Impact of NCAA's 'ghost transfer' rule explained + NCAA tournament expansion effect on CFP

On today's College Football Enquirer, we will tell scary ghost stories about ghost transfers. What's a ghost transfer, US? We will explain. There's penalties involved too. Plus Ross Dellinger on a potentially expanded or different NCAA basketball tournament. But let's be real, all conversations about power conferences manipulating the basketball tournament are football conversations too. We'll talk about all of it on the College Football Enquirer today. Hey, everybody, this is Andy Staples from the College Football Enquirer. The College Football season has 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 Game Time app, you can see exactly where you'd be sitting in Tiger Stadium. 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This is College Football Enquirer with Ross Dellinger and Stephen Godfrey. I am Andy Staples and gentlemen on Wednesday, the NCAA did something well spooky. They passed a rule banning ghost transfers. Ross, I'm going to let you say what a ghost transfer is and why a coach might be spending six games for it. Yeah. Yeah. I think we talked about this maybe about a month ago. I was in Indianapolis for the meetings when this sort of emerged a little bit surprisingly from the room, the meeting room of the football oversight that they were going to do this. A ghost transfer, same thing as a blind transfer. They've decided that the NCAA, at least they're going to refer to it as ghost transfer and not blind transfer, but a blind or a ghost transfer. They don't want to offend blind people. They're okay with defending ghosts. I guess that's right. They're dead. Well, they don't have good lobbyists. They could haunt it anyway. There you go. There you go. So what is a ghost transfer? It is a player who enters the, who doesn't enter the portal, who transfers without entering the portal and then magically appears on the roster of the football, basketball, baseball team, et cetera. And this has happened a lot. I think it's only been public a few times. There's some big, some big, some big, Xavier Lucas from Wisconsin to Miami last year. From Wisconsin to Miami, which spurred, of course, a lawsuit because he broke a revenue sharing sort of contract with Wisconsin. That lawsuit's still ongoing. So the NCAA is trying to obviously, and I say the NCAA, this football oversight committee was made up of athletic directors and school officials, right? So this is, this is the schools saying we want this. And the NCAA legal counsel was in the room. And I did hear, just in the meeting a month ago, NCAA legal counsel was kind of like, eh, this is a little risky here, right? But the schools want rules and they want stiff penalties. So they did it, right? They passed this rule that if you take a player that transfers into your school outside of the portal and then eventually plays on your roster, then you're suspended for a half a season. Number one, your head coach is suspended a half a season. And number two, your school is fine 20% of whatever that sports budget is. So if it's football, it could be well into the seven figures. Yeah. So you, I mean, we could be talking about a 15 to $20 million suspension for the, or fine NA six game suspension. If you're talking about the teams at the very top of the sport. So that is rather significant. And you mentioned the legal counsel. Okay. I am not a lawyer, but I am betting a thousand in predicting what NCAA rules violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. This one certainly does. If it were challenged in court, it would have no chance of surviving. But if you were going to violate the Sherman Act, do it creatively, I say. And they are doing it creatively by punishing the coaches and the athletic department offers the actual players. But the students really are punished in a way, which is where the lawsuit probably comes into play. Right. Eventually. Yes. The students are going to, the athletes are going to argue, well, one, that you're tied to education. So you're going to stop me from moving schools and being educated somewhere else. Right. And number two, though you're penalizing the coaches in the schools, you're, you're coming back to penalize me, especially if I'm giving, if I'm giving a raise, more NIL compensation from one school, but can't go get that because of this rule. They're, they would have what the lawyers call a chilling effect on the market for football player compensation. So, or basketball player compensation. But what I find interesting about this guys is I'm not sure there's a player who's worth taking the risk for right now. Because if you look at the past few spring portals, there's the occasional, occasional star. And I'm using that fairly loosely. I mean, like the biggest names we're talking about are a couple of years ago, Dominic Williams, the defensive tackle one from TCU to Oklahoma. Last year was Nico Yamaliava, the quarterback going from Tennessee to UCLA. That's the level of player, like the top, top, top level of player we're talking about. Usually when these guys move after the spring, with the exception of Jordan Addison coming off his bulletin call season, usually it's people who lost a position battle. They're buried on the depth chart. Like I ain't risking getting suspended six games for most of these dudes. And so I'm not going to be the one file in the lawsuit. And if none of the players feel comfortable moving or they're people who are buried on a depth chart anyway, I'm not sure they're going to feel super comfortable filing a lawsuit. So I don't know if they're going to get the person to sue. That's what I've been trying to figure out guys is who's going to want to do this. And that there's two groups of people that I can think of. Okay. Whoever feels like they're behind in the Alabama quarterback competition, Healan Russell or Austin Mack, whoever feels like they're behind in the Virginia quarterback competition, Beau Perpuller or Eli Holstein, or there's also the Chandler Morris thing. He has a hearing today, by the way, to see if he gets another year. So those would be my candidates or a coach in the state of Nebraska, Tennessee, Louisiana or Ohio wants to take somebody really badly. And their state attorney general is like, I got your back money. What in your first, in the first scenario are you, what kind of case are you building to circumvent this? Because that's inevitably what's going to happen, right? You need something very easy case. You are not the state Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're not. This would have to be in federal court, I would think on antitrust grounds like you are you all these competitors are colluding. Okay. To suppress my earning capability. Yeah, preventing you from getting a higher NIL compensation at another school. But not only that, but there's again, like I mentioned earlier, there's the education piece. You're still in you're still a student or you're supposed to be a student. So now you're stopping, you're not stopping a student from moving to another school for an education, but that student also wants to play sports, but wants to switch majors or for whatever educational reason, switch schools. That could be also some kind of a legal case. Which they may not care about that much, but I'm sure in the legal filing, they would care deeply about it. It's going to be fascinating. If I'm the Virginia quarterback race loser, what I just wrote there, fantastic. And it is late April, early May. Would I not need someone to pay me more than I was making at Virginia for this to work? Starting job also would work. Yeah. Because that is also a thing of value that can so even if I dip down to the group of 17 or whatever it is, and I'm more of an inside track for a starting job there, I can say that this is essentially it's a right to work issue. That's what I can say. There you go. So now here's why they have to try stuff like this. Okay. Which is risky. Because if this doesn't work, there is no transfer portal window. Yeah. The transfer portal window is all day every day. It is 24, 7, 365. And because of this, Andy, there really hasn't been. Like the transfer portal, I remember writing a story a while ago about it, it's really unenforceable because of the blind transfer. But the NCAA made this structured this in a way where players weren't supposed to be able to communicate with other schools without getting in the portal. So that was the reason to get in the portal. When we know though, there's been plenty of communication in the realm of tampering. No. You talk to players and other coaches. What does that mean? Really, I don't know exactly why the portal existed. Are you implying the rules aren't being followed? No. Me? I would never do such a thing. I would never do such a thing. I don't hate this. I don't hate this as the resident anarchists, the resident pro-labor stooge, I guess. I don't hate this because it does actually fortify what I think should happen, which is as a transfer portal. I'll hear arguments for one or two or three, I guess. This is not the worst thing in the world. It's funny. You who typically are very much against whatever the schools in the NCAA are trying to do in terms of the rules. Yeah. Yeah. Well, being actually much more hardline than I think any judge in the world would. Well, but this is where there's a but. There's always a but. None of this is actually going to last or hold up. It's the... Here's what I'm trying to do. I want to reach across that ideological aisle here. I was thinking about our young man Xavier Lucas who did this unthinkable, horrible thing, which is he took more money to work a job. That bastard. And then withdrew from one college and enrolled at a different college. How dare he? Yeah. And then I thought about our friend Manuel Alberto Diaz II, who was the head coach at Temple University for 17 days. I don't remember there being an outrage about the inability for college football to function when Manny Diaz bolted, essentially on the Temple job because he was supposed to succeed at the time. It was... But Miami had to pay Temple for that. Funny symmetry there, Staples. It turns out Manny's involved both of these. So again, what I'm trying to do is let's reach across that ideological aisle for a second rather than just make fun of them, which is what I do on Tuesdays, but this is Thursdays. What you are seeking is structure. What you are seeking is adherence to some sort of plan. And the way you get that, my friends, is probably going to be collective bargaining. And it's probably going to be acknowledging that these individuals are laborers because you're holding them to the standard of a laborer. That's it. I don't want to yell. We're not going to do our normal bits. Yes. Is this going to die on the vine? Actually, it won't die on the vine. It'll die in court. It will be challenged and someone will carry this out. You're right. It'll probably be a quarterback. I just love that this last gasp is probably going to end up getting taken down by a QB3 who's looking to become a QB2 somewhere. Someone who sucks. It's going to be somebody who's throwing 15 interceptions in Comfort USA by the end of his career. Let's be honest. This is not world changing talent that's going to be challenging this thing. No, the issue here is that I want to communicate to those stakeholders on the other side, those old calcifying individuals, both in mind and body, and say, we also, on this side of the fence, we seek structure as well. And I love the idea of a window for a transfer portal. And I love the idea of adherence to it. And I could see why Wisconsin was pretty chuffed that an individual under, I believe, Ross, it was a two-year NIL contract. Is that right? And I believe a lot of angry old white guys were like, you need to stick to the terms of this contract. Or Miami could have paid out Wisconsin. They could have paid back into their fund for RevSher or NIL or however, whatever silly thing they were to call it. Which they probably did to Duke for Darian Minster this year. Yes. So how do we accomplish what both sides are actually looking for, which is the same thing? We classify the football players. As laborers. Because that's where they are. That's it. I'm not going to yell at them. I'm glad. I'm glad you're not yelling. I don't think you need to yell. I want to keep my voice. What about you, Utanima, like a second, third string, you know, quarterbacks that would be prone to challenges. What about when we have inevitably have injuries to key players in the spring, practice or summer workouts. And there's a big hole in a roster and a coach says, well, I'm going to throw twice as much money as the all-American player in the Sunbelts, like first team all-American, you know, left guard. Are you willing to sit out six games for that, Ross? Because again, either you as the coach have to challenge that or you have to find the player who can challenge it. Now, I point out, recently a coach has won a national title while missing six games, while being suspended for six games of a season. I think he missed like 11 games. That's true. I don't think he showed up for much of work. Yeah. Because Jim Harbaugh did that in 2023. Now, I will point out, they did write this in a way that you're not allowed to go to practice meetings either during this suspension. So it's not the same as the Jim Harbaugh six game suspension, but I still find it somewhat hilarious that we are less than three years removed from a head coach missing six games in a season and still winning a national title. Obviously, putting the onus on the coach is what they can do to skirt the obvious legal mess that's going to happen when this ever gets challenged. And so that's why it's written to die. It's not ever going to be held up in its current incarnation. I don't think that the NCAA will ever succeed. All the NCAA rules written to die. But I admire the Hutzpah. I do. I admire the Hutzpah behind this. Look, this is going up in flames. So let's make those flames fly as high as possible. Let's put some Dylan Thomas on the podcast. They are reaching against the dying of the light. For sure. I think I said this when we talked about it last month when it came out of that committee, but Brett Bielema is I think is on that committee. Josh Whitman is the head of the cabinet that passed. Josh is the cabinet head. The football oversight though is the committee that it came out of. I can't remember if it's Eli Drinkwitz or if it's Brett Bielema on the football oversight committee. In Josh Brooks, the Georgia Athletic Director kind of led this in the football oversight with Mark Allnut, the Buffalo AD. But coaches, Drinkwitz in, I think Bielema, it seemed like we're all like, you know, sort of on board with this. It seemed like they want this to slow down and limit transfers. What's so funny is the coaches follow the rule, strengthens the players case when they ultimately sue. That's the best part. What if we flip the... Let me go back because I want to try and break this and actually create the doomsday that the more conservative side is worried about. So let's say your star quarterback goes down, you want to go shopping in April, like tournay, CL, spring game, worst case scenario, you want to go shopping, you want to break this conceit and you want someone to unenroll and then reenroll at your university. Worst possible scenario. What if there was a minor sort of red shirting, like penalty? What if it was they had to sit four games but they could play the rest of the season? What if instead... The coaching staff thing is never going to happen. There are so many players that the coaches would do that math for. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Again, what I'm proposing is something that a, I don't know, a players union might agree upon, right? Something where it was like, hey, if I am the projected starter Toledo, I'm the... You know, I've been there three years. I'm headed into my junior or senior season. It's going to be a big year for Toledo. Michigan State's calling. I'm making these teams up. Please don't get mad. Please don't get in the comments. Michigan State calls and, hey, we lost our quarterback. We've got nothing. We really like you. We've seen your tape. All right. We're going to start our back. We're going to burn a red shirt and start a freshman for those four games when we're playing like the FCS opponents, et cetera. And then you're going to come in and you're going to start in week five. That seems reasonable, right? That seems like a way to swallow. Yeah. The sort of thing that would happen if you had two sides negotiating something, rather than one side unilaterally declaring something. I like how I even suggesting this, I like how people are like, Socialist! The most successful sports league in our entire nation has a players union. I'm not suggesting something that's arcane. No, this is the thing that allows the NFL and the NBA and the MLB to do the things they do. And like MLB and results may vary. We might have MLB next year. NFL and NBA do. So it's possible to get a lot of the things you want like a salary. We're so close. Andy, we're so close. I think the other side is listening now. Like we want structure too. Let's all just sit down and think about it. I think this is the last guy. Glad you mentioned Dylan Thomas. Do not go gently into that. Good night. The greatest Villanelle ever written. Let's go. Where are we going? Where are we going? But they are raging against the dying of the light here. And this might be it. This might be the final flicker. Because I thought when Dabo got up and said, here's how Ole Miss tampered with Luke Forelli, I thought that was him saying, okay, I'm going to make you admit you can't do anything. And that's where you saw Dabo who was staunch turn and say, you know what? It might be a better way to do this. Did you guys see the golden response? I did. Hey, there's two sides to every story. Hey, that was the most D's nuts response I've ever seen. That was the most funny. And all right. Yeah. Like, I mean, the guy swore like four or five times in his opening spring presser and like he did everything but admit like prove it and or do something about it. I'm going to use the bow foot offense in this case. I mean, yeah, D's nuts. Yeah. Come get it. Meet me in the parking lot. That's. But I know Pete a little bit. Pete would meet you in the parking lot. I thought after that you'd see more of the people in real power. So you know what? Maybe we should stop forever banging our heads against this concrete wall. But no, we're taking more and more crack. And this is amazing. And the fact that in the past 24 hours, they have rebranded it. It's such an amazing way. And the ghost part. Ghost transfer sounds like something terrible. I think they, I mean, Ross, you can speak to this. I think this is a good example of the kind of what I call the make work theory of the NCAA where we are talking about the intent. Well, you know, everything we've discussed up until this point has been what is the functional solution here? How long is it going to take for us to get there? Obviously, we have to make concessions at one side is not willing to do, which is just to declare these guys labor. But in the NCAA's case, what they were able to do this time, and I feel like we do this segment once a week where it's like, they've done a thing, it's going to die in court eventually, but they're doing a thing. They married good intent with something that is going to die in court. So it really checks a box of like make work. I feel like for Charlie and the crew, like this, this is a win for the NCAA because it looks like they're doing their job. As Ross said, the schools wanted these rules. The coaches wanted these rules. But that's every NCAA rule. The schools are the NCAA. You know, yes, who is the NCAA Andy? I mean, they're getting, they're working on right like more, you know, to Andy's point about Dabba, like the tampering stuff right there working on like a new penalty structure for tampering and modernizing the tampering rules. And it's a committee of the schools. No, it's not a committee Ross. It's a task force. A task force. Yes. What does that mean? They get guns? Like, I don't know, maybe. I wonder if Mr. Golding has cooperated at all at the NCAA in their investigation into Ole Miss. He said that's why there's enforcement Ross. I'll go back to the phrase D's nuts. Yeah, I'm not sure he has. I'm going to go ahead and tell you that Pete Golding is that yeah, I'm going to guess that he hasn't. Yeah. I'm going to guess that they've turned over all evidence of people tampering with their players. They have it. I don't know if they've turned it over yet, but they certainly have it. Yeah. This is where we, you know what, since we've already done Dylan Thomas twice. So this podcast will actually count as at least two hours of credit for any Mississippi junior college English minor. Let's go ahead and talk about mutually assured destruction, which is the inevitable end of any tampering investigation. There is no way. And we flirted with this at the height of enforcement cases. Unless you tamper with a service academy guy, then you're screwed. That might be a bridge too far. But we, you know, we flirted with this back when I was covering all these different enforcement cases at sort of the height of the violation era when, you know, a thousand bucks were sleeping on the wrong couch, got you the death penalty. That had a cascading effect, but the NCAA had discretion at the time to choose what they were going to enforce and what they were going to investigate. As someone, me, who reviewed a bunch of these cases and a bunch of the internal documents that the public's not meant to see, the NCAA could be very discretionary in how they enforce their rules and what cases they decided to elevate into violations and what they dismissed. They did this for years. It's something they don't want you to know. If they were to actually enforce what we're talking about now to the letter of the law, there's such a level of transparency now, where the first school that quote unquote goes down for this is then going to make public the exact same thing that happened to them. Because we're only talking guys, we're only talking about the haves here who would actually take a rap on this charge, if you will, right? So what you're going to see are about 20 and then eventually 40 and eventually 80 schools with actual playoff aspirations and playoff credibility doing the same thing to one another. It is the last scene of reservoir dogs, which I think I've said on here before. We all got guns pointed at each other. So the first person to pull the trigger is killing everybody in the room. Can I just ask everyone, just go ahead and do this? We'll kill everybody. My God, our shows would be so good. What if what I'm talking about happens? I mean, it's essentially like the boring middle hour of Oppenheimer when they're like, what if we blow up the world? Maybe. We're talking about a chain reaction. I was watching the barbie movie that weekend. You can do both. Look, you can be a Renaissance man. Barbenheimer. I'm trying to get back on track at Staples Fault. If we were in a situation with 7, 15, 20 of these active investigations at the same time during a football season, wouldn't it actually render the entire process of moot, right? Because we would be so tied up and it would be such a circus that it would be impossible to do with the NCAA is always looking for a scarecrow. That's a quote that was given to me by a former enforcement officer. They need one school to put up in the field as a dead body and say, don't do this thing that we killed this person for, right? Old West mentality. The problem that they have in this and so many other sports is everybody's doing the same crime, right? So it would be impossible for the NCAA to succeed in their objective of saying, don't cheat. Don't be pulling kids. Don't tamper because the cascade effect would draw the entire sport in. And Ross, this is where I turn it to you. That's what's happened with the CSE too, right now, right? Everybody is going on the cap. So it's hard to... Wouldn't this spur the big two? Wouldn't this spur the big two, Ross, to say, all right, now we're done. Okay, right there, I'm going to put a pin in this because what you just said leads into something our friend Ross wrote about for Yahoo on Thursday. Connecticut basketball? Yes, they're involved in it because they're involved in the NCAA basketball tournament. He wrote about the NCAA basketball tournament, but I'm here to tell you folks, any conversation about the format of the basketball tournament and who is putting the screws to whom is a football conversation. We'll explain why when we come back. We are back at the College Football Enquirer. Great story today from Ross Dellinger about the NCAA basketball tournament, the proposed enlarging of said tournament, which by God does not need to happen. It's already four teams too big. Please don't do it, but they're going to probably do it. Why are they probably going to do it, Ross? Yeah, to appease the almighty power conferences, to give them more access, which is the same thing we've seen happen with the College Football Playoff and honestly, so many other things in college athletics like the NCAA governance model and weighted voting. Give the power conferences more authority, more access and yes, eventually more money. Another part of my story is not just about expansion, but what happens in six years when the NCAA tournaments contract expires with CBS and WVD. I am so glad you took us there, Ross. I am so glad because 2031, that is when the NCAA tournament contract expires. Ross, what other contracts expire in, oh, I don't know, 2030, 2031, 2032, 2033? That's a busy time between 2029 and 2032. You've got the Big 12 TV contract. You've got the Big Ken TV contract. You've got the SEC renegotiation window at ESPN. You've got the ACC's exit fees dropping below $100 million for a school. Wait, there's one more. And you've got the expiration of the College Football Playoff contract as well in 2032. So it's all moving to big span. What if, oh boy, spitball in here, Ross. Here we go. Uh-oh. What if there were several leagues that got together? I don't know. Maybe they got some Congress people to change a certain law that was passed in 1960. What if they got together and sold, I don't know, the College Football and Basketball Regular Seasons, the College Football Playoff, and the NCAA tournaments, men and women all together as one thing to whoever would bid the highest on it. It'd be pretty valuable, wouldn't it, Andy? And I would guess there's a lot of entities out there that, you know, there's a lot of conferences that certainly would like to also see the NCAA tournament in the College Football Playoff look drastically different from an automatic bid perspective in a revenue distribution. It would like Texas and Iowa to be your Cinderella's as they were this year, but just every year. And the problem and the issue since we're, you know, on Final Four week here is that the fewer, and you know, we've had two straight years without the sender row, without a mid-major really, counting the biggies along with the power conferences in this discussion. They submit like a basketball. Yes. Yeah, without a mid-major advancing to the sweet 16 back-to-back years. It hasn't happened in the last 15 years once it happened in the last, in the back-to-back years, and the thought is obviously three things, NIL, players transferring in conference realignment are sort of all attributed to that. But if that continues, it's sort of just more of an argument, but the power leagues to say, see, they're not even winning games anymore, let's change the whole thing. Give us the whole tournament, which they have threatened to do in the past. Yeah. Brought up something, Greg Sanky said, his predecessor, Mike Slive threatened to do it. There was rhetoric, you know, when it was Mike Slive and Jim Delaney in charge of the SEC and Big Ten, when they asked for more autonomy for the power conferences back before the college football playoff was even created. So this is not a new conversation, but it feels like it is barreling toward a very critical juncture. I'm having a tough time here. In reading Ross's story, you always look for that asinine quote that some official has given that they want to try and, you know, stand with. And I think the NCAA tournament might be the best sporting event in America, sometimes, some years, right? Oh, I think a 64 team Division one NCAA basketball tournament where everybody legitimately has a real shot, sort of like the US Open in golf. Every person who plays golf in America has a chance to make the US Open. Theoretically. One of the things, yeah. Every person, every team that plays in Division one, theoretically has a chance to win the national championship. So, you know, to take it back to our sport, I grew up on the one double A playoff and I loved it so much for a variety of reasons, but you would take all these teams of very different make-ups. And now, you know, now potentially you could have, you know, North Dakota State playing, you know, Dartmouth or not North Dakota State anymore. I apologize, South Dakota State playing Dartmouth, you know, right? You have this wonderful variety. And that's what the basketball tournament, I think, best and most frequently represented. I had just as much fun watching Sienna push Duke as I did with any actual name brand. Shout out to Sienna, just south of Albany, lovely campus, very nice people. I, unfortunately, and this is where I feel like I've been foreboding on the show lately, where I'm like, I'm going to have to come to terms with this G6 advocacy and reading your story, Ross. The phrase Texas is a Cinderella rings about as true and American as saying like a great local restaurant is Applebee's like, kiss my ass. Okay. It's, it's a billion dollar enterprise. They're never a Cinderella. What you're talking about is an underperforming asset that finally got its stuff together late in March to barely make a tournament and surprise some people for two weeks. That's not Cinderella. All right. Cinderella is not the daughter of a hedge fund manager. I don't want to hear Cinderella in Texas again. No offense to the horns. No offense to Notre Dame. Anybody else that's just, you know, richer than four foot of a bull's ass, but this is ridiculous. Texas is not the new Cinderella. I'm sorry. It's a small school with a 2,500 sub like enrollment. It's probably more accurate to say there's just no Cinderella. Well, right. This is what I'm, this is what I'm getting at is that I, I can sit here and rage against there's old Dylan Thomas sports blogger again, Randy. So it's all stepsisters, baby. We're dying of the light again. Here's the deal. I cannot argue what's happening. And I, and it's also a, it's not even a byproduct. It's a direct product of the advocacy that, that individuals like myself and the media pushed for, which was player agency. This is a byproduct or a direct, direct product, I should say, of what we push for. It is. And it's really hard to, to mount an argument against what you're reporting Ross, not you. I'm saying what, what, where the narrative is headed in, in, in college sports. It makes sense now to probably have, God, I can't believe I'm saying this. It makes sense now to have more power teams in, in terms of quality, in the basketball. And I don't know a lot about basketball, but what scares me is I, as we talked this through is we're going to start having this conversation a couple of months about football and this, I think we're headed to a point where we're, what is the same four leagues sold the CFP and the two basketball tournaments as a singular product? I don't even want to admit how much I think about this, Andy, but like there is no, I talked to a lot of group of six coaches and like, I don't know if you can form something the way that Tom Herman had a Houston team that beat Florida State or, you know, we can do this, right? The Scott Frost UCF team that beats Auburn and on and on and on and the Luke Fickles Cincinnati. I think we've created, we created too big of a chasm here and we might have to actually start talking about a true division. I don't know where this leaves Boise or Memphis or the tiny handful is left, but in reading Ross's story, I'm seeing an argument I can't really rebuke. Yeah. And I think that's what the most interesting piece of that was because Ross, you sent it to us and I popped onto our recording chat and I was like, listen, these years just jump out, they jump off the page at me. Yeah. Because it feels like we're heading towards something inevitable. Yeah. When I, there's no more Catholic nuns at tiny schools you've never heard of, like this, that's going away. And all these like aside from obviously that stretch of years, Andy, we're almost certainly going to have conference realignment or some kind of shake up among the schools, but you're also going to have, yeah, the NCAA basketball, the NCAA, the basketball championship in the football championship be probably undergo wholesale changes from an access and a revenue standpoint. I mean, already we've seen in football and the revenue distribution model changing, right? Where 58% of the revenue goes to two leagues, the Big Ten and SEC, because they threatened to leave. So everybody agreed. And I think we're going to see probably something similar to that in basketball. Let me run through a few numbers that probably would surprise people. The NCAA's revenues annually that they sort of, the revenues they have, right, they generate is about like a little over $1 billion, $1.2, $1.3 somewhere around there. One billion of that, basically all of it, 90% of it is from the men's basketball tournament. But only $200 million of the $1 billion is directly distributed to schools based on their participation in performance in the event that generates the money. And that's certainly been an issue among a lot of people. And so, to $200 directly to the basketball, $600 total distributed to schools. So $400 million does go to schools, right? They end up getting that $600. However, it's distributed in different sort of funds based on how many sports you sponsor. There's another fund based on your academic success, right? And that money does not necessarily just go to the power conference schools as a lot of the performance-based money does. So again, the power conferences, as they often do, feel like they should be getting a bigger check of that $1 billion. Now, to add one more thing here, roughly $500 million of the $1.2 billion goes for the NCAA to operate championships, to provide division two and division three subsidies and to pay athlete insurance and stuff like that, and to pay legal fees, which I was wondering when you're getting to that. Fighting court cases, many of which are supported by their own member schools fighting against them. For instance, I have in this story, I don't think a figure that's been reported, but the NCAAs spent $16 million in the last year just on fighting all the eligibility. Many of which, again, are supported by their schools. Two thirds or so. Yeah. Feels weird to charge the schools for that, I guess, and around about what they're doing. Well, think about it. It's a circular thing, right? As I say, schools want more distribution from the NCAA for an event that they feel like, especially at the power of comfort level, they are valued. Their value is producing this money from the men's basketball tournament, and the NCAA is using some of that money to pay court cases, to fight court cases against players from their schools in which the schools are supporting those players. It's so typical college athletics. But, and I'm going to do what Godfrey's been doing a lot of this episode and put myself in their shoes. While it would take away what I think makes the tournament so magical and perfect, you can have a tournament without Sienna. You can't really have one without Kentucky, Kansas, Duke, Michigan. If they decide they'd like to do something else, you don't have a tournament. Yeah. So, if you're the other schools, you will take whatever scraps they will give you, because they could just give you nothing. And I think that's the part that people are coming to grips with now. I'm curious about Ross, you correctly identified the Big East as the sort of, there's a power five in basketball, right? The Big East is like, to look at what St. John's and Connecticut are doing, that's not- And you can argue in the NIL era that it's more advantageous to be at a good Big East school than it is to be at a bottom tier power comer school. Yeah, they're spending the money. Yeah, they're spending the money for sure. Well, that kind of leads me to the question I'm asking. I'm wondering if when this inevitable sort of cleaving off of what we call the FBS occurs, is there any chance beyond power, what we call power four membership now, but it really comes down to the problem as I talked this out is that St. John's is spending on basketball, at least in the same range the way a good Big 12 team is spending on basketball. And Connecticut obviously is a national powerhouse, like that I don't know if you can comp this in football. It feels like the divide is actually greater and the lines are clearer in football. Actually- Or you tell me I'm wrong. I'm glad you brought up Connecticut. No, I'm glad you brought up Connecticut because when we come back, we're going to talk about another Ross Dellinger story that ties into this. And it's about the University of Connecticut, which we'll go to the final four this weekend, trying to win a third national title in four years while also being independent in football, playing a very different sport. We'll be right back. We are back at the College Football Enquirer and we were just talking about the NCAA basketball tournament and the push and pull with the power conferences versus the mid majors and the low majors and what's going to happen to that. What that means for football because it's really a football conversation as well because if certain conferences were to all get together and make some decisions to do some things, they might make even more money just combining their football business and their basketball business instead of letting the NCAA send the money all over the place. Ross, you have another story about the University of Connecticut, which is in a strange place relative to this because they are maybe the best college basketball program of the past 20 years if we're just talking national championships, but they have existed in this strange conference world where they were in the original Big East. They then made a goal of it in the American after having some football success in the Big East. They then left the American to go back to the Big East in their other sports and go independent in football. So they're kind of eking out a living in football while they are the kings and queens of the sport of basketball. How dare you not mention the 2011 Fiesta Bowl? I did say they had success in football and that's why they made a goal in the American. Hey, they beat the ACC champion last year in football. They sure did. Win Oklahoma beat Connecticut 48 to 20 in the 2011 Fiesta Bowl. That was maybe the best sort of like scalp that the anti-BCS crowd could hold up and say, what are we doing here? So in the final year of the BCS, so that would be the year that Florida State played Auburn for the national championship in the Rose Bowl. We at Sports Illustrated had a burgeoning video department and they said, do you have any ideas for videos? I said, yes, I want to hold a funeral for the BCS. We held a funeral for the BCS. So the funeral ends and it was like me in a dark suit. Just I was the efficient funeral ends, screen fades to black. It comes back up on me and I'm wearing devil horns and I'm welcoming the BCS to hell where it belonged. And as it's internal punishment, the BCS was sentenced to watch the Yukon Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl for all of eternity. And as the devil, I said, this one really is for all the tostitos. Yeah, 48 to 20 if you're young or just uninformed was probably not an accurate numerical representation of what otherwise was like basically a snuff film. It was absolutely horrible. Yeah. And these were the common matchups you got in the BCS era. Sorry. Anyway, Huskies football. Yeah, let's get us back. Let's get us back on track with the punch it over their way. Yeah, yeah, punch it back to back to back seasons of nine wins. They beat the ACC champion. They beat Boston College last year and I think Jim Mora made them look likable, which is insane. That alone like a PR firm would charge millions for it. But despite all that, despite the recent success, the Huskies are as their AD said to me on an island when it comes to more talk of money distribution from the College football playoff, they are the only school in the country getting below $1 million in distribution from the College football playoff because they are the only independent left in the country aside from Notre Dame, which gets a College football playoff carve out from distribution. So the Huskies get or stand to get starting next year, roughly $350,000 in the College football playoff and every other group of six program stands to get $1.8 million. So there's a little bit of a few people upset, you might imagine, in stores and they have gone to the College football playoff asking, hey, why are we being treated differently? And it's supposed to come up in the College football playoff meetings later this month in Dallas about maybe giving them more money. And if they don't give them more money, the question of legal situation may arise at some point. Join a conference, dork. There's that. They're in a conference. They were in a conference. Not in football. They were in a conference in football in 2019. That is something that many of the people at the CEP and the commissioners have said, why don't they just join a conference like everybody else did? They're the only ones, except for Notre Dame, who didn't run into a conference. Army did recently UMass leaving them alone. The problem with them joining a conference as I wrote in that weekly sports business column on three is that their basketball sort of makes it a little tricky because they want to stay in the conference. Yeah, they want to stay in the big East unless there's a power conference invitation and they can bring everybody along. Ross, is Sac State a full member of the Mac? They are not. Football. Take your ass to the Mac, Yukon. I don't want to hear that. Take your ass to the Mac. I think don't give me that special boy nonsense. They have talked to the PAC 12 about football only. I'm sorry. They have. Last year that was discussed. It was a football only PAC 12. They certainly talked about with the American about some kind of football scheduling sort of situation. Yeah. And of course, we all remember a year and a half ago when the big 12 had come the closest of any power league to actually extending an invitation to Yukon. They were in pretty deep negotiations with Yukon to add them for all sports. If they got a power conference invite, Yukon was going to take all of its sports over. But if it's just a group of six invite, they just want to take football. And that sort of is the problem, I think. Here's the problem. This is a wonderful story. Good job, Ross. There is no program in the country where I feel more affectionate towards one of their teams and more angry towards one of their others. I love what Dan Hurley does. By the way, love his parents swearing like sailors. Did you guys see the Pelley Crab shot on that? Oh yeah. Fantastic. If your mom can't drop an F-bomb in a tactical moment and like what kind of family we're talking about here. I love Yukon basketball for disrupting this sort of elitism at the very top of college basketball. Love it. Love it. Love the women's, all of it. This football team's special boy status needs to be revoked. Join a conference or shut up, Dork. You are Yukon football. You'd never say that's a Notre Dame. Show me some Notre Dame results. They beat Duke. They beat the ACC champ last year. They lost the Delaware. They lost the Delaware. They lost the Delaware with a crappy Falcons coach. Like, let's stop already. They're undefeated in regular in regulation, by the way, last year. Oh my gosh. Did you use Les Miles that? Did you just use the Les Miles that? I appreciate that, Ross. I'm defeated in regulation, baby. That was one of the songs. Overtime loss to Rice to swear to God. We're Delaware and Delaware Overtime to Syracuse. We're not doing this. Join a conference, you dorks. Join the Mac. Join the American. I also want to acknowledge, I'm kind of doing a bit here with football. I think we said this a couple weeks ago. The Biggie's basketball tournament in Madison Square Garden with a bunch of Southern dudes on this podcast. I want to acknowledge one of the best environments, cultures. It's awesome. Protect that. Don't go to a football conference. Can I give you the problem here? This is the problem, and this is the bigger problem. Whether they do that or not, whether they, let's say they join the Mac in football. They should. Let's say what happens, what Ross's other story that we were just talking about in the previous segment. Let's say the conferences at the top consolidate the basketball tournament. What happens to you, Con? That's why I asked about the scenario. Andy, that's why I asked about the power five status of the Big East in basketball. Yeah. What happens to you? You don't screw it, right? You don't screw with that. This is why we've seen a lot of these schools invest. I have James Franklin on my on three show on Thursday with Babcock, his new AD at Virginia Tech, before he hired James Franklin, had to go to his board and say, look, we are not funding this in a way that is going to allow us to be part of whatever the thing is in the future. If you don't have good football, are you going to be part of whatever the thing is in the future? Anything probably includes basketball, right? No, no, no, no, no. Hang on. I understand where you're going because this is the Indiana theory. This is why Indiana threw as much money as they did into football. But if you are spending in basketball, if you were a basketball, St. John's ain't fielding the football team anytime soon in Queens. Villanova does field a football team in a very good FCS team. But they put the money toward basketball. Absolutely. I think if you are spending commiserate to the other power four conferences in basketball, inclusion is mandatory. I also think you are... They let you in the club. Well, but I also think you are the collect same. Again, to go back to the Big East basketball tournament, to go back to multinational champion in men's and women's basketball, UConn, you are the club. Okay. There's a difference between football and basketball. Let's not kid ourselves. That's the problem. They're not the club. I'll go back to 2010 when the first bubbles of that round of realignment popped up. And remember the Big 12 missile crisis in 2010 and 2011? Remember the existential dread at Kansas missile crisis? I just got, I'm sorry. Yeah. North Korea threatened to obliterate Arizona State. But remember the existential dread at Kansas, like what happens to us now? Yeah. There's no guarantee that UConn gets to be part of that. And that's why, Ross, I'm guessing there's a level of freak out going on there, not just because of what they get from the CFP, but in general. Yeah. Are we going to be included in anything? Actually, they're athletic director. They've been at it, gave me a quote. If there's some kind of new, another tournament created, and that tournament says they were going to pay you this much, you know, more money and the power conferences create this tournament. He said, in order to basically crown a national champion, well, the big East kind of needs to be in that too. It's the same argument as the football break. Yeah. It's the same argument as the football breakaway argument too, right? It's like, if the SEC and Big 10 break away, can they, can they together say, are champions of football champion? There would be some argument from the team, one of the teams that played in the Ami-Ami Ambitious game this year. Yes. Yeah. Now, theoretically, they could just steal the ones they think they could. Would make everyone believe that their winner was the real champion. I know they're both underdogs this weekend, but it wouldn't be interesting if you had a big East ACC final. I mean, again, we cannot grade. I understand that football drives this conversation and the structure because of the finances. I'm not arguing that. I tell people that all the time, but when it comes down to organizing a postseason tournament, if we're talking about a post NCAA reality, Andy, you will not be able to effectively sell this product without the Big East basketball teams. And maybe you should be clear for the. I am with you. I believe you. I agree with you that the Big East is essential. I don't think everyone agrees. And I think that's the problem. They're going to screw it up. But like, I'm just going to tell you right now. Definitely doesn't agree. Yeah. Sanky and Boutitti are going to screw this up badly if they think that they can stage a postseason tournament and miss a cornerstone of national championship quality basketball. Yeah. I think you said Big East ACC championship. Big 12. Sorry about that. Sorry. No, the Duke is in a dramatic fashion. If you didn't see. Yeah. To the Big East. I did crunch some numbers last 20 NCAA tournaments and did the win loss for each conference. So I didn't do it, but you know, a sports reference did it for me. Big East is third. ACC has the best winning percentage. SEC is the second best winning percentage. And the Big East is at this third at 59% of their above-group. And the Big East doesn't even get credit for the Kevin Oli UConn national championship because he was American for that. I want to be really clear as we exit this episode. So what we started off talking about, oh, like, you know what, begrudgingly, we'll write the epitaph for the Bucknells and the Siennas of the world. And you know, if it's Pacific one year, whatever school I can randomly pull out of my head are so long Jesuits, right? That's what this started with, right? Now, what you guys are telling me is that there's a reality in which the power brokers of college athletics could actually plow forward and excise the Big East from a postseason basketball tournament. This is where, like, I feel like my duty here is to just say, hey, is everyone hearing how stupid this is? Well, right now, does everyone aware of how dumb this is? This is why when I read what Ross wrote, I started this discussion because I wanted you to come to that conclusion and explain that. Because I think there's a lot of just feel the way you feel. If you're just a Peckerwood College football fan and God knows that that's my bloodline and you just know Georgia and Alabama and Florida State, that's great. But you don't, there is a massive difference between Sienna and Providence or any of the other schools that we're talking about. For those YouTube watchers, Andy just went dark, literally automatic lights in his office turned off and we're about to shut down the pot anyway. So your office is telling you, we're done, Andy. Yeah, this is what the office is telling me. It's also telling me that I need to start talking more about spooky ghost transfers. Hold on, hold on. Wait, wait, wait. I think we could do this. We could do this properly. Let me tell you about Andy. Andy is now shining a flashlight on his face in the dark. The quarterback who lost out on the job at Virginia, who filed a lawsuit. Let me tell you about some kids. I got rid of the transfer portal once and for all. That's a spooky ghost transfer. Some kid who couldn't win seven games in the ACC Coastal is going to throw 14 interceptions, three of them against Bowling Green. Oh God. Rip ACC Coastal. That's the real ghost here, the ACC Coastal. We love you. We'll talk to you Tuesday.