Pate State Extra: Rankings Debates & Shocking Results

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm sitting here with this huge bag of mail. We got so much left over from Q&A submissions over the weeks and months that I thought it was time. And I think it is time. And it feels like it is time to bring back the Pate State Extra podcast, formerly known as the Late Kick Extra podcast. Those of you who have rolled with us from the beginning know this to be, over time, our most entertaining avenue of content. Those of you over time know that you can only find this in the podcast feeds on Spotify or Apple or whatnot. You're really not going to see this on the YouTube channel. Maybe, maybe if Jesse gets around to it, you see a clip or two, but we don't put this in long form on the YouTube channel. So here's the deal. I just have a bunch of things written down on a piece of paper. I have a few questions that you asked saved. And I will just meander through these as the morning rolls on. Happy you're with us here. Our next live show will be Thursday night. But in the meantime, there's really no formatted way we do this. I just dive into it. So first question. And I close my eyes and I point my index finger. And oh, good. We actually land on one of my favorites. Kyle from Tacoma, Washington. asked about preseason rankings. Are preseason rankings the most useless thing we do in college football? Who is we, Kyle? Who is we? I can't include myself in we because I am going to take a very unpopular stance here. I love preseason rankings. I heavily traffic in them. I participate in them. I put out several versions of them. I'm not even talking about power ratings either. I mean, just straight up rankings as if I filled it out one by one on a ballot. I love them. I love them because it makes June and July and August go by faster. I love them because it's this quantitative visual way of stacking teams in order of what? In order of your opinion. Now, what we do know is nothing's actually been accomplished in the spring and summer. So no one needs to hold anyone to these things. God knows last year, the last thing I wanted anyone doing was holding me to my preseason rankings. Although, this actually is a little bit of a baked in excuse because I need them. Penn State, everyone had them in their top 10. Clemson, I think most everyone had them in their top 10. Who else? LSU, most people had them in their top 10. I don't know that anyone started Indiana number one in the preseason or Miami number two in the preseason. So yes, it's not meant to be gospel. It's not meant to be anything like that. But let's just walk through this, Zach, and anyone else listening. I don't know if this is a silent minority or a silent majority, but I know a lot of people out there can't wait to see these things and or do them themselves in the spring and summer. I love them. So there's this counter argument that, oh man, they're a waste of time, which, you know, that's opinion. But then there's this other counter argument that, oh, they're bad. They're bad for college football. Man, they do all kinds of harm. And the working theory there, just to prove to you that I do know the sentiment here, I do understand the sentiment, The working theory is everyone sets this opinion in the spring or the summer, even though no games have been played. And that's all well and good. The problem is the opinion starts to crystallize, and then it disproportionately shapes what's going to happen during the season. I.e., if a team starts unranked, they have to do twice the work to get up into the top 10 as a team that started ranked, especially if they were ranked top five, because that team can even lose a game. and not fall further than the team that was outside the top 25 that's been doing nothing but winning. And so it's unfair. Like the thinking there's everyone should start from the starting line, and then boom, the horn sounds, and everyone should take off at the same time. And only then should we start grading the runners, or only then should we start ranking the teams. I think you can do both. So I think what you have to do is you have to find a happy medium here. You have to understand both sides of that equation. You have to find a happy medium, and you have to look at it, and you have to say, it's okay to rank these teams as long as we understand what we're doing. So Zach, this is where you and I have to have a little private conversation that everyone else is just going to be privy to. So what do we think we're doing in the preseason? What do we think we're doing where we're ranking teams? I'll tell you what I think I'm doing. Having fun. Trying to maybe loosely map out how I see things happening. And it's important to note when I rank teams, I'm not predicting how I think they're going to end. Case in point, LSU this upcoming year. Maybe I'll start LSU 11th, but then I predict them to go to the Final Four. Well, that doesn't make sense. Josh, if you're going to predict them to go to the Final Four, shouldn't they be one of your top four teams? No, because I don't think they're going to start the season as one of the best four teams. I think it may take them a while, and then I think they may gel late, and they may surge late, which means I think they're starting the season as one of the 10 or 15 best teams in the country, and I think they'll finish as one of the top four. That's just how my own methodology works. But put that to the side for a second. Let's say I start LSU at 5th. And they come out of the gate and they get smoked by Clemson at home, even though they're a double-digit favorite. And it's a shock to everyone's senses. Well, you've got to be willing to drop LSU completely. You've got to be willing to have wild fluctuations in your rankings in the first few weeks of the season. Because it stands to reason four quarters of actual football should be worth more to you than five months of opinion building. Notre Dame was a perfect example of this last year. So Notre Dame, I can't remember where I had them ranked, but I had them ranked high to start the year. They lose close to Miami. Dropped them a little bit. Not much, but dropped them a little bit. Then they had the bye week. Then they lost to A&M. I had them unranked after that. The AP didn't. The AP kept them ranked. I disagreed with that. Obviously, had Notre Dame started the season ranked 30th, they wouldn't have climbed into the top 25 by losing those two games. But since they started the season ranked top 10, there was this resistance to drop them out, especially because they played close games. And my thinking there is, hey, if they really are a top 10 team, they got 10 more games to prove it. And you know what? They did. And you know what? they ended up climbing again. So Zach, I think as long as you're willing to do that, as long as you're willing to have huge, wild swings and fluctuations in your first three or four weeks, as you calibrate the thing and you sort of bang out the dents and work out the inaccuracies, I'm fine with preseason rankings. I think they're really fun. I do agree with you that there are too many people, probably still, that stay married to them. It remains people's defaults. And you can get into October a lot of times in college football, and people are still clinging to their preseason notions. By October, I mean, I would say midway through September, but especially by October, you shouldn't have a single doubt in your mind about a team because of your preseason prediction. If your preseason prediction is they're going to be a top 10 team and they've played like a team outside the top 40 for four weeks in a row, you were just wrong. You got to recalibrate. You're going to be wrong. You're going to be wrong about several teams. I will also tell you this. There are a lot of head coaches of teams out there that four weeks into the season ended up being wrong about their own team. So as long as we have that attitude, then I don't know anything wrong with preseason rankings. And also, what are you going to do instead of that? Really, let's walk this through. I'm going to take like one more minute on this and we'll move on. I got a lot to get to. What would you do instead, Zach, if you did not have preseason rankings? If someone could wave a magic wand and it just became illegal to rank teams in the preseason, do you really want to spend all spring and summer going through preview magazines and they're just being blank pages. You've got your team preview, but then there's no predictions anywhere. There's no thoughts. There's no comparative analysis of how I think Purdue stacks up to Penn State. Alabama and LSU, here's how I think they compare. None of that. You really want none of that. If you do, Zach, that's your prerogative. I would just tell you, I think it's a net positive for college football to have preseason rankings, as long as you do them the right way. Let's not forget that second part, as long as you do it the right way. Next question. This is Caleb in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He asked, do you think Nick Saban would still win big in this era of college football? Saban retired like three years ago. We're talking about him like he's Newt Rockne. How would Nick Saban do these days? Well, So seeing as how some of the players Saban recruited, I think, are still on Alabama's roster, let's remember it hasn't been that long since he was there, but I do get what you're saying, Caleb. So what you're clearly saying or asking is how would Nick Saban do in the fully fleshed out new world of transfer portal NIL? Yes, he existed during the early versions of that world, but he kind of hit the exit ramp as it really started to ramp up. A lot of uses of the word ramp there. He would not win to the degree that he won. No one will, I don't think. So Nick Saban was extremely tactical in how he exited stage left. And luckily for Saban, he already had a full career under his belt. Like Saban was in his early 70s. Some of these guys are in their early 50s. They're still in what should be the primes of their careers. Think about Dabo. Dabo's in his 50s, I think. Kirby Smart's in his late 40s, early 50s, I think he's early 50s. These guys historically should still have a long runway. They should still have a decade plus of being a head coach in major college football. And so it's not the tail end of their career. Nick Saban at any given point could look at it and say, all right, you know what? I'm out. That's it. I'm going to call it a career. Greatest of all time. I'm gone. Some of these guys can't do that right now. So with Saban, you never really got to find out. but I kind of think you did. I kind of think you did. This is not to not Nick Saban at all because I've said it and I meant it that I think he's the greatest of all time. Towards the end of Nick Saban's run at Alabama, you started to see some hints of the impact of the early version of this new era on quote-unquote Saban's Alabama. Now, I don't just think it was that in a vacuum. I think there were some questionable hires, questionable hiring decisions made down the stretch of Nick Saban's run at Alabama that probably contributed to this too. But if you look at his last couple of years there, they were still near the top of the sport. He won a conference title. They went to the playoff. I mean, his last game was overtime in a semifinal game against Michigan, the eventual national champ. So it's not like you saw a steady decline, but relative to the vintage Alabama teams of the 20 teens, that 2020 team even and what you saw in 20 what 2 23 yeah it fallen off a little bit and I think it really got masked and this is a credit to them that they won some close games they won some one score games some of them were really weird like inexplicable one score games they had a close one against Arkansas they had a really close game against a bad LSU team but they came out on the right side of it. So history just forgets that. History just remembers that Saban's teams dominated right up to the very end. Well, they didn't dominate. They won up until the very end, but they went from winning dominantly to just winning competitively. Now, that was, I think, an early indication that some of the impacts were being felt there So if you extrapolate that out let say we going to keep saving there until 2030 He right smack dab in the middle of this stuff right now What does the Alabama roster look like Here's one misnomer. One misnomer is, oh, it would have fallen right back to earth. It wouldn't have. It would have remained extremely competitive. It would have remained at or near the top of the sport. The difference is the distance and the gap would have eroded. and so there's much more variance into the equation there and I think Kirby and Georgia are a really good example. Kirby and Georgia are still winning. They're still the class of the conference in any given year. They've won I think the conference two years in a row. Yeah they've won two years in a row but it hasn't been dominant but they've been very skillful in winning close games. But think about this past year. The Florida game was a one possession game. The Auburn game They're shut out in the first half, or they have like three points in the first half, something like that. The Tennessee game, they go to overtime, but they're winning all those games. So they still go 11-1 in the regular season, but it doesn't look as dominant as it used to look. That'd be what Alabama under Saban looked like, if Saban were still there. They'd still have really good rosters, they'd still be very competitive, but you wouldn't have a bunch of 35-3 at halftime in conference play. You just wouldn't have that anymore. And then I also wonder if he would have decided to stick around. I wonder how much of a role an active coach Nick Saban would have taken in trying to change things. Like I know you hear headlines and you hear rumors of him doing that right now. But really, he's not personally impacted by it the way he used to be. So I wonder that. And then I also wonder as he got further down the road in terms of age, I wonder what his coaching staffs would have looked like, because I think that had already started to creep up a little bit. So anyway, the answer is Saban would have still won. I don't think they would have dominated, because I don't know that anyone's dominating in this era. Now, Indiana just did it over a year's run. If that becomes a two- or three- or four-year run, well, then maybe Kurt Signetti's the guy that's going to dominate in this era. But I just don't know that anyone's really going to dominate. Appreciate you guys listening this morning. Sounded like the end. It's not the end. I just need to take a sip of cold brew right quick. I had a question here about something that happened in our past, a very checkered past we have on this show. We didn't build the old Pate State campus here the typical way. So Lori from Mountain Brook, Alabama, asked me, is it true that you once got banned from college game day? Uh, that's a interesting way to ask that question. I personally didn't get banned from college game day. I've never, have I ever been, I've never been on college game day as a participant. I've never been on college game day. Maybe once upon a time back in the day, I went as a fan and you saw me on camera and that would have been like 2010 or seven or whatever, but I've never been on college game day as a participant. Would be honored to, but I've never been on there. What Lori is asking about is, did we, as a brand, get banned from college game day? Kind of, sort of. So here's what happened. A few years ago, what would it be, like four years ago, when I had come to, at the time, 24-7 sports, and I was doing my show over at 24-7, like five blocks away from where I'm sitting right now, we were building the show. We were building, at the time, Late Kick. And we had to get our name out there. We didn't have a marketing budget. We still don't, actually. But now it's by choice. Back then it was by necessity. We did not have a marketing budget, so we couldn't really promote the show. We just had to do it the old-fashioned way, guerrilla tactics. Take it to the streets. And so what our audience did was our audience started showing up at events and holding up posters or holding up anything with our insignia on it or our brand, our name, my name, our logo, because we've got a very, very, very engaged audience that you guys take ownership of the show, which is good. I've always wanted it that way. I ask you to do that. And our audience ended up taking it very, very literally, and they took it as a challenge. So they would go to game day, and they'd camp out, and they'd get there early, so they'd get prime positioning behind some of the hard camera locations, which meant you were going to be on TV a lot. And so I'm watching game day a few weeks in a row and I see like Pate State signs or our Pate State Freights logo. Guys would screen print it out on big posters and they'd hold it up and everyone would say, hey, look, and they'd tag you on Instagram or Twitter or stuff like that. Hey, your logo's on TV. They're good work. And I was like, I didn't do that, but I love it, but I didn't do it. So I pointed it out one Sunday on one of the Sunday shows. I said, hey, whoever this was, I want to send you a chalice of supremacy. This is when we started sending chalice out, mind you. It was all organic. First off, we had to create them. Then we had to send them out because I wanted a token of appreciation to send people. So we started sending them out. And then the next week it happened again. As I recall, I came on the Sunday show after that and I said, all right, it feels like something's happening here. So here's the challenge. Anyone who gets our brand represented on national TV, so basically college game day, you're getting a chalice of supremacy. Because anyone who's going to those lengths to promote our show, you need to be handsomely rewarded. Then the following week, it was everywhere. Borderline obnoxious. It was everywhere. And you got to remember, this is a new show. So like the folks at ESPN don't know what it is. The folks at ESPN, And especially the production team for college game days looking around and saying, I wonder if that's some inside joke. Pate State, that's not a real school. What is that? What is that logo? Is that a train? What is that? Then I think someone smartened them up to it. And then, and I've never gotten this story directly from ESPN, who I have since gone into business with, by the way, so I should. I've never gotten this story from them, but I think they put two and two together and they thought that we were actively trying to hijack their show to promote our show, which wasn't exactly true, but it was kind of what was happening. So then the next week, the challenge is out there again. And let's say game day goes on at 9 a.m. Let's just say that was the time. 7, 8, 8.15, 8.30 a.m., I start getting lit up on social. I start getting tagged on social. and it's by people who are having their signs taken away from them. And one guy even had his sign taken away and he watched the people, the sign police, take it and throw it in a pile and he took a picture of the pile and there were a bunch of state posters in a pile just on the ground like common street trash, sad. And so I got informed that our stuff had been banned from College Game Day. Now look, was I happy about it? Kind of, yes, because it meant that at least we're on someone's radar. And I went on the air the following night and I said, I regret to inform you that we've been banned. We've been banned from College Game Day. And then that had the exact effect that you would think it would have. And then the next week it doubled in how big the pile was. And we got some correspondence from our soldiers out there on the battlefield that they had been told in no uncertain terms by folks on the ground there that, no, you're not bringing this. We know what you're doing. We know what you're up to. We know what that show is trying to do. Hey, my hands are clean. My hands are clean. I think litigiously my hands were clean, at least. Legally, my hands were clean. So that's what happened to Lori. Now, since then, I kind of called a moratorium. Herbstreet even made a public statement at some point, as I recall. So I kind of issued a ceasefire, issued a truce, and all's well that ends well. And now we do okay as a show. We don't necessarily need that. But this is now. That was then. Back then, 2021, all's fair. All's fair in loving college football, as Memaw would say. Yeah, I had forgotten about that. Maybe we need to revisit that in longer form. Maybe I got to go back in my timelines and stuff. I think I have a segment. I want to say we did a segment on it. I'll have Jesse pull that. But I want to say we did a segment on it, and that'll probably refresh my memory a little bit more. Banned from college game day. It's a good headline, even if there are only loose shades of truth to it. Good headline there. Let's see. All right. Kevin from Milwaukee, Wisconsin said, simple question, what are your favorite Big Ten stadiums? Somewhat incomplete here because I haven't been to all of them. Let me pull this list up. I had all the Big Ten stadiums pulled up. Okay, so the Big Ten has like 40 teams now. I have not been to Wisconsin, unfortunately. I have not been to Rutgers, Maryland, and Purdue. Have not been there. Strangely, I haven't been to USC, but many of these places I have been. I went to my first Nebraska game this past year. Loved the setup at Nebraska. Was, I guess, kind of surprised at how updated the facilities are because that's a very old stadium. So they've done a lot of work, a lot of renovation. They're at Will Compton Memorial Stadium, I think is the name of Nebraska's stadium. So I liked that. Now, let me tell you, maybe the way I look at it is a little bit different than the way you would look at it. If you buy a ticket to one of these places, what you care about is you care about parking. We all care about parking. You care about concessions, bathroom accessibility, how cramped is the seating, how good are the sight lines. If you buy an upper deck ticket, how good is the view from up there, that sort of thing. Logistically, is it easy enough to get in and get out? Now, fortunately for me, I get to have a different list. So the parking, they give us egregiously good parking. Ridiculous. Especially in the Big Ten, they give us parking way better than we should have. I think we should have to park in another area code. Don't tell people I said that. But we get good parking, so I don't think about that so much. Obviously, we're there before the gates open, so getting in and getting out is not a problem. But me, if I'm covering the game, I always tell our friends in the SID's office, Don't waste spots in the press box for me. I want to be on the field. And we're blessed enough that they let us do that. So we're on the field for games. All right, so what I want is I want a great environment. I want room on the sideline, but also it's really awesome when there isn't room on the sideline. Like I've been to Oklahoma very recently. Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State for that matter, there's virtually no room on the sidelines. Well, that means the crowd's closer. That means it's a very intimate setting. The only downside for someone like me, and this is a first world problem, is you can't go from one end zone to the other because there's no room behind the benches to walk. So you have to go all the way up a ramp, down the concourse, all the way back down. Anyway, that's not your problem. That's my problem. But I'm thinking about it in terms of the places that I like, like my favorite stadiums. So in the Big Ten, Penn State is one that I always look forward to going to. Now, the thing about Penn State is it does not matter what time of day the game kicks off. You've just got to dedicate a whole day because it is by far the toughest place to get in and out of, of all the big venues, all the big campuses, camp I, that we go to. But that's okay. But it's a day. It's a whole day. And the whiteout being a primetime game, I was up there for the whiteout a few years ago. It's great. It's wonderful. just to understand you're checking in the hotel about 3 a.m. If you're lucky. I think last time I went there I was flying out of Pittsburgh at 530 in the morning I went from the stadium to the airport and did not sleep at the airport or anything like that I just kind of got there and that was pretty much how long it took But Penn State awesome And the accessibility you can get to your room underneath the stadium pretty quickly. But the two that I have liked the most that I only sort of semi-recently got to visit was Oregon. Because Oregon's awesome in terms of environment. Fairly easy enough to get in and out of. The architecture is way different. It's extremely loud. It's deceptively loud. And the place where I would have all my stuff is just right off the field. I mean, it's like 10 steps off the field. It's right up a little tunnel. So that's good. Washington is another one. I've only been there once. I've only been to one game at Washington. It was two years ago. It was the Oregon game. But Washington has everything I could want. Washington has bathroom accessibility right off the field, media room accessibility right off the field. Insane environment, insane views. It looks like a screensaver up there. Just everything's gorgeous. Everything's 10 of 10. Someone needs to tell Jed Fish I said this, by the way, because we're not ranking programs here. If we're ranking settings in the Big Ten, there aren't many at all that are above Washington. Now, as for the older places, is so Michigan very historic love it no complaints about Michigan the only thing there is yeah you're going to have to go a little ways if you need to get to a bathroom or get to warmth which some of us who grew up in the south need is it soft yeah it is I'm soft when it comes to weather I'm soft I don't know what to tell you and you're going to have to go up that tunnel which burns the glutes it burns the quads which is okay but it's going to be there so it's going to take you a couple of minutes if you need to get up there. Ohio State is probably the biggest difference in doing what I do versus doing what I would do if I bought a ticket. If I bought a ticket, I'd love everything about the shoe. I'm not saying I hate anything about the shoe as is. The difference is I kind of, I don't know how to describe this. I love amenities, but I love for them to look like they were built in 1638. I hate new looking college football stadiums. I'm very weird about that. So I will grant you that I'm probably in the minority. You should never build a stadium with me in mind, but I love old, functional old. I love that. So at Ohio State, it's just kind of, if you picture, I don't know which north or south, I don't know which end zone it is, but the end zone that's flat, not the one that's curved, the end zone that's flat, the non-horseshoe portion of the stadium. Underneath those lower bleachers, like where the band is, that's where you would go if you're like a field media photographer or something like that. And those are most of the time the areas that I put my stuff. I don't know how else to say this. It's just kind of there. There's not really anything romantic about it. There are a couple of porta-potties in there that over the span of four quarters, You could imagine doing number on the overall ambiance of that very confined space. And it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But it just lacks the sort of Roman Coliseum tunnel romanticism that you would have at some other places. But I love going there because pregame, in the press box, no one does it in the Big Ten like Ohio State does it. Love it. They got McDonald's up there. And I don't mean Big Macs. I mean, they got the, you know, the, like the iced coffee and stuff like that, which I only get when I go to Ohio state, cause I don't really go fast food a whole lot. Chick-fil-A doesn't count as fast food. Michigan state, surprisingly, I was a big fan of. Michigan state is one of those programs. I keep sitting here waiting to get good again. So we have reason to go up there, just like Wisconsin. I haven't even been able to cover a game at Wisconsin, which I hate saying, but it is a reality. So data is incomplete on that one. Who else am I missing? UCLA. Actually, I have been to a UCLA game. It was a couple of years ago. It was the USC game. It's the Rose Bowl. Love the Rose Bowl. You will never have me speak ill of the Rose Bowl. Although ironically, if you go back to what I was talking about, how there's a big difference between covering a game somewhere and attending a game somewhere, apparently the Rose Bowl is that. and that's why I always hesitate. Like Klatt will wear the Rose Bowl hat and he'll just sit there and he'll plant the flag and he'll say, we need the national title game in the Rose Bowl every year. And I don't push back on it. Like it's an idea I can get on board with. The only reason I pause, the only reason I don't make it part of my platform or whatever is because I always hear from fans, no, the Rose Bowl is very overrated. You guys in media, you don't have to experience what we experience. the amenities are very much out of date. The seats cramped. It's impossible to get in and out of there. And those things are true. And I don't have to deal with those. So I just get to go out there and experience the vibe of the Rose Bowl without the reality of it. So I don't really know that I can even answer that. I mean, I went to the Rose Bowl as a fan, but I was a kid when I went out there. So like as a full grown adult, I haven't, I haven't had to sit like this next to a couple of strangers for four quarters. So maybe I would feel different. I don't know. Next up would be, let's see, we got Ohio State, have not been to Minnesota. Oh, here's the one, Iowa. I haven't been to a game at Iowa and that's pretty bad. Got to get to a game at Iowa. Thought we were going to get up there last year. I can't remember what happened. Plans changed at the last minute, but I got to go to a game at Iowa because I don't think this list is complete. Like some of these other teams have sucked. And that's why we haven't been there. Iowa's been pretty good. And we haven't been there. Let's see. Oh, here's a good one. Here's a good one. This is from, let me find him. So Sean in Amarillo, Texas, he said, did you ever think about becoming a weatherman? Like doing meteorology as a career, I guess. Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. I did. For a long time, I thought I may do that when I was a kid. But when I was a kid, this is peak SportsCenter era. This is peak Weather Channel era. This is me staying at Meemaw's house every day after school or just staying there all day in the summer. And I would be glued to SportsCenter and I would be glued to the Weather Channel. Also remember, if you're of a certain age, like if you're in the age bracket that I'm in, And you may be just old enough to remember when SportsCenter would run replays. Like they would do the morning SportsCenter. And then they would just replay that SportsCenter. And that's certainly not anything they do anymore. But I didn't care. I'd watch replays of SportsCenters that I had already watched. But then also on the Weather Channel, I would just be glued to the Weather Channel. And the personalities on the Weather Channel, like Paul Goodloe or Jim Cantore, who's still there, Mike Seidel or Paul Cosen, Vivian Brown, all of these people were like Linda Cohn, Dan Patrick, Stuart Scott. They were tit for tat with me. They were yin and yang for me. If you're an on-air personality at ESPN or you're an on-air personality at the Weather Channel, frankly, those were the biggest celebrities in the world to me. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, okay, whatever. I'm sure they're doing big things, but I don't know, guys. There's something about Rich Eisen and Dan Patrick. There's something about watching Jim Cantore knowing that a big landfalling hurricane is imminent down there on the Gulf Coast. There's something about that that really just moves the needle more for me. So yes, I did think about being a weatherman. To do that, you're going to get a degree in atmospheric science. In the South, you would go to Mississippi State in all likelihood. for that, or maybe you would go to Oklahoma for that. So yeah, I thought about it. Here's what got me. I looked at certain portions of the year and I thought, man, in summer, it kind of gets redundant. Like there's not a whole lot of action. In the winter, you got winter storms. In the spring, prime tornado season. Summer kind of gets monotonous a little bit. It's just Atlanta, Georgia, Highs in the low 90s, isolated slash scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon, and it's going to be really humid. Rinse and repeat pretty much every day for three months. And so I thought to myself, that may be a little boring. Whereas if I cover sports, there's something happening in sports all year. Of course, at the time, I didn't even know that you could cover college football year round. So anyway, I'll wrap this up because this has a little to do with college football. But I will say this. Sorry, my fridge is making a weird sound. I will say this. let's not assume that you can't still have a career in weather. Because there are all different ways to have all different types of careers these days. So I'll just say February has been a very interesting, very busy month. It'll have nothing to do with this show. But I'm just saying there's a lot out there, guys. There's a lot out there. Next up. Oh, here's a really, really good question. Okay, this was from Seth. Seth in Pensacola, Florida, give me your biggest shock of last year. It had to be Indiana, didn't it? Indiana was a big shock. Not that they were good. Indiana was obviously a big shock of the fact that they were dominant. They went and won a national championship. I didn't pick that. I don't know that many people picked that. So I was thinking immediately, okay, well, what could rival that? And you could have teams that fell off. That's where my mind immediately went. So teams that fell off, three preseason top tens immediately come to mind. I mentioned them earlier today, actually. I mentioned Clemson. I don't know if shocking would be the word. Clemson's season was not more shocking to me than Indiana's. I'm going to put it that way. So what about LSU? LSU, I wasn't shocked by that either. Brian Kelly even being fired, I wasn't shocked. In fact, I think we did a season preview video about LSU, or I at least remember thinking this if we didn't do the video, where I thought that, oh, I'm going to put LSU in the top 10. Okay, so just heads up. LSU is going to be in the top 10. However, out of all these teams that are going to start top 10, I circled LSU and I said, if it goes bad early there, that's the one where a head coach could be fired in the middle of the season. And sure enough, It was almost prophetic. It happened exactly like I thought the worst case could happen for LSU, but that wasn't as shocking as the other one. The way Penn State's season went last year may be more shocking to me than the way Indiana's season went. Because Penn State started preseason top 10, in many cases a preseason top five, and if you looked at their schedule last year, what did they have? You knew they had Oregon at home early, but remember the buildup to that. It was Oregon with a young team having to go cross country. It was their first big road game. And it was Penn State veteran team in their building. Like every one of the chips looked to be stacked against Oregon. This is the one. This is the, in a long line of James Franklin can't win the big one moments, this was going to be the big when he won. And the only other huge hurdle they had, at least in the preseason it looked this way, the only other big hurdle they were going to have was they were going to have to go to Ohio State. So a lot of people, myself included, looked at it and said, okay, so all Penn State's got to do is basically hold serve at home. And they can go to Ohio State and lose. But at the worst, this is a two-loss team. At the very worst, this is a two-loss team. The question was, how would Penn State miss the playoffs? Now, of course, you didn't know at the time Indiana was going to be quite the force they were, although Penn State still ended up playing them close. But point being, if you would have told me, even in the fall, early fall, August, let go preseason pick which one will be more shocking Indiana wins a national title or James Franklin is fired what before Halloween I would have said the latter Especially if you told me there going to be no scandal like he not getting fired because some breaking news story erupted I would have thought the latter was more shocking. And it did happen that way, and I stand by it. I think the way the Penn State season went down was more shocking. Now maybe the closer you get to the Penn State program, maybe there are people on the inside there that tell you, you know, in retrospect, this isn't all too dissimilar from LSU and Kelly. And by that, they mean the ice was plenty thick enough to skate on and do all kinds of tricks on, but it was still thin enough to where if you really punched hard, you could fall through it. Whereas at Ohio State right now, or at Georgia right now, I mean, Kirby Smart could punch the ice as hard as he wants. He's not falling through that ice. And they would tell you things like that. I just didn't view it that way. And I viewed the floor for Penn State to be so high. I mean, do you remember when this happened? So you remember the Oregon game happened and you think, okay, well, this is the one they're going to have to regroup. If you can't beat Oregon at home, I don't know that you're going to Ohio State later in the year and winning. So this is going to be a 10 and two team probably, you know, cause the bookends had been set. Like the bumpers on the bowling lane had been set for Penn State. That was just kind of who they were as a program. Maybe a lower ceiling, maybe a higher floor. Not a ton of variance in the outcome, at least we thought. And then when they went to UCLA the next week and that happened to them, I can't remember where I was, but I just remember looking at the score updates and thinking, first off, I was thinking, oh, they got off to a sluggish start. And then quickly it turned into, oh, they're in trouble. And then it turned into they lost. I don't really know that we're in the bumpers anymore. I don't really know that we're sort of in the lane anymore. I think the ball jumped over into the other lane, which happens sometimes. And then Northwestern, I still remember the week of the Northwestern game, how toxic it was. And you could clearly tell something was changing. And I remember saying something like, if Northwestern has an opening scoring drive, like if Northwestern takes an early lead in this game, you have no idea how toxic that environment's going to be. And sure enough, that happened. And I remember at that point, like I caught a glimpse of the TV broadcast and I heard what it was like and I saw what it was like. And at that point, now I won't tell you I thought he was going to get fired, but at that point I realized all bets are off and it wouldn't shock me. Nothing would shock me. And then it happened. But all in all, that was shocking to me, just in totality that it happened. Whereas with Indiana, Indiana had made the playoff the year before. Okay. So all Indiana needed to do was defy conventional wisdom and be better. And that was really going to come down to how good Fernando Mendoza was. And he was as good as he could possibly be. And then the rest of that team did what it was supposed to do and they gelled around him. And he never had to carry the team. I sound like I'm talking about a quarterback carrying a team. Even though he won the Heisman, he didn't carry the team. But that was a big, big surprise. The Penn State thing, just the way it went down looking back was shocking. And then think about it. If you just drive it out further, just let the record play a little bit further. Then you're telling me James Franklin ends up at Virginia Tech and everybody feels good about it. And they do a really good job of putting a roster together, putting staff together. Brent Pry is fired at Virginia Tech and stays at Virginia Tech as the defensive coordinator under James Franklin, same guy he worked under at Penn State. And then the Penn State coaching search flies around like a pinball only to land in the exact slot it should have landed in at the very beginning, which is Matt Campbell. That's a snow globe that if you shook it up, you never could have predicted where all the flakes were going to fall, which is why we love college football. Very unpredictable. Sometimes it's not fun. Sometimes it is fun. It is always fascinating. The most boring college football season in the history of the world was still way more fascinating than most pro sports seasons could ever be to me. That's at least the way I look at it. Next, this is Kevin. Where was Kevin from? Okay, Kevin's from LA. He said, love the show. I want to ask something. I don't mean this disrespectfully. Is there any sacrifice that you feel like you have to make in exchange for the show being owned by corporate media? If the show was owned by corporate media, there would be sacrifices that I would have to make. I'm happy to report to you, Kevin, nobody owns anything related to our show slash this show slash the YouTube channel slash the podcast feeds. Nobody owns any of it. We own all of it. We own 101% of it. So we just kind of get to do what we want. And then anything above and beyond that, like I have several partnerships. I have a partnership with Yahoo Sports. Love those dudes. I have a partnership with ESPN, obviously. And we want that to go on for a long time because That's been really fun. Have a partnership with On3. Shannon Terry was the one who gave me my first ever shot to come up here back when he owned and ran 24-7 sports. And so you always want to be in business with the people you know, the people you trust. But as far as anyone owning anything, a few years ago, which I think I've told the story several times, a few years ago when I was still over at CBS and we were able to negotiate ownership of all of these assets back under our umbrella, that is the biggest sigh of relief that you could ever have. Because at that point, you know college football is not going anywhere, and you trust that you could do a good college football show. And I trust our audience to continue to grow and to build our college football show because you and I both want the same thing. We want what we can't really get or we're not getting anywhere else, which is kind of the entire way we built the show and built the platform and stuff like that. But you're right, Kevin. If we were owned by a corporate entity, yeah, you never know because you never really control what you get to say. They could always walk in and they could say, hey, we need you to push this. We need you to promote that. They could throw branding on your show that's out of your control. They could pitch you advertisers that at the end of the day, you don't have a right of refusal to. I've got all that. We don't do business with anyone we don't want to do business with. We don't talk about anything we don't want to talk about. That doesn't mean it's a perfect show, obviously. We whiff just like everyone else, but when we whiff, it's just because we whiffed. It's not because someone else made us do something. Now, I will say this. I never had any issues. When the show was at CBS, tons and tons of credit to the folks over there. There was never, ever a whiff of anyone trying to interfere in the show. Ever. I would tell you because I don't have any incentive to hold that back now. Never. They were very helpful. What I thought is, I love the people who are in positions of power at CBS right now, i.e. 2022 or 2023. My concern was always, I don't know that they're here forever. So what if Jeff Gertula, dude I love, what if Jeff Gertula is out because of corporate restructuring? Or what if he elevates and takes another position somewhere and there's someone else in that chair and they don't see things the way he does. That happens just like that. In corporate media, it happens just like that. Not just in sports corporate media either. So that always was something I wanted to get ahead of and we were able to get ahead of it, thankfully. But yeah, no sacrifice. Now the sacrifice is you don't get the benefit of resources that you get. Like everyone says, ooh, corporate ownership. Oh man, such an evil connotation. It has its upsides and its downsides. I can promise you if you have a full operational marketing department, a fully operational sales department, a data department, if you have all those folks, an analytics department, if you have a booking department, if you don't have to worry about expensing, if you don't have to worry about travel, if you don't have to worry about lodging, if you don't have to worry about all those expenses, buying your own equipment, all that's taken care of. So there's a lot of benefit to it too. It's not all bad. There's good and then there's fear more so than there's just good and bad. What else did we have? Well, we had, I didn't want to get to this one. I mean, we had one about the coaching rankings the other night. Someone was just giving feedback. It was, I got a bunch of this. I got a bunch of, how could you have Kirby below Ryan Day? And if you don't know what they're talking about. I did my head coaching power rankings, not ratings, power rankings the other day. And I had Ryan Day number one. And I explained what my criteria was slash were. Is it criteria were? Was? Criteria. That's the plural. So my criteria were that I valued your on-field results and I valued relative talent acquisition. I valued how strong your culture and your organization was, how good your ability to hire a staff was. And then I had a little bit of a forward-facing predictive component. Where do I think you're going? And I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but Ryan Day and Kirby have been very comparable in terms of win-loss. One of them has won a national title in the last three years. It's fractions of inches here and there, which is an important thing I'll come back to in a second. And I just gave Ryan Day the nod. I'm not going to argue with anyone if they had Signetti number one, because I had Ryan Day, Kirby, Kurt Signetti, one, two, three. You could shake up that order and pour it out in any order. I don't really care. My whole point is, listen to what I'm saying. I'm saying, hey, I think it's, you couldn't go wrong either way here. They're very comparable. It's very close. It's like watching a horse race and three of them are out ahead of the pack and it's down to the wire and, oh wow, did the blue one win? I think the red one went. No, no, no. It was the yellow one by a nose. and then I get feedback. Oh, this isn't even close. It's like a photo finish and then, oh, it's not even close. Oh, Kirby's, Ryan Day's not even in the same league as Kirby. Well, one of them's in the Big Ten and the SEC, so that's true. They're technically not in the same league. I can assure you in terms of output, they're very close. I can assure you in terms of output, they're very comparable. But I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on that one because we're probably going to get to that one on the Thursday show. Which brings me to my next point. I think we're good. We're in about 45 minutes. Sometimes these will be between 30 minutes and an hour. But we are going to wrap this one up because I have to get it over to the team so they can put it out. Just wanted to bring the Pate State Extra pod back. We'll probably do this weekly as time allows throughout the spring and summer. Definitely not the offseason, but throughout the spring and summer. So I appreciate you guys so much. Make sure if you're not following, make sure you're following slash subscribe to the podcast feed. Appreciate you so much. Take care and God bless. We'll see you next time. bets which expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit fanduel.com slash RG. 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