College Football's Growing Pains | A Summer Story of Triumph

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Matt news breaking this afternoon in theworld of athletics. Yeah, the Big
Twelve is in negotiations with All Stateto name to be the naming rights partner
of the conference. That means thatthe new name for this conference, potentially
that has emerged, according to YahooSports, could be the All State twelve,
the All State twelve. How manymembers do they have? Sixteen?

(00:25):
I have far less of a problemwith All State being in the name than
them sticking with the twelve. You'rechanging your name and you're sticking with the
wrong number. I give up,I give up. Yeah, but it's
the branding, right. No,the number is the Roman numeral twelve that
they use, right, get ridof it, throw out in the trash.
They're not twelve, they're sixteen.What about the Big Ten? I

(00:45):
feel the same way, and they'reprobably going to get one of these names
too. Now. Look, look, look college sports. A couple of
one hundred years from now, peopleare going to be looking in their history
books and they're going to be thinking, this is why they had all these
problems. They didn't know how todo math. It's not even the math
part of it. Just like thisused to be college athletics and now it's
money making minor league football is whatit is. Yeah, it is.

(01:06):
It's developmental minor league football. AndI'm one of those who has a very
unpopular opinion that oh fire, hey, you know what, lay it out
there, man, it's good forthe content. Now that i've yeah,
I've I've learned to keep this opinionto myself amongst college football fans. I
really do feel like, like you'resaying, it's it's being turned into minor

(01:29):
league football, and so I justwonder why not just why not just have
minor league football? Why are weforcing these young adults to have to play
this game, to have to livethis charade? Who is the quarterback from
Ohio State saying I didn't come hereto play school, card aale Jones.
People railed against that statement, Butwhat did he say? That was incorrect?

(01:51):
You know, didn't come here toplay school? Right, And so
I just think he said we ain'tcome here to play school. Yeah,
he put it in a much coolervernacular than I could. But I just
think what we're doing here is we'repaying homage to history. That's so important.
And I'm saying this as a Huskerfan. I don't want the Huskers
to go away. But I doalso think that there's got to be some

(02:12):
sort of way where we can separatethese sports out from the idea that this
is like a college thing. Well, in these college football sometimes depending on
the school, basketball mostly men's basketballreally just gets the money through the media
rights deals and everything to fund theother sports, the fencing team, the
rowing team, all the gymnastics team, you know, not the baseball.

(02:37):
We live on college baseball in thistown. But the idea that these kids
are still going to class like theelite athletes are still expected to get their
degree and that's enough compensation. Whilethe rest of these schools, right the
schools themselves making hundreds of millions ofdollars over the media contract billions and billions
of dollars on the backs of theathletes. And I know that that's not

(03:00):
a popular opinion either, but we'relooking at this from a traditional aspect that
hey, these good athletes are gettingan education. That education is never meant
less than it does right now.It's not just because these a lot of
these players at these big schools aregoing to play some sort of professional ball
even if they don't. You knowthat the whole point of them going to
college in the first place was theydidn't want to get the degree. Most

(03:22):
of them just wanted to play highlevel college football. You look at the
degree. Honestly, how often arewe telling kids right now that that's not
necessarily the right way to go ifyou want a proper education and get into
a certain industry. Well, thedegree has never been more watered down because
everything, every job these days youneed a degree for and everybody goes to

(03:43):
college, you know, So it'sjust, yeah, it's not special anymore.
There's a bubble there. I feellike there's a bubble. There's a
proper education for certain jobs. Obviously, you want to be a doctor or
a lawyer, that takes a lotof time. You have to invest in
that. If you're trying to bea car salesman, what are we talking
about? Am I wrong? Idon't have a degree in broadcast. My
degree is in sports administration. Youwant to be a car salesman, you
go to ABC University. Always beclosing, always be closing. Coffee is

(04:09):
for closers. I'm telling you that. To me, college sports has never
been further from where it started.But then again, it wasn't a business
when it got started. Nobody knewthat it was going to be a business.
When college football first happened, itwas a recreational activity for the students.
When they realized that a lot ofpeople want to go and watch these
games, they were like, man, this is pretty popular. And it

(04:30):
wasn't until well into the twentieth centurywe started figuring out how to make good
money on this stuff. And thenintermedia rites you know, the advent of
streaming channels the last fifteen years havecompletely changed the way that this works.
And this is why this realignment stuffhappens. Forget tradition. When you can
make millions of dollars, I thinkthere's there has to be at some point,

(04:51):
some level of separation, and it'sgoing to happen, I believe naturally
at some point, because you can'thave a game where people are on a
level, a level playing field andone is getting paid millions of dollars,
thus having endless resources already at aninstitution like Alabama or Nebraska or these Ohio
state power conferences, and to saythat they are on the same footing as

(05:13):
these little schools, I think,like, yeah, I think there's going
to be and some of these someof the recent ones that they had the
n ideal nil, you know,lawsuits and things that are going through.
Like things are changing and we're moldinginto what it's going to be. We're
just not there yet. We're justkind of in this. Really, I
feel like college football, I don'tknow what you call it. Whether are
they in their tween years they're goingthrough these awkward growing, awkward situation.

(05:35):
Yeah, this is this is theawkward middle phase of what college sports used
to be and what it is goingto be in the future. With in
il, the transfer portal and allthis stuff, it really is just turning
into minor league football. And it'sit's very lucrative. There's a ton of
money. People go to all thegames and most of these major schools and
even the students that are going tothe smaller schools that don't get that kind

(05:58):
of attention, don't have that mediamoney. You know what. Those are
the kids that are actually going tocollege not just to play a sport,
but they actually probably mostly are interestedin going to the classes too, and
for the experience the college provides tothem. Not everything is the exact same,
but when you start seeing the allstate twelve being mentioned, that is
your Iowa State's conference. That isyou know, Oklahoma States conference, that

(06:21):
is Kansas's conference. I can't waituntil the Big ten has theirs and the
SEC has theirs and you can justthrow all this stuff in the garbage can
these little minor leagues, which iswhat they are. They're not college conferences
anymore. They're minor leagues for Americanfootball. And that's just the way that
it's going to be from now on. To me, the fact that they're
keeping the twelve in the name afterrebranding, but based on a corporate spot

(06:44):
you theinition have been growing pains andperfectly summating what is wrong right now with
college You want them to do whatthe PAC ten did when they added two
teams, they became wait, itwas what Colorado and Utah. When they
added those teams, they became thePAC twelve. They didn't keep the name,
but every other conference I can thinkof, unless that conference fully dissolved,
like the Big East Football Conference,unless the conference dissolved, or the

(07:06):
whack the Western Athletic Conference, thenames have say the same. They don't
want to rebrand the logo, thelogo with the XII which is you know
the Roman numer for twelve and thebig ten. Right, it says b
ig but the one and the Gthe I looks like a one in the
G is kind of in the shapeof a zero for ten, right,

(07:26):
Like they don't want to change thosethings. They just want to sell it
off so people can be like,so, how would the big ten work?
Right, they'd have to keep bigin the title of the name.
It's you know, like Harley DavidsonBig ten or something like that. Just
rip off the band aid, finda new name. That's all you gotta
do. It's gonna be tough fora while. Yeah, you're gonna miss
the twelve, but you're not sixteen. It'll be okay. Hey, I

(07:49):
want Matt to share an anecdote fromhis night last night. We'll leave that
next. And he's Radio eleven tenkfab The Truth and Everything Important in Omaha
and Beyond. Emery Songer on newsRadio eleven ten kfab. Such a cool

(08:09):
story. So last night at thepool, taking in some good pool time
in the evening hours, and Iwas at a pool that had a pretty
high high dive. I would estimatethat it was at least twelve feet above
the water. Just an estimation,but it was. It was pretty high
up there, and there was therewas somebody who got up on the on
the high dive his first time upthere. Clearly was younger, i'd guess

(08:33):
probably middle school age, started walkingout towards the edge of the high dive
and went through that moment that we'veseen in movies, maybe been through ourselves
or seen ourselves, where you havethat moment when you kind of look over
and you're like, oh, thisis higher up than I thought. So
he kind of did the thing wherehe got right past the railing and started

(08:54):
to take a step back. That'swhen a crowd at this pool started to
get a lit vocal in the bestway possible. People started encouraging him.
I didn't know what was going onat first. I was just hearing people
talk. I was like, what'sgoing on? People are looking at something
and saying something. It looked around, Oh, there's someone up there who's
on the high dive, and wejust all, probably not every single person,

(09:15):
but most people at that pool startedencouraging this young gentleman as he was
poised and nervous on the edge ofthe high dive, and he overcame his
fear as we cheered him on.I mean, I was there in the
chorus in the pool as well,shouting like you could do it, you
could do it, You got this, you got this. He goes to

(09:37):
the edge, jumps lands, comesback up. There were a couple of
lifeguards there that were just making sureyou know that he felt okay about everything.
He swam to the edge, hegot out of the pool, his
dad kind of fuzzied his hair alittle, his wet hair a little bit,
and his brother came over and gavehim a big old hug, and
everyone was just cheering. That's whatsummer's about. That's what levin your fellow

(09:58):
man or woman is about. Ijust I was excited to be in that
crowd last night. It was areally cool moment. These are the things
that we need to remind ourselves thatlife is more than just news headlines.
Life is more than just things thatyou hear in the media. It's about
living, and it's about living withreal people, regardless of where they come
from or what they might think aboutcertain issues. But you can all celebrate
a moment like that