Let us know in the YouTube comments, or here, which game you’d like to see next.

2. Subscribe to our channels, especially our new one.

Two YouTube channels? What will they think of next?

We’re changing our strategy a bit over on YouTube, an important platform for getting podcasts out into the world. We started an episodes-only channel where you can get full-length video versions of every free episode we put out. Our old channel will now be dedicated to special video projects. Subscribe to both!

• Podcast episode channel

• YouTube exclusives channel

We are especially eager to get people subscribed to the new podcast channel, because we can monetize that channel after we cross 1,000 subscribers.

Back in January, Richard and Alex wrote about how YouTube fits into what we do here. tldr: We are not pivoting to video and will always be a podcast, but we think we can discover new listeners by doing more video. Your views and subscriptions help!

Now, some thoughts on this week’s much more serious CFB news

On the free show this week, Alex and Richard went in-depth on the story surrounding (for now) Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, formerly of Indiana and Cincinnati.

Placing a bet on your own team’s game is a cardinal sin in sports. But what comes next? Will NFL teams consider him in next year’s draft or the upcoming supplemental draft? The Shield hasn’t been immune to gambling stories. Calvin Ridley bet on NFL games in 2022 and was subsequently suspended for a season. He later admitted he was in the wrong and has gotten back on the field. Sorsby’s talent could lead him down the same path, but we’ll see.

If he makes an NFL roster, his journey will be unlike most. Going through rehab for gambling and then immersing yourself back into football in a league that is inundated with gambling ads is its own challenge. (As Alex and Richard discuss at some length on the show this week, this podcast has also aired sportsbook ads in the past.) Instances of fans harassing players on social media because they lost money betting on a player are only increasing. Sorsby would have to deal with a whole separate genre of those comments while attempting to separate himself from any semblance of gambling.

It’s going to be difficult, and there’s no tidy way to package all this. It’s a convoluted situation for Sorsby, and for the people who have had their lives consumed by the unregulated world of sports betting and prediction markets. All we can do for now is throw ideas at a wall and hope we collectively figure out a way to rein in at least some part of the gambling apparatus.

Here’s what Alex and Richard dropped into your podcast feeds this week:

• Richard and Alex spend a lot of the free episode talking about Sorsby’s reported gambling and what it means for him, the policies behind why gambling is so easy now, and how you should not fall for Texas Tech trying to play the victim in all this. There’s also an NFL Draft postmortem at the tail end of the show, which includes Cade Klubnik fulfilling his destiny as a late-season starting QB for the New York Jets. Alex called it a month ago.

• Godfrey joined the pod for a subscriber-only show to talk about a big batch of offseason stories, including the potential move of Week 1 to the current Week 0.

Some recommended reading:

• Alex talked a little on the podcast about the policy aspect of the Brendan Sorsby gambling scandal, but he goes into additional detail in his article over at Slate.

• The current state of gambling has made a lot of facets of life notably worse, especially war. Alex wrote about the abuse of prediction markets earlier this week.

• 2025 Clemson had more NFL Draft picks than wins last season! At CBS Sports, Richard explains why that should motivate the Tigers to improve their evaluation and performance for the upcoming season.

• Arkansas dropped men’s and women’s tennis, which is a surprising move since it’s in the SEC. Did the programs generate a ton of revenue for the school? Not really. But the school also wasn’t in a dire position to cut the programs. Matt Brown explains how messy the process and math was over at Extra Points.

• The Big Ten has been the recent conference of champions, but the SEC still has them beat in one category — NFL Draft picks.

Thanks for reading and watching, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe to our new @collegefootballpodcast channel to get video versions of all our free episodes, and subscribe to our main channel for our occasional history short docs and other fun YouTube exclusives.

Richard and Alex go deep on this week’s biggest story: Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby is under investigation for sports betting, including wagers reportedly placed on his own team while he was at Indiana. Inside:

• 2:05: The Sorsby betting story and why it’s such an uphill fight for him to ever play college football again

• 25:37: What this makes us think about the state of sports gambling in the United States and our own sports media history with it

• 38:08: Thanks to our great sponsors, Homefield and Nokian Tyres

• 40:05: NFL Draft postmortem: Diego Pavia, Cade Klubnik, UNC and Colorado coming up empty, and interesting late-round CFB finds

• 52:42: The NCAA’s potential move to a “five in five” eligibility standard

Producer: Anthony Vito

SUBSCRIBER EPISODE: Richard, Alex, and host emeritus Steven Godfrey bounce around to a handful of college football news stories that demand more discussion:

• 1:46: Kentucky’s attempt to set up a sketchy $1 million job for outgoing athletic director Mitch Barnhart, which came apart under political pressure

• 12:02: Virginia Tech’s disempowered AD finally stepping away

• 19:18: The unusual amount of post-job change animosity flowing toward Auburn coach Alex Golesh from USF

• 30:40: Jeremy Pruitt’s tangled mess of an attempt to get out of his NCAA show cause, and what it tells us about the current state of enforcement

• 38:42: The NCAA seems poised to move up Week 1 to the current Week 0 slot in late August. Why is this happening? Well, the NFL. Does college football have any chance of hanging on to a prime calendar spot? And what other sacred spots on the schedule might be under attack?

Producer: Anthony Vito.

This is a subscriber episode, but everyone can hear a nice big free preview

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First, a programming note: Subscribe to our new YouTube channel for episode video

1. We already have a YouTube channel. In the future, you’ll find short CFB history docs and video essays there. It has about 37,000 subscribers right now, and we would love for you to be the 37,001st!

2. We now have a NEW YouTube channel right here, where we will post only video versions of our regular podcast episodes. If you would like to see our faces while we talk about college football, follow along, or just watch the video above.

OK, here’s this week’s episode:

NFL teams have more data and scouting resources than ever. Yet they haven’t gotten better at picking the best college football players. Why not? ESPN senior writer Bill Barnwell joins Richard and Alex to dive into a complicated topic:

• 0:20: Welcoming our guest, Bill Barnwell

• 9:24: The NFL Draft is the biggest deal in the city of Pittsburgh

• 16:31: Why NFL teams haven’t gotten better at drafting over the decades

During this episode, Alex mentions a few statistical studies that researchers have done on pro sports teams’ draft performance over time. You can find those here and here. Producer: Anthony Vito

SUBSCRIBER EPISODE: Longtime pals Ben Solak of ESPN and Derrik Klassen of The Athletic join Richard for this year’s discussion of the college football QBs who will soon become NFL QBs. From Joe Fagnano and Diego Pavia (a statue player in CFB, but probably not one in the NFL) to No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza, here’s how the crew sees this year’s QBs stacking up.

Producer: Anthony Vito

This is a subscriber episode, but everyone can hear a nice big free preview

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To get this episode and many, many more (as well as a whole back catalog of evergreen college football history shows, reporting on the coach carousel, and more), become a paid subscriber today.

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we have never tampered with an opponent’s podcaster, nor would we ever, because we have honor.

It has been a while since the last newsletter went out. Since we last hit your inbox, Michigan won a championship in [checks notes] basketball? UCLA won the women’s tournament and six of their players would be drafted in the WNBA Draft. With Indiana rounding out the championship bona fides on the football side, the Big Ten is dominating among the power conferences. In this episode snippet, Alex says he doesn’t expect fans to be chanting B-1-G like they’re SEC fans, but it would be very funny if we see that at some point.

Not everything in the Big Ten has been positive, however. The NCAA recently vacated some of Iowa’s wins from 2023 due to tampering involving QB Cade McNamara. While a member of the Michigan Wolverines, McNamara would learn he would have to compete for the starting job with JJ McCarthy. Rather than seeing that path play out, McNamara got a jump on conversations with Iowa and eventually joined the Hawkeyes. He produced the following line:

The number of vacated wins (four) is negligible, especially because McNamara’s injury that season minimized any further punishment. But it does raise the question of how often tampering happens in college football. Dabo Swinney recently accused Pete Golding’s Ole Miss staff of illicitly poaching linebacker Luke Ferrelli. This is just going to keep coming up.

As Richard points out in this week’s free episode, the jokes were flying when news broke that the NCAA issue a ruling regarding the tampering. Yes, the jokes have been funny, but how do we actively regulate this? The long answer is: We probably can’t at this rate. The McNamara tampering happened in late ‘22, a lifetime ago in college football. Back then, NIL was in its infancy. The influx of money since then probably means conversations between players, team, and third parties have only increased. Players getting paid is always great, but if we’re talking about a tampering problem from 2022, the NCAA will probably address whatever has happened between Ole Miss and Clemson in 2030.

I’m not holding my breath that some sort of legislation will fix it either. That’s a whole other can of worms that smarter people like Extra Points’ Matt Brown can explain. Speaking of whom:

Here’s what Alex and Richard dropped into your podcast feeds this week:

• Matt Brown joined the gang for the Sports Business Hour. They discussed the $2 billion Learfield sale and how it’s not as foreboding as it initially seems. And they go in depth about how Donald Trump’s executive order is both a distraction from everything else going on and an annoyance to senators who have been working to pass their own legislation that might more seriously address college sports’ difficulties.

• We have an April mailbag episode for you this week as well, out this morning. Richard and Alex talk about the perils of the coach-in-waiting and also reveal which non-college football sport they would most like to cover.

Some recommended reading:

• Over at Slate, Alex chronicled the latest chapter in Anthropic’s journey and how the AI company’s relatively positive reputation from refusing the Pentagon’s wishes might not be enough to generate enough happy consumers.

• Pour one out for Slate’s Hang up & Listen, which had its final episode this week. Alex and company were joined by guests who helped them predict the next 17 years in sports.

• We’re not going to let April pass us by without mentioning The Masters here at least once. Richard wrote about the college football connections at Augusta for CBS Sports.

Soon: The EDSBS Charity Bowl

Our friends over at Channel 6 are about to kickstart the 2026 EDSBS Charity Bowl supporting New American Pathways. Starting on Monday, donate to the cause using your favorite college football score or stat to see which university raises the most money at the end of the week. For example, if you’re an Indiana fan who wants to continue basking in National Championship glory, you can donate 27.21 in honor of the Hoosiers. You’ll hear more about this on SZD next week.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week.

SUBSCRIBER EPISODE: Richard and Alex take subscriber questions! As the college football offseason hits more or less its halfway point, it’s mailbag time. Among the many questions we answer in this episode, you will find

• 0:55: Utah did not envision that Kyle Whittingham’s departure would go down like that. Was the Utes’ fate foretold by what happened at … Maryland? All the way back in 2010?

• 22:03: Who could be the next Texas Tech?

• 50:15: Does basketball really have more portal activity than football, or does it seem that way because of small roster sizes? (Yes.)

• 52:34: Why doesn’t Richard believe in the sanctity of the one true portal window?

• 54:00: How big is the talent gap between a G6 and P4 position coach?

• 58:43: Was Greg Sankey born on third base? Plus a longer chat about the way college sports media talk about conference commissioners.

• 1:04:13: Why do we express skepticism about USF’s finances?

• 1:11:23: If we could cover any sport other than CFB for a living, what would it be?

Producer: Anthony Vito

This is a subscriber episode, but everyone can hear a nice big free preview

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To get this episode and many, many more (as well as a whole back catalog of evergreen college football history shows, reporting on the coach carousel, and more), become a paid subscriber today.

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• 0:45: Learfield, the college sports multimedia rights company, sold to a (new) private equity owner in a $2 billion deal. This is one of the largest deals in college sports history, but for what? Matt helps us understand the importance of companies like Learfield and its rival Playfly, and how they affect both our favorite teams and their financial statements. Will this deal change much about the college sports landscape, though? It doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.

• 19:45: The Trump administration’s college sports executive order is fake and made up, but somehow, that’s not the same thing as “meaningless.” It also might destroy any potential for a serious legislative solution to college sports’ problems. Matt tells us what he’s learned from Capitol Hill sources.

• 32:37: Did the Big Ten office do a make-work for Wisconsin’s AD so that the Badgers could get someone better in that job? The answer isn’t “definitely not.”

• 42:34: The NCAA makes an example of … Iowa.

• 47:35: Audience question 1: What would be the pros and cons of media rights consolidation?

• 52:04: Audience question 2: Which schools are doing fun and different things with their House settlement allocations?

Thanks to Matt! Read him all the time at www.extrapointsmb.com

Producer: Anthony Vito

This episode is free, but to get lots more, become a paid subscriber today

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Richard and Alex discuss how the offseason is going across the Group of 6 college football conferences. In this episode:

• 1:52: A fresh way to talk about the G6 offseason

• 3:55: Our tour through new head coaching hires, starting with Charles Huff at Memphis and Brian Hartline at USF, then moving all around the country

• 1:10:49: Recruiting talk. Who has money? Miami University, apparently

• 1:24:35: Fine, we’ll talk about the Masters, and Alex will make peace with Auburn fans

Read the 2026 returning production rankings

Producer: Anthony Vito

This episode is free, but to get lots more, become a paid subscriber today

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For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this thing alive and well

Thanks to Homefield and Nokian Tyres

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Shop Michigan and UCLA national title gear at Homefield.

Godfrey joins Richard and Alex for a discussion about college football history. For understandable reasons, people all cautious about calling for teams to make coaching changes when the incumbent is a legend in the job. How careful should we be, though? In this episode, we go through the past 40-ish years of coaching transitions from living legend to … someone else. How do schools do when they either fire an all-timer or need to replace him in retirement? The answer isn’t great, but it’s not as bad as you might think.

• 2:04: Why Dabo Swinney got us thinking about this subject

• 16:20: The rare cases of the “guy after the guy” arguably doing a better job than the coach he replaced, or at least winning more games for a while

• 21:15: The maintainers who kept the train on the tracks, like Ryan Day

• 39:13: The long, slow declines, like Virginia Tech post-Frank Beamer

• 59:52: The tank jobs, like Ron Zook or Ron Prince

• 1:24:16: The cases where the jury is still out, like Kalen DeBoer. (Is that jury still out? We have a mini-debate.)

• 1:31:15: Lessons for Clemson heading into another fraught season

This is a subscriber episode, but everyone can hear a nice big free preview

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Producer: Anthony Vito

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Virginia Tech has had a rough decade. Has the cavalry finally arrived to save the program from irrelevance? Tech hired James Franklin and appears to appears to be throwing huge sums of cash at his program in the hopes of stopping a backslide that started late in Frank Beamer’s career and then spun out of control under Justin F…

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How are things going for all 16 teams in the SEC? Let’s discuss which way the arrow is pointing. Alex and Richard head to the Southeast on this latest Offseason Vibe Check, a chance to talk about actual football teams during the long, cold offseason. In this episode, the crew covers …

• 1:25: Texas’s offensive line problem and whether a nice finish to the regular season and a bowl win can be a springboard

• 5:16: Ole Miss’s Pete Golding era and the window that’s still open

• 9:41: LSU’s Lane Kiffin honeymoon period

• 13:45: Texas A&M’s opportunity depending on Marcel Reed’s growth

• 16:57: Arkansas’s Tyson money, Ryan Silverfield’s rough PR start, and a transfer class that makes you raise your eyebrows

• 22:18: Mississippi State’s reunion with an old friend

• 26:15: Vanderbilt’s post-Diego Pavia reset with five-star Jared Curtis

• 28:05: Alabama’s Ryan Williams retention and a quiet case for quarterback development. But what else is there?

• 33:29: Auburn’s clear and immediate upgrade at quarterback

• 36:26: Oklahoma’s OL portal haul

• 39:47: Florida’s Georgia Tech offensive import and Buster Faulkner’s fresh start

• 41:09: Kentucky’s CEO-style setup under Will Stein

• 44:14: Missouri’s dip down the prep recruiting rankings and whether Eli Drinkwitz can reverse that trend

• 48:49: Georgia’s spurning of the portal world

• 52:12: Tennessee’s latest blue-chip QB moment

• 58:27: South Carolina’s crossroads under Shane Beamer

This episode is free, but to get lots more, become a paid subscriber today

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For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this thing alive and well

Alex talks with the wise baseball scribe (and USC football fan) Joe Sheehan of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter about how our sport is currently on a trajectory that looks awfully familiar to another sport’s recent arc.

College football is grappling with a long list of the same problems and proposals that have been bouncing around Major League Baseball for decades: Should the sport consolidate its media rights in the name of “competitive balance”? Can we even agree on what that term means and on how balanced the game is right now? How wide is too wide a gap between the richest teams and the poorest? To what extent should players be tied to their teams so that fans have a reason to build a connection with them? And what could college football’s leaders learn from the good and bad decisions baseball’s bosses have made over the past 50 years? What about from the rules of baseball that didn’t even come out of any one decision, but by accident? This episode covers all of that. Happy Opening Day, by the way.

Alex here with the strongest possible recommendation to check out and subscribe to Joe’s newsletter here. For me, Joe is a formative writer whose years of emails have shaped the way I think about one of my favorite sports. I appreciate him coming on SZD to indulge this theory of mine.

Producer: Anthony Vito

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For $10 a month (or getting a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this podcast alive and well

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The ACC Offseason Vibe Check is here. Alex and Richard check in with all 17 ACC football schools and throw in Notre Dame as well. In this episode …

• 1:31: Miami made a big playoff run and then simply reloaded

• 4:14: Duke won football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball conference titles in the same year, and yet still has bad vibes because of some devastating portal losses

• 7:47: Georgia Tech’s fourth defensive coordinator under Brent Key, the Buster Faulkner exodus to Florida, and whether Alberto Mendoza can be the next Haynes King

• 10:16: SMU’s offensive coordinator change leaves Kevin Jennings is looking around the empty house wondering who’s going to help him

• 13:29: Stanford brings on Tavita Pritchard as Andrew Luck’s handpicked guy, and Yale transfer Nico Brown is the portal add to watch

• 17:01: Virginia might really be building something now?

• 19:25: Cal has a legitimately improved talent picture under Tosh Lupoi

• 22:56: NC State went 8-5, but doesn’t feel like an 8-5 program

• 24:45: Louisville is setting itself up for another preseason hype cycle

• 28:17: Wake Forest had a great first year under Jake Dickert and may find itself strained to keep the momentum going

• 29:09: Boston College’s year-two flameout to 2-10 under Bill O’Brien leaves questions about what happens now

• 32:54: Syracuse continues to cook in recruiting, but will need a QB

• 34:32: North Carolina looks better, at least on the field

• 36:52: Clemson may – may! – be getting close to the end

• 41:52: Pitt kept its QB and OC, but the money situation is a big problem

• 45:40: Notre Dame brings back most of the band and takes a shot at an Ohio State wide receiver

• 51:30: Florida State’s early-season schedule could end the Mike Norvell era by mid-October

• 58:41: Virginia Tech is the most fascinating team in the sport to Alex, but we’ll mainly talk about the Hokies on a larger show next week

This episode is free, but to get lots more, become a paid subscriber today

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• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this thing alive and well

Lucy Rohden has spent the past few college football seasons visiting dozens of stadiums for some of the biggest games of the year. What has she learned about the sport through these travels? She joins Richard to talk about her-long road trip through the sport. In this episode:

• 1:34: What constitutes a college town, plus the critical nature of a college town being easily walkable (sorry, South Bend and College Station)

• 6:58: Lucy’s proprietary system for ranking 50 college towns

• 8:27: The gameday environments she’s found overrated and underrated, and which places are too quiet because of either stadium design or the people who pack into the building

• 12:22: The 50/50 proposition of getting a good meal on a game weekend in a college town, and how Auburn’s restaurant seen is like New York’s

• 13:58: Lucy’s most overrated stadium in the sport

• 18:43: The very different ways the Big Ten and SEC situate their most famous stadiums as compared to the rest of campus. Plus, the majesty of a nice Friday afternoon walk around a campus you’re visiting for a game

• 20:16: Hater’s guide to College Station plus the gentrification of a lot of these towns. (See some of our old work on this topic here.)

• 25:02: The majesty of the trees in Gainesville, Florida

• 34:32: The contradiction of perhaps the greatest game environment in the sport, LSU, not even really being in a college town

You can find Lucy all over the internet. Her YouTube channel is here. We appreciate her stopping by and sharing some of her lessons from the road!

Producer: Anthony Vito

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This is a subscriber episode

For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this podcast alive and well

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Our offseason wellness check on all 16 teams in the Big 12. Richard and Alex discuss a league with a few teams trending upward and a lot more teams just trying to figure things out. In this episode, we start out with some talk about March Madness and the Big 12’s glass basketball court and then move to …

• 8:05: Arizona State

• 12:56: Utah

• 16:21: Kansas State

• 19:13: TCU

• 24:11: Arizona

• 26:08: Cincinnati

• 31:06: Iowa State

• 33:15: Baylor

• 36:47: Colorado

• 42:58: Houston

• 46:04: Texas Tech

• 49:02: UCF

• 52:06: BYU

• 53:40: Kansas

• 56:26: Oklahoma State

• 1:01:00: WVU

Producer: Anthony Vito

Previously in Offseason Vibe Checks: The Big Ten

This episode is free, but to get a lot more, become a paid subscriber

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For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this thing alive and well

For the second third year in a row, Split Zone Duo presents a revolutionary idea:

A college basketball bracket competition from a college football podcast? Yeah it’s weird, but no weirder than Georgia Nebraska making the tournament.

We’ll use ESPN’s “Tournament Challenge” platform. Be mindful that your fellow competitors will be able to see your picks and ESPN display name, and you’ll need to have an account on the ESPN site. Everyone is limited to one entry for the men’s and women’s tournaments. If you already have a bracket on ESPN’s platform, it’s extremely easy to enter it in our group.

Information after the paywall jump here, because the bracket contest is limited to paid subscribers. Stick with us!

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Alex and Richard go through the one-of-a-kind football life lived by Lou Holtz, who died on March 4 at age 89. In this episode, we discuss:

• 1:46: Holtz’s Saban-like upbringing and why Notre Dame was the apple of his eye from an early age

• 4:14: William & Mary, Holtz’s first head coaching stop

• 7:25: NC State, where he was an all-timer

• 11:13: The Jets, a one-year misadventure

• 17:15: Arkansas, where Holtz was “the guy after the guy” and managed to stick the landing after replacing Frank Broyles … for a while

• 24:41: Minnesota, where Holtz’s eye was elsewhere

• 28:15: Notre Dame, a school that already had a unique football tradition but that Holtz took to another level on the field and mythologically

• 37:25: South Carolina, a strong closing act

• 39:16: Where Holtz’s resume is truly exceptional

• 42:58: Holtz as an NCAA perp, TV commentator, irascible storyteller, and guy who made Ryan Day really, really angry

• 48:49: Holtz’s endorsement of Jesse Helms, and a discussion of the cognitive dissonance that he deployed throughout his career

Producer: Anthony Vito

College basketball has many of the same challenges as football, and some that are even tougher. Rodger Sherman joins Alex and Richard for a state of the union on CBB and a compare-contrast of how the dynamics we’ve observed in football are showing up in hoops. In this episode, you’ll find:

• 7:46: The story of Miami (Ohio), a mid-major basketball team whose undefeated regular season has resulted in an awfully CFB-like discourse about whether they should miss the NCAA tournament

• 17:08: The widening gap between the high-major conferences and everyone else, quantified in real time by Rodger

• 27:33: Why continuity problems appear to be worse in CBB

• 41:32: Is that thing actually happening where the House settlement results in basketball-only schools having an advantage?

• 45:06: We probably shouldn’t actually worry that much about a small number of recent pros returning to the college game

• 1:00:27: Rodger prepares us for March Madness

Produced by Anthony Vito.

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This is a subscriber episode

For $10 a month (or getting a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

• Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

• The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this podcast alive and well

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Offseason vibe checks return for 2026, starting with the Big Ten. This is our way of checking in on how the offseason is going for every team in the league. Richard and Alex go through the 18-team B1G in the following order:

• 3:22: Indiana

• 9:08: Iowa

• 12:08: Oregon

• 16:36: Rutgers

• 17:39: Illinois

• 20:24: Penn State

• 25:59: Michigan State

• 30:15: Michigan

• 34:38: Purdue

• 36:01: UCLA

• 38:23: Nebraska

• 42:10: Wisconsin

• 47:44: Maryland

• 52:19: USC

• 55:38: Minnesota

• 57:18: Washington

• 1:00:24: Northwestern

• 1:08:52: Ohio State

This episode is free, but you can get a lot more of them by becoming a paid subscriber

For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

• Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

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