Sac State goes to the MAC as conference realignment rages on

On today's College Football Inquirer, Sacramento State is now in the MAC. If you didn't know, Northern Illinois was already in the Mountain West. North Dakota State's in the Mountain West too. Realignment is, at this point, completely out of control. Where does the badness end? Plus, updates on all the latest eligibility lawsuits since the last time we talked. Trinidad Shambliss has gotten his injunction. Joey Aguilar in Tennessee is trying to get an injunction. We'll find out what happens next and what the difference is between these two cases. Also, we talked last week about how someone asked Mr. Beast if he'd donate $100 million to East Carolina to win a national title. And I said, there's no way that would win you a national title. And Stephen Godfrey begged to differ. So I want to know Stephen Godfrey's plan for spending Mr. Beast's money and bringing the Pirates a natty. I want to know how this happens because if it can, well, just imagine the content. All on today's College Football Inquirer. Hey, everybody. This is Andy Staples from the College Football Inquirer. The college football season is wrapped up, but it is never too early to start planning for next season. And when you do, go to the Game Time app for all your ticketing needs. I'm looking right now at tickets to Lane Kiffin's LSU debut with the Clemson Tigers coming to Baton Rouge, you can get in for as little as $242. And when you're using the GameTime app, you can see exactly where you'd be sitting in Tiger Stadium. You turn your phone, it's like you're turning your head. GameTime is so easy to use. I used it when my wife woke up one morning and said, hey, I'm taking our daughter to the Ares Tour, the Taylor Swift concert in Miami tonight. You better get us some tickets right now. And of course I went to GameTime and they had all the tickets I needed. I love that the price you see is the price you pay. There are no hidden add-ons when you get to checkout. 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Ross Dellinger, what is going on here? Well, the MAC has become a coast-to-coast conference, Andy, because, of course, they have UMass. They added UMass last year. Um, so we got UMass and we got Sacramento, uh, state across the country, by the way, that's 3000 miles, I think from, uh, UMass to Sacramento state. Um, so if you're going to get on the road and take no breaks, it's about 45 hours, uh, one to the other. Um, so yeah, you know, Sacramento state pitched, uh, multiple FBS leagues, um, their proposal to basically buy into a conference. They're trying to get into a conference so they can get into FBS. Their waiver to get into FBS as an independent was denied over the summer. And so that left them with only one pathway in and that's to get into a conference and thus get into FBS. So their proposal was something we probably never quite seen in college athletics. I mean, we've seen a lot of buying your way into a conference. SMU? This is the biggest one. Yeah, I mean, SMU not taking distribution for nine years from the ACC. And then, obviously, North Dakota State just last week or a week and a half ago buying their way in at $12.5 million. We saw Memphis offer $200 million to buy into the Big 12. That was sort of denied. The Big 12 decided not to do it. But up to this point, as far as deals that are done, we haven't seen a school spend this much money to buy their win. They're spending $18 million is going to the MAC, $5 million in an entry fee to just get into the FBS, the normal standard entry fee. And then they're paying for five years, four games a year for MAC teams to travel to Sacramento, which is around $150,000 to $200,000 a trip. So it's an extra three or four million dollars on top of that. So just that, just the entry fees in the cost to fly Mac teams out, it's going to be about twenty seven, twenty eight million dollars. I would like to point out one clarification. We mentioned SMU in that. Have you guys ever seen those tick tocks of like they ask SMU students, like, what does your dad do for a living? What's your biggest financial flex? We have a helicopter. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I without knowing a ton about Northern California in the area, I don't know if there's that many Sac State alumni who are maybe operating in the PJ sector quite as frequently as Southern Methodist. I don't want to make this all about Sac State because it's more. Oh, we won't. It's more a referendum on like what the hell we're calling the FBS at this point. But like, Ross, where is this money coming from? Yeah, that's a good question. And the university president, Luke Wood, says the money is coming from mostly from by games. Obviously, when Sacramento State plays a power conference or another FBS team over the years and over the next five years, they'll get they'll get money. And so they're they're banking sort of on most of the money to come from there. But something that should be sort of mentioned here is most of Sacramento State's athletic budget is subsidized by the university. And we're in a state to kind of sort of, as Andy mentioned, like sort of expand this conversation in general to this situation we're seeing right now. Is that especially with the athlete compensation in schools budgets, everything is losing money. Like, right, like, like every sport's going to end up losing money. You're not going to you're not going to really turn a profit on anything anymore. And so I think a university has to decide, is this our marketing branding arm and we're just going to start pumping money into it and view it as another department on our campus or not? And I think places like SMU in Sacramento State have already clearly made that decision. And they're just going to take university money and they're going to either pump it into the athletic department or subsidize it in subsidized athletics in other ways. I think that's what they're doing. Can we just stop and talk about how stupid this all is, though? The best meme I saw all weekend. And I'm sorry I'm not giving the person credit. I don't have it in front. Please say it's ball sack. You're ball sack. It was it's it's two groups of people that appear to be on airplanes. And it says basically when the northern Illinois football team. Is going to fly to its conference game in Hawaii and passes in midair, the Sacramento State football team going to its conference game at UMass. Northern Illinois just left the Mac to join the Mountain West. Northern Illinois is in the same conference as Hawaii, and UMass and Sacramento State are in the same conference. This is incredibly stupid. Yeah, makes no sense. And a lot of folks thought that the Mountain West would maybe eventually take Sac State and North Dakota State, both of them, like would take two at a time. And, you know, they they decided they decided against that because Sac State presented this proposal to the Mountain West in the Pac-12, most notably. And they both they both turned it down. But geographically, yeah, it would have made a lot more sense. Okay, where does this all end? Like, what's the natural input? Because I was told by lots of people who were begging for a congressional law that nobody would want to do this anymore because it's just too expensive. Seems like people still want to do it. In fact, want to do it in a way that completely inconveniences everyone. I think you have to look at the value proposition. and we need to find, we kind of need to find the mean and median here for what a transition means and then what a transition up means. Sac State had football. Brynne Marion was the head coach last year. So they have a pattern of, hey, you know, if you come to this university, you get to experience college football at a particular level. What I'm curious is, is this all just a misinterpretation of this Alabama theorem where when Saban was there, they were winning national titles. You got all these Wall Street Journal stories about, oh, this is now the new front porch of the university and our enrollments up and our out-of-state enrollments up and this is all because we're winning national titles on television i've heard that parroted back by so many different individuals at so many different sub levels of college football including sac state's president you saw about out-of-state tuition yeah out-of-state recruiting of students and i'm really curious ross because there are so many pieces of context missing as you continue to take the step down if you're talking about football as a front porch for a university alabama on the old you know cbs 2.30 Central, sorry, God's time zone, 2.30 Central broadcasts on CBS, that's as big and marquee as you can get in terms of a display item for recruiting. 10 million people watching your three and a half hour infomercial, yes. The worst, but you know what? The one thing that I haven't seen anybody talk about yet is, do you guys, you guys do, do the people in California, in Northern California understand when the majority of Mac Conference football games are played? It's like, boys, the first thing I thought What are you going to do? When this came out is they opened a new TV window for Tuesday night action. Late night action. 10.30 p.m. Eastern on a Tuesday night, baby. Let's go. 10 p.m. kickoff. There you go. Yeah, that's one thing I'm curious about. I just don't know if that sort of apron that they think they're achieving in terms of exposure is ever possible. Is it possible to open a casino on campus? Because really, that's who's going to be watching their games. so if you can attract gamblers willing to pay out of state tuition maybe that's your market that's a dan wetzel special i interviewed him on one of my old podcasts about the mac and thinking like i was going to get this midwest and sentimentality he's like nobody watches that but the gamblers so like that was my wetzel by the way that's a good wetzel hi dan thanks i didn't have a miller light in my hand when i did it um i would maybe some commission out there has commissions, commission, commission to study about transition and what the actual ROI is because there is something to say for SMU, very deep pocketed, saying, all right, we're going to go to the ACC. We're going to play Florida State. We're going to have these, we're going to have games. They made it in the playoff, you won. Exactly. So definitely ROI there. And no, they don't really need the television revenue. They have deep enough pockets as it is. I am curious how this works out as you look at the schools that have moved up a tier. And for this exercise, I would consider moving from FCS to a low G5, moving up a tier. So it's the same as SVU moving up a tier from the Americans to the ACC. And then also, you know, looking at what's the long-term implication for the Red River schools? What's the long-term implication for the LA schools? um i i think it's just so i think it's all bespoke though and i i just i i know we're not gonna make this about sacks day but i'm kind of flummoxed the eagerness with which some of these programs have to move into such an unstable environment i feel like i'm repeating myself from the north dakota state segment i'm just curious where you think the profit is because you've invested so much money we have to have a profit here guys we have to have a long-term Maybe it's a better business than people realize because as I like to point out to everyone who says they're all broke, they're all broke. When they're cranes up building new things, you ain't broke. When you're broke, you're selling pieces off. That's what broke people do. I work for a newspaper. I know broke. These people ain't broke. Somebody's paying them. Somebody's willing to give them money. there is a revenue stream and they're doing this because they think they will get some sort of positive roi out of it now godfrey i think you're right is not necessarily a dollars and cents roi it might be a hearts and minds roi yeah results in dollars and cents later or at least that's what they're well there there's money there and you remember when they were making the push it was really hard last year to get in the pack 12 they had they had at least gotten commitments from donors of allegedly of $50 million of NIL if tied to the Pac-12. That was tied to Pac-12. Yeah, I asked Brennan Marion who he was going to recruit. Yeah. He had quite a list. Yeah. Okay. So that was tethered to the Pac-12. Now, there are promises and commitments that I think were tethered to an FBS move. So I think they have a pretty big enrollment, and the enrollment cliff is upon us. So I think that's why Luke Wood was discussing with me. One of the big reasons for the move was enrollment and how FCS to FBS, just the platform on ESPN, the televised games, all that stuff just gets you more notoriety and is better for the brand. He's looking at it as their branding and marketing arm. That's also, I'm just going to say, he's approaching that from a disingenuous place because California cost of living has skyrocketed in recent years. And they're also trying to prevent students from leaving to go out of state for an actual cheaper experience. It's the same as the population shift from Southern California into places like Arizona and New Mexico. So if you're a large public in a highly affluent area in Northern California, your concern is just, but again, I think your methodology here is misguided. This is people wanting to do this and justifying it with some nobler claim of enrollment I just curious what the endgame is here The endgame is to probably get into the Pac eventually right There a five deal It a five deal So that probably the end game is to move up again And then the end game after that, the end game is to move up again if they can. It's just keep elevating. Okay, let's widen this lens out. Speaking of end games, where does... Because none of the current realignment moves none of them have made sense texas and oklahoma was the last one that kind of sort of geographically made sense i guess but and i guess the big 12 taking the schools it took from the pac-12 but that was not the plan so when does it start making sense again when did because we keep talking about what's next what's next what's next what super league this when yeah that's when it realignment makes sense i think none of it makes sense none of it's supposed to i mean some kind of super league or different division um uh that brings together the top brands uh probably is the the next thing to happen whether i don't know if it's going to make sense but certainly the the brave that does happen the brands that will be in that group in the schools that would be in that group may not make a lot of geographic sense, but certainly from like a brand value and all that stuff will probably make sense. They'll be like-minded and like resources. The first thing they do, though, Ross, is break them into geographical divisions that kind of look like all the old conferences. A lot of the talk in D.C. is, I think we discussed it here about modifications a few weeks ago, modifications to the SCORE Act that are undergoing and still undergoing. and one of them is hey can we like can we just read or at least a discussion this hasn't been any kind of amendment to the bill but is like can we just restructure this whole thing can we just blow it all up consolidate media rights what is the rearrange the conferences all of that stuff you know the thing being the thing being the idea of identifying via conference well you said blow the thing up are you talking about like so i know what everybody's thinking in their head this is what i'm leading you to is like the sec is healthy the big 10 is healthy the acc is in constant tumult and then the big 12 is a sort of flotilla of pirates shout out your mark but everyone else it's the identity is essentially fading or if it hasn't faded out completely like what how do you explain the mac now with sac state there and northern illinois the mountain west is like that's what we're getting at right right okay so are you going to force these lower tier conferences to essentially dissolve and then redraft? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, right? I mean, you've seen the models out there where the Sports Broadcasting Act has changed, allowing everybody to consolidate media rights and FBS. And then from that point, if you're consolidating altogether, do you end up rearranging conferences later on? It's hard to see that actually happening. it's easier to see happening a bigger Super League type of deal that's the part I like there's so many steps in between Ross whether it's you need congressional action to change the Sports Broadcasting Act which would allow them to all sell their TV rights together which is the thing because I always you know it's just like anything else you follow the money yeah if they want to make more money they would sell their TV rights as one yeah As Ross, I think you and I were talking to the same person a few weeks ago when this person who is very, very smart told us the real money, the only way they make the real, real money where the dollars, the dollars per eyeball start to approach what the NFL gets per eyeball is if they sell the whole regular season and the whole postseason together, which they cannot do right now. They'll never do that. Yeah, right. they will if it's was forced upon them by the federal government i guess to potentially uh wait hang on hang on sankey's not going to do that they're not going to give up that they're not going to give up their agency in that process you would have to have multiple university presidents or leaders whatever you want to call them in the south eastern conference go to him and say right they will give up whatever you want them to give up everybody's money hungry that would have to be communicated. You used to work in wrestling. Everybody has a price for the million dollar man. Oh man. Yeah. So does he. Well, his son does. He's facing jail time. There's shout out Brett Favre. Why'd you block me on Twitter? I think that we're jumping around a lot of topics here. And I think the takeaway is that the anxiety, even on the media side, not just the fans, the people we run into and ask us questions about college football, the middle tier, the group of whatever the hell we're going to call this thing, is growing more and more bloated, but also unstable. I think in order to kick off what Ross is talking about or what has been sort of hypothesized is someone's going to have to tap out. And I think that might happen where the revenue doesn't match the promise on some of these schools and you're shipping your softball team across the country and then eventually someone just says, hey, we can't, this isn't feasible. When somebody at the bottom of one of these leagues is going to say, we can't. But the thing that's happened before that is two in the last two weeks have said, no, no, we're tapping in. Yes, yes. Well, you know, hubris is a powerful thing, but if you look at Idaho as a case study, Idaho is healthier now financially and more successful in their sports by actually stepping back down. So if you don't know, Idaho was at the FBS level. They decided we're going to go back to the FCS level. They're also in one of the most geographically isolated parts of the country, short of Hawaii, in terms of getting teams in and out. They're basically next door to Washington state. So, um, I, I, I, I've questioned the motives here. I'm incredulous about that. Whatever kind of brand you're trying to build in the group of five, group of six group of whatever, it's getting harder and harder to do that because of the transience of all this, the uncertainty of all this. I would love to spend three segments on this show, giving you like a G five map of how we should cut this up and what we should do. And I do think if a greater separation occurred, let me throw this by y'all. Rather than think of the FBS as a whole right now, what if there's separation at the very top where it's the big two and or big four that are separating now autonomously and they're working on their own, they're working their own TV rights, whatever that might be. And then you have this middle class. And if they were to join, if the Sunbelt, CUSA, MAC, Mountain West and PAC whatever were to actually negotiate as a unit for television rights as inventory i'm not separating them into their own postseason i know a lot of people get really sensitive about that i do too i think that would suck even though i love the fcs playoff i think you can't really do that at the next level that feels like a solution to then say all right sac state you're going to be on the west side of this thing northern illinois we're going to put you here we're going to have some sort of scheduling component very similar to what we talked about with that pack 12 andy like we could have at the end of this if northern in Illinois has 10 or 11 wins and they're vying. We pluck them and we pluck Boise and then we pluck like, you know, App or whomever. And then they all play each other in the final week or whatever if you're still fighting for that one playoff spot in the big boy tournament, the Disney Invitational. So it's... I could see a collective action, Ross, happening from the middle sooner and more logically than I could from the very top. Right. No, I think that's fair. And I think the group of six commissioners they've met a lot together over the last year and a half, two years. And this is one thing that I think that's been discussed, maybe not seriously, but is more of a, like, it's been, this is how it's been described to me, is forming a national sort of football conference at the G6 level, like getting all the big football brands together to be competitive as much as they can with the A4. I know that has been something discussed. And I think Tim Furnetti of the Americans has been actually public with that idea of, hey, let's have like a national football conference. One of the things we've seen the last few months is I think three schools have moved conferences to go football only. yeah right so they're northern illinois north dakota state and now sacramento state are playing football only in another league and i wonder if we will start to see more of that where you do have these sport only conferences developing uh you know i i just wonder if that is also in the in the future we already do in the sports we don't care about yeah big 10 hockey is not like I don't think Maryland has a team I don't think we're you know like Big Ten hockey includes other schools that are outside of Big Ten in football. Notre Dame's in the Big Ten in hockey. Yeah so and there are other sports where this this is the case and I there's been a lot of pearl clutching about that one and I'm not even trying to troll here I really don't understand what the problem is if we just align sports by conference rather than schools. I that seems logical enough to me. Big East basketball was always a great argument. Well it's almost like they're completely different businesses. big time football and the bottom lines are very different our businesses and and yeah the other sports at those even those schools are charities that it's it's two completely different business models so yeah i mean there i know there are profit generating men's hockey and women's hockey teams at the very top just like there's profit generating baseball i mean we're talking about under 20 programs in baseball and hockey that are turning a profit yep so i we'll see what happens here. But again, like Godfrey said, nobody's tapping out yet. We got more people tapping in. None of it makes sense. They do need to figure this out eventually, but they're not going to figure it out today. What they might figure out in the next few days is whether everybody's been running the courthouse to try to get an injunction or not. We will have an update on the Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Shambliss, who appears to be playing in 2026 for legal reasons. Also, Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar. We're still waiting on a decision on him. We'll talk about that when we come back. We are back at the College Football Inquirer, and we have legal news. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Okay, well, when we left you last, Trinidad Chambliss was headed into a courtroom in Mississippi. that day all that stuff wrapped up in fact we got to listen to the judge read an order for i think a whole hour oh we got to listen to a judge all right over an hour i think yeah it's unbelievable yeah apparently everybody in the courthouse wanted to get across the street to a place called el jefe which was still a happy hour at the time pittsburgh mississippi is the most nowhere location humanly possible for one of these did you see what was across the street from the courthouse it was a junkyard was across the street as a junk Ross you'd be the only person that I could talk to have you ever driven it's south no I don't think I've ever driven through there so I had to do my first gig out of college I did preps in northeast and that's the only time I've driven through Pittsburgh I think was either going to or leaving Bruce on the way Bruce maybe to oh my god I can't remember right maybe to what is it like 45 minutes south of Oxford maybe it is middle of freaking nowhere i mean yeah so i really don't i was curious why the whole college football world descended on pittsburgh mississippi so it's a town of 220 hearing it's got some grisham energy for sure oh the whole hearing was ripped from the knob from a john grisham novel including the none of the attorneys were seersucker though because it was apparently the wrong season for uh yes it's just that no only summer only um the uh too yes let's let's let's let's um even though it's a little old now yeah we have to talk about how this yeah i want you to help explain because this is something i've i've been trying to explain to people and and it's hard trinidad shambliss suing for eligibility gets his injunction joey aguilar from tennessee suing for eligibility. We're waiting to see what the judge says. They had the hearing on Friday. The judge had some very pointed questions for the attorneys, far more than than the judge in the Trinidad Chambliss case had in both cases. The cases are in state court. In both cases, the judges are were selected. You know, that venue is selected because the judge may be a homer for the school. I'll point out that maybe. Yeah. But I'll point out that the judge that denied Charles Betty Yako, the Alabama basketball player, his injunction has an undergrad degree from Alabama and IDs as a Christmas tide fan. So it doesn't guarantee you anything. No. Well, there's a big difference in sports there. True. But, Ross, I want you to help explain the difference in these two cases. Yeah, big differences. One, with Trinidad case, he's asking for a sixth year of college eligibility. Aguilar is asking for an eighth year of college eligibility. And Trinidad is asking for a medical redshirt for a season in which he says he was too sick to play. And Aguilar is asking the court to exempt his junior college season in the NCAA eligibility standards. So to act like it didn't count when it comes to NCAA eligibility. Kind of similar to the Diego Pavia stuff. It involved the junior college season. So these are very different. Trinidad had a pretty good argument, even if it wasn't in a tiny little Mississippi town. No matter how you feel about tonsillitis and how serious it is. Very serious. But there are thousands of NCAA cases in history where somebody asked for a medical hardship. Some of them got granted, some of them didn't. Yeah. The application of that might be termed somewhat arbitrary. In the Joey Aguilar case there has never been a case where they like we just ignore your JUCO stuff Like the Diego Pavia thing was the ncaa was treating players who spent 2020 in juco differently than it was treating players who spent 2020 in the ncaa right it was it was a very un it was clearly unfair it was very specific to that year and joey aguilar was in juco in 2020 the difference is he's also juco 2019 Yeah, he was in JUCO four years. He played two. He was in JUCO four years. And he's asking the NCAA his last JUCO year, his last JUCO season, not to count it. Similar, we've seen some of these cases. And we've seen a lot of judges actually rule for the NCAA in these cases when it comes to exempting junior college seasons. So we'll see what happens there. But guys, I know it's kind of old, but what happened in the courthouse in Mississippi was straight out of a John Grisham novel. And it was really something. I mean, from the very start, the invocation, the man who gave the invocation, part of his prayer was to ask for an extended eligibility in the middle of the courtroom before the hearing started. asked the Lord Jesus for extended eligibility for Trinidad. So that's how it started. Right. The judge got up there, and I mean, just typical everything about the judge. Again, John Grisham character. He was oozing Mississippi. Dripping, yeah, oozing, oozing country Mississippi. You never want to ooze Mississippi, trust me. It's a ridiculous antibiotic regimen. The judge, by the way, Judge Robert Whitwell, former JUCO quarterback. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. In Mississippi. Yeah, yeah. And then so, and then during the break when the judge went back to quote, deliberate, which if you listen to him read his order, it took him over an hour and he deliberated for like, I think less than an hour. So there's no way he wrote his order. That man must type 7 million words. No, there's no way he wrote his order during the deliberation. We all know that, actually the Betty Aco case kind of taught me this. The attorneys send in But like, if we win, here's what, here's how the order should read. Yeah. So you've got something you can copy and paste from. Right. But while he's deliberating, Trinidad is signing autographs for people, signing their like ties. He signed a tissue box. Boxes of, yeah, Kleenexes and whatever. And then, and then to cap it all off, and this was the greatest thing, and probably the most bizarre I've ever seen in covering all these court hearings and stuff, is the judge got visibly and audibly emotional while reading his decision and granting Trinidad an extra year of eligibility on the brink of tears. Are we sure he was audibly emotional? We played the video on my On 3 show. I just gave out because he'd been reading for an hour. I don't know. My favorite part, you haven't mentioned yet, Ross. Oh, yes. The NCAA just left. They peaced out. They just left. They knew. I'm sure they knew. I can't blame them. Yeah, they knew by the way that hearing went, it was pretty obvious where this decision was going. And there was a little bit of a rumor that, I think it started on social, that the judge got a signed football from Trinidad, which would have really been the cherry on top of all this. I had to find out about this, right? So I called the courthouse and got the secretary. I'm like, hey, I just was curious. Like, did the judge receive a signed football from Trinidad? And she's like, hold on one second. There's like, you know, 20 seconds of pause where she's clearly going into the judge's chambers and asking him. And she came back, unfortunately, and said, no, he didn't get assigned football. This is the kind of this is the kind of well is getting the royal treatment at Vaught Hemingway Stadium this this year, no matter what. Yes, this is the kind of stuff that like I'm sure somebody out there is listening and they're just absolutely outraged. And that's fine. But this is probably like the only way I can relate to this is this is how I felt when I would get phone calls from NCAA enforcement officers who would say like, yeah, Dabo and Nick stopped by our office today and everybody everybody stopped what they were doing in the enforcement office to take pictures with them. yeah like it's just it's always been this crooked I'm sorry like I know we're involving actual courts now but like it's it always will be it's always about fandom it's yeah like I know people are outraged I guess but like we didn't get here by accident we got here because of an absence of over something because everybody's like oh this is going to inspire copycats and I do think the legal strategy will inspire copycats sure file yeah filing a state court making a contract dispute rather than you know trying to do a class action antitrust suit in federal court but here's the thing how many really good players in any sport get to year five and get done with year five and did not play a single play of their sport in the first two years there or in two separate years without a massive injury and you're not going to find many you're not going to find many that schools would want to keep on their roster who couldn't play for the first two years who couldn't sniff the field for the first year treinand shambles is a really unusual case Joey Aguilar is not an unusual case. Well, one of the things, too, that keeps coming up, I keep hearing, and it kept coming up in response to my story after the hearing and during the hearing, is, hey, why doesn't he just go pro? Why would he want to stay in college? Well, first of all, I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun in college. College is fun. Like, college is fun. And you weren't making $5 million a year, which is what he may be making this year. He had agreed back in December to a contract that's over $5 million in compensation. So imagine being a college kid and making $5 million plus, which is more than he would have made. I think, Andy, you know the numbers of this. If he was drafted outside of the top 15, he would not have been able to make $5 million plus next year in the NFL. Yeah. It's pretty easy. It's just money guys. It's guaranteed money. Like this is the same. I mean, Diego Aguilar, Aguilar is a little bit of a different situation as it relates to Tennessee, but like this is probably for most of these individuals, the last time they can make this much money playing the sport. And that's why I do think Trinidad is, is a different case in terms of football talent too. I do think he can make an NFL roster. I think he'd be in the NFL a while now. I will say from, from talking to people at the senior bowl, there's still a lot of people who thought if he has to come out, he's still a day three pick. Well, it's a size concern. We're talking about size here. It's okay to say that. We all laughed when Diego's real measurements came out. This is just a size concern. These guys can achieve at the highest level at this level, but their ability to earn money at the next one is in question. We're not talking about, they're not going to be 35 doing this like they this just goes back to like give them six just give it give it it's a six year window or don't count you go or whatever play five no waivers if you get hurt too bad like no waivers no red shirt make it clean make it easy yeah if there's no waiver process like the waiver process is what they were what they were fighting in this case fighting over yes if there's no waiver process there's nothing to fight over there's nothing to argue about they're fighting over the waivers, all of them, virtually all these cases are about denied. Almost all of them are denied waivers, right? Well, if that hadn't been such an arbitrary process for 50 years, then maybe we wouldn't find ourselves here. Bingo! But the problem is they can't, you know, they say they can't do five for five right now because of the lawsuits and how it would impact. Because everybody else will, there will be a class action suit. Then there would be a class action, number one. And number two, the lawsuits they're currently fighting, that would not help them in those lawsuits if they just all of a sudden growing an extra year to everybody it's never going to stop you're going to have to accept that there will be a line of demarcation where you say we're going to do it this way and you have to deal with that which is nil right nil became a thing and lo and behold we got the house settlement because there was a lawsuit on behalf of previous players to get their nil back um to get their nil compensation back pay so that's where we are that you just Honestly, they're going to claim inability. They're going to claim outrage. And then eventually you take them to the highest court in the land or to a definitive moment. You break them open and then you do what you wanted to do in the first place. That's the lesson that we learned from Alston. The inevitable will occur. They're just going to create as much inertia as possible in the process. And the price we're paying, and I don't think it's that big a price, is that we have these sort of – we're in a very weird transition era of college sports. I do think in 15 years we're going to look back and be like, oh man, do you guys remember the 2020s when it was different every year and no one knew what to do and this wasn't settled and that wasn't settled? This is the era that we're living in, but we're also paying off a tab of the previous 80 years of the sport. Right, right. This is the transition from whatever it was before to a real full-fledged business that's being run like a business. and that there will be growing pains and there will be a tab to be paid, I think is the right word to describe it. Because if you want to get to the five to play five, yeah, you're just going to have to settle with the people who sue you because you did do all that. Yes, and be cautious if you're listening or watching this and you're not in the industry. Be cautious when someone from an authority position or an outside authority position, specifically in politics, starts to talk about a doomsday scenario because we now have enough data over the last couple of years to realize that none of those doomsday scenarios have actually come in. They're still making tons of money. All of these people who told you that. When they pay players, no one's going to care. The sport's going to fall apart. No, it's not. Ratings have never been better. Attendance is up. It's just simply not true. So be very, very careful when people talk about college sports being broken because they're completely okay with cracks and fissures on the side that they benefit from, right? So that guy in Missouri that Ross was reporting on a couple days ago, Senator or Congressman Ross? Senator. What's his name? Senator Eric Schmidt. Okay, I would love if Eric Schmidt, and I could already tell based off of his alignment and voting record, I'm curious if he thought there was something broken in college sports when Jimbo was owed 70 million in dead money. The answer is, of course, no. It's just that now that you have this much more player agency, the sport is ending. So just be very careful who you listen to and and and be very careful when they say things like that sound too big to be true because they aren't true also if they keep saying this is going to we're never going to be able to afford this but and yet they still hire coaches for more yet they still pay those buyouts they're lying to you because clearly the money's there i remember two years i remember a year or two ago everyone's like we're gonna these buyouts in the coaching contracts they're gonna to change people are going to stop signing these coaching contracts like the uh remember the i think it was the week i was at the u.s capital for the alleged vote of the score act where it didn't when it got stopped at the last minute and i think it was the week before was when lane kiffin signed the 93 million dollar deal i remember somebody at the capital or around the capital telling me yeah um not great timing on that yeah and when they want to fire him in three years and they owe him all that money, I guarantee you a politician in Louisiana is going to be like, none of this would be happening if we didn't have to pay those players. So just be careful who you absorb information from. Well, I get all my information on YouTube from Mr. Beast. Ooh, effortless transition. Yeah, there you go. I wasn't going to talk about this, but Godfrey got me intrigued last week. I didn't. No, we're going to discuss this because it's not just Mr. Beast. story. This is a Phil Knight story and a Cody Campbell story and an everybody else with money story. And it has to do with paying them damn players and how you pay them and how much you pay them and how frequently you pay them. Can Mr. Beast buy a national title? It sounds like YouTube SEO because that's what it is. But Godfrey says it could happen and I want to know how it could happen. and talk about it when we come back. We are back at the College Football Inquirer. I am Andy Staples with Ross Dellinger and Stephen Godfrey. And we talked about this briefly last week. And it very much intrigued me, something Godfrey said, because I had just sort of dismissed it when it came out. So a couple of weeks ago, somebody asked Mr. Beast. If you don't know who Mr. Beast is, you're probably old like me. I had to just Google, by the way. If you don't know who Mr. Beast is, schedule your colonoscopy. Yeah, you're old like us. Mr. Beast is one of the most popular people on YouTube. I believe he has 466 million subscribers on YouTube. Basically, every video he puts out gets the viewership of the Super Bowl. What does he do? Well, he does various things. It started with him counting to 100,000. What? That was where he kind of caught old. Man, I feel so old. But what he started doing after that was getting very real money and giving it away. Like, I'm going to give away a million dollars today. And then it became these challenges. Like, I'm going to stack $5 million in a pyramid. And whoever climbs to the top first wins. That sort of thing. and high production value and all that people love it people love it so the guy is really taken off so somebody asked him on instagram a few weeks ago uh he he's based in north carolina and somebody asked him would you be willing to donate a hundred million dollars to ecu to east carolina he from greenville north carolina which is where east carolina is would you be willing to donate million to East Carolina to win a national title And I thought no million would win your national title This poor naive soul on the internet asking Mr. Beast, Mr. Beast said, should I do this? Which he's one of those, if he asks, should I do this? Sometimes he actually does this. So I brought it up on the show and Godfrey's like, yeah, $100 million, you could get in the mix. And I want to know. Okay. If Mr. Beast writes a check tomorrow to East Carolina for $100 million. What happens? How could East Carolina theoretically build a team that might compete for a national title? And how long does that take? And how do you divvy up the money? How do you do it? The reason I wanted to talk about this is it's twofold. One, the power of these YouTube celebrities. I think we are not the intended audience to understand the magnitude of this. Clearly not. Like I have, we have done our damnedest as parents to basically eliminate YouTube, other than the College Football Inquirer on Yahoo, from our kids, you know, media diet, right? Because it's just filled with crap. And yet they are still ardent followers of this Ryan Trahan. Yeah, my kids with Dude Perfect, like whatever Dude Perfect said when my kids were seven, they would have listened. Like those guys, the Purple Hoser and like all those guys, they would have listened to them. I'm in deep trouble. Okay, so it's that. I was kind of fascinated that Andy invoked someone like Mr. Beast. And then second, I had a conversation. I'm going to be really careful about this. I had a conversation with a person who is in charge of the NIL distribution, like how you spend the money, the roster building for a Group of Five program a couple months ago. they are working on a plan to court an entity to sort of do a very public almost like buy-in of the team and i'll leave it at that i can't i really cannot say any more than that i probably should have said that but but this was this fell directly into like what you're talking about all right and i was talking with this person like how this would work and and you know it was all just kind of a hypothetical situation and so then i went and asked this person after you said this andy how this would work and what the dollar figure would be at the i it's going to take a long time for me to say group of six sorry i'm gonna keep saying g5 because i've been doing it for 15 years okay sorry so at the group at the g level we're gonna start calling it the g league that won't be confusing oh wait that won't be confusing all right so i said hey staples has this thing that I said, if you gave ECU $100 million in NIL for one year, could they win a natty? And I threw it to him. And he said... It doesn't have to be one year, but let's say it is one year. One year? It's $100 million. It's $100 million in fusion. I just said, here is the check. Do with it what you will. And he said, CFP, yes. After that, obviously, it's a crapshoot. So what he's saying is no matter what you do, you're still subject to the whims of the bracket. Which is what I think people don't understand. So I was at the Orange Bowl, which is probably the best example of this. It was two teams funded by literal billionaires who are worth, Phil Knight and Cody Campbell are worth what Mr. Beast is worth thousands of times over. That was a quarterback issue. To me, that one is like, it is to your point, Andy, but also I just look back at the Texas Tech's entire season down the stretch, and I was like... oregon got boat raced by indiana well they had a bet they had our reliable honda pilot fernando mendoza phil's a billionaire too sometimes you buy the wrong quarterback mr beast is worth 2.6 billion by the way is he oh my god he's a billionaire oh i wasn't really sorry mr beast i was not familiar with your i i was thinking he was a hundred millionaire okay he's already a billionaire so so cody campbell are kind of in the same neighborhood then close probably so i so i started to tease the number down because like andy's number was sort of a hypothetical hyperbolic state but i was thinking i wasn't thinking in a year i was thinking maybe you you take that hundred well he took it he took your theory this is where he's headed he said at least he said at least 20 at that level to have a shot at a natty plus you have still have to have a good plan with it so the theory the working theory right now is that if a g6 team has a guaranteed 20 in nil they should be cfp eligible meaning like in that one to two percent of all the group schools um to get in and then get that slot but i think if you're spending more and i think you're gonna have to overpay a little bit to get them to come there you're psychic yeah okay yeah you just wait just wait okay just wait he said 40 in a single season would let you compete at the very very top and truly push for national title contention 40 in one year at a g school all right is that and that's In addition to the rev share. Whatever your situation might be. Before Ross told us about last week. Yes. So the thing is, and I'm scrolling through all my notes here, he said specifically exactly what you said, which is because of the brand, let's call it brand confusion in this case, and let's stick with ECU, okay? You would not spend the 20 the same way another school would. You would actually have to over-index. That's why he mentioned the 40, because you have to pay against the brand confusion, Meaning you're overpaying at every position relative to market price to get them there in the first place because there's going to be negative recruiting on it. There's going to be chatter about you're not going to get developed, et cetera, et cetera. So you have to pay a premium against market price at ECU, which is where the 40 number came from. There's plenty of kids that just even just wouldn't go, right? Right. Like, I mean, even with the money, even if you overpay, they're just not going to go there. And this was my question because I think Harold's done a hell of a job at ECU. Yeah. but do you use some of that money so to buy a more expensive coach and coaching staff here's so i said is 100 i said well andy threw out 100 is 100 overkill and he said well defined overkill because you wouldn't turn it down and at some point it would be hard to spend all that in a cycle it would also be hard in one portal window cycle he said but hang on a couple swear words if you would pay egregiously high for some positions in the first window to make sure they came then you have you're starting a legacy brand it's what texas tech has to pay a little bit more for these guys up until right now. So exactly what we just said, I have someone in personnel saying, Texas Tech overspent. Your person, if I took the 100 and split it 50 one year and 50 another year, and I signed some of the people I signed to two-year deals so I could start, you know, get a little continuity going. So my target date for, let's say I'm doing this, we're imagining we did this before this portal window. So if we did it before this portal window, we'd be building a roster for 26, but my target date for the national championship contention would be 27. Well, so you're fighting. There's two things I want to talk about. You're fighting the conception of the player and their agent, which we established a little bit. He gave me a specific example there for a second. But then also he thinks it's a two to three year window you'd have established. So maybe it's like 45 and then 25 and then you spread the rest out over two more years. And so you're creating something like a four-year window. Something like a four-year window. Yeah, and if you're successful, you're getting more money to use in the successive years. So the example he gave, and this is at his particular school right now, so I'm going to clean this up a little bit to protect the source. What the problem they're having right now is, in the group level, they're offering pretty good money at a lot of these schools. It's like top-line FCS players, but they can't compete with the big four. right? Especially the power two. So what the power two is actually doing, it's tricky. These players could go for 100K, like a defensive lineman for 100K. They could go to the group, become an all-conference player, right? And then get drafted, be able to put a lot on tape. What they're experiencing right now, and this is where it would factor into our ECU issue is, so let's say this group school pays 100. And let's say a Big Ten team comes in and says, we're going to give you 200. The kids are going there, even though the kids, their agents and their families know they're going to be a role player at best. These are depth ads, right? So these kids are choosing the bird in the hand, the extra 100K in the one season over the ability to basically ball out in one year at half that cost and up their profile. Now, would that trend continue? This is why you have to overpay. And what he's saying is Texas Tech had to go with elite talent at elite positions and say we're texas tech we're not ohio state or alabama so we got to prove it to you on the bottom line first got to come to lubbock west texas yeah you also got to live in lubbock and greenville now greenville north carolina actually kind of a little bit easier to get to barbecue scene is amazing bees barbecue knew that also he goes short drive from the skylight in so it's it's pretty incredible but i think you i get where you're coming from so texas tech you're talking about David Bailey. You're talking about Lee Hunter, people who were at premium positions that could have gone anywhere that you do have to pay a premium for to get them to come to Texas Tech. Yes. Your premium is even more when you're trying to get them to come to East Carolina. Correct. So that's why the hundred is necessary because you have to overpay against market bias. I guess you could call it the bias of the market for at least one cycle, if not two. You also need positive word of mouth recruiting from those kids you initially pay. And then the other thing is, you've got to show some sort of feasibility plan there. Although I really like everything that's happening at ECU football right now. Like I think Blake Harrell's a rising star. I really like what he did in the turnaround year as an interim. ECU historically kind of goes back to my old, you know, 1AA. If you're good, they truly embrace it. They pack the place. They're loud. It's fun. I know we all know this, but I think people would be shocked to understand how big that stadium is, how much they used to pack it out. It really was a little pocket universe in college football for years because that side of the state wasn't well recruited for a long time, but you had a lot of talent. You had a lot of talent in some lower income areas in Eastern Carolina that didn't, you'd have eligibility issues getting in. And ECU lived in this liminal space for a couple of years, the way Southern Miss did, and they would clean up and kick ass. And that kind of all fell apart. They had budget issues for a long time. so Andy your specific suggestion of ECU given the fact that we all kind of like their coaching staff and where they're headed they've kind of finally turned it around combined with the celebrity of someone like Mr. Beast just think about they have a billionaire who grew up in their community like yeah but back up back up for a second because I think we're answering our question or for our biggest problem our biggest problem we said was going to be market bias of the individual player right like why is this five-star defensive lineman going to go to ECU instead of school X and the power four, right? Money. But also, think about, do you understand the media apparatus, not you guys, I think a lot of people our age don't understand, Mr. Beast alone, if he really did this, would provide so much extra attention. He makes your true NIL so much more valuable. Yeah, that's true. I don't think people understand the value of what he brings in terms of exposure. It would dwarf anything that ESPN could do, or Fox, by far. Is Mr. Beast getting through the NIL Go clearinghouse? to the NIO. Does Deloitte know who Mr. Beast is? I didn't. That's going to be a question for you, Mr. Deloitte. I don't think Deloitte's stupid. I think they pay attention. I'm not kidding. If you go to Mr. Beast's YouTube page and look at the views, it is a Super Bowl broadcast, essentially. It is more valuable. It would be more valuable, especially to a 19-year-old brain, for branding than anything ESPN or Fox could offer. And this is also what terrifies major media corporations at night. News Corp and Disney, they are mortified of these people because they're doing it outside the boundaries. There's really no... And remember, Mr. Beast has crossed over. Mr. Beast has a deal with Amazon. Yeah. You could do... Let me put it this way. If Mr. Beast lent his very bespoke celebrity to a sort of hard-knock style program through third-party rights, which ECU would be... They would be within their deal to license out. they would be the most watched supplementary football program on Prime and probably across sports streaming. And people think I'm insane right now. It's probably because you're 45 or 50 and you don't understand the power of these YouTube celebrities. Oh, okay. But these kids do. Wrexham, good example. Yes. Welsh soccer program was in the, what, fifth division? They were awful, yes. I watched the first two seasons and I kind of tapered off. So Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhaney, they're in the championship now which is the second division. Yes, and if things go the way they are they will probably have to take on additional investment because the premiership is so they could be in the Premier League in the next three years and it would complete the greatest whatever you want, trajectory or glow up of a soccer franchise in the world in history. That's how well they got. And Ryan Reynolds is an A-list movie star but he still probably doesn't have the reach of Mr. Beast. Correct. Would you risk dying for $500,000? That's one of his YouTube posts. Survive 100 days trapped in a private jet and then keep it. Wow. I might have to watch some of these. I'll report back. Okay. Ross is going to be subscriber of 466 million and one. My wife is overhearing, overheard the pod in the next room and she just texted me live while we're taping and said, what are y'all doing talking about Mr. Beast? see there you go there you go we're buying east carolina national title that's by the way if any of this makes you wince it's no less unbecoming than the you know dod contractors and oil barons that currently fund this sport i mean this is just the next evolution of a meddlesome booster as i slip as i slip my nike shoes off congratulations east carolina on your national title yeah and your doctor series yeah go pirates poor poor mr beast don't the pirates are going to inundate him now i want to wait did we just do a consulting firm thing again i need to cut i need to cut we definitely need to use carolina should when they celebrate their first national title i i mean text will be written all three of us well ross has ethics so i'll take his he's right doesn't have that many ethics not right yeah he's a real reporter i'm just an idiot real we will be back on Thursday we'll buy another team a national title we'll talk to you then