone the, the numbers that we're hearing. A dude that just played for Cincinnati, we're just talking about him getting $5 million. And all I'm saying is nobody told me about him yet. I haven't seen him play. Maybe he is excellent. But I would think that if he was going to get $5 million, somebody would have hit me and been like, hey, man, you know, they got this dude at Cincinnati. You might want to check them out.
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No, it's not. And that's the weird thing is it's not like what you and I are used to. It's not the, oh, my God, you got to go check this kid out. That still is kind of reserved for high school, right? Like, one of the secrets that Miami, you know, getting as far as they have to this point, is that they're still doing that thing in high school, right? Like the kid named Baby Jesus, he's getting that attention when he's, you know, 15, 16. So that still happens. The thing that we're all trying to process. And look, I don't know if I don't want to get into a competition, but at least as a sort of a former hard news reporter, I was about as pro players a human being could. Just because I used my own eyes for 10 years in this business and saw the ridiculous disparity. But I don't know if I ever saw it getting like this. That's not to say that I'm not one of these people saying it's out of hand or any of that kind of stuff. It's just that I never really saw what I would describe to be a fair to Midland Cincinnati quarterback commanding $5 million. But part of that too is that that position in the sport is just always understaffed. Like we how many bad deals, Dude, I'm a Falcons fan. How many bad deals have I seen thrown at a quarterback? Like that happens everywhere. I mean maybe in 20 years we're going to be doing this for 13 year olds in Texas high school. I don't know. But like that I guess I shouldn't be as surprised by. But I'm also going to tell you this, you didn't miss anything. This isn't the next great kid. It's the what I'm scared of doing is making fun of him too much right now because I sure as hell didn't think the Cal quarterback was going to win the Heisman last year and be the number one pick in the NFL draft.
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Well, so I think there are a couple things on the point with quarterbacks that I find interesting. One which is yes, quarterbacks on the professional level are quite scarce. On the collegiate level, however, you're finding Trinidad Tampas at Ferris State, for example. Like I am surprised that the market equilibrium would be as high as it is. But again, these people are looking to Cody Campbell, who is the benefactor of Texas Tech football. Right. He's a oil billionaire. He's on the board. I think he's under 40. Like he's a fairly young guy.
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I think he might be early 40s because I'm trying to place him. He was an O lineman at Tech under Leech. Yeah.
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Yeah. So. And Leech didn't take that job until 1999.
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So 40. So yeah, it's okay. 44. He's my age. Yeah, okay. Right.
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Yeah. So he's 44.
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OK. Okay, yeah.
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He's funding two things. Making America great again.
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Sure.
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And Texas Tech football.
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Oh, Bo, come on. He's also protecting women's sports. Haven't you seen the commercial?
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I did not know he was one of those.
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That's him.
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Oh, oh.
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I'm not even talking about trans rights. I'm talking about. Well, look, I'm sure he's on. I'm sure he's on that platform. Without looking, I feel confident saying that all of those commercials that ran during college football this year, that's him.
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Did not know.
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All they're trying to do is basically get Congress to intercede so they can freeze what's going on to protect schools like Texas Tech from getting lost in a super conference shuffle. This guy is stroking checks from I want a new running back to I want to play God in college sports. This guy is involved.
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Yeah, he's interesting. And I also, I also say he made a point on Twitter a few months ago that was worthwhile with his. When the big ten, I mean, the private equity money is coming. But he was the guy that was like, hold on, guys, how in the world are you getting all this money and yet you still need this money? And it's because the day that is here was always on the way and you acted like it was never going to come.
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Right? Correct.
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Now all of a sudden it's time to pay and you guys have no idea what you're doing. And that gets me to the next observation that I have about this, which is. And you just kind of touched on it with what he's talking about. We're trying to get Congress to be involved. Rather than fireproofing the House, the strategy for saving the House is to let it catch on fire. Because I'm sure the fire department knows what to do. And in this case, the fire department. Do you read the news like, like the people that think that this Congress is going to be the one to come up with something that makes sense is insane.
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It's an inertia as a long term strategy. I've never seen anything like it. In all the years of work I've done in media or business, I've never seen inertia as the governing factor of a strategy. And what I mean by that is that we, you know, you joked about it, but we saw this day coming. Look, when I, when I got into this as a, you know, as a, as a student reporter, all the way up to a national Reporter Starting around 2010, we all knew what the culture was. We. And you know, it Was written off for a while of, oh, hey, it's just happening in the south, or maybe it's just happening in Texas, or maybe it's just happened in Ohio State. No, it happened everywhere. We knew this. We've known this since the twenties. Okay, this I can get on a soapbox, but I won't. This idea of relegating the player compensation epidemic, it was called at one point to certain parts of the country, is a fallacy. This has been going on since college sports were deemed to be amateur endeavors and then schools started profiting off of it. But the sea change was around that 2010, 2012 mark where you essentially couldn't argue it anymore. Right. The money got too big, voices got too mainstream. And so the ncaa, to go back to this inertia concept, look, have has. Can you recall a 9, 0 unanimous decision in the Supreme Court other than Alston? Right, right. This Supreme Court can't agree on anything. Hell, it's conservative side can't agree on anything. And to a man and woman, they said nine nothing. I have never seen, and I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I've never seen a more emphatic Supreme Court decision in my lifetime. That's the NCAA strategy. And hey, let me be clear. They knew. I've talked to former enforcement officers, I've talked to former people on the legal team. They knew going in they were doomed, but they decided we are going to stand here, die on the sword, because we cannot unravel the NCAA apparatus to then include player compensation in any way, shape or form. So what you're seeing now with the unchecked market, what you're seeing with the casual complaints of all these kids are changing schools every year. And none of this is binding. All of this could have been addressed six, seven years ago. All right, there's about seven years ago when the NCAA had a working group and said, hey, the end is coming, right? Can we adapt to the future? And they said no. So every complaint that the casual conservative college football fan has, and there are hundreds of millions of those, could have been addressed by the apparatus in place seven years ago.
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And it's wild because you've mentioned the money and where the money has gotten and how quickly it has gotten, the scandals of the past seem so quaint at this point. Like Reggie Bush's parents getting a place to live and somebody getting Reggie A96SS, which, by the way, if you are going to cheat, getting a 96 SS is a great way to go about doing it. The $200,000 for Cam Newton, which we already knew was the best $200,000 allegedly anybody had ever spent, right? All those numbers, the SMU numbers, when you go back and look at the money that those guys were getting paid, it was like $1,000 a month in many of those, in those cases, like it really wasn't that joke much much. It was about if you took the.
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More 2000 era scandals and the money we heard to like Reggie. You know, you mentioned Cam. Obviously, you know, there were comp, there were a lot of minor ones that happened along the way. Tennessee Ole Miss, of course, Alber means I would say any of the Rank and file SEC country, they're somewhere at about 1/100th or 1/10, you know, depending on the positional value of what we're paying now. So the market, the black market was great if you were the one in charge of luring the player. This is why like I get, I, I've, I've kind of had my limit. I've written I think four columns already for the Washington Post about this, this idea of having Nick Saban installed on that game day seat as the sort of the wise sage of college football. I, I, I can't, I can't swallow it. I can't do it. Because that man built a dynasty that can't be replicated. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with coaching prowess. It has nothing to do with schematic genius. It has everything to do with, with a personnel market that was aggressively restrained on the player side, right? The moment he realized he would have to renegotiate and re recruit his entire roster on an annual basis, buddy, he stepped quick. He was out. That was it.
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They all thought away. They all did. All in basketball is where you really saw it, really. Roy Williams, Jay Wright, Mike Shashi, Tom Izzo is the only one still hanging around. And yeah, know why? Like I'd have, I'd have beat the street. So it is chaos. I don't blame these guys for being like, hey, that ain't the job that I was doing.
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And the thing that bothers me about Saban is he still sort of applies his standard in a very, very public way, you know, and, and, and he was trying to kind of manipulate the kiffin search for lsu. None of I, I, I try and encourage people to understand this. None of what he did would work. Now the totalitarian state and the statue building mentality, like all of that is gone. It cannot come back now. Okay? Because the courts finally caught up and the lawyers finally caught up. So this idea that you can do this, like, you know, we can talk about Alabama if you want. I feel for Caleb DeBoer, man, because I don't know if there's a number he could ever reach for wins there that.
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Oh, no.
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That paying base, like, calm down.
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Hey, man, you got two kinds of coaches at Alabama. Actual factual legends and dudes that get run out of town. There has been no in between in the last 65 years of what it is to be at Alabama is those two.
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I made a bet against several of my colleagues and co hosts after that retirement, and most of them were under the age of, like, 32.
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That's the key.
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That's the key. And they don't know. They don't do, dude, nothing crazier. Nothing. You think that's happened. That's crazy. In college football, hasn't already happened to a coach or his wife or some people or some kids or something in Tuscaloosa. They don't know about Mike Dubose. Right. They don't know about Mike Shula, Bill Curry, Joe Kynes, interim head coach situation on team. Like, they have no idea. The Dodge Charger economy got decimated. We started paying kids because you go through Tuscaloosa. I mean, God, that's the. The. Was the comedian Shane Gillis, that dog Saban on air last year. I was shocked because it was like, putting it. It was the first time I saw the things spoken to on. On, like, the big corporate media stage of, yeah, man, you can't just have the local guy in the dealership give them a new car and then you. You mf them for four years on their way to the NFL. That's done. It's never coming back. Yeah.
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One of the funny things also about, like, looking back on the. On the. On the good old days, which were the more charming old days, I do think. I think that we would agree, like, I think that dudes dropping the money off in a bag has proven to be much more charming than these ridiculous contracts often filled with landmines and loopholes, all the way through, as it was before. But it is so crazy to think that Jim Trestle, who, by the way. Oh, my God. For those of you. For those of you who don't know what Jim Trestle is up to these days. Jim Trestle went from being the president at Youngstown State, where he used to be the football coach, he is now the lieutenant governor of the state of Ohio. And they ran him off the job at Ohio State in large part over.
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Some tattoos, over not knowing, not Knowing this wasn't even a coach who was orchestrating illicit benefits, they exhausted two years of an NCAA investigation to find out only that he had no hand in the actual matter. By the way, I guess we should say what we're talking about. Some kids got some free tattoos. And by the way, as someone who lived a life of ill repute in his 20s, don't get a tattoo in a college town. I don't even, even if it's Columbus, y' all don't get a tattoo in a college town. Okay? You are 110% guaranteed to regret that shit. 20 years later.
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He didn't even know.
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And they busted his ass just for having, just for being in charge of the program when free tattoos were handed out. Yes, but you can't explain Bo to somebody young how much coverage the media gave to Tattoo Gate. It was huge.
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I, I even myself gave a little more than I should have. And where I got it wrong was I just looked at how Trestle handled it and was just like, oh, you've blown this. And they kind of sold the kids out a little bit there, there's a whole, there's, there's a whole element of that that went down. He in. Well, he didn't get in trouble. Troy Smith got in trouble because he told Tresley he needed some money and Trestle sent him to Far More. Man, if you remember, there used to be a chain of drugstores called Far More and they got shut down over some measure of fraud. And the guy that was in charge, he wound up doing some time. But he used to be the money behind Youngstown State football. And so Trestle, because Trestle, Trestle's amazing. I, I, I'd watch a Jim Trestle documentary immediately because it's just hard to believe. He, he is an archetype that has gone away completely. But Troy Smith almost had his whole college thing messed up over like a couple thousand dollars. But Trestle survived. When Maurice Corette one day got up and was like, hey, I'm going to call Gene Wojahowski and tell him exactly how the money works at Ohio State and laid it all out in ESPN the Magazine and we all just said whatever. But now you look back at it and it's quaint.
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There's, it's weird too, to think of that time where the amount of water the media carried for the NCAA and there's still some of those guys hanging on, I think they're pretty pissed off about the current state of things. But yeah, like, that was the fast track of the Media to being better sourced, more respected was to tow that moral line for the ncaa. That's the thing that jumps out at me because I took so much hell in 2014, you know, when Spencer and everybody that worked on that story with me, we did the bag man story in 2014, man, I was a pariah in, in the media. There's a lot of people that said that's it, we're never credentialing him again. And it's because I gave, I mean, I just gave away the secret that was in front of everybody's face. And even as far as we've come as a sport, there's still a mentality and we can all kind of figure out why that is amongst the consumer, that all of a sudden compensating players is where college football has gone off the rails now. Academics have said it for years and decades. I got like 10 books behind me written by academics on why college sports is a pox upon higher education, all that kind of stuff. Right. But all of a sudden now things are, things are out of hand. You see a lot of that. Things have, things have gone too crazy. And it's just that, it's just the one thing that's changed. It wasn't a billion dollar TV deals. I know that. Yeah, nobody, nobody seemed to clutch their pearls about that, by the way. But we're over a billion in dead money awarded to coaches. That ain't it. Nobody's bothered by that. So, yeah, what changed?
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Yeah, like my thing always is I'm good with the money. I think you talked about this earlier. The money got to be so big that certain things became morally unenforceable or impossible to sell. But it shouldn't be this easy to leave.
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Right?
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Like, it's one thing to have free agency, it's another thing where everybody can become a free agent at any point. But also we're finding out that that is weird because something you and I were talking about a little bit before the show and I've been waiting for you to come in to talk about this part. There's a whole new economy that is brewing up now, right? Because you have all these players who need representation and by the way, you have all these schools that need people who understand the rules and understand the laws and those the economy around this new world order has not been built up yet. And what that means is it's a lot of people out here getting some horrific advice because there are not enough qualified advisors to satisfy the demand of all these players who now need a qualified Advisor.
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So what did I say earlier? That when we legitimized everything, the Dodge Charger economy took a hit. Let me tell you what didn't. Let me tell you what you should have invested in. It's the cousin and uncle economy, all right? The, my, you know, my buddy in them economy, all right? Because that is insane right now. If you look, if you don't know anything about the representation side of entertainment and sports, like so I use an agent if I have TV deals. Like so when I got this Yahoo gig, I got an agent specifically to handle that. And it's really one. And you know this. You've been through this a thousand times, Beau. Like you want to have somebody else saying yes and no and arguing about money, you don't ever want to be the person who does that. You also want someone who's been to law school. It's really about that simple to look at a contract, you know, at the show I'm doing now, Phantom Island Ryan, nanny from SB Nation, he and I founded this company. And the best thing about working with Ryan in a two man show is.
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B
He went to law.
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He was a lawyer for the city of New York. So I just say, hey, look at this. Right? And the reason I say all this is that you got kids who are making good money, legitimate money and being offered legitimate money and not having a single professional in their life to vet that. Now I want to be clear, there was a lot of scaremongering early on. Do we want to have an 18 year old defensive back having to pay taxes? I'm not that part, I'm not worried about that part. Well, yeah, what scares me right now. So there are a couple three letter acronym like you pretty much know in sports entertainment, caa W W me. You know, uta. Right. And then in college sports, there's a couple of brands that are a little bit like athletes. First they do NFL in college and Excel and a couple of. Okay, that's like I can name about on one hand. The problem is, and you could ask those guys off the record, they won't tell you on the record. They don't want to get involved in this right now. Right. So the guys who are repping Kaylin DeBoer or Dan Lanning or Steve Sarkeesian, they aren't touching the kid who's trying to make maybe like, like barely six figures as a DB and he's bouncing around from Conference USA to the Big 12. So who is repping them? The problem right now is it's just kind of any and Everybody. And it becomes like a not so funny episode of Entourage where you're like, you got your old buddy from the bar and. Or you got your, you do it. You literally have a family member who's out there negotiating. Who, by the way, I've heard some eye raising stories from sitting head coaches saying, I've got a kid, he's a feature back, he's quarterback like skill, position, talent. We are relying upon him. I've got him on nil. We have signed and agreed to something in August, right? Locked him in halfway through the season, his cousin's on the phone saying, hey, LSU just called us. Or hey, Nebraska just called us. What are you going to do about it? And by the way, what are you going to do about it now? Let's tear up that deal right now. We want 50,000 more per game or we want whatever it is. So not shockingly, because we have no central governance and we have no regulation whatsoever because the people in charge said, burn it down, we're done. Burn it down, we don't care. And that's why inertia was the strategy, BO is that they wanted to, to make this. They knew they were going to lose, but they also thought, well, you know, when our system of governance falls, we can make it look so chaotic that people will want us back. That was a long term strategy by a lot of people in the ncaa. So is it chaotic right now? Yes, it is, badly. So now you spoke to the, the idea of kids being able to leave so effortlessly. The problem, and I'm kind of speaking in broad strokes here after talking to a lot of legal experts, is that the moment you put guardrails around that you have now officially done away with any concept of these kids not being labor.
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B
Right.
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And that's when you get into a whole other world that so far they've skirted. Right. This is why they're begging the US government to give them antitrust exemptions and to get them out of any kind of labor regulation. Because the moment I look, I agree. I think any fan of a team right now doesn't want to go through this crap where, you know, we're losing 60 to 70 players a year. We thought we had this guy for two, at least two years, and now he's jumping because he's getting a little bit more money.
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B
I don't know who's on the team anymore. Right. Like, like it is truly reduced it to the idea that this is laundry. And that's, that's not actually the way that people engage with this Sport, right. No, the way we said it, the kids deserve what they're getting.
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Yes.
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This just isn't as much fun to watch.
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Correct. And we were also sussing out to go back to the endorsement fallacy so far. And we don't have a lot of data on this. We only have about four years so far. The name on the front of the jersey is still more marketable. Meaning that we are not, we're not in an NBA or NFL culture where kids are following players. Right. And I say kids, I mean fans. I mean like, you know, a 12 year old is not necessarily going to follow a defensive end from one SEC school to another. Right. Or running back or a quarterback for that matter. And so that bears out. That's important to know because, you know, as a sports agent, you're building a brand around an individual. And what we've learned so far is you can't really build a brand around an individual yet. In other words, if like whatever you invest in this kid who's 18 and he goes to a Big 12 school, it's kind of really reliant on that Big 12 schools culture and their marketing because that's not really going to carry over if you then transfer to another school. So financially it's impactful. And I think what looks like what we're seeing in the margins is that everybody knows we got to put up some type of rule set on, let's just call it a commitment. Right. Which is probably too generic of a term. If you're going to transfer, you can have maybe X transfers and then I think you're allotted. I really like the concept of opening transfer without penalty if the coach is fired or leaves. I think that has to be the bedrock. Okay, so I'll give you a great example. Like you can, you can look at the trajectory of Cam Ward, who by the way, like I used him as an example in the beginning. Like the only reason he was unrecruited was that poor guy lived in the one county in Texas that runs a triple option. That's it. I'm serious. That's the only reason why he didn't get a look, because there's just no way with his skill set in the state of Texas that he should have gone completely unrecruited. But he was somewhere, it's somewhere southeast of Houston.
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B
Like, yeah, is Brazoria. Brazoria county is where he's from.
- [28:25]
A
So they are famous for running basically, like you might be able to call it gun option, but it's, you know, it may not Be like Army under center, but it's pretty close. So he of course washed out when it came to all those quarterback evaluations and camps. So his ability to go from incarnate word, all right, where they're, where they're running a high stat offense, they were scoring in like 90 points a game to then go to Washington State and then finally get that transfer offer to basically go into a professional system at Miami. Well, that's the reason why he's a millionaire now living here in Nashville. So that's great. But I think often about like, why not. So let's look at the trajectory of a guy named Charles Huff. All right. Charles Huff was an assistant under Nick Saban. He was an assistant under James Franklin. He had his bona fides. He kind of got stuck. And I'll speed this up in a weird situation at Marshall and we could probably talk about Marshall as a culture later, but he wins the Sun Belt when he really wasn't supposed to. He goes to Southern Miss, turns that program around and, and now he's the head coach at Memphis. If you know anything about college football, Memphis is a trajectory job. It is a, it is a vault job. So I would say within two years, Charles Huff, who's from the dmv, is probably going to be somewhere like Maryland or UVA or something like that, or maybe even an NC State. Those players have gone with him. And I really don't have a problem with that. All right. Because if you're telling a kid that is from the D.C. area, he commits to Marshall, your coach leaves, you're stuck in West Virginia, Right? No, you should be able to go with that coach to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And then as someone who's lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, you get the hell out of there as fast as you can. And if you can, if you can, and you're, you are of that caliber or bo, if you've developed, you should be able to go with him to Memphis. And the reason why. So like the most casual ass radio question I'm getting right now is how, how is Signetti doing it? Right. A lot of those standout pieces on what is probably the next national champion, like I, if I had to pick one right now, I think I might pick Indiana. A lot of those standout pieces were recruited to James Madison. Like he's a really good talent evaluator. But those kids who it was like, we've heard this before. You can coach a two star to be a three star. What we've never really seen is that all Right. You're at a three star program. Jmu's got real money for their, for where they are at in the pecking order. Like they, they spin very well. All right. If that kid's a three star at JMU and they go 12 and one and he gets a job at the big, in the Big Ten and you are, you are the caliber of defensive back that can play in the Big Ten, you should be able to go with him. Right? That's what I would like to protect moving forward. Now the TJ Finley's of the world, the Jeff Sims of the world. I'm talking about quarterbacks. If you don't know who are just one year. They're everywhere. Like T.J. finley forever.
- [31:08]
B
By the way, T.J. finley is year seven.
- [31:10]
A
Yeah. Texas State, Georgia State, Auburn, NC State maybe. Like I mean I'm leaving, got Jeff Sims, Georgia Tech, Arizona State. I'm leaving a school out there like that. We should probably figure out a way to stop that. Like we should probably. But I'm the other thing to go back to Chambers for a second or, or Diego Pavia. I met Diego Pavia at camp because I live near Vanderbilt and they were like, you got to see this kid from New Mexico State. And then I spent the first, the two hours after they beat Alabama. I did like a really fast sort of embed with him inside the building that night. And he's awesome. He's great and he's amazing. I think he's great character for college football history. Yada, yada, yada. I don't really give, I really don't care what he said at the Heisman. Diego's never going to play in the NFL, Bo. Never. Like I know Doug Flutie exists, unfortunately Drew Brees exists. But like I'm telling you right now, that dude, that dude is not going to play in the NFL. Okay? Not, not unless he has like a couple backup spleens. So him getting that extra year of eligibility, I had no problem with that either. I now I know this is such a dumb bad faith slippery slope and somebody's going to say well you want to a 32 year old playing. No, I don't. But I am saying like if it's a six year window that you can exhaust because look man, Diego Pavia is never going to make money again playing football. Right? So I'm fine with that. Trinidad Shambliss. That's it, man. He might have a shot at the pros, but again, from a physical standpoint, from a physical standpoint, he's probably not going to have a pro career. So if he could, dude, if he could make $4 million next year, right, I'm not going to take that away from him.
- [32:51]
B
Right. That's it. All right, we're going to come back with more from Stephen Godfrey. I got one question for him that I didn't get to on that topic and then he's an old MIS grad. I'm sure he has things to say about the SEC every Friday from 6 to 7:30, it's NBA happy hour on FanDuel. Your pregame for the weekend. We're talking limited time specials you won't want to miss, boosts, bonuses, surprises, all dropping in the app during happy hour. So before tip off, check the FanDuel app to see the week special. Then make your move before the shot clock expires at 7:30 Eastern. It's the perfect way to start your weekend. A little basketball, a little action and a whole lot of Friday energy. That's NBA Happy Hour every Friday from 6 to 7:30pm Eastern only on FanDuel. Official sportsbook partner of the NBA 21.
- [33:42]
A
Plus and President select states for Kansas and affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 + in present in D.C. kansas, Wyoming opt in requirement awards are non withdrawable restrictions supply including bonus and token expiration leg requirements and max wager amount e terms@sportsdual.fanduel.com gambling problem. Call 1-800-Gambler or visit rg-help for.com call 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org chatincut or visit mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland, hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplinema.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24. 7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-877-8-HOPE NY or text Hopeny in New York.
- [34:31]
B
We all have goals for 2026, but who can help us achieve them? It's hard to find people who are so good at what they do. It's like if you're hiring. How can you find the best people for all the different roles on your team? Easy, ZipRecruiter, and right now you can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com Bomani ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent so you won't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your role. In ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can instantly unlock top candidates. Contact info let ZipRecruiter help you find the best people for all of your roles. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.com bomani Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com bomani ZipRecruiter the smartest way to Hire this show is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year doesn't require a new you, maybe just a less burdened you. Therapy can help more easily identify what weighs you down, holds you back by offering an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motivations and emotions. Therapy has helped me move past obstacles in my life and maybe it can help you do so as well. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and our 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means we typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from our tailored RECS with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, Having served over 5 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com bomani that's betterhelp.com bomani all right, we are back with Stephen Godfrey from Split Zone duo Yahoo Sports. Whole lot of people. One question I want to ask you for people we alluded to it a little bit earlier but didn't talk about it thoroughly. You wrote a story that made big news about 10, 11 years ago where you sat down with a bag man, the man who drops the money off to players in the course of recruiting. What happens to those people now?
- [37:20]
A
A lot of them. So that story was the only thing I regret about that story was we had to create a composite from three different sources and I didn't really emphasize that enough. So it was three different guys I spoke to at three different SEC schools. It's been however many years I think you can figure out which one what one of those schools was. All right to be able to earn their trust. All right? And then I might live in the state of another one, maybe potentially. It doesn't really matter anymore. I don't really have to, like, hide that shit. But those guys. Well, three of them. Three of them, specifically, one kind of fell off the map because he got terrified as I was putting the story together and kind of ghosted me. And then two, the other two guys are involved in the current nil. So the short answer is you're in the NIL system now. If you were a true blue bag man, you have probably a different function in college sports now. So here's the difference. You got your check writers, you got the people who are spending the money. And then oftentimes they are fit. They are interacting like you and I are creating a transaction for play. But a bag man traditionally was actually the go between. So he. It was not his $50,000 to get the kid to sign, right? He was the. He was the conduit, right? So those guys still exist in a lot of capacities because there are still a lot of problems to fix in college towns, if you get what I'm saying, right? Like, there's still a lot of issues where something's going on. And by the way, we're getting into this Rev Share era, the, you know, slush fund payments are still happening. I want to be clear about that, right? It's just to a much smaller degree, like when, when you have this amazing, life changing lump sum, you know, if you're kicking a kid 500,000 bucks now, it's the magnitude of it just, it's so different. Most of those guys integrated into the NIL system. If they have real money. A lot of those guys turned around and started complaining about paying players because they didn't have real money, though. They had fake ass money. And here's what I mean by fake ass money, all right? If you have a semi successful, whatever, dealership in the middle of nowhere, the south, all right, you got a little bit of money, you got destined money, all right? You don't even have 30amoney, right? All right? And you don't have real ass Hampton's, Miami, south beach money, and you never did, and you never were. Now that these kids are getting $5 million, your ability to say, you know what I'm gonna do for you, alma mater? I got 50,000 in cash off the books of my business. We can get a whole defense for that, right? That's, that's the, that was the mindset in 1999. That guy is far less important in the machine. What's amazing now is that you got the dude from Oracle buying his girlfriend a quarterback for $10 million. So it became a richer man's game is the short answer. So a lot of these wannabe tycoons got busted out.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah. So on some level, some of these guys are like the mobsters who now work at the casino. And the rest of these guys don't have enough money. Like you can't run a game anymore.
- [40:26]
A
What if I am a. If I am in, it doesn't even matter what position it is. If I'm worth my salt and I'm a three or four star kid and I'm in the deep south and you're trying to come up on the side and offer me some. Like what scratched up lease that you're going to put my aunt's name for a car. That day's over. Right. So, yeah, those guys, some of them are pretty bitter about it, but you know. Oh, well.
- [40:48]
B
Yeah. Now mentioned that you were an old MIS graduate. This has been a wild month and change, right, for Ole Miss football. Number one. We are currently in the midst of something. Now granted my prediction that Ole Miss will never win the SEC in my life. That one still got a chance.
- [41:04]
A
You got it right. You nailed it.
- [41:06]
B
It's still there. But them being one of the last four teams did not see that coming. That is a product of a number of factors that allow this to happen. But now we're in the madness of Lane has gone to lsu. Lane wants to still be a good guy somehow and look like he's the benevolent benefactor. And he's letting some of his coaches go back and coach at Ole Miss.
- [41:28]
A
It's only a couple of them.
- [41:30]
B
It is clear that Pete Golding hates Lane Kiffin's guts and has been dogging him to anybody who would listen for the last month. Parlayed that into a job that he would never otherwise get because Ole Miss needed to hold this season together so tightly. But now it's here. They have a legitimate chance at winning a national championship. But it all feels crazy. Am I wrong?
- [41:51]
A
No, you're. That's an accurate assessment. Let's be honest. How do I piss my alma mater off the fastest here? Let's be honest. There's some terrible offensive decision making on Georgia's part in that game that led us to this point. All right, I want to start there. Like Gunner Stockton. It runs one more keeper. They kick a field goal rather than throwing an incompletion. Ole Miss can't drive the field in that game. And that's what should have happened because Georgia, I really think owned own the line of scrimmage in that game. So we're here because of a kind of a fluky ending. And I think even a lot, I mean, I know a lot of Ole Miss people have reached out and said, wow, we really kind of backed into that. Now. I don't want to take anything away from the play of Chambliss. He was amazing. It was sort of Manzel esque, what they did moving down the field. Kwan Lacy played banged up like they were. They are better than I had any idea they would be this season because they're a year expired on the expectation because Kiffin had the more nil heavy roster last year. You know, the front seven, I think four started in the NFL this year. They're all gone though. So they are good legitimately. That is true. Now you're just going to have to guide me here because I could probably monologue in any direction in terms of like Ole Miss as an identity or what this Kiffin thing is. I think what I can't say enough is that this Lane Kiffin image rehab thing was never real, ever.
- [43:15]
B
I'm amazed that anybody fell for it. He looked like Lane Kiffin at every turn.
- [43:20]
A
Everybody fell for it. And it was a really beautiful piece of like, PR craftsmanship. And here's what I mean by that. SEC Network runs this, like bespoke documentary about Lane Kiffin and oh, he's, you know, he's such a card. He's such a. He's such a goofball on Twitter and look how different he is with his hot yoga and he's always making Instagrams with his daughters and all this kind of stuff. What they were doing at CAA was that after last season, Lane knew he could push through and maybe get eight or nine more wins at Ole Miss. And enough time had expired from his chicanery stuff that happened off the field at various stages in his career to be legitimately considered by an actual SEC power. That's what he wanted. All right. He knew Florida was going to open. He did not know LSU was going to open. All right. The first time I got a phone call about LSU is early October. And there was still a lot of disbelief there because of the way that Kelly contract was structured. Honestly, they needed the governor to kind of lose his mind and make that happen. But. But Lane knew he could get in on the biggest type of job. So this PR effort that you saw, it worked beautifully because it worked both ways. The entire time. And here's what I mean by that. He is dog whistling and signaling off to the Florida's of the world. Look how different I am. Look how I've changed. And I keep saying Florida, bo because when Florida hired Billy Napier in 22, there was a kind of like an internal mandate amongst every booster and every leader at Florida. We are not evaluating Lane Kiffin. We do not want that headache. That was the, that was the PR rep of Lane Kiffin just a couple years ago. Coming off of all pick a rumor that you know about from a message board. I'm going to tell you as a college football reporter, it's probably true about Kiffin, right? A lot of baggage. And I'm kind of speeding this up so we don't get bogged down. What changed in three years was seasons above expectation at a middle class SEC program. And we know how hard it is to do that, right? So his on field acumen was starting to improve. It was starting to kind of wash off all this other stuff off the field. He still has a lot of things going on, I'll say. But he's able to manufacture this thing. And here's the genius. The whole time this is happening, do you know what everybody in Oxford's saying? We did that. Ole Miss did that. We're such a great place to live and this is home and this is such a wonderful. Oxford's, such a great community. We healed Lane Kiffin. They bought that so bad. They're still pulling the hook out of their mouth, okay. Whether they want to admit it now or not, they fell for it, hook, line, okay? And you could see him saying it throughout the season. I didn't like the size of the crowd today. I don't like, you know, the fans didn't turn up on time except all this little ticky tack stuff. You knew he was headed out the door. But what he didn't know was that LSU was going to open. And he also probably didn't know that Nick Saban was going to step in via Jimmy Sexton in the process and say, hey, I know you think Florida is the ultimate destination here. You need to go to lsu. That's a better job. So that's the fast way of how we got here was it was an excellent amount of public relations finesse. Now in the last two weeks we've seen a really interesting development which is something that if you cover the sport, you know, Lane is not a grinder, okay? Lane is not Nick Saban. Lane is not the offensive Nick Saban. And that's what he's tried to do. Do you know how many times he's put his name next to Knicks the last three years on tv? He wants people to think that he is some amazing combination of Pete Carroll and Nick Saban. And he's not really either. Because both of those guys, for all their faults, buddy, they work their asses off, right? They do their 25 hour days and that ain't lame. So what you've seen early on in the Portal returns at LSU and in the recruiting process is that Lane doesn't have his guys. You know, this, this goes back to the assistant coach crisis. You know, when he got to Ole Miss, he was a little slow in recruiting and Portal and all that. And then he got Jeff Lebby to sort of be that guy. And then Jeff Lebby eventually turned that into a head coaching job at Mississippi State. Pete Golding, who is much more familiar with Mississippi, played at Delta State. He's from Hammond, Louisiana. His wife went to Ole Miss. He, that was his guy that was like his worker be. He always had a staff underneath him that was kind of doing all this stuff so he could literally show up on game day and do the sort of flippant, the kind of ingenue BS as an offensive play caller. Now, if it sounds like I'm disparaging him as a coach, I think LSU is going to be successful. But I want to be really clear about this. LSU is going to have much more of an Ed Orgeron experience than, than the Nick Saban thing they think they're getting again. Okay. Yeah. There's going to be one inexplicable 11 or 12 win season for LSU and they're going to go deep in the playoff and they're going to be magic on offense. There's also going to be two or three years, depending on how long this lasts. Bomani, where there is a ridiculous amount of palace intrigue. There is some nasty off field rumor and the combination is going to break them in a couple weird games every year. Because Lane Kiffin is good for an absolute, let's call it brain fart of a coaching effort. One time in the 12 games you get a season, one of those, Lane Kiffin is going to make it inexplicably confounding.
- [48:41]
B
Yeah. So a couple things about him in this job as it relates to the previous guys on the job that I think are lost have been lost. Number one, it did not go well for Brian Kelly. It is not because that man cannot coach.
- [48:58]
A
Yes.
- [48:58]
B
Right. This is, this is A job where Les Miles in at Ogeron can win national championships, but also a job where Brian Kelly can get shit canned. Right. This is not. Your mileage may vary on what this job is. I think there's something to be said about Les and Ed and their understanding of if we get really big guys, I think we'll be okay. Right.
- [49:19]
A
Like.
- [49:19]
B
Like there's a certain humility to the understanding of this is a Jimmy Joe, Jimmy's and Joe's situation. This is what we're going to do. The thing about Les and Ed that I think was very important and that Brian Kelly was not and what got him in trouble is. And also Nick Saban. Those guys are nothing in the positive on this one. Saban, Miles, Ogeron, they are not insincere. That is a place that I think values a certain level of sincerity. Lane Kiffin drips with insincerity at every turn. Yes, he better win and he better win fast because they will get sour on him quick, quickly.
- [49:54]
A
The amount of emotional distance I think he has to create for his own sanity is going to kill him at any major job. Ole Miss, because of their station in the world, because of where they fell in the pecking order, largely self inflicted, by the way. We could probably do a whole other hour on why Ole Miss is. Is where it is. But you got to account for about 100 years of history. Ole Miss was willing to put up with that. Ole Miss was willing to. To deal with the grumpiness. Ole Miss was willing to deal with the guy who blew off the charity golf tournament, who blew off the request to do such and such for the sick kid in the hospital, who wasn't around in April, who wasn't around in March, who wasn't around in August until practice started. They were going to put up with all that. This place. To your point, the thing that they just extended was all of that I just described kind of applied to Brian Kelly too.
- [50:42]
B
Yes.
- [50:43]
A
Brian Kelly gave off this unspoken sort of exclamation that he did not really want to be in Louisiana. He was here as a coaching experiment because he believed Notre Dame was holding him back.
- [50:56]
B
Right.
- [50:56]
A
And we found out he was completely wrong. Right. Okay. That he was actually holding Notre Dame back in a lot of ways. What you're getting with Lane now is, I'm going to be really honest. Everything I know about Louisiana, married into a Louisiana family. I know a ton of LSU people. They have everything in the blueprint to be Alabama or Texas or insert magical school here. But there's something terminally fraught about that culture.
- [51:21]
B
And I was about to say, it's all those people from Louisiana are your issue.
- [51:25]
A
It's that combined with the accidental success of Nick Saban at lsu, meaning he came in and he was able to power wash about four decades of corruption off of Baton Rouge. And I really, like. I need to emphasize this. So, like, one of my favorite NFL players is Wark Dunn. Work done. Grew up in Baton Rouge. Wark Dunn, he got the hell out of Baton Rouge. He never considered LSU before he went to Florida State. That was never. I asked him about it in person one time at a Falcons game. Hey, man, no. No chance whatsoever. LSU had major race relations, race relations issues. It had major economic issues. It had terrible fundraising. The facilities looked like the rest of Louisiana, which is that you stood around and said, where the hell's all the money going?
- [52:11]
B
Well, you know, we wanted to keep the illegal drinking age 18.
- [52:15]
A
You see where the priorities are if you go to LSU in, like, 1997. So Saban gets there, and by sheer force of will and all that curmudgeonly spirit, he's able to browbeat a lot of that corruption back and create a synthesis of all the talents here. Y', all, it's leaving. You have more talent on these six exits of I10 and I12. I don't know if I12 existed then. And they're all leaving. They're going to the Florida schools. They're going. They're. They're going out. They're going to Texas.
- [52:42]
B
All.
- [52:42]
A
All he did was create the ruthless blueprint that changed college football for 30 years. The problem was he. He applied that blueprint when he came back to their now arch rival Alabama. Right? So the problem is they've been chasing a statue, not a championship. O. Because we. Hey, Les Miles championship. Ed Orgeron championship, right? They have the rings. They've been chasing a statue. And what mystifies me is that since the Edwards are on debacle with the athletic director and them not wanting that, you know, Ed was a little too rough around the edges and all this shit. And they're, like, making him hire a defensive coordinator he doesn't want to. Like, they kind of broke up.
- [53:21]
B
What.
- [53:21]
A
What could have been a decent little dynasty. Like, even after Burrow left, there was enough talent on that roster for them to be competitive. Then they hire Brian Kelly, who we've established is not a fit in any way, shape, or form. And now they're chasing the hot hand and inviting more controversy into a place that breeds its own controversy, like in college football terms, going from Oxford to Baton Rouge in a media sense is like, if you're in the NFL. This is what always worries me about Dak Prescott. Like, Dak needed to be in, like, Jacksonville. He didn't need to be in Dallas. Right. Because of the scrutiny you have gone from, like, the Tennessee Titans media beat to the Philadelphia Eagles. He is bo. He's gonna lose. He's going to lose an inexplicable game, all right? And they're going to eat his ass alive. They're going to scour his Instagram. They're going to find out if there's any funny business on the side. Up, down, left, right. They're going to know his status with his ex wife. I don't think he's prepared for this yet.
- [54:20]
B
He has a. He is at Ole Miss, and I don't know if this is exactly him. Some other guys may be in this place, but this is. To me, it feels like the first generation that doesn't think of Ole Miss the way that I think of Ole Miss. Right. That does not associate Ole Miss with the flags. That does not associate it with overwhelming Confederate imagery.
- [54:41]
A
All right, let's talk about this for a second because. So I got invited back to the journalism department this year, and I made the documentary called Foul Play a couple years ago that centered around the NCAA investigation of the two Mississippi schools. Schools I hadn't been back since. So I'm an alumnus because I got a free education there. I'm not from Mississippi. You know, I. I kind of have to state. I have to state this up front. I feel like I, you know, I got the degree there. It was cheap. I'm not from Mississippi. I don't cheer for Ole Miss. If they changed all that shit tomorrow, I would say it's 50 years overdue. Let's go. That's great, right? By the way, they used to be called the Mississippi Flood, which is kind of a badass. Like, if they went to that, that'd be kind of badass.
- [55:23]
B
I did not know that.
- [55:25]
A
Guess what? It ain't never going to happen. So I went back this year and, dude, I am shocked as. As a dissident inside of that culture and someone who's taken a fair amount of shit from his own alumnus. It's not gone. I'm not naive. I have eyes. But winning and business and the recruitment culture that's going on in the SEC right now. Do you know how many affluent white kids from Chicago and New Jersey and Massachusetts and. Yeah, dude, what is that about?
- [55:55]
B
By the way, it's a little worrisome because it's happening all over the SEC because they, they want the real thing. They don't, they don't want, they don't want that schism like they got up top. They want to go down to. Hey Sauce, if you can't get into.
- [56:08]
A
Insert, insert Leafy IV or Junior IV in here and you're in Massachusetts, why are you going to go to some frickin SUNY right? Or something like that and spend that money when you can go if your parents got the cash and it's not cheap, right? Okay. I got an 11 year old who told me wants to go to UGA. I looked up out of state. That shit is rough. But like, but if your folks got the money and you go down there, it is a country club to them. Like it's a whole, it's a, it's, it's a four year theme park for alcoholics and future investment bankers. So it's bizarre. I'm not saying it's gone. And in Ole Miss's case specifically the hill that I'm going to die on is that there was this period of time where it was such a dog whistle. It was actually the kids from Atlanta and Dallas specifically who kind of came from means but couldn't do shit academically. So they would come to Ole Miss because it was like, oh, I can be, I can be my real self there, right? And when there was a flag burning incident or there was some bullshit in the last 10 to 15 years, you would. It was never the kid from Meridian and it was never the kid from Indianola. It was the kid from Highland park or Roswell, Georgia. And here's why. Again, I want to be really careful about how I'm saying this because I'm somewhat of an expert in this. It's not that those kids from Mississippi didn't have that belief right. It's not from. It's that they, their mom and them knew better because Mississippi is a small place. Yeah, you do some dumb shit like that, whether mom and dad agree with it or not, you're going to be in trouble because it's going to get back.
- [57:38]
B
And they carry a great shame of being basically. It's the same way people from Boston, what they get mad at is you saying they're more racist than everybody else. Their response is always, well, what about them and their racism in Mississippi? Mississippi as a state, Boston as a city. They are the flag bearers for American racism and they're sick of it. They don't like that.
- [57:57]
A
And even if you're a middle of the road white conservative from some town in Mississippi, because of that there's an extra sensitivity. So you may hold conservative values and it may not align with someone like myself, but you're going to be extra mindful for your kids. Better not be pulling any bullshit, putting a Confederate flag on the back of their Tahoe like that. That's not, believe it or not, that's not the kids doing it. It's the kids that grow up in this kind of like new neocon culture from these southern metropolitan areas who academically aren't that strong and want to go for the more recreational aspects at Ole Miss. And then they get in there and they really start feeling themselves. Right. So that is still there. But what struck me was the size of the place, the amount of out of state influence, the lack of like deep south accents that I heard. And then also they've, look, I'll give them their flowers in one thing. They have boosted every form of graduate undergraduate doctorate enrollment amongst minorities in a way that like it was a 35 year effort to change those numbers. They have done it.
- [58:57]
B
I mean, black enrollment is something like 20. It's over 20%. The last time I heard, the number was like 20%. Now granted, the state is at 35, but still their peers, University of Texas will Never have a 20% black population. Write that down.
- [59:10]
A
But here's the thing that they don't want me to say and it's not necessarily their fault because I think they as a university are trying their ass off. They disappear. So if it's a Friday night. So I went back, I spoke. Our mutual friend Brian Floyd went to Washington State. They played Wazoo for homecoming. He flew in. He'd never been to an SEC game, so I took him and I just went as a normal person. Not media, not credentialed. And I just kind of looked around town like just sort of took it all in for the first time. So we're walking around and all this stuff. It's Friday night on the square at Ole Miss. They got a big game, Nash. They were ranked number three in the country. Bo. Wherever that undergraduate enrollment went for the minority culture, it still doesn't exist socially. You see what I'm saying? There's a weird thing that happens in the south where if you don't go to an hbcu, you, you go home on Friday at a school. And that there's a lot of reasons for that and we probably don't have time to get into it. But if you go to Auburn or Ole Miss or Alabama, it's a little bit different now. But it used to be the majority of the minority enrollment, they would go off campus or, or go out of town or whatever. They go to Memphis, they go to Atlanta, whatever. And so the thing you get on the B roll before the game kicks off is still the lily white concept. It's still the shit that looks like 1963. And so that dissonance is still there, even though when you walk on campus on a Thursday morning, it's more multicultural than I, than I ever thought it could be. So it's a fascinating disconnect and they never getting rid of that mascot. So.
- [60:46]
B
So, and that's the thing, one of my pushbacks. And I get where guys like Lane who work there and don't have an investment of it, you can keep your hashtag come to the sip. As far as I'm concerned, as long as you fight to be the. If you fight to be the Ole Miss Rebels, I am going to treat you like you're the Ole Miss Rebels. You don't get to act like you're these other people in order to woo the talent and then bounce back into it when you're trying to sell your brand to something larger. Like, I'm insistent upon this. Like, I know there's a movement to go back to referring to the school, to the University of Mississippi. I'm like, nah, not yet. Not yet. You're not fooling me.
- [61:20]
A
Oh, I got my ass kicked on Social because when I write for the Post it's AP style. So AP style and sports reference is that you don't call them Ole Miss, not because of any kind of racial sensitivity. On first reference. It's a state university name just so you have to call them Mississippi. So I wrote a piece that really didn't have anything to do with. It was just college football and it was about Lane. And in the, in the headline it was Mississippi. It was not Ole Miss. And I try and shy like I try and insert Mississippi where I can mainly just because it needles a bunch of people I know and I'm just, honestly, I'm just screwing with them. And I. And I got just an avalanche of. Of hate on. On Social because they thought it was sort of a mindful decision. So the Ole Miss thing there, I'll say this on this show and I guess it's breaking news. I guess I was told by an individual who would. Who had direct access to the decision making process at the University of Mississippi that going all the way back to the summer of 2020, a working group was put together and a plan has been written and put into place to eliminate Rebels. It's just, what, what, when are we actually going to flip that switch? All right, Right. So they're going to keep the blue, they're going to keep the red because they say that, that, that that's Ivy League inspired and they're just going to exist as a non mascot, it sort of like a Stanford concept. And they're just simply waiting for the right time to do it. I don't know what the rubric is on the timeline or anything like that, but they are just simply going to exist non Rebels. Now my question back was, well, what pot? What, what Pollyanna? What cheery day can you create in Mississippi where you think you can flip that switch without all hell getting raised?
- [63:02]
B
Right?
- [63:02]
A
Like, is it winning a national title?
- [63:04]
B
Right? You can't, you can't say that you put Ole Miss on a stick, but you can't bring sticks to the stadium like they did with the flag. It's not that simple.
- [63:12]
A
That's you. And I will never see the day where it's completely stripped out. Right? That's never going to happen. I think the best that you could offer is, is eliminating the concept Rebels in any way, shape or form. And then after that it would be a much, much slower marginalization of the, of the, the handful of tropes. But I will tell you that in that winning cures all mentality, you don't see the on campus protests about it anymore. And you don't see that like kind of page A1 divisiveness. And it's only because they have a winning football program, right. That winning cures all is still fascinating. Has it fixed the underlying issues? Not particularly. But it's weird what commerce does to this situation. Like, it's weird how much out of state enrollment has changed it, how much paying the athletes has changed it. Hey man, I'm gonna tell you something. You gonna be on your damn P's and Q's when you got a $3 million minority, a $4 million minority, a 5 million dollar minority skill position player who could just up and leave your ass, right? Your culture has to be a hell of a lot more genuine when the players have this much more agency. And so whether we like the way they're finally coming around or not, I have accepted the fact that they are in big ways. I never expected at least coming around to a level of civility that I did not see. In my time there.
- [64:35]
B
Yeah. I'll tell you as we wrap, you sent a tweet about five or six years ago that I will never forget. And this was in the midst of the. What made me stop rooting for Texas? Their insistence upon the eyes of Texas in spite of people being like, hey, we're really offended by this. And they're like, no, you're going to stand for this shit. You're going to like it, too. Where you said that Texas is like. Texas looks at Oklahoma as Ole Miss looks at Alabama, not understanding why it is that they're better than we are. Right. It is not exactly like Alabama turned into Cal Berkeley, but Alabama did decide that they were not once the. Once the game changed, they were like, we're not getting out inworded. It's not gonna happen. Oklahoma, on the other hand, was like, this is the only chance we have.
- [65:15]
A
No, the secret redneck conversation is always as a redneck passing individual is very simple. You go to a tailgate, and nobody's going to want to talk about this. Okay? You go to a tailgate in the south and Ole Miss gets brought up. The first thing that every white tailgater says is they should have never gotten rid of the mascot. And if you respond to an Alabama fan, a Georgia fan, a Texas, whatever, and I said, cool. Would you be the Rebels? Is that because they are culturally enlightened? Hell, no, dude. I'm from Bibb County, Georgia. There's no difference. But you go to Bibb County, Georgia right now and ask all those Sidewalk Dog alumni, all right. How much do you believe? How outraged are you? Are you going to be the University of Georgia Rebels next season? Hell, no. No, not a chance.
- [66:06]
B
They won't do that. But they also haven't had a black quarterback in 20 years, and that is a discussion for not had a Black quarterback in 20 years in a state with Cam Newton to show. Watson might have.
- [66:18]
A
Could have used one.
- [66:21]
B
Justin. They had Justin Fields and we're like, nah, we're good.
- [66:24]
A
Gunner Stockton might have rolled right a little bit differently last week.
- [66:29]
B
Oh, man. Stephen Godfrey. Check him out. Split zone duo. Check them out. Yahoo Sports, Washington Post. My bad. This has been fantastic, man. We got to do this again soon.
- [66:38]
A
Absolutely. Anytime, sir. All right.
- [66:39]
B
I appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Right Time. We do this four times a week. Ryan Brumley handles everything behind the scenes. Thank you, sir. Remember. Oh, hit the voicemail line. 323-59-67767. Remember, follow the right time subscribe. Like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. And we'll talk to you guys in a couple of days. Take it easy.