So we asked you the listener, to spell out your anxieties about your favorite team so that we can analyze whether they’re substantiated or whether you’re just mostly being a impatient for the season to come. In this episode we cover:

• 07:56 Boston College

• 11:28 Cal

• 14:00 Duke

• 16:01 Georgia Tech

• 18:09 Louisville

• 22:32 North Carolina

• 23:30 Pitt

• 25:00 Stanford

• 27:01 Virginia Tech

• 33:02 Arizona

• 35:23 Iowa State

• 37:37 BYU

• 43:41 Texas Tech

• 52:16 Michigan State

• 58:48 Penn State

Producer: Anthony Vito

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If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription.

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

Transfer portal season is over. The actual college football season is almost here. With the dust (probably) settled on everyone’s roster, Richard and Alex pick through dozens of portal classes and highlight 26 players who are sliding into situations worth tracking in 2026. This episode is NOT just a recitation of the highest-ranked transfers, but a deeper examination of who’s being relied on to fill major holes, who’s propping up a hot-seated coach, and who’s just going to be plain old fun to watch. We cover new players going to:

• 11:55: Texas

• 13:50: Nebraska

• 16:51: Miami

• 19:49: Clemson

• 22:27: Oregon

• 24:12: James Madison

• 27:01: Ohio State

• 29:56: Washington

• 36:06: LSU

• 42:31: Oklahoma

• 47:55: Texas Tech

• 51:43: Florida State

• 54:34: Cal

• 56:59: Baylor

• 58:49: Miami University

• 1:02:22: Michigan

• 1:03:04: Wisconsin

Producer: Anthony Vito

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If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription.

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

This episode is for paid subscribers, but everyone can hear a free preview. Want to get all of our podcasts? Join us here.

Brendan Sorsby has his temporary injunction, and the field is open for Texas Tech’s QB to play in 2026. Yes, Alex is as shocked as you are. What now, though? To answer that question and a few more, let’s welcome Sam Ehrlich, an assistant professor of legal studies at Boise State and operator of the College Sports Litigation Tracker. In this episode:

• 0:17: Alex’s monologue on why Sorsby’s triumph is so absurd, even for people used to watching the NCAA lose in court, like all of us.

• 8:14: Welcoming Sam Ehrlich, asking what he thinks of the ruling, and why the judge’s order left so much unsaid.

• 11:57: What the NCAA’s appeal changes, and why the clock may now work in Sorsby’s favor instead of against him.

• 14:59: Whether one Texas injunction really changes the NCAA’s ability to enforce gambling rules elsewhere. (Be careful about this one.)

• 18:23: Why collectively bargained rules or a federal college sports bill would probably have prevented this situation.

• 23:43: Venue shopping, “home cooking” complaints, broader sports-integrity fallout, and what angry Big 12 schools can actually do about it.

Producer: Anthony Vito

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where Congress has finally produced something that everyone in college sports can agree is interesting. No, it’s not a comprehensive bipartisan law or anything like that, though we might be getting closer to that with the introduction of the Protect College Sports Act, the subject of this week’s Sports Business Hour with Extra Points’ Matt Brown.

What I’m actually referring to is NIL data from the tail end of the last college football dynasty. Under oath on Wednesday in front of the Senate Commerce Committee, Nick Saban revealed Alabama’s NIL budgets going back to 2021, including the changeover period from Saban to Kalen DeBoer.

Let me give you the history. My first year we had a collective at Alabama: $2.7 million. Next year, 7 million. Next year, $10 million. I retired. Next year $17 million. Next year, $24 million. Now you have schools that have close to $40 million rosters.

This mostly matches the rumors around Alabama’s rough level of spending the past few years. But in a space with little transparency, it was striking to get someone as public as Saban giving specific, year-by-year numbers. And doing it under oath!

Saban’s goal was to demonstrate how high the bill has become to run a successful college program, and to explain what he sees as the resulting threat to other sports. And that argument might work for the committee members sitting at the hearing. But you, the reader, know that money is just a piece of what makes a good team on the field.

For example, we can now compare 2025 Alabama to another school with a similar budget. Luckily for us, we don’t have to look far to find the Indiana Hoosiers, which Alex and Richard have reported had a budget pretty close to that same $24 million last year. These teams faced each other in the Rose Bowl. How did that turn out for the Crimson Tide? 38-3.

The difference was coaching and player development, but you probably won’t hear anything about payments in those departments being too high — not even if a head coach is the highest paid public employee in the entire state. I wonder why that is.

Because it’s the “wild west,” at least according to the people at those congressional hearings, the amount of money for players will go up. Will Alabama’s player development follow? We have to wait until the players hit the field in a few months. Until then:

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

• For subscribers, the crew has a vibe check for Year 2 coaches. Who is already on the hot seat and why is it Bill Belichick?

• A new Sports Business Hour with Matt Brown went live on Thursday. They talk about the new bill that aims to regulate college player payments, the troubles with staging international games, Utah’s private equity deal, and of course, the latest Brendan Sorsby news.

Some recommended reading

• On the topic of Alabama player development, Richard wrote about Ryan Coleman-Williams and his expectations in his third year as Crimson Tide receiver.

• Over at Slate, Alex interviewed LA voters who are supporting reality star Spencer Pratt for mayor.

• For The Athletic, Michael Silver talked to Maurice Jones-Drew about the NAACP’s boycott and how we shouldn’t underestimate player collective action.

• Some college hoops venue news: rather than playing at Madison Square Garden, Michigan and Duke will now play … at the Miami Marlins’ stadium?

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

In this episode:

• 4:14: Why the Protect College Sports Act is more serious than past college-sports bills, and what it would do to NIL disclosures, transfer limits, athlete compensation, and the College Sports Commission.

• 25:08: How media-rights pooling became one of the bill’s biggest fights, why the Big Ten and SEC hate it, and how Cody Campbell’s fingerprints are all over the politics.

• 36:52: The so-called Lane Kiffin rule, and whether Congress can actually stop coaches from arranging new jobs during the season.

• 41:19: Utah’s private equity experiment, the layoff headline, the missing public details, and why fan revolt in American college sports tends to be so muted.

• 51:24: Why the planned NC State-Virginia game in Brazil fell apart, and what it says about trying to export college football internationally.

• 1:06:36: Why Brendan Sorsby’s eligibility fight feels so ridiculous.

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If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription.

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

Producer: Anthony Vito

Is your head coach going to succeed? Most of the time, you’ll know by Year 2. Welcome to the latest installment of SZD’s checkup on head coaches about to start their second season on the job. The class of 2025 was famously light on Power 4 hires but offers more G6 hope than you might think. In this episode, we’ll tier out this crop of second-year coaches as follows:

• 0:16: Why Year 2 remains such a revealing checkpoint for college football coaches, even after the portal changed the roster-building calendar.

• 8:03: The guys who are trending up, like Zach Kittley at FAU, Mark Carney at Kent State, Matt Drinkall at Central Michigan, Willie Simmons at FIU, Jerry Mack at Kennesaw State, Dan Mullen at UNLV, Jason Eck at New Mexico, and Matt Entz at Fresno State.

• 24:28: The guys who have us in wait-and-see mode, including the hard AAC jobs, Phil Longo at Sam Houston, Mike Uremovich at Ball State, Eddie George at Bowling Green, Dowell Loggains at App State, Tony Gibson at Marshall, Barry Odom at Purdue, and Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia.

• 39:22: The guys who are already trending the wrong way and need a turnaround, like Scott Frost at UCF and, well …

• 46:01: Bill Belichick’s lousy first year at North Carolina and how much hope there is that things could improve

Producer: Anthony Vito

Everyone can hear a free preview of this episode. To get the whole thing, become a paid subscriber today.

Subscribe now

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

NOTE: Alex regrets that we skipped Wake Forest’s Jake Dickert. We will come back to him while we wait for the next occasion on which Alex skips right past something in the show notes and doesn’t realize it until after publication.

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where there are no rules, according to Mike Elko.

Earlier this week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announced that the conference would stop scheduling FCS and Group of 6 opponents, starting in 2027. He referred to the league’s “cupcake weekend,” whereas you and I have long called it “SoCon Saturday.” The move is partly due to the SEC expanding its schedule to nine conference games.

But because this is the SEC and it just means more, you also have to remember that this move means less money for the Mercers and Citadels of the world. Those schools gladly accepted an inevitable 70-7 score in exchange for the money that could ultimately help them amongst their own contemporaries. (Just one example: FCS Eastern Illinois lost 56-0 at Bama last year. EIU got $560,000, out of a total revenue pot that usually settles between $14 and $18 million. Not a small deal!) That delta between the larger institutions and everyone else has been the story of the offseason. It keeps growing, bit by bit.

Even worse, we’re going to miss those moments where the underdog still managed to get one over the SEC team. We wouldn’t have the objectively funny trope of Diego Pavia beating Hugh Freeze’s teams if it wasn’t for that initial 31-10 New Mexico State-Auburn game.

Pavia and Jerry Kill may not have gone to Vanderbilt had it not been for that showing, which also means then No. 1 Alabama may not have lost to the Commodores in 2024. Those Vandy goalposts could still be in the end zone instead of going through Broadway and eventually a river. Kalen DeBoer’s reputation amongst Bama fans would have been overwhelmingly positive still. I am just highlighting one domino effect here, but there are countless others out there.

So while we have one more season of cupcakes, let’s treat ourselves and remember a game from the penultimate week of the season. What was your favorite? It could be an upset, or it could just be a random blowout that you remember watching back in college. I asked Richard for his:

SEC-SoCon Challenge Saturday has a very interesting and almost soft spot in my heart. Yes, the games were bad. But I do remember growing up as a kid, before the SEC Network was a thing, that games used to be on pay-per-view. And those were the types of games that would be on that.

I remember the SoCon Saturday the year the Gators won the national championship in 2006. I had a bunch of friends over for a pizza party, and we bought the game. I begged my mom to buy the game. I think I actually may have paid for it with my own money.

I remember that being a big deal. I later found out that late in the game, a walk-on running back scored a touchdown. That walk-on running back ended up being one of my high school football coaches and a teacher at my high school.

But I also remember this week going poorly for the Gators when they lost to Georgia Southern. Georgia Southern threw three passes that game. I had a former high school teammate who was on that Georgia Southern team, and I remember how inexplicable the whole day felt. The game was not going well, and it was capped by the infamous highlight of the two Florida players blocking each other.

And the whole time you’re like, there’s no way they’re actually gonna lose this game, right? They’re not playing well, but in the end they’ll pull it out. Well, they didn’t. Rest in peace, SoCon Saturday.

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

• The Ringer’s Joel Anderson joins Richard to talk about the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign, which encourages Black football players to reconsider playing for SEC schools (among a few others) in favor of HBCUs as Southern states consider dismantling Black representation. Is that a lot to ask for these young adults? They discuss collective action, generational divides, and the need for more political education. This is one of my favorite recent episodes. Take a listen or watch over on our YouTube page.

• Godfrey is back to reminisce about the summer of 2016. Everyone was playing Pokémon Go and the Big 12 was flirting with expansion. It eventually happened in some respect, but that year was marked by a lot of public flirtation with the BYUs and UCFs of the college football world.

Some recommended reading:

• Over at Slate, Alex chronicled some use cases for AI tools that are not using it to write or brainstorm for him.

• Richard takes us inside Florida State’s offseason and examines whether Mike Norvell can turn the Noles’ luck around this time.

• Remember how we quickly eulogized the SCORE Act in last week’s newsletter? Well, a couple of senators have now introduced the Protect College Sports Act. Matt Brown shared his thoughts on it over at Extra Points, and it seems like this one should be taken seriously, at least more than other legislative efforts.

• David Covucci at FOIABall wrote about Marc Andreessen’s father-in-law. How is this related to college sports? He’s a big donor at Stanford, for one thing.

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

Subscriber episode: Host emeritus Steven Godfrey joins Richard and Alex for a look back at the Big 12’s extremely public flirtation with expansion a full decade ago. It was a strange spring and summer in 2016, as the Big 12 basically put on realignment tryouts for a long list of schools including several (BYU, UCF, Houston, and Cincinnati) who did get into the conference — but not until years later, when others dominoes had fallen. Let’s revisit the summer of realignment that wasn’t, and then let’s think about how it changed the next decade of college football.

In this episode:

• 0:00: Why the realignment fashion show became so public

• 8:10: The now-quaint factors that drove realignment decisions back then

• 12:28: The candidate pool, including Houston and Cincinnati’s very different campaigns, BYU’s many complications, UCF before the Scott Frost/Josh Heupel run, and SMU before it became an ACC playoff team

• 32:02: Why the process came down to BYU, Cincinnati, and Houston. (Also, why the Big 12 was genuinely scared of Houston)

• 43:48: Counterfactuals: whether earlier expansion would have changed Texas and Oklahoma’s exit, the Pac-12’s collapse, or the expanded playoff’s politics around non-power teams

• 56:08: The afterlife of the public audition, from Memphis and Sacramento State to the next round of conference-movement anxiety.

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Everyone can hear a free preview of this episode

To get the whole thing, become a paid subscriber today. For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

Producer: Anthony Vito

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Richard is joined by Joel Anderson, host of The Ringer Tailgate and The Press Box podcasts, for a conversation about the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign and the bigger question underneath it: What is fair to ask of Black college athletes and recruits at a moment when lawmakers and the courts are attacking Black voting power? They start with HBCUs and PWIs, move through the campaign’s specifics asks, and cover lots of topics from there: political education, NIL incentives, the transfer portal, the limits and power of boycotts, and why college football keeps becoming the platform for this kind of discussion.

In this episode:

• 0:00: The roles of HBCUs and PWIs in Black college life, and how generational experiences shape Richard’s and Joel’s views.

• 12:01: The NAACP’s campaign and its asks of recruits, current athletes, fans, donors, and consumers.

• 16:16: What is fair to expect of college athlete activism now

• 26:55: Whether the idea of a “boycott” has lost force

• 37:53: The role of the NAACP in 2026

Producer: Anthony Vito

More on the story covered in this episode:

• NAACP press statement: Black athletes and fans should withhold support from public schools in states attacking Black voting rights

• NAACP: Out of Bounds

• CBS Sports on the NAACP campaign

Subscribe now

If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription.

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

Welcome to the College Football Podcast, where we’re going to create the most tanned, athleisure-wearing staff ever concocted.

If one thing has defined this offseason, it’s been eligibility lawsuits. As we all know, billable hours are undefeated. We’ve seen Trinidad Chambliss defeat the NCAA for a sixth year of eligibility to play at Ole Miss. More recently, Brendan Sorsby has asked a judge for his own injunction to play this season.

Sorsby claims that the NCAA banning him for betting on his own team is both illegal and hypocritical, because the NCAA makes money from sports gambling. (This is not directly true, and the NCAA doesn’t sell sportsbook sponsorships. It does help the NCAA somewhat if gambling boosts viewership or commercial rate for March Madness.) Sorsby sued in federal district court in Lubbock, so it wasn’t surprising that the judge who got the case was a Texas Tech alum.

Some people got excited about this. Surely, the Red Raider alum on the bench would put the QB back on the field. But then the judge filed to recuse himself.

It’s not just in college football, either. College basketball had its own big case this year with Charles Bediako, who briefly rejoined Alabama’s roster after playing in the G League. Bediako was ultimately ruled ineligible, but before that, a judge granted him a temporary restraining order that allowed him to return to the court. That judge turned out to be a six-figure Alabama athletics donor, and he recused himself before the preliminary injunction ruling.

And there’s the game within the game in all that. A player suing for eligibility is bound to get a judge from the area, and major sports programs tend to come from big universities with a lot of law school alums. And if they’re lucky, that connection to the university could be fairly significant. But does a judge who is an alum make it likelier that the ruling will fall in the favor of the player, and therefore the school? It doesn’t seem clear. Here’s Alex:

I think this is my favorite bit of cliched lore on the college football internet right now. Maybe it’s not quite to the level of fans confidently making coaching search predictions based on flight trackers that often have nothing to do with the ongoing search, but it’s still really good.

You think, as a college sports fan, that your fellow fan who is also a judge is going to compromise his reputation to help your favorite coach or quarterback get back on the field. I’m not saying this never works, and obviously the last thing I’d ever do is impugn the Ole Miss judge who granted Trinidad Chambliss his final year of eligibility. I’m just saying that the batting average here is not high enough to get anyone to the all-star game.

Other recent examples of “the alma maters of the lawyers and judges involved in the case may not save you”: a Michigan alum judge (who was also a lecturer at the school) declining to step in and block the Big Ten’s midseason suspension of Jim Harbaugh, and an NCAA lawyer and Vols alum beating Joey Aguilar in court. Sometimes, unfortunately, lawyers just do their jobs.

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

• Should we be taking UCLA seriously? It’s a real question, at least for a few months. The Athletic’s Ira Gorawara joined Alex to talk about the good vibes from the first offseason under Bob Chesney. They talk about the alumni base and about what the Bruins’ expectations will be once they hit the field in a few months.

• The free episode dropped on Thursday, and it’s a Memorial Day mailbag. Godfrey hangs out for this one to talk about which head coach is on the hot seat. The trio also has a great conversation about cookout tips, just in case you need a little motivation ahead of the long weekend. You can watch the video version of this over on YouTube.

Some recommended reading:

• We’ve talked about the impending 24-team playoff and what it means for future seasons, but Matt Brown over at Extra Points chronicled what past seasons would have looked like under the format.

• Remember the SCORE Act? Well, you can forget about it (for now) because the House of Representatives pulled it from the voting schedule.

• We might get twice as much football in the coming years and it has nothing to do with CFP or NFL expansion. The NCAA is hoping to move women’s flag football to varsity status as soon as 2028.

• Oh hey Ed Orgeron is back at LSU lmao. He’s joining Lane Kiffin’s staff as a special assistant to recruiting and defense. The news dropped in the middle of Game 2 of the Spurs-Thunder series. A masterful news dump by LSU brass, not that many people wouldn’t be happy to see the news. I’m sure Richard and Alex will have fun talking about this one next week.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the long weekend

In this episode:

• 2:08: Who is under more pressure in 2026: Lincoln Riley or Steve Sarkisian? Plus: Will Muschamp’s role at Texas and USC’s politics around Notre Dame

• 13:46: Where G.J. Kinne could go next, and which coaches might make sense for future Texas G5 openings.

• 19:51: Arkansas reinstates tennis, then the conversation turns to Hunter Yurachek and athletic department accountability.

• 26:44: Would a 24-team Playoff make schools schedule better non-conference games, or just change the incentive to chase automatic bids?

• 33:57: Kirby Smart, Dabo Swinney, Dan Lanning, and Eli Drinkwitz as case studies in how we talk about portal usage, title ceilings, and carousel smoke.

• 44:52: Memorial Day light fare: Eastside LA food, message board culture, Tottenham and Valencia, cookout rules, beans, and all-time Spotify listening history.

Producer: Anthony Vito

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SUBSCRIBER EPISODE: Alex and Richard start with the surprise of UCLA becoming one of the offseason’s best recruiting stories, then Alex brings on Ira Gorawara fromThe Athletic for a campus-level look at Bob Chesney’s first few months in Westwood. This subscriber episode is about whether UCLA’s current burst of money, attention, and salesmanship is the first sign that a program long trapped between Los Angeles indifference and its own underinvestment might finally be changing its shape. Follow Ira’s work.

In this episode:

• 0:00: Richard and Alex set up UCLA’s recruiting surge, the money behind it, and why Los Angeles is a hard place to matter unless you are winning or selling.

• 10:49: Ira Gorawara joins to explain why Bob Chesney’s arrival has given the program a different feel than it had under recent coaches

• 17:02: Chesney’s contrast with Chip Kelly and DeShaun Foster

• 22:45: Whether UCLA’s donor alignment and roster spending are real enough to change the program’s ceiling.

• 29:17: How durable the Bruins’ recruiting bump might be, and what counts as success over the long term

• 34:29: The Rose Bowl vs. SoFi Stadium

Producer: Anthony Vito

Subscribe now

Everyone can hear a free preview of this episode.

To get the whole thing, become a paid subscriber today. For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where an expanded playoff is begrudgingly closer than ever.

It feels like the walls are closing in on this iteration of the College Football Playoff, especially after this week. We saw the American Football Coaches Association put out a statement in favor of a 24-team playoff expansion. The ACC wasn’t shy when it announced its preference for the same thing. Commissioner Jim Phillips claims that an expanded playoff would give more teams “hope.” The Big Ten has financial and perhaps competitive motivations for the same format, but the SEC would prefer a 16-team bracket.

Still, no matter what the outcome, all signs are pointing in one clear direction, and it’s “more.” At this point, it may not be a matter of whether expansion will come, but how it will look.

Not everyone is a fan of expansion, however. Steve Sarkisian was vocal about his disapproval for a new format in an interview with USA Today. He said, “We don’t think about the unintended consequences of decisions we make. It’s all knee-jerk reactions.”

He also points out that expansion would make the selection committee’s current job even harder, since they won’t have enough time to watch all the games to accurately judge which 24 teams make the cut. Based on his comments, Sarkisian doesn’t believe they have the time to fully analyze the 12 best teams right now, so what would doubling the number of slots improve? It will obviously increase revenue for some, but you’re not getting a ticket rebate or a discount on your season tickets. There’s an apparent disconnect between what administrators and coaches want right now and what fans want. Did you ask for this?

Sarkisian’s critique aside, the institutions behind this all seem coordinated in their own way to make this happen. Richard was at the ACC meetings in Jacksonville, so let’s ask him for a firsthand account of things:

The most surprising thing to me from ACC meetings was not necessarily that the ACC had gotten on board with 24 teams, but the coaches being unanimous about it. This isn’t just something coming from the suits and the bureaucrats. The coaches are on board with this here, and they’re not bucking.

You might see that happen in another conference like the SEC, and the coaches are dismissing the stuff about the regular-season devaluation. Now they’re doing it because they want to say that more access creates a more compelling November.

But in any event, they are doing it, which is very interesting to me. So the ACC not tearing itself apart and actually being united was a welcome change for ACC meetings. I mean, two years ago, we were at ACC meetings and half the league was about to sue to leave. So it’s interesting what they can accomplish when they’re together.

A unified ACC. Who’d have thought this would be what did it?

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

• Godfrey joined to talk about where Alabama is now that it’s firmly in its post-Nick Saban era. They talk about Kalen DeBoer’s extension and also about how the old way of Bama team-building is squarely in the rearview mirror for reasons bigger than the university. Godfrey is on a roll in this episode, highlighted by his comparison of Bama to a recently divorced 40-something re-entering the dating scene.

• This week’s free episode dropped in your feeds this Thursday. Richard and Alex talk about Lane Kiffin, who made some comments about the racism at Ole Miss that sound incredibly insincere. That’s just a small bit of a more than hour-long show, though.

Some recommended reading:

• Alex has some bad news about air travel: with Spirit shutting down and higher gas prices, your next plane ride is only getting more expensive. He writes about it at Slate.

• At CBS Sports, Richard checks in on Florida and how the tone has shifted now with Jon Sumrall leading the Gators. The change in mood is exemplified by one word: good.

• Listeners of the podcast this year know how much we like Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele. The Athletic’s Antonio Morales wrote about Cal’s effort to keep JKS on the roster for the long term.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk to you next week.

Alex and Richard use Richard’s trip to ACC meetings as a window into the big college sports fight of the hour: how many teams will be in the College Football Playoff going forward. Then they sort through the Big Ten/SEC split over 24 teams, Ole Miss’ strange week as a national punching bag in the middle of May, and Nebraska’s first run-in with the new NIL enforcement system, which might be less the end of creative player payments than the start of better paperwork.

In this episode:

• 3:22: What Richard learned at ACC meetings, including the coming ACC tiebreaker puzzle

• 7:24: Why 16 vs. 24 teams is the next Playoff fight, and how conference title games, ESPN, and FOX fit into it

• 17:47: Why the Big Ten and SEC are on opposite sides of the 24-team debate

• 37:25: Ole Miss catches strays from Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian

• 47:22: Nebraska’s rejected NIL deals, the College Sports Commission’s first big test, and the future of athletic department creativity

Producer: Anthony Vito

Subscribe now

If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription.

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

Subscriber episode: Steven Godfrey joins Alex and Richard to do a two-year checkup on Alabama under Kalen DeBoer. When Nick Saban retired in January 2024, Godfrey thought the Crimson Tide were due for a major reality check, while Alex thought one of Saban’s gifts to Bama was a durable and higher floor. Two seasons into the DeBoe…

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where money doesn’t grow on trees. But there is money in Boise’s blue turf.

Brian Kelly is using AI. In a video interview with USA Today, the former LSU coach says he’s using Claude to give him potential questions to prepare him for the next time he talks to an athletic director for an open job. He’s creating a job coach of sorts, a role that undoubtedly has a human equivalent Kelly could easily find. For as long as Kelly has been in college football, he should have a rolodex of people still in the industry whom he can talk to in order to be well prepared. Which raises the question: Why tell us this?

More important than Brian Kelly’s AI use is him informing people that he’s using AI. He has already learned one thing: if you slap a mention of AI onto an existing entity, you’re bound to get some sort of advantage in the attention economy. That’s partially why his interview was aggregated by other sites and partially why I’m writing about it now. By the way, did you hear that Allbirds and TOTO are shifting their focus into AI? If a former shoe company and a toilet manufacturer can rebrand for attention, why can’t a former head coach? (Editor’s note: Long live Allbirds, aka the Salesforce 1s.)

Broadcasting that to potential athletic directors is Kelly’s attempt to show that he’s on the cutting edge of … something, though depending on the line of questions being generated, that may not be football-related. He could develop great interviewing skills while also not adapting his coaching style to what his contemporaries are currently doing. And sometimes that might be enough. This is adjacent to not firing a coach or a coordinator because they’re a good hang outside of the workplace. That happens fairly often, though I haven’t seen any public instances of Kelly being a good hang. Whatever AI’s capabilities may be, rehabbing Kelly’s image would be the technology’s greatest trick yet.

Also interesting about this: how Kelly is using AI. Interview prep isn’t the first use I would think of when trying to figure out its application in college football, especially because Kelly has been a head coach for a long time. He already knows how both the interviewing process and the modern game work. Elsewhere, schools have used it to improve ticketing revenue. More than likely, data and roster analysis would be a more apt use of the technology than a coach thinking Claude could get him in an AD’s good graces. Especially with the increased player moves via the transfer portal, it can be hard to keep up and AI can theoretically handle some of the analysis. That carries risks, though.

And luckily for us, we have ESPN’s Bill Connelly on the show this week to talk about all this.

Two podcast episodes for you to catch up on

• Bill joined the Wednesday show to talk about how data is harder to analyze now that more players are entering the transfer portal. That, in turn, has teams like Notre Dame at the top because they are retaining production from the previous season. Bill, Alex, and Richard also spent some time talking about databases and how AI is (and probably isn’t) helping schools and administrators do their jobs. You can listen to the episode here or watch the video version on our podcast YouTube channel.

• New Sports Business Hour for subscribers! Richard and Alex ask Matt what the deal is with ESPN moving some Duke games to Amazon Prime. They also talk about [checks notes] The Rock’s greatest contribution to pop culture.

Some recommended reading from our crew + friends

• Spirit Airlines is shutting down. And even though folks in Washington would have played a political blame game, the real answer is that the budget airline succumbed to a litany of economic and political forces, as Alex outlines over at Slate.

• Over at CBS Sports, Richard chronicled what went wrong at Texas in 2025 and how the Longhorns can improve heading into the 2026 season.

• Richard is also doing a video series over on his Instagram about teams that can bounce back this season. This week’s topic is Clemson. If you’ve been a subscriber for a minute, you might already know some of what he’s going to bring up.

• We brought this up in the Sports Business Hour, but if you want to go more in depth on what the Duke games going to Amazon Prime mean (and don’t mean), read Matt Brown’s full analysis over at Extra Points.

• Three-star recruit Duece Jones-Drew committed to UCLA this week. If you remember seeing his dad play for the Bruins, don’t forget to do your stretches before getting out of bed tomorrow morning.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk to you next week.

Extra Points publisher Matt Brown joins Alex and Richard for this subscriber edition of the Sports Business Hour, starting with the Big 12’s RedBird Capital deal and why a lot of schools that need money might still say no to expensive outside cash. From there, the group gets into what “revenue generation” can mean for a conference office, how Utah’s private-equity idea differs from a loan, why winning alone is a shaky athletic department business plan, and what Duke’s new Amazon arrangement does and does not reveal about the future of conference s media rights. The episode closes with Brendan Sorsby’s unsettled gambling case, where NCAA enforcement, Texas Tech, the NFL, and some (actually) serious lawyers could all wind up in the same big story.

In this subscriber episode:

• 0:16: RedBird, private capital, and why many Big 12 schools may pass on the league’s new borrowing option.

• 5:00: Why the conference office, specifically, is taking the money

• 15:02: The latest in “winning is not a business model,” with case studies from Indiana and South Carolina

• 23:02: ACC meetings primer: Uneven schedules, tiebreakers, revenue-sharing stakes, and a looming (but still quiet) realignment problem

• 30:35: Duke’s Amazon games, ESPN’s role, Big Ten objections, and why this is not a template for big football brands peeling off TV rights.

• 49:36: New developments in the Brendan Sorsby case

Thanks to Matt. Read and subscribe to Extra Points!

Producer: Anthony Vito

Everyone can hear a free preview of this episode. To get the whole thing, become a paid subscriber today

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ESPN’s Bill Connelly joins Alex and Richard to talk about his returning production rankings for the 2026 college football season. The power leagues are retaining more of last year’s snaps and yards, while the G6 is increasingly forced into annual rebuilds. Bill explains how the formula for returning talent has evolved, how the transfer portal has made it messy, and which 2026 teams look interesting based on who’s coming back. In this episode:

• 0:55: Exactly how dire is the returning production picture in the Group of 6?

• 4:10: How the returning-production formula has changed in the portal era, from FCS/FBS translation to incoming-transfer weight.

• 12:58: Why the weights look the way they do, including offensive line snaps, pass catchers, quarterbacks, and defensive stickiness.

• 15:02: What we can learn from last year’s big returning production flop, the No. 1-ranked (sort of) Clemson Tigers

• 20:18: The new grind of roster evaluation, why G6 previews can become transfer lists, and 2026 FAU as a returning production test case.

• 27:13: AI in roster work and recruiting operations, and why Bill still prefers doing his own spreadsheeting

• 35:55: 2026 case studies near the top: Notre Dame, Maryland, South Carolina, and Texas.

• 49:10: Rebuilds at Tulane, North Texas, and James Madison, a packed American race, and … a little curiosity at Ohio State?

Producer: Anthony Vito

If you like this episode, you’ll love a paid subscription

Subscribe now

For $10 a month (or you can get a free month with an annual subscription), subscribers get about twice as many Split Zone Duo podcasts, as well as our coach carousel reporting, deep dives on college football history, Q&A opportunities, and many more goodies as we think of them. You also help keep this show independent and ensure we’re making a podcast that puts our listeners, not anyone else, first.

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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