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

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

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

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

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

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Producer: Anthony Vito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer: Anthony Vito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 36:26: Oklahoma’s OL portal haul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer: Anthony Vito

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This is a subscriber episode

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer: Anthony Vito

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This is a subscriber episode

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

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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

• 8:05: Arizona State

• 12:56: Utah

• 16:21: Kansas State

• 19:13: TCU

• 24:11: Arizona

• 26:08: Cincinnati

• 31:06: Iowa State

• 33:15: Baylor

• 36:47: Colorado

• 42:58: Houston

• 46:04: Texas Tech

• 49:02: UCF

• 52:06: BYU

• 53:40: Kansas

• 56:26: Oklahoma State

• 1:01:00: WVU

Producer: Anthony Vito

Previously in Offseason Vibe Checks: The Big Ten

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

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

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer: Anthony Vito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Produced by Anthony Vito.

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This is a subscriber episode

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

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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

• 3:22: Indiana

• 9:08: Iowa

• 12:08: Oregon

• 16:36: Rutgers

• 17:39: Illinois

• 20:24: Penn State

• 25:59: Michigan State

• 30:15: Michigan

• 34:38: Purdue

• 36:01: UCLA

• 38:23: Nebraska

• 42:10: Wisconsin

• 47:44: Maryland

• 52:19: USC

• 55:38: Minnesota

• 57:18: Washington

• 1:00:24: Northwestern

• 1:08:52: Ohio State

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

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

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

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

• Subscriber Q&A opportunities

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

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Producer: Anthony Vito

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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.

This is a subscriber episode! To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber at this link, so you can hear Richard and Godfrey guide you through the key things to know about the assistant coach carousel for this cycle.

Host emeritus Steven Godfrey is back to join Richard for a whip-around of the most interesting coordinator moves (and non-moves) from the 2026 coaching carousel. There’s a lot to cover here, including but not limited to:

• 1:04: Miami’s key retentions

• 3:13: Palace intrigue at Auburn

• 4:45: Clemson pushes the Chad Morris button

• 8:50: Texas says hi again to Will Muschamp

• 11:31: Kansas does the same with Andy Kotelnicki

• 12:45: Tennessee’s possibly great but definitely kind of awkward Jim Knowles hire, after he flopped at Penn State

• 16:45: Chip Kelly’s post-Eagles career remains bizarre

• 19:49: Bobby Petrino and Bill Belichick

• 23:05: Ole Miss’ new world

• 27:48: Gary Patterson and USC

• 29:02: Deion’s shrinking runway in Boulder

• 30:22: TCU’s identity shift

• 31:22: Mike Norvell, play-caller

• 31:45: Michigan’s Utah era

• 32:31: Ohio State’s NFL OC hire

• 33:00: Oregon replacing not one but two coordinators

• 34:50: Buster Faulkner (with the GT offense?) heads to Gainesville

Producer: Anthony Vito

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• The worst athletic director Matt has ever seen

• What used to be the key markers of a good AD?

• How have those traits changed in the 2020s?

• News story reactions: Oliver Luck gets yet another college sports job, and Mississippi is poised to give tax breaks to athletes on NIL deals

Thanks to Matt! You can read him all the time at Extra Points.

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We don’t stop in the offseason! Subscribers get bonus shows roughly each week (sometimes more frequently) on college football history, the coaching carousel, or any other topic or news story that we think you’ll be interested in hearing about. Thanks to the 4,000 of you who make this show possible!

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Producer: Anthony Vito

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.

In this subscriber episode, Godfrey, Richard, and Alex revisit 28 head coach transitions before the 2012 college football season. This was one of the most consequential coach carousels of the 21st century, with lots of very good, lots of very bad, plenty in the middle, and also the John L. Smith situation:

THE GOOD

• 9:29: Urban Meyer to Ohio State

• 16:05: Mike Leach to Washington State

• 22:39: Bill O’Brien to Penn State

• 31:34: Justin Fuente to Memphis

• 34:28: Matt Campbell to Toledo

• 35:31: Jim McElwain to Colorado State

• 36:55: Gus Malzahn to Arkansas State

• 39:28: Terry Bowden to Akron

THE WHATEVER

• 41:36: Jim Mora Jr. to UCLA

• 46:54: Todd Graham to Arizona State

• 50:28: Paul Chryst to Pitt

• 51:10: Larry Fedora to North Carolina

• 53:42: Kyle Flood to Rutgers

• 55:45: Bob Davie to New Mexico

• 56:46: Tim DeRuyter to Fresno State

THE UGLY

• 58:05: Tim Beckman to Illinois

• 59:00: Tony Levine to Houston

• 1:00:59: Curtis Johnson to Tulane

• 1:01:59: Norm Chow to Hawaii

• 1:05:54: Charley Molnar to UMass

• 1:06:21: Garrick McGee to UAB

• 1:13:08: Carl Pelini to FAU

• 1:17:05: Ellis Johnson to Southern Miss

• 1:19:25: Charlie Weis to Kansas

• 1:28:00: John L. Smith to Arkansas

THE DEBATABLE

• 1:20:48: Kevin Sumlin to Texas A&M

• 1:21:36: Hugh Freeze to Ole Miss

• 1:25:02: Rich Rodriguez to Arizona

Produced by Anthony Vito.

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• 2001

• 2010

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Your mission is simple, should you choose to accept it: By awarding or subtracting 24 points from a handful of old college football games, how much can you alter about the entire trajectory of the sport? Richard and Alex see how much damage they can do with three possessions’ worth of points:

• 0:23: RIP to college football’s Wes Rucker, Joey Knight, and Rondale Moore

• 3:37: Richard’s additional reporting on Sacramento State’s MAC move and the ridiculous math used to justify it

• 13:22: The Split Zone Duo Hockey Hour responds to the Olympics

• 19:46: News of the week: Joey Aguilar loses his eligibility case, and Jeff Monken suggests moving Army-Navy to Thanksgiving weekend

• 24:32: Reshaping college football history with 24 points

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The offseason is a busy time at SZD, where we focus a lot on creative projects and CFB history while also keeping tabs on the news of the moment. Many of our favorite episodes go out in these months for subscribers — including the next one on Friday, featuring host emeritus Steven Godfrey.

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Producer: Anthony Vito

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.

This is a subscriber episode of Split Zone Duo, but everyone can listen to a free preview. Become a subscriber today by clicking on this link.

In the second leg of our big offseason-opening mailbag, Richard and Alex take a big list of subscriber questions. (But first, yet another MAC head coach leaves his job and restarts the coach carousel in the process.) Among the questions answered in this episode: 7:54: Which new Sun Belt head coach is the best bet to succeed this year?

• 11:05: How excited should we be about Buster Faulkner as Florida’s new offensive coordinator?

• 16:41: Who’s having the hardest time coping with Curt Cignetti’s success at Indiana? (Alex says it’s Purdue fans; Richard disagrees.)

• 21:50: How durable is the House settlement-generated age of parity?

• 23:17: What will it take for college football players to finally be declared university employees?

• 28:17: Will college football adopt transfer fees like European soccer?

• 30:09: Are schools stuck in mutually assured destruction when it comes to recruiting rule enforcement?

• 32:04: What happened with the major running back transfers that fizzled out this year?

• 33:14: Can mid-tier power conference programs like Pitt still have breakthrough seasons in this era?

• 36:05: Why can’t Nebraska take the next step in NIL and rev share spending?

• 39:08: How can resource-deprived programs like West Virginia compete at the highest level right now?

• 43:22: Will the single transfer portal window eventually move from winter to post-spring ball?

• 46:50: Will more five-star recruits pick smaller schools over Blue Bloods, and are we entering the era of the strategic redshirt?

• 50:31: Does the expanded playoff put even more emphasis on having veteran starters on your roster?

• 52:15: Is the Pac-12 media deal ever actually going to happen, and what’s going on with the Mountain West lawsuit?

• 53:19: Does the new Pac-12 have the horses to keep up with the American, and will the playoff committee treat it as a premier G6 league?

• 54:00: Can the Pac-12 and Mountain West coexist, or is one conference going to have to absorb the other?

• 59:19: What happens to conference championships if they get rid of conference championship games?

• 1:04:07: Is the Big Ten pushing for a 24-team playoff because Fox wants to renegotiate media rights?

• 1:07:57: Would you rather have the Lou Groza Award winner or the Ray Guy Award winner on your team?

• 1:09:11: What will it take for spring football to succeed, and do people even want it?

Then, in the FUN ROUND:

• 1:10:46: Why are the swear words bleeped in the SZD podcast intro?

• 1:12:24: Who’s been the main character of SZD throughout its existence?

• 1:14:15: For Richard: What’s more likely, Dabo embracing the transfer portal or Spurs winning the Champions League?

• 1:15:51: Alex, have you ever done a trail run, and do you have any advice for someone training for a trail half and a 50K?

• 1:17:45: Alex, what’s on your race calendar these days? \

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Produced by Anthony Vito.

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