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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we have calculated our 40 times and verticals for the combine. It turns out that Alex has a vertical like Spud Webb.

What makes a good athletic director? That all depends on the hierarchy of the school’s athletics, its location, what it wants to achieve in the future, and, of course, the effectiveness of the AD itself.

If you’re in the Power 4, chances are that you want an AD with a good read on where college sports are going, who can help you get into whatever the “superleague” of the future looks like while navigating issues like NIL at the largest scale. Maybe you want someone who can politic their way into state legislatures to ensure that you’re ahead of the game in whatever new frontier the industry is about to embrace. If you’re a MAC school, you might just be looking for an AD who can keep your budget above water while everyone figures out what’s next.

But one constant for all athletic directors is the desire to keep the university president and the fans happy. So we asked you on our various social media accounts: Do you like your school’s athletic director? Here’s what you said. (You can also peruse our Bluesky replies here, if you want to see where many of the below responses came from. We’ll embed a few later on.)

Here are some schools whose fans gave us really interesting responses.

• Oregon State fans gave absolutely scathing responses about AD Scott Barnes. One Beaver fan called him an “unmitigated disaster” and said: “Doesn’t fundraise. Totally fucked up our NIL program and then lied about it. Hired a GM in August, fired him in Oct, said we didn’t need one, then hired a new one in Dec. Our rev sports are tanking. He isn’t funding them like he promised, either. Another fan just said “no” and pointed to this tough local radio segment on Barnes.

• Ohio State fans have their issues with Ross Bjork. Asked if they like him, one of our followers merely replied, “no, because he’s ross bjork.” But how about this person finding a silver lining? “Ross Bjork is way too private equity-curious for me But I love that Warde Manuel is Michigan’s AD.” Manuel has had big problems at Michigan, ones that we’ve covered on the podcast in the past. In fact, Alex and Matt Brown bring up the latest scandal tangentially related to Michigan to Richard in one of this week’s episodes.

• Iowa fans are the real window into how strongly fans can feel about an AD, though. Current Hawkeyes athletic director Beth Goetz gets mostly positive reviews from fans, in our admittedly small sample. She is relatively new to the job, starting in January 2024. But much of the goodwill is not for the things she has accomplished in her short time there. Instead, she gets a thumbs up because she is not former AD Gary Barta, whom Alex talked about (negatively) on the show this week. Just a sample:

Not all that scientific, but we’re proud to be a podcast whose listeners have strong takes on athletic administrators. We’ll never take it for granted!

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

• Matt Brown of Extra Points joined the gang for the Sports Business Hour. They talk about what it takes to be a good athletic director. We already covered bad ADs here, but they also list a few examples of good ADs throughout the years. There’s also a great segment towards the end about how Mississisppi’s no-tax NIL bill is mostly loud and unhelpful for everyone involved.

• Godfrey joined Richard on Thursday to talk about a specific type of coaching carousel: the coordinator one. Which assistants are head coaches-in-waiting and which ones will intentionally not make a move right now to reap the benefits later.

Some recommended reading:

• Alex talks about the fallout of the State of the Union and USA men’s hockey over at Slate.

• Arkansas came to an agreement with Tyson Foods (a Razorback alum company, of course) for a new on-field jersey sponsorship. It’s one of the first of these announcements since the NCAA approved the patches back in January. According to CBS Sports’ Brandon Marcello, 90 percent of the money from that deal will go to the players.

• Grace Raynor at The Athletic wrote about Washington State tight end Nathaniel Salmon, who is 22 years old and has never played football. But he’s athletic enough that the Los Angeles Chargers were interested in him prior to him joining Wazzu. Salmon might be the perfect subject for a Pac-12 After Dark performance.

We are so close to March Madness that I can almost picture myself skipping my work obligations to head to a bar with the fellas to watch two teams I didn’t care about until five minutes ago like I have been a lifelong fan. Be on the lookout for some football-centric college basketball podcasting from us next week.

No word yet on whether Alex is picking Gonzaga to win itallthisyear. I have watched Zags games with him before and, reader, I still cannot tell if it is a bit or not. But I respect his tenacity. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you here next week.

On Thursday, the NCAA Football Playing Rules Committee proposed a new set of rules for the upcoming season. Among them are reasonable changes pertaining to the game itself. Even if you didn’t necessarily agree with making offensive pass interference calls a 10-yard penalty (one of the proposals), you can at least see where the conversation started: The NFL has a 10-yard rule rather than college’s 15, and it’s worked fine in the NFL.

A more ticky-tack proposal deals with enforcing a rule that’s already on the books: Call it the too-much-leg rule, violated flagrantly by many players over the years. Last season’s most notorious shorts criminal was Oklahoma’s Lou Groza Award-winning kicker, Tate Sandell:

What gives, then? As The Athletic’s Chris Vannini points out, college football does not have specific officials to enforce these uniform violations. In the likely event that this new proposal becomes the law of the land, officials will make players leave the game if their pants don’t cover the knees. One offense is a warning, followed by five- and 15-yard penalties. That should do it.

If anything, we need more leg in football. Show off more thigh! What else are the squats for, then? It feels like the real machination behind all of this is professionalizing more facets of the college game to make them more NFL-like. That can be fine—like when players get paid instead of working for scholarships—but do we need it here? Just two seasons ago, the NFL fined Jalen Hurts for wearing mismatched shoes.

I’ll let Alex and Richard tell you their thoughts in a future SZD episode. (There are some early concerns that Alex may support the shorts crackdown.) As far as this week is concerned …

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

• What would you do with the power to add or subtract 24 points across the history of college football? Do you help a team who was on the cusp of greatness but eventually came up short? Or would you channel your inner hater and retroactively make a great team disappear into the ether of the college football almanac? Alex and Richard talked about how they would change the fates of teams, including Florida. Think of this exercise like the old Madden Rewind feature but even bigger.

• Godfrey stopped by for a subscriber episode where he talked with Alex and Richard about the 2012 coaching carousel. They chat about the surprising run of coaches at Arkansas State in the 2010s. Godfrey also tells the story of how Todd Monken, current Cleveland Browns coach, abruptly quit Southern Miss because the administration failed to keep a promise.

Some more recommended reading and listening:

• At the top of this week’s free show, Alex talked about the history of hockey for a minute. If you want an extensive conversation, check out this week’s Hang Up and Listen, where he explains how the United States men and women’s teams captured Olympic gold.

• For Slate, Alex wrote a major tech fight: Anthropic vs. the Defense Department.

• Last Friday, Richard published a YouTube video explaining why Sacramento State’s economic impact number for its move to the MAC was inflated. He reported out the specific details over at CBS Sports, which resulted in the college consulting company doing a lot of explaining.

• Friend of the show Mike Craven wrote about DJ Lagway’s new yet familiar journey as the Texas native heads to Baylor to play quarterback.

As always, thanks for reading and we’ll see you here next week. Only 20 days until spring.

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where our consultants have estimated that you reading this will result in $1 billion of economic impact. You and I won’t get that money, but someone somewhere out there will, maybe.

North Dakota State did not get a long runway as the newest FBS program. The Sacramento State Hornets have finally gotten their wish and are joining FBS and the Mid-American Conference. Sacramento State had made it clear for months that they intended to make the leap from the Big Sky (via a quick stopover as an FCS independent) to an FBS conference with the help of new money. SacState figured that would be the Pac-12. Instead, it’s the MAC.

This move will generate about a billion dollars, according to Sacramento State, in something called “economic impact.” We hope to see the math one day soon.

Sacramento State’s contract with the MAC is also very explicit that the move is for a five-year period. The Hornets may well expect to be in and out of the MAC by 2031. That departure could arise from any of these scenarios:

• The Hornets, who are 330–414–8 all-time, are so successful in their short stint that they draw the attention of a more geographically sensible conference.

• The MAC declines to renew SacState’s membership once the school stops paying for teams’ plane travel to California.

• SacState gets tired of the geographic hassle of being in this conference.

• The MAC ceases to exist in its current form and its teams get rolled into some new league with other Group of 6 and current FCS teams.

In these scenarios, the Hornets could just become FBS independents—which they’d be fine with, as compared to trying and failing to get a waiver to move up.

We love the MAC on this podcast but we have also pointed out its struggles as the tides have shifted against them in media rights, the transfer portal, and the coaching carousel. Just this week, Thomas Hammock left NIU (which is still technically in the MAC for a few more months, then goes to the Mountain West) for a Seahawks assistant job. Sacramento State’s football success isn’t necessarily tied to playoff opportunities, but not being eligible for the postseason for two out of the five years doesn’t inspire any additional confidence.

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

• Alex and Richard talk about the Sacramento State move in detail and also cover topics like how the NCAA thinks Diego Pavia’s case to keep playing college football technically could mean other players are entitled to an 18-year collegiate career.

• Part 2 of the big offseason-opening mailbag dropped this week for subscribers. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. As a bonus, you get to listen to Alex and Richard react to the tail end of the Czechia-Canada men’s hockey game.

Some recommended reading and listening from our hosts:

• At Hang Up and Listen over at Slate, Alex talked about the NBA’s tanking problem

• Richard graded every new FBS head coach hire for CBS Sports.

• Montana linebacker Solomon Tuliaupupu is prepping for his (probably) final season. Because injuries have derailed his previous years, this is his ninth season in college football.

If you’re reading this on Friday, be on the lookout for a new YouTube video narrated by Richard. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you here next week. Here’s our YouTube.

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where it’s never the offseason and we’ve just been granted a sixth year of eligibility pending further legal proceedings.

Goodbye to Bobby Hauck’s retirement, which lasted about five days. Goodbye to a few bowl games: Detroit’s bowl game most recently known as the GameAbove Sports Bowl and the LA Bowl. Not even Gronk was able to help it thrive.

And, of course: Goodbye to North Dakota State in the FCS.

The Bison announced that they are jumping from FCS to FBS and the Mountain West. Not sparing any time, their first FBS season will be this fall. North Dakota State has been the powerhouse in FCS, winning 10 championships since 2011. While they haven’t spent money like an FBS team, they seem to think they have the infrastructure to do so. If they’re right, they can position themselves as contenders in a Mountain West that’s finding its new identity after schools departed to the Pac-12.

So the timing of the news is surprising, but the move isn’t. As Richard said on this week’s podcast, a recent radio soundbite from Bison AD Matt Larsen gave us a hint that this would be happening. In a few years, maybe even this year, we could look back at the move and realize that North Dakota State had all the pieces in place to make this a successful move. We’ll think about them like James Madison. But that begs the question: Are there any other FCS schools who have a similar track record and structure in place to move to FBS in the coming years, or was this a situation where the Bison were outgrowing FCS? Here’s Alex:

Similar track record? Not really. There’s nothing like a program that just won 10 of 15 national titles. Aside from whether UC Davis or Sacramento State manages to get FBS membership, the schools that make me wonder the most are Montana and Montana State. The Brawl of the Wild, a rivalry we’ve covered in some detail, is probably the most marketable whole rivalry that any FBS league could import wholesale. (Think about the Sun Belt adding App State and Georgia Southern in the 2010s.) But, as we talked about this week, the money has to be right for everyone. No predictions from me on that front.

South Dakota State is natural to wonder about, even though I think there’s a reason (a financial one) they’re not moving up at the same time as their biggest rival. Tarleton State feels like a program that just wants to keep rising. And then there’s the chance that realignment sometime in the next few years makes it pointless to even distinguish between FCS and the Group of 5.

Congratulations to Richard!

Richard received the Media Award from the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches. It turns out that podcasting and reporting is indeed a portender or predictor of schematic success. That’s interesting.

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

• Alex and Richard sat down to talk about the Bison’s move to FBS. Is this a scenario where they outgrew their position in FCS? Were there murmurs of this happening in the background of the young offseason? Did they secure a bunch more money to make sure they’re set for the future. Yes!

• We know audio is your thing, but this episode is also available in its entirety on YouTube as well for those who prefer watching the podcast. The ending of this episode with Alex and Richard arguing about participation trophies needs to be seen.

• For subscribers, we have a special mailbag episode this morning. Alex and Richard answer questions like “What does success look like for James Franklin?” and “Does USC’s timeline match Lincoln Riley’s?”

Some recommended reading:

• The average football fan would probably tell you that this year’s Super Bowl was just OK, if not boring. But others will tell you it was a masterclass in defensive line play and, more importantly, punting. Which is why Alex argues over at Slate that the Super Bowl MVP should have actually gone to punter Michael Dickson instead. He wasn’t kidding!

• Alex also wrote about the A.I. Super Bowl commercials that got Sam Altman so Mad Online because it’s a sign that his company is losing its momentum.

• The FAA shut down El Paso’s airport over a suspected cartel drone that turned out to probably be a mylar balloon. Matt Brown at Extra Points asked staffers at UTEP how that type of event affects the school and teams traveling to and from campus.

Thanks for reading, take care of yourselves, and have fun … uh, not watching football. Both the college and NFL seasons really flew by. Spend the non-college football Saturdays with your people. Maybe pick up a fun project. Alex is working on his sourdough bread game. I am using this offseason to learn my way around a vertical offset charcoal smoker, so please send any tips or recommendations if you have any.

We’ll see you here next week.

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we know what time the Super Bowl is. It’s at 6:30pm E.T. on Sunday (Thank you for bearing with me for the shameless SEO play).

Even if you’re not a fan of the Patriots or Seahawks, chances are you’re rooting for a player or coach in the Super Bowl simply because he attended your favorite school. I’m sure there’s an Ohio State fan somewhere who is rooting for the Patriots, because that means TreVeyon Henderson can go from national champion in 2025 to Super Bowl winner in 2026. That would be an incredible accomplishment. I’m from Los Angeles, so it’s easy for me to root for USC Trojan Sam Darnold, despite him beating my beloved Rams in the NFC Championship.

(Someone living in North Carolina right now is hoping that Drake Maye leads the Patriots to the franchise’s seventh Super Bowl win. And that person is probably not Bill Belichick. Awkward times for Bill.)

But going back to Darnold, his journey to the Super Bowl is so surprising if you’ve only kept up with his professional journey. The Jets-to-Panthers-to-Vikings combination isn’t the most confidence-inspiring path to a Super Bowl (he also had a stint as 49ers QB). But if you remember how he played at USC, especially at the Rose Bowl to cap the 2016 season against Penn State, you’ll know he could play lights-out. His emergence then was still surprising considering he started the season as the backup. The 2016 Trojans were a happy story despite them not making the College Football Playoff.

I can let Alex explain this one further, in. But instead of him typing out his response as usual, we have a YouTube video for you instead. It’s the one at the very top of this newsletter, released for all of you before we list it on YouTube later tonight. This is part of our new strategy of putting a few extras on YouTube, as outlined in Alex and Richard’s State of SZD newsletter from last week.

Many Friday evenings at 6 p.m. ET, we’re aiming to publish a new YouTube video that’s separate from anything on the podcast feed. Some of them will be about people in the news like Curt Cignetti. Other videos will try to explain how college football works, from NIL to eligibility to recruiting. If you’re reading this, chances are you already know how the sport generally operates but it’s important to take a step back and examine how we got here. Give this a watch and send us some feedback, so we can make more kinds of videos that you enjoy.

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

● Godfrey paid a visit to open up the time capsule from the beginning of the ‘25 season. The season was as unpredictable as ever, so you’re gonna get a laugh at some of the predictions. But one thing that Godfrey (sort of) correctly guessed was the rise of North Texas’ quarterback. The only problem is that he didn’t write down Drew Mestemaker’s name. Still, we commend the process and are giving him the W on that anyway.

● Matt Brown joined Alex and Richard for the SZD-Extra Poins Sports Business Hour to talk about how Rutgers got itself into a half a billion (yes, really) financial hole since joining the Big Ten and why the imminent jersey sponsors won’t be fun. We’re going to get banks and insurance companies. A lot of money will be spent on these, even at smaller programs like ULM.

Our hosts also write a lot, including about non-CFB subjects

● Gus Malzahn retired after 35 years in the game. For CBS Sports, Richard explained all the ways he innovated offenses at his various stops.

● At Hang Up and Listen, Alex talked about his favorite Olympics events now that the Winter games are officially underway.

● Speaking of the Olympics, you should subscribe to Rodger Sherman’s Sports! Newsletter. He dropped his Winter Olympics primer and I already feel smarter reading it. If you’re even at least a bit online, you know that Rodger and the Olympics are a perfect combination.

Take care of yourselves, and enjoy the last NFL game of the season.

We try to live up to that trust in a lot of ways. Number one is that we take your feedback seriously. For the past four or five years, we’ve run nearly annual audience surveys, seeking to get a sense of what you’re looking for from us. We take those results seriously, too. They have helped us pick our editorial direction (for example, doing more history podcasts after being told you all love CFB history). They have helped us pick advertising partners, like the ones you’ve seen on the show for four, five, or six years at a time. They’ve helped us figure out which advertisers you don’t want, which has also been important. In fact, we passed on an opportunity just this week because we felt confident it was not right for us, or for you.

We also try to keep your trust by building a show that works for you. The word “independent” is overused in the media, as we’re all dependent on someone, and we are dependent on you. The only group that we’re really accountable to is our audience, especially our paying subscribers. We’re very lucky to have a few great corporate partners, but our business is primarily subscription-driven.

That means two things: One, we try to make a show you will love. Two, we feel some obligation to keep you looped on how things are going. We’ve admired how outlets like Defector and Extra Points have offered annual reports on the state of their business. So, here goes ours.

How Everything’s Going: The Summary

We are happy to report that Split Zone Duo is in good health. The two of us met in person in January and left feeling optimistic about the next year. A few reasons why:

• At the moment, Split Zone Duo has 4,000 paying subscribers, give or take a few depending on the day. These generous, wise, and savvy consumers get roughly twice as many podcasts from us as everyone else. Subscribe here. This doesn’t give you equity in Split Zone Duo LLC, but you are stakeholders in our success. We could not do this without you

• Subscriber revenue was down 5 percent in 2025. A few things were happening here. Number one, our excellent co-founder and co-host emeritus Steven Godfrey stepped away from full-time SZD duties in January 2025. He’s still with us on a regular basis (at least monthly, often more frequent), but drawing down the full-time cast of the show by one-third clearly affected growth. You may have also heard that 2025 was a tough year for subscription businesses in general, as the state of the economy encouraged people to cut spending where they could. We didn’t know what would happen over the course of the year, but we’re very happy and grateful that the vast majority of subscribers have stuck around, and plenty of new ones have joined up.

• Fortunately, we made up that shortfall with some additional sponsorship revenue. This year, we added Dad Water (discount link here) as another Indiana-based sponsor. We also ran a campaign for Modelo, a beer you have probably heard of. Sponsorships are less than half of our revenue, but they really help. We’ve now spent six years with Homefield, the best collegiate apparel company in the business. We’ve now spent four years with Nokian Tyres, inventor of the winter tire. These have been reciprocally great partnerships, and not just because we’ve scored some free hoodies and tires. Our audience has really bought in, which has allowed our champions at these companies to continue to keep us involved with their marketing. (Special thanks to Connor Hitchcock, Josh Johns, Wes Boling, Chris Golski, and everyone else who’s helped us make a business out of this.) We’ve succeeded with brand partners not by having the biggest scale in the world but by having a very loyal audience that supports partners of the show. So thanks to all of you, too, especially if you’ve bought something or posted on social media about our partners.

• Overall, the SZD audience continues to grow. Podcast metrics are a hilarious, disorganized black hole, but our show usually generates 15,000 to 20,000 downloads per free episode, not counting anything on YouTube. We grew downloads by a few percentage points in 2025. We are especially proud that we (and this includes our dear Godfrey, and all of you) have built this community with zero institutional support behind us. We are not part of a media conglomerate. Until this past football season, our combined advertising budget in the entire history of the show was approximately $500. This community has grown by word of mouth, and we’ll never take that for granted.

If you’re interested in partnering with the show, by the way, email sales@splitzoneduo.com.

Our Big Goals for 2026

We want to do a few things this year:

• Make the podcast better. This is our goal every year. We are well positioned to do it in 2026, both with our own big pile of ideas and a lovely cast of outside voices. We’ve had a great time podcasting with the likes of Rodger Sherman, Matt Brown, host emeritus Godfrey, and more. We also will have the help of social media producer Hector Diaz and audio engineer Anthony Vito, who are going on a half-decade with us. We are planning some longer-lead podcast ideas that we are excited to get out into the world.

• Grow the audience. Let us explain this one, though, because we know it’s obvious. Every year, some people will stop listening to the show. The goal is to bring in more new people—not because we’re trying to get bought by some multinational company, but so we can keep making this our jobs, paying talented people to help us, and making a show that is for the audience instead of any specific sponsor. We’re on all of the major social platforms. The one that’s born the most fruit of late is YouTube, where we had 5,000 subscribers last year and now have about 27,000. Many of those people will not become regular podcast listeners to the traditional audio feeds, but some will, and they’ll help keep our ecosystem healthy. Others will just stay on YouTube, and we’ll try to give them videos they enjoy, like this one about Curt Cignetti. The results have been good.

• Try a weird thing or two. We have a few ideas in the hopper right now that could enrich your time with us, help us find new listeners, let us put more back into the podcast, or all of the above. Stay tuned.

We face challenges every year. The Balkanization of the internet is a big one, as we know there are now infinite publications and streaming services asking for your time and subscription dollars. The key aim for 2026 will be making sure this show is great enough to keep earning your time and money. Ideally, we’d also sleep more this year than we did last year.

How to Support This Podcast, if You Want!

There are many options:

1. Subscribe. We also offer gifts and group discounts. If you just feel like supporting this show at a higher level because you believe in what we’re doing, we also have a “Founding Member” tier where you can name your amount.

2. Tell a friend about the show! Word of mouth is real. Existing subscribers can also refer people here and earn subscription rewards for doing so.

3. Follow the show on your preferred social media platform. Linking here to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Bluesky, and X.

4. Leave an Apple Podcasts or Spotify review.

5. Just listen to an episode. That’s always great!

6. Join our free email list here.

Thank you for being a part of what we do. We do not take it for granted how unusual it is to have stable media gigs in 2026, let alone stable media gigs talking about college football with, and to, people we love. It’s a great gift, and we will spend this year working to pay it back with a show you appreciate.

Thank you, Lee,

Alex Kirshner
Richard Johnson

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we have one game left of the season.

It feels just like yesterday that the Penn State Nittany Lions were one of the favorites to head to Miami with the help of head coach James Franklin. This was finally going to be their year after years of being the also-ran of the Big Ten. Remember when Bill Belichick and North Carolina looked unstoppable after that one scripted drive? That unprecedented hype culminated in Chapel Hill with a suite featuring the likes of Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor, and Randy Moss. Then TCU stepped onto the field.

Of course, the storylines at the start of the season aren’t the same ones we’re looking at now and that’s what’s beautiful about this sport. The Mario Cristobal clock management jokes are at an all-time low with the Hurricanes now in the National Championship. Instead, we’re raving about the chunk plays from Malachi Toney and the one-two defensive punch of Rueben Bain and Akheem Mesidor.

Everyone was also wondering “Who is this season’s Indiana?” It turns out, it was Indiana. And still, I don’t think many would have predicted a perfect regular season, especially in the way they achieved that with casual 50, 60, and even 70-point wins. Curt Cignetti has perfectly balanced both the sports Cinderella story with one of a runaway train set for destruction. This has been Indiana’s season and we’re just living in it.

The Ducks were eliminated by the Hoosiers in the previous round and the end of their run naturally led to pondering about Dante Moore’s future. Then we got word that Dylan Raiola would transfer from Nebraska to Oregon, which should have told everyone at home that Moore is on his way to the NFL. But that did not happen. Moore instead opted to return for another college season and now Oregon has both him and Raiola on the roster. That’s presumably a lot of money to have on two quarterbacks in one season, so what happened? I asked Alex for his thoughts:

This is really the ultimate rich program luxury in 2026. Every power conference team can and will spend a few million bucks on a starting QB and six figures on the rest of the QB room. What did Dylan Raiola cost Oregon for this year? I don’t know, but I know that he’s either one of the most expensive backups in the country OR he’s so enamored with Oregon’s recent spate of QB development that he doesn’t mind passing up on millions of dollars just so that he can get one year as Oregon’s starter in 2027. (Given that the coordinator who’s overseen the Oregon development of Bo Nix, Dillon Gabriel, and Dante Moore just left to be Kentucky’s head coach, I’d guess it’s the former or a mixture. But again, just a guess.) What’s certain is that there aren’t more than four or five programs in the sport that get to stockpile QB talent in this manner. This is CFB’s version of pretty privilege.

Here’s what the SZD crew dropped into your podcast feeds this week:

● Rodger Sherman joined Alex for a subscriber only episode on how to find the next Curt Cignetti. They analyzed the actual Curt Cignetti and his path to becoming Indiana’s head coach. Some of his path follows the usual college football coaching ladder, but the detours along the way seem to have shaped his recruiting immensely.

● The Tasting Menu dropped on a Thursday this week. Alex and Richard break down the game from both offenses and identify their one major weakness. For Miami, it’s probably a near guaranteed turnover from Carson Beck. For Indiana, it’s … uh, I got nothing. Also, lots of talk about the circumstances of this matchup.

● Scheme School! It’s been a minute since Richard sat down with a guest to talk Xs and Os. He had Michael Felder on to talk about how Miami’s edge rush can mess with Fernando Mendoza and Indiana.

Our hosts also write a lot, including about non-CFB subjects

● Over at Slate, Alex wrote about that the once up and coming LIV Golf is struggling. Will it stay alive with its little fanfare despite an endless amount of money?

● At CBS Sports, Richard listed the various three-star and fifth-year players at Indiana who have helped build this juggernaut.

Thanks for reading, take care of yourselves, and enjoy the National Championship on Monday. For next week’s newsletter, Alex and Richard are tagging in to talk about SZD plans for the offseason and beyond.

Happy new year, and thanks for being part of Split Zone Duo. Alex and Richard here to give you some year-opening notes and fulfill a promise we made on the show a few months ago.

Last year, SZD released 168 episodes, with about half going out to the full audience and half reserved for our paid subscribers. (If that’s not you, we’d love for you to check out the subscription product.) In this newsletter, we’re highlighting a handful of our favorite evergreen episodes (i.e. not ones tied to a specific week of college football). We’ve also put together a guide to our own favorite podcasts, and we invite all subscribers to share more of their favorites in the comments. If you like our podcast, our guess is that you might also like the shows we’ll share with you at the bottom of this mailing.

Our favorite SZD episodes of 2025

• “Anatomy of a Coaching Carousel: 2000.” Richard, Alex, and host emeritus Steven Godfrey did a retrospective on the coaching cycle that brought Pete Carroll to USC, Jim Tressel to Ohio State, Gary Patterson to TCU, and … a lot of hires that didn’t go nearly that well.

• “Dead Letters: Miami University.” We added a fresh installment to a long-running series in which Alex investigates why a once-great college football program hit the rocks. The story of Miami is also the story of the Mid-American Conference, but with some localized twists.

• “When the Supreme Court Imploded College Football,” a narrative, one-episode show featuring legal reporter (and Cal football diehard) Jay Willis, who went deep with Alex on the 1984 Supreme Court decision that paved the way for the rest of CFB history.

• “Inside the Brawl of the Wild with Kevin Van Valkenburg.” One of the best storytellers in media happens to be a friend of the show and a former Montana football player. He joined us to talk about the provincialism and culture clashes behind the Montana vs. Montana State rivalry.

• “Overtime: What’s It Take to be a Sideline Reporter?” Wanna hear the ins and outs of what it takes to do a truly unique college football television job? Richard did it earlier this year when he was on the mic for the Air Force-UConn game in November. It’s a stream of consciousness inside look at how the sausage of what you see on the screen gets made leading up to and including Saturday.

• “How UMass, the Worst Team in College Football, Got Like This.” Yes, anybody can point and laugh at a truly bad football team but Alex and Rodger wanted to go deeper and dig into why this year’s Minutemen were truly wretched and what exactly that means for the future of the program.

• “Picking the Defining Team of Every Decade of College Football.” Part of the beauty of the sport is how it has weaved itself into the fabric of the country going all the way back to the 19th century. This isn’t about who is necessarily the best team from each decade, but it is about looking back and saying you cannot tell the story of that decade without that team.

• “Why Do You Love College Football?”A simple question with a not-so-simple answer. Consider this our love letter to the game in audio doc format with submissions from our wonderful subscribers. We’re all here because this sport gets us going for some similar and different reasons. There is nothing like it, and we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t truly love it.

Richard’s podcasts

• The Football Ramble: I won’t bore you with the multiple Tottenham Hotspur podcasts I listen to on a weekly basis, but consider this like if the Fullcast and us were on the same show and talked about the other football. The Football Ramble and its sister show On The Continent cover the ins and outs of the global game from English and European sensibilities. The Ramble’s home base is the Premier League, and they talk about the game with a chemistry and a love of the game that keeps it in my weekly rotation.

• Cube Show: I can honestly say the person who makes me smartest about college football is Cole Cubelic. Nobody in the media sphere gets as granular into the game as Cubelic does and he does it from the perspective of a lineman. It’s SEC-focused, because that’s where he lives and what he does for work as a sideline reporter and personality for the SEC Network. Cole has a no-nonsense style of analysis and communication, and his knowledge is unmatched.

• The Varsity: I cannot for the life of me understand why regular fans are into the machinations of sports media, but if you are, give John Ourand’s show a listen. For me, it’s essentially my trade publication working in this business especially on the TV side (Ourand cut his teeth covering the cable industry). He has interesting insights, interviews with power players, and his finger on the pulse of what’s happening on the corporate side that gives me a better understanding of sports business beyond college football.

• Golfer’s Journal / No Laying Up / ShotgunStart / The Fried Egg. I am healthily obsessed with golf (seriously, my therapist actually told me it’s good for me to have it as an outlet, so I can term it like this). It is the vast majority of what I think about when I’m not focusing on CFB, and I have a deep passion for the game. These shows all fuel that.

  • Alex and I have both done work for The Golfer’s Journal, and yours truly has won one of their events (light flex). Renowned golf writer Tom Coyne does a great job interviewing interesting people in the game. Their glossy magazine is seriously a quarterly work of art that I look forward to every time it hits my mailbox.

  • No Laying Up is fun week-in, week-out analysis of the PGA Tour that — if you’re like me, and depraved enough to actually watch the Friday rounds of the Mexico Open — you’ll really dig. Shoutout to Tron for being a Jags fan. Shotgun Start is in a similar mold and feels like if SZD did golf with the interplay between Andy and Brendan (and now KVV, PJ, and Joseph!). There is nothing like the SGS Year In Review series in sports podcasting that I’ve come across.

  • The Fried Egg is the complement to SGS. It goes deep on course architecture and the ins and outs that create the courses we play on. Andy’s understanding of what makes a golf course good has evolved how I think about the game, and it’s a must-listen.

Alex’s podcasts

• Odd Lots from Bloomberg: A finance show that often isn’t about finance but uses it as an entry point to tell interesting stories I hadn’t thought about before. Here’s a great episode about a middleman company that makes a bunch of chain restaurants’ menus taste the same. I was very surprised when this show informed me which casual sitdown chain is America’s biggest by sales. I bet you won’t get it on your first try, either. (A strong hint is enclosed at the bottom of this email.)

• Power Lines from Status, a media newsletter led by Oliver Darcy. I like to know what’s happening in the wide world of media (especially podcasts, but also TV, movies, etc.) and this show is the best media crit out there, I think. I also really enjoy The Town from The Ringer and Puck, which is a bit more shop-talky in its tone but is always an informative listen.

• Blowback, a reported narrative podcast that tackles American foreign policy shenanigans and catastrophes. I will finish a season and think, “Damn, [insert war here] was an even worse idea than I thought.”

• Effectively Wild from FanGraphs and Rates & Barrels from The Athletic. I love baseball and love how these two shows talk baseball. They make time for every team — something that appeals to me for reasons that I hope are obvious, as both a Pirates fan and Split Zone Duo host. They’re smart without being condescending. I listen whenever I can.

• Hang Up and Listen from Slate. A bit of self-promotion here! I host this show on Mondays with panelists Ben Lindbergh (of Effectively Wild, as it happens) and Lindsay Gibbs (of CBS Sports). We cover three-ish sports stories per week, often ones that intersect with politics or tech. If you want to hear me talk about non-CFB sports, Hang Up is a great place to find me.

• The Shutdown Fullcast. I won’t try to explain this one.

If you haven’t given these a shot, we think you’ll like them! Thanks for supporting what we do here, and we’ll see you soon.

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we hate to see a breakup in the middle of the holidays. Yes, we’re looking at you, USC and Notre Dame.

First, a few thoughts on Michigan and Kyle Whittingham from Alex

I’ll turn this over to Hector in a moment. But first, because reports are emerging that Michigan is very likely to hire Kyle Whittingham as head coach on Friday, I’ll just share a few quick-take thoughts on the likely new Wolverines boss.

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• If you are like me and have been critical of Michigan’s seemingly lousy athletic department culture, then Whittingham makes a lot of sense. We never really know without being in the building, but Whittingham’s track record suggests he’s a serious leader who maintains a high standard for how people inside his program should act. He represents a clean break from the Jim Harbaugh era. It was fun! It’s also over now.

• Whittingham is 66. Without going all the way down the rabbit hole here, I’m sure he’s one of the oldest coaches ever to take a job this good. I wouldn’t worry about age that much, though. Whittingham could still kick the ass of a significant number of his players and coaches. Most importantly, he strikes me as an adaptable guy who coaches the roster he has, not the one he thought was appropriate 20 years ago. For example, Utah’s designed QB runs more than doubled when Devon Dampier and Byrd Ficklin showed up on the 2025 roster.

• The big question will be the recruiting. Part of why I felt so confident before this season that Whittingham would be out at Utah after the year was that significant pressure had built up in the fanbase over the Utes falling behind BYU in recruiting. How much of that was on Whittingham? I don’t think anyone can say. Not close to all of it, but maybe not none of it, either. How does that translate to a school that has the Michigan money cannon at its disposal? I’d imagine Michigan decision-makers thought about that. The front-office setup is going to be important.

• Pay attention to whose name is on the press release announcing the hire, as well as who’s sitting at the podium when Whittingham is introduced. Will the not-yet-fired Warde Manuel be among those people?

We’ll record a podcast about Whittingham and Michigan in the near future. Now is a great time to become a paid subscriber. I’ll turn it over to Hector next.

Let’s talk about December CFB and gratitude

Bowl season is here and no matter what your opinion is on the state of bowls in the College Football Playoff era, you’re probably watching a few of them. I personally took a chunk out of my family time to watch Ohio vs. UNLV in the Frisco Bowl. Now, we’ll be the first to tell you that bowl wins only matter when you want them to matter. But what always counts is that bowls serve as a culmination and a moment to show gratitude for what happened this year. And we’re taking that same ethos for this week’s newsletter.

Thank you for checking your inbox every Friday and spending a few minutes with us. We’re working hard to fill your podcast feeds with both free and subscriber-only episodes. It takes a lot of research to pull that off, and Richard and Alex are able to do that 52 weeks out of the year. I want to make sure they get their flowers for all the hard work they put into learning and synthesizing all the goings on in college football. A big shoutout to audio producer Anthony Vito for being ready to produce the latest episode, especially when the gang records emergency episodes late into the night.

(Editor’s note: Also shoutout to Hector, whose newsletters and social media work have been a huge part of our work here.)

Seeing the comments on this newsletter personally makes me happy every week. This newsletter is part of some different home run swings we’ve tried in 2025. The YouTube exclusives on Nebraska and the MAC are part of that, and the CFP team previews are, too. And every step of the way, you’ve shown support on social and in the comments of the videos. So thank you all very much.

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

• Do bowl games still carry the weight and importance as the bowl games of yesteryear? Is our personal nostalgia making us more fond of their previous iterations? Rodger Sherman joined Alex to talk about what’s missing from bowl games and how we can improve them.

• Holiday Q&A! Richard and Alex answered questions from paid subscribers. The questions range from the unceremonious end of the Notre Dame-USC rivalry to which side of Los Angeles Alex prefers. (For the record, he answered the Eastside, which is correct.) We also talk about some 2026 goals that we have for Split Zone Duo LLC.

Thanks for reading, happy holidays, and happy new year. The next time we’ll hit your inbox, it’ll be 2026, and we’ll know how the Rose Bowl went. Enjoy the rest of the games while we’re still in the middle of the Playoff!

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where we’ve had our tiebreaker rules firmly established since day one.

Duke’s win over Virginia in the ACC Championship has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving. Not only did the Blue Devils’ victory open the door for a second Group of 5 team to make the Playoff, but now the ACC has changed its scheduling and vows to fix its tiebreaker scenario to prevent any of this college football chaos from happening again. The operative word here is should, because the new ACC schedule requires at least a second reading to get it all right.

The ACC plan is to have a nine-game conference schedule soon. Some of that will happen next year, but everyone should have nine games by 2027 (kind of, stay with me here). 2026 will be a transitional year of sorts because some teams will have eight conference games while others will immediately move to the nine-conference game schedule. In 2027, everything should be in order and everyone will have the same number of conference games — with the exception of one school a year, because the conference has an odd number of teams at 17. That team will rotate every season.

If there was only an independent team somewhere that would join the ACC to even out this conference at 18 to finally fix this problem. Fine, I’ll spell it out: come on down, UConn Huskies!

But in all seriousness, this does feel like a band-aid solution to the larger problems facing the ACC. So, what’s the long term solution to fix this? I asked Richard what he makes of it all:

Everything about the ACC seems slapdashed together with duct tape and spittle. The schedule is yet another example. Obviously, even after they get through this bridge period, not every team will be able to play a full nine-game conference schedule. It’s utterly ridiculous. It is obviously a negative byproduct of the super conference movement.

The other thing tucked in here is that the ACC is going to fix their tiebreaker thing. We will see what that ends up being, but at least they say they’re going to fix it, so we’ll see. But at the end of the day, there’s no way for schedule equity to actually happen in today’s day and age with the super conferences. I just cannot wait to see the dumb way this bites the ACC in the ass in the future.

Let’s preview some Playoff games:

Have you gotten up to speed on the Playoff teams and how they got here? You should have some fun mini episodes reviewing every team’s regular season and examining whether they have a legitimate shot at hosting the National Championship in Miami. If you want the video version of these, check out our YouTube channel, where we wrapped them up in a nice playlist just for you:

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

• Did you know the Montana-Montana State rivalry game isn’t really referred to as the “Brawl of the Wild?,” and that name is really more of a branding thing? I didn’t know that until I listened to our episode with guest and former Griz linebacker Kevin Van Valkenburg.

• We have an extra hefty Tasting Menu this week in honor of the first round of the College Football Playoff.

• Host emeritus Godfrey stops by for a subscriber-only episode about coaching superlatives. Which coach will definitely succeed and which one will definitely not?

Elsewhere in college football:

• Brandon Marcello at CBS Sports chronicled Jon Sumrall’s journey as he tries to balance out Tulane’s present and Florida’s future. He’s dual wielding cell phones and running on very little sleep. Don’t get me wrong: it would be great to have Tulane defeat Ole Miss on Saturday but Sumrall getting an adequate amount of sleep for the first time in weeks would also be a good consolation.

• I know there are plenty of college football fans who are also into wrestling, so I bet you would enjoy Alex talking with David Shoemaker about John Cena’s legacy after his final match. If you’re not into wrestling, you should still listen because the rest of the episode also includes talk about what Michigan should do after firing Sherrone Moore.

• Speaking of Michigan, Richard is reporting that Michigan is considering elevating interim coach Biff Poggi to the permanent head coach role. That has its own risks, given how everything in Ann Arbor’s leadership seems to currently be in the air given the developing situation.

• If you’re in a giving mood this holiday season, the Sickos Committee is doing a food drive benefiting folks in State College, PA.

Bowl season is here, and Alabama-Oklahoma is only hours away, deepening on when you are reading this. Have fun watching the games, and we’ll talk to you Sunday (or maybe even very late Saturday, depending on how the day goes).

Quick note off the top for subscribers! A few people have told us that their subscriber episodes have not been populating in their feeds. A lot of folks’ annual subscriptions renewed in the past two weeks. If you’ve had issues, there’s a good chance it’s because you changed credit cards or had a card decline. If that’s you, you can fix it in your settings under Subscriptions.

Good afternoon. Alex here, with a mini-column on the week’s big news and a few updates and roundups of what we’ve been up to at Split Zone Duo.

Subscribers got our Michigan emergency episode on Thursday night. Unlike a lot of coach carousel episodes that we call “emergency” shows, this one really did come as a stunner. I appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten on that show, especially from Michigan fans who are appalled at this course of events.

“The next head coach at Michigan cannot even be able to spell ‘Jim Harbaugh,’” Richard told me on that episode. I’ve thought about that and also this line by one of the internet’s O.G. Michigan bloggers, Ace Anbender, quoting me over on Bluesky: “umich’s needed reckoning has nothing to do with decoding some football signals. it’s shocking that sherrone moore was fired and then arrested. it’s not *surprising* that a umich authority figure used their position of power to facilitate misconduct. i’m doing my best to choose my words carefully.”

I think these points get to the crux of the matter at Michigan. The sign-stealing story just does not matter here, except insofar as it’s part of Moore’s path to the head coaching job in the first place. (By replacing Harbaugh so well during his 2023 suspensions, and by Harbaugh having extra incentive to get out of college football after that season, Moore took the big chair.) But there’s been so much other wrongdoing by people that athletic director Warde Manuel either hired or empowered. Is Manuel the kind of guy to fix whatever might be broken? His track record doesn’t point in that direction, and neither does the way he refused to break even slightly with Bo Schembechler’s legacy over the past few years. (This should not have been a hard call, and yet.)

I put some more Michigan thoughts into a column on all of this at Slate:

There’s no direct cause and effect between one football coach’s destructive decision-making and an athletic department and school’s refusal to reckon with decades-old crimes. But leadership either sets a culture where misconduct by powerful people is unacceptable from jump, or it doesn’t. There is no way to argue that Manuel has set that culture at Michigan, no matter what else we learn about Moore’s firing. One other detail came to light on Thursday: “Michigan had been alerted prior to Wednesday that Sherrone Moore was dealing with mental health issues yet Warde Manuel fired him alone with no HR rep and no security present,” Nicole Auerbach reported. Later that day, Moore was in police custody.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. In the meantime, I wish you a chill weekend and appreciate you listening to our podcasts and reading us all over the internet.

Introducing the SZD 2025 College Football Playoff Preview, presented by Modelo

“Alex, what are all of these 10-minute episodes showing up in my podcast feed? What blessed me with such a bounty of new podcasts??”

So glad you asked. This year, we decided to run a dozen small team preview episodes on all of the teams in the Playoff. These will go up roughly once a day until the Playoff begins, and Richard and I thought they were a fun way to sum up how we’re feeling about all of the teams before toe meets leather. I am excited to discuss a particular class at UGA when we get to the Dawgs. I am also pumped to roll out an analogy for Curt Cignetti that made Richard smirk for 10 seconds as he searched unsuccessfully for a way to argue against me.

More from us this week

• With Godfrey, we did a bunch of coach carousel talk, non-Michigan variety

• With Rodger, we did a deeper dive into the causes of college football’s late-year calendar logjam. Let’s see if we can fix this, shall we?

I’m realizing as I list out all of these episodes that we are doing a whole lot of podcasts right now. We appreciate you being along for the ride.

Split Zone Duo social fun of the week

We don’t really do trends but could not resist this one:

@splitzoneduo"Thank you, Lee"

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Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, where Penn State is probably about to hire a coach, and it’s probably going to be Matt Campbell. But stay tuned.

Penn State’s search has taken more than 50 days. Why? Because a lot of head coaches have used the vacancy to secure long-term extensions with their current schools. Were they genuinely interested in the situation at Happy Valley? You wouldn’t have the conversation without being somewhat serious about it. Is it also apparent that Penn State is mostly being used for leverage? Yes.

But where does that leave Penn State? In earlier episodes, the crew mentioned that the Nittany Lions wanted to be early to the market. You tell the rest of college football that you’re ready to talk to everyone and anyone to make sure you lay out as many scenarios to put yourself in the best position for the future. That works best when a move is made before all the candidates get snatched up by other schools. And in Penn State’s case, the options have narrowed.

If the search ends imminently with Campbell in the job, that will be a solid outcome. But the time delay has already been costly, with Penn State a complete non-factor in the early signing period for high school recruits.

That doesn’t bode well for the Nittany Lions now or four years from now. So I asked Richard on Thursday: What’s been the driving force behind Penn State being taken seriously enough to get a bunch of other coaches extensions, but not enough to have someone commit to the vacant role?

There’s some accuracy and there’s some inaccuracy to that. It’s kind of how all rectangles are squares, but not all squares are rectangles (or however the metaphor goes). Curt Cignettti got an extension off of Penn State. Matt Rhule got an extension off of Penn State. Mike Elko got an extension off Penn State. That’s all fair to say.

Eli Drinkwitz got an extension off Penn State, Florida, and LSU. There was more interest than just Missouri. Brent Key got an extension at Georgia Tech. That’s one where there were overlapping interests as well.

Kalani Sitake is obviously the most recent one, but that was not a pure leverage play. There were people on both sides of this that thought he was gone for Penn State. This wasn’t just fake confidence. I think Sitake has pulled some leverage plays in the past in recent years, most recently last year at UCF.

Clark Lea is also an overlapping deal, where he was going to get interest from an Auburn, Florida, etc. So some of these coaches are definitely getting extensions directly off of Penn State, which funny enough, has been open since October 12.

In the meantime, we have so many good conference championship games to watch. I’m of course talking about the ACC Championship between Virginia and five-loss Duke. Much like your hosts, I’m also rooting for the Blue Devils for maximum chaos as the College Football Playoff committee has to make some decisions that I’m sure people won’t be angry at.

Here’s what the SZD crew dropped into your podcast feeds this week:

• Congratulations to all of you who weathered through the three day excursion of #LaneWatch that saw the former Ole Miss head coach go to LSU. Alex and Richard broke down that move as well as all the other hires that happened on Sunday.

• Richard recorded a special I-Formation episode about the coaching cycle, peeling back the curtain and explaining what really goes down in a search behind the scenes. It’s a great listen about all the work that goes into connecting the smoke to the fire of coach rumors.

• Duke fan and writer Shaker Samman joined the Main Course presented by Modelo to talk about the ACC championship game. The episode is also on our YouTube if you want to check it out there. (Also we just hit 10k subscribers over there. Come join the party)

Our hosts also write a lot, including about non-CFB subjects

• The closest Penn State got to hiring a coach this week was with BYU’s Kalani Sitake. But Sitake decided to stay in Utah, after agreeing with a new extension. Over at CBS Sports, Richard gave us the timeline of how an influx of money from BYU donors convinced Sitake to stay with the Cougars.

• You already know this because you subscribe to this newsletter and therefore know ball, but Louisiana governor Jeff Landry has a lot of pull at LSU. Alex wrote an explainer about Landry’s cynicism in the hiring of Lane Kiffin, over at Slate.

• One last Lane thing, I promise: Rodger Sherman wrote about how exhausting the whole Kiffin ordeal was over at Sports! He was so over it that he published this before an actual decision was made.

See you at the SZD/Nokian Tyres Watch Party this Saturday!

If you’re in New York, hang out with Alex and Richard tomorrow for a Championship Saturday at Mason Jar in Manhattan at noon.

Entry is free. RSVP here.

SZD Social Fun of the Week

Posting this in here for posterity: Richard is confident that Miami will be ranked ahead of Notre Dame no matter what. That may or may not lead to the Fighting Irish being out of the College Football Playoff, depending on the scenario, but he’s pretty sure that the order will not change. Watch it and be amazed as Alex was after hearing that.

@splitzoneduo"Miami is going to be ahead of Notre Dame" - @RJ_CFB

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This has been a fun season. Enjoy Championship Saturday!

Welcome to the College Football Newsletter, which, this week, is just me sharing the mac-n-cheese recipe that I discussed on this week’s CFB Tasting Menu.

It’s not bragging when you’re right, so I’ll just tell you: I make a 99th-percentile mac-n-cheese. Are there better out there? I’m sure. But I’m playing in the major leagues with this dish. Other than the times when I’ve nailed a steak on a charcoal grill, I’ve never made anything that elicits the kind of response this mac-n-cheese gets every time. And the beauty of this recipe is that — despite being a two-time attendee of some cooking classes my wife got me for Christmas one year — I am nothing special in the kitchen. You, too, can make this mac-n-cheese, and if you do, you will teleport your guests to a new dimension.

My mac-n-cheese is an iteration of a recipe I first saw during COVID: Southern Macaroni and Cheese in New York Times Cooking. What I loved about this particular mac-n-cheese was how substantial it felt. Mac-n-cheese is usually a side, and that’s fine. It doesn’t need to be the star player on the team, but it should feel like an event rather than window dressing.

Over the years, I’ve made a series of adjustments to give this recipe even more heft and flavor. I’ve swapped out elbow noodles for the spiraling cavatappi, providing more surface area for the cheese to interact with the noodles. I’ve upped the eggs from two to three, providing density to act as a foundation for the gooey cheese all around it. I’ve added mozzarella on top, because it broils well at the end and provides a crispy finish. And most critically, I’ve added cinnamon, a sweet complement that imbues the right aftertaste for a savory dish.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound cavatappi noodles (or another spiraling noodle, or even elbows if you aren’t a fan of that shape)

• 2 bags extra-sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (regular sharp cheddar is fine too)

• 2 bags Colby Jack or Mexican blend cheese, shredded

• 1 bag mozzarella cheese, shredded

• 3 eggs, beaten

• 2 cups whole milk

• ½ stick butter, melted (but you can scale this depending on preference)

• Salt to your heart’s content

• Cinnamon (at least a few sprinkles, but don’t be a cheapskate about it)

• A few bread crumbs

Instructions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F and get out a 9x13 baking pan.

2. Start boiling some water in a pot.

3. In a large mixing bowl, combine the melted butter, milk, the beaten eggs, 1.5 bags of extra-sharp cheddar, half a bag of Colby Jack, a few shakes of salt, and a few sprinkles of cinnamon. A whisk or a big spoon will do the job.

4. Your pot is boiling. Put the cavatappi noodles in the pot, and keep them there for a few minutes, until they’re almost soft but not quite. (They’ll cook more in the oven.)

5. Drain the noodles and rinse them with cold water to stop the cooking.

6. Put the noodles in the mixing bowl with your wet ingredients.

7. Put a little more cinnamon in your noodle-and-cheese mixture. Mix.

8. Spread the first half of the noodle-and-cheese mixture into your baking pan.

9. Take the rest of the Colby Jack and extra-sharp cheddar and layer it evenly atop that first half of your mixture.

10. Add the rest of the noodle mixture on top of that Colby Jack.

11. Cover the pan with foil and bake for 20 minutes.

12. Remove the foil, spread the mozzarella across the top, and switch to broil. Let it go until the top crisps up and browns.

13. Consider adding a few bread crumbs near the end of the broiling process for extra crispiness. Beware that these guys will burn quickly, and when they start to do that, you’re done. It’s optional but a nice addition.

Let it sit for a few minutes if you want. Or don’t! The mac-n-cheese will be a little bit drippier and messier if you serve it right away. I’m not a food photographer, but here’s a rough idea of what it will look like at the end:

I encourage you to iterate on this recipe, as I have. Just remember two things:

1. Don’t forget the cinnamon, and

2. Nobody ever complained about mac-n-cheese having too much cheese.

I now turn it over to Hector with some notes and links. Happy Thanksgiving.

Here’s what the SZD crew dropped into your podcast feeds this week:

• The regular season is coming to a close, and unfortunately, some coaches may be coaching their last games at their current jobs. That of course won’t be their decision, unless you’re Lane Kiffin who is set to make an announcement about his future at Ole Miss after the Egg Bowl. Rodger Sherman joined Alex and Richard to talk about which teams will be looking to upgrade over the offseason and which coaches are the frontrunners for those jobs.

• This week’s Tasting Menu is as big as a Thanksgiving feast. And for the first time this season, Alex and Richard disagree on the Home Dog of the Week.

• Bill Landis of Bill and Doug on Ohio State Football joined the Main Course presented by Modelo to break down The Game. Will Ryan Day get payback on Michigan for somehow spoiling the 2024 championship season? Probably. Will that Ohio State loss be less funny? Absolutely not. For anyone keeping score at home, Bill, Richard, and Alex are all anticipating a Buckeyes win.

Our hosts also write a lot, including about non-CFB subjects

• Some of you might be traveling as you’re reading this. We hope your flight is on time and everyone is accommodating and friendly. Can we interest you in a Slate article by Alex on the incredible new Pittsburgh airport while you wait for your group to board?

All MAC, no cheese

On Tuesday, we dropped a new YouTube exclusive on the Mid-American Conference. We love MACtion but its the conference’s relative decline is part of the larger story about the new college football. Richard narrates this one. Enjoy!