First Year Coaches Who Can Win + My Worst Predictions

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

I don't know why I'm just excited about the mailbag episode, nothing wrong with a little

Tuesday show, Tuesday March 31st, the year of our Lord 2026 jam packed, high atop a very

allergen, laden, downtown, Nashville, Tennessee.

Challenge number one, submit good questions for the mailbag episode.

That's on you.

Challenge number two, do not sneeze on air.

And that's on me.

Time will tell.

First year coaches, we got a question about that.

How many of them are going to ever win a national title?

How many of them are even here?

Five years from now.

Not in terms of being alive, but in terms of still being employed by their current institution.

The health of college football, I made a resolution, a spring resolution, not to be so

doom and gloomy this year, so I'm going to mean it's happy as I can while still telling

the truth about college football's health ratings, speaking of truth.

We're talking about Sark in this show.

We're talking about some scheduling stuff.

We're talking about all sorts of different things because the paid state mailbag is wide

open.

I could go a number of different directions.

They're watching us in San Diego, California, Round Rock, Texas.

Where else?

Provo, Utah, Millbrook, Alabama, checking in.

We all know who's watching in Millbrook.

We don't.

Bradley does, though, remind or please subscribe to the channel and not for me for Bradley.

Bradley's really the one who puts that in the rundown every day.

Speaker series is going great.

We did Mike Elko on Monday.

We're going to do another, I would say notable head coaching name in the old college football

profession out there later this week.

That's why we're doing the show on Tuesday.

That's a lie.

We just wanted to get out of town for Easter as well.

But we will have another big name on the Speaker Series later in the week.

It's gone really well, having fun.

We're not even halfway done with that and appreciate all the good feedback.

Let's dive into the show.

We about once every, I don't know, month, maybe month and a half this time of year, I just

go to Jesse and I say, scrap the rundown, open the mail bag.

I just want to talk about what people want to talk about, which in an ideal world we're

doing all the time.

But we're really going to do it tonight.

Lane in Houston, Texas starts us off.

He said fast forward five to 10 years.

Jake, where all the programs who just hired new coaches are, has Kiffin won a natty, K-I-F-F-I-N

ladies and gentlemen, has he won a natty?

Did Alex Golisch make Auburn competitive again?

Is Florida a powerhouse?

Why?

Or why won't these head coaches work?

Let's start with Lane Kiff and K-F-F-I-N Lane Kiffin.

Lane Kiffin will win a national championship at LSU.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is Lane Kiffin will not be at LSU in 10 years.

How old is he, Jesse?

We looked at this just a little while ago.

Was he 32?

Yeah, 33.

No.

Lane is, I think old enough to wear, if you've been earning eight figures per year for the next

several years like he's going to, I just don't think he's there 10 years.

I don't think much of anyone is still at the same program they are 10 years from now.

But that's just kind of the overall nature of college football right now.

But don't worry, he'll win a national championship there.

I am moderately to strongly convinced that he'll win a national title there.

Last four years, you would look at and you would say, oh, it hasn't been that great.

Well, it's not because they didn't have players.

It's not because they couldn't go get talent, which is the name of the game.

They were number four recruiting and number two portal over the last four years on average.

So they've done okay, even when Brian Kelly was on the scene and they were allegedly under

a cheat, it's not a legend.

They were under achieving on the field, but they had the players.

But you notice what he asked in the question.

He said, if they don't win and if they're not there, why?

Why did it go wrong?

Well, it's very simple.

If it goes wrong with Lane, it's just that his best wasn't good enough.

All you can do is your best.

Some guys are good enough to win a national title.

Some guys are good enough to handle the pressure that comes along with having a job like LSU

and some aren't.

They made a calculated risk.

They put 13 million behind him per year in thinking that he will be capable of taking

that on.

I believe he's capable of taking it on.

But then the other thing is just the cumulative grind, earmuffs in the big 10, 3, 2, 1, just

the cumulative grind of an SEC 9 game schedule.

All right, take them off.

That could wear on one, too.

So yeah, that's why he wouldn't win one.

Kyle Winningham at Michigan just got hired.

Now, this is way different.

Kyle Winningham is 66 years old right now.

So Kyle Winningham is not going to be there in 10 years.

Kyle Winningham, if I'm a Michigan fan, here's the approach.

I'm taking.

He is the bridge to get me to the next guy.

The next guy is the long-term answer.

The next guy is the guy I want there for 10 to 15 years.

And in the process of doing that, we can still win.

No one said you had to be like a substitute teacher.

No one said you couldn't install your game plans and no one said that you can't win at all.

But we're talking long-term here.

Kyle Winningham is not the long-term answer at Michigan.

He knows that.

Everyone knows that.

What can you get under Bryce Underwood over the next two years?

What do you get out of him?

I was going to ask that no matter who the Michigan coach was.

Alex Golis had Auburn.

Now this is one where we have not seen him be a head coach at the premier level.

We've seen Lane at Ole Miss.

We've seen Kyle Winningham at Utah.

Alex Golis is taking over a job at a place where three of the last four guys did not reach

year five.

So at Auburn, there's been a lot of churn.

Also at Auburn, there's a belief that maybe there's a little more alignment than there

has been in the past.

You've heard me say that.

I've said it because I believe it.

But it's all conditional to Alex Golis getting the job done.

Do they have the quarterback of the future there?

Right now?

No, they do not.

His fate will be directly tied to the quarterback position.

You know what they need though?

What Alex Golis at Auburn needs is one of those Florida State 2023 moments.

But they need to achieve it in way different fashion.

They don't need to go portal Bonanza, throw a winner together, and then have it all implode

in on them.

No, they don't need to do that.

But what they need to do is they need to announce their reemergence like Florida State did.

Picture Florida State in 2023.

They do that and then they follow it up year over year with more playoff caliber products.

That's what Auburn needs to do.

But the first thing they need to do is announce their reemergence because it didn't work out

under hue freeze and now there's a little bit of a mess to clean up down there.

Matt Campbell's at Penn State.

Now you know that I believe that this is the guy they should have gone after immediately.

But as Mima always said, a coach not gotten immediately must be gotten eventually.

She saw it coming.

She saw it.

And now we have the result of that sort of logic.

Matt Campbell the head coach at Penn State.

Here is how I envision this going.

Matt Campbell was a really good but underrated coach at Iowa State because you couldn't

achieve at Iowa State what you potentially could at Penn State.

I think this is going to sort of turbo boost his reputation.

Not cause he's going to change it all.

It's just going to cause it's going to make him capable of achieving at a little bit higher

level.

Now that means all of Penn State has to be behind him.

That means the financial piece has to be there.

And I think that will become self serving in a sense that once he shows that he's the

guy, there will be immense motivation to make sure we put more wind in the sales up there.

He's got to win big games.

That's what Penn State didn't do.

Everybody knows that.

That's what they didn't do under James Franklin.

So if he goes in there and just wins big games, like if they were to go to Michigan this

year, whatever you think about Michigan, if they were to go in there, win on the road

this year.

I mean, that'd be a big deal.

That would be a signature moment that maybe you hadn't gotten all that much under James

Franklin.

So I look, I think the world of Matt Campbell, I think he's going to win there.

I think they can compete for a national championship there, not this year, just in general.

John Summerall at Florida, think the same thing.

But at Florida, four straight top 15 classes.

So again, this is a place where the infrastructure is not the problem.

Jesse had a great quote today.

Jesse said, you just have to pull the right level levers, but all the levers are there.

You didn't even screw up your R. You just said it the first thing, you said, the levers

are there.

You just got to pull them.

Florida's had four straight top 15 classes.

So Napier, even though they didn't win enough on the field, he was getting the players.

They had the infrastructure in place.

That infrastructure is still in place.

I think they've put together a really good front office.

We were down there last week talking to a number of those guys.

I think they, I think they've got the right people in the building.

I already thought that you just got to have the right leader in the building.

And so I think that again, for what it's worth and my predictions on Florida leadership

have not been worth a lot over the past few years.

But I really think I'm going to nail this one.

It comes down to the same thing is his best good enough.

Is goal is just best good enough?

Is John Somerall's best good enough?

Is Lee Kiffin's best good enough?

Like that's all it comes down to.

And sometimes it's fractions of inches here and there as to whether you're best is good

enough.

James Franklin, we were just mentioning him a second ago, he's at Virginia Tech now.

He's a program builder.

So Virginia Tech had a home run here.

I like Virginia Tech got exactly what Virginia Tech needed.

Lee James Franklin post firing got what James Franklin needed fresh start.

It's a chance to restart your clock.

You're somewhere where they have not experienced winning Penn State was experiencing a certain

level of winning under you.

And then that became the floor that became the default.

Well, we know we're going to win nine per year.

Now we got to win 10 or 11 per year.

Will it Virginia Tech?

They haven't been that six wins, three wins, seven wins, six wins, three wins.

Those are the last five years.

Where he got there.

So you go in nine up there.

That's a really, really big deal.

The bar isn't as high.

You can also rapidly ascend in the ACC.

We have seen that that conference ladder, like you've got Miami with a stranglehold on

the top overall position in the conference, but even Miami hasn't been to Charlotte.

So like it's a very, very weird nature in the ACC.

James Franklin will be fine there and they got a really, really good shot to make some

noise this year, not circling them as, you know, a playoff contender just yet or anything

like that.

But they got a chance to have a pretty good year this year.

And then two more we were talking about.

Pat Fitzgerald at Michigan State right now.

I thought got lost in the shuffle of all the coaching carousel talk and he was at Northwestern

for a long time.

Northwestern was a thorn in the big 10 side for a long time.

Some like every couple of years, Pat Fitzgerald would have a team that was good and you had

no explanation for it because they never showed up in the recruiting rankings.

He knows how to win.

He knows how to build an organization.

They have got a radically overhaul recruiting and portal there.

But then the other question that you got to ask about Pat Fitzgerald and any coach that's

been around a while is, are they still on the wave or are they behind the wave?

The wave being the new way that college football works.

Is that thing slapped them in the face and left them behind or are they up on the surfboard

or are they capable of riding it?

Colin Klein, I'd ask the same thing about him at Kansas State.

Not that Colin Klein has like an established track record as a coach.

He doesn't as a head coach at least.

I'm asking it more about Kansas State as a program.

For a long time, the big 12 was such that if you ran the kind of program that they had

run at Kansas State, you could win the thing.

If everything fell right, if you got the bounce of balls, if you were plus turnovers, and

if you had a junior senior laden team, you could win the league.

Texas Tech has turned that thing on its ear now.

Texas Tech and their spending is having a ripple effect at places like Oklahoma State.

For example, and the more you get that infused into your conference, the more it makes me

wonder, man, is the window for Kansas State to do what they were capable of doing.

Is that closed a little bit?

Colin Klein's got to come in and just change the way people think about looking at Kansas

State in what I would call the new world of the big 12.

Good question though.

A lot of new coaches, a lot of first year coaches, a lot of programs need to be turned around.

Hey, let's talk about health.

Our good close friends from Morgantown, West Virginia, the coal country podcast, they

hit us up, frowns on their faces and said, honestly, do you think college football will

get better?

Yes.

Yes.

I have a vested interest in it getting better.

Also maybe it's not so bad.

Maybe it's not so bad.

So as you know, if you watch every show, a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago at

this point, I said as we entered the offseason that I was going to treat it differently this

year because we went back and we looked at the way we were talking last spring.

And it seemed like every show we were presenting this existential crisis facing college football

and how this wasn't as good as it used to be.

And that wasn't as good as it used to be.

Here's what NIL's doing.

Here's what the portal's doing and come to find out that, yeah, there may be problems,

but we kind of made mole hills into mountains, as Mimal would say, a little bit.

We don't want to do that.

So we want to put the problems in the proper context, coal country podcast and friends.

And so we got to, we got to separate people here.

Some people want to unite.

No, I want to separate people for a second.

There is a group of people that thinks everything is fine and they love everything about

college football right now.

I'm not here to tell you you're wrong.

I'm here to tell you.

I want you to go sit over here for a second when I'm about to say, may not pertain to

you so much.

There is another group of people that are die hard fans maybe that get way, way, way emotionally

invested.

Yes, most people watching the show, especially in March or April, that's us.

You may tend to look, especially if you're of any age, like if you're 30 years old or

older, you're old enough to remember a way things were.

And if you're 50 years old, you've seen multiple iterations of the way things were.

If I know you guys like I think I do, chances are there is something about college football

in the past that you preferred more to the way something about college football is working

right now.

It's not limited to college football.

People feel that way about movies, about music, about the town they live in.

You can feel any which way you want.

If you feel that way, let's break this down for a second.

I have my thoughts.

I have my feelings on it.

But I do think that there is a drive by type of fan and a die hard type of fan.

The drive by type of fan we can talk about, they're probably not here right now.

The drive by fan and there's nothing wrong with these people, but they're the kind of

folks who show up in the fall for the big games.

To them college football, it's fine.

The die hard fan who lives, eats, sleeps and breathes this stuff 12 months a year, you

may have more fundamental issues with the landscape of the sport right now.

Let me tell you where I am on that because I'm the die hard fan.

So the biggest issues that I've talked about for quite a while on the show are like connective

tissue issues.

My problem is not how electric the stadiums are in the fall because they're still electric.

My problem is not the product on the field, the product's amazing.

My problem is not TV ratings, cause TV ratings are through the roof.

So those aren't my problems.

My problems are connective tissue and two examples that I've given and I'll give them

to you again is national signing day and in spring games.

Neither of these really matter when Penn State's play in Oregon and it's the middle of the

third quarter in the middle of October.

So this stuff matters to a die hard fan.

I used to love national signing day.

I don't pay much attention to national signing day anymore, it'd just be an honest with

you.

And the reason is because back in the day with few exceptions, I was trained to learn that

if you signed with Tennessee out of high school, chances were you were going to be on campus

four years.

You were going to go through your ups and downs, go through your struggles, but you were

going to be there.

And therefore what you were rated in high school mattered to me if I was a Tennessee fan

because it mattered that you were still going to be here three or four years.

You are definitively the future of my program.

And I'm not saying high school recruiting as a whole doesn't matter anymore, it matters

a great deal, but I have a far more difficult time getting invested in it when I see the

percentage of roster churn per year.

And when I know the percentage chance of any given kid committing to a place and staying

for four years is greatly reduced.

And also the nature of the recruitments themselves, I am not ignorant enough to think money

never changed hands.

I know money's always changed hands.

I know that you don't need to go in the comment section and tell me that.

But back in the day, there was a big difference in some of these like white hot SEC recruitments

where you knew everyone was passing around the same amount of cash under the table.

And the recruitments, I'm going to sound like a kid when I say this.

I'm going to sound really dumb when I say this, but they almost had this more pristine

nature about them or an authentic nature about them where you knew there was some stuff

behind the scenes, but really it was still a relationship thing too.

It wasn't nearly as transactional feeling.

It wasn't like, again, to use the analogy, like if I'm a South Carolina fan.

And I've watched my program recruit this kid from Rock Hill, South Carolina for three years.

And I've been getting updates on the message board from the insiders for two years.

And I've been following the in-home visits and I've been following the official visits.

And I know that it's down to us and Florida and Clemson for this kid.

Back in the day, Texas didn't just come in and offer two times what I'm offering him

and completely render everything that I've known the past three years irrelevant.

That happens now.

Why would I ever emotionally invest in following it?

That's how I view recruiting now.

And I miss it because that is like if you were to use the NFL comparison, not caring about

the draft anymore.

It's just insane that the most important talent acquisition portion of a season for college

football that's recruiting a national signing day for the NFL that's the draft would be

rendered not irrelevant in a sense of mattering to roster construction, but more irrelevant

in terms of fan interest.

And then the second thing, which we may be on the road directifying, I don't know yet,

is spring games have always mattered a lot to me.

Not that I'm learning a whole lot, but they matter as like an institution.

They matter that I can go to Lincoln, Nebraska, and I'm going to see the Nebraska spring

game.

And for families, sometimes it's the only chance to take kids.

Sometimes the affordability of tickets in the fall is out of your price range.

And so this is the trip that you can make to campus.

It's spring.

It's sunny outside.

Stuff is blooming.

You're zero and zero.

That was like so readily thrown into a blender recently because we had a second portal

window post spring that no one really wanted to risk showing off their players for.

So people just kind of canceled their spring games.

They didn't even give a passing thought to the impact that it had from a connective tissue

standpoint.

All right.

So now we don't have a second spring portal or a post spring portal.

Maybe we get spring games back, but my point remains that stuff is my bigger issue.

And so if we can rectify that sort of thing, man, a lot of this other stuff I can deal

with.

But I just, I root for the merging of those two bills that are kind of out there right

now.

The score act, which kind of provides room for governance of college football.

And then the overhauling of the Broadcasting Act, which in the future, it allows for

the pooling of media rights and that's your funding mechanism.

I told you, I root for those two things to be merged, to where everyone sort of wins

on that front.

I don't want to get into the boring details of that.

That's what I'm rooting for right now.

I would love, love, love for National Signing Day to be what it used to be.

And people say, oh, that'll never happen again.

No, it can.

It can.

You just have to fundamentally alter the motivation for kids to stick around the programs

they commit to.

That's it.

You don't have to lock them in anywhere, by the way.

Incentivize it.

That's the way you go about that.

Next up, couldn't believe this when I saw this, Eric from Roswell, Georgia, is claiming

that David Pollock said, Georgia's got no shot at a national title.

If they get the same gunner stocked in from last year and he wants to know if I agree or

disagree.

Now look, David Pollock is a good close personal friend of the show, a good close personal

friend in general.

And we all know him to be above reproach.

So if he said these things, we know he's put some thought into it.

Here's what I did.

I had the staff go find this.

I had to hear it and see it for myself.

And so we have located this footage and we are going to play it.

And then if Eric is right, and if David Pollock said this, we will respond accordingly,

Bradley hit me.

If Gunner Stockton's the same quarterback he was a year ago, Georgia has no chance to

win an addy.

They have no chance.

What you're talking about, yes, you saw that in spurts.

I saw him grow.

I saw him put more touch on the football instead of trying to throw through it through everybody's

chest, which he has a tendency to do.

And things, it's all fastballs.

Like I like some changeups.

Another thing I saw, I saw him change arm angles without taking a big wind up and throw,

which I really, really like because the dude's got plenty of arm strength to turn and flick

it.

It ain't no thing for him.

So understanding that, but I think it's more personality driven with Gunner Stockton

than any of them.

He's a kid that doesn't want to mess up.

He's a kid that wants to be perfect.

Those are hard things, man, because life ain't perfect.

Quarterback, dang sure ain't perfect.

He said it, Jesse.

David, does David Pollock hate Georgia?

Did I miss this?

Did David Pollock anti-Georgia?

So I get where he's going there.

Let's talk about this.

So remember, there's this way of thinking that is permeating, not Pollock necessarily,

but the college football ecosystem that Georgia is on the downslope, Georgia's regressing.

Now all they've done is make the playoff with First Round Bies back-to-back years and

one back-to-back conference titles.

So that's, hey, look, that's fading if I've ever seen it.

But there is a thought that maybe their best is good enough to get there, but not good enough

to win it right now, fair.

It hasn't been good enough the last two years.

Gunner Stockton.

Six full years of starter last year.

He enters this year.

Let's just lay it out.

Let's lay out the case.

He's got top 10 highs and monods.

Make of that what you will.

But Georgia, can they win a national title if they get the same Gunner Stockton?

Because what Pollock did not say is they can't win a title with Gunner Stockton.

See, that's what the internet does.

I'm just trying to beat the internet to the punch.

The internet will listen to that and they'll hear him say,

George, you can't win a title with Gunner Stockton.

That's not what he said.

He said they can't win a title with the same Gunner Stockton they just got.

There's a little slider on the screen right now if you're listening on podcast that is

showing us the Gunner Stockton they got last year.

34 to 5, total TD to INT.

Nearly a 70% completion guy got knocked all over the place and never tapped out.

Over pound like the toughest player that we saw in the country last year.

But Georgia as a team this year, let's just say they were to get the same production,

the same Gunner Stockton.

That's going to be a top 10 team in returning production.

That is one of those teams that has quarterback, head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive

coordinator back.

They've been the number one recruiter in the country the last four years.

Their number six in the overall playoff title odds that probably be higher than that if

they were in the big 12 or the ACC.

You know what?

They can also do.

They can match physicality.

If they go up against a Miami or they go up against whoever you want to throw out there

in the playoffs, it's not that they're guaranteed to win or anything like that.

They won't be bulldozed.

They won't be a physically second best.

There's a big difference in saying, boy, they're going to have a low margin for error versus

they can't.

I think if I were to get the same Gunner Stockton from last year, I will grant you there's

a pretty low margin for error.

If George is in the playoffs with him, I'm not going to say that they got no shot though.

I'm not going to do that.

Number one, because I don't know what the rest of the field looks like just any given year.

And number two, last year they ran into what we were saying at the outset of the playoffs

was the most dangerous quarterback, the most dangerous player in the playoffs, Trinidad

Chamblis.

They ran into him and they played a classic down there in New Orleans.

And they got beat.

And if they have some kind of player, maybe it's Trinidad Chamblis again, and they got some

kind of player that does that to him this year, okay, it's tough, man.

It's the playoffs.

It's very, very tough.

Had they won, had they won, they would have gone and played Miami, that would have been

tough too.

And then if they won that, I mean you're eventually going to run into Indiana, no one wanted

that last year.

But Georgia, look, just as an overall concept, Georgia is going to be good enough to win

a title if things go right for him.

It's just that this kind of Georgia team, with Gunner Stockton, if he's not improved, if

he's just who he was last year, they can afford for less things to go wrong.

That's the only difference with them.

There have been versions of Georgia in the past, versions of Bama teams before them, LSU

2019.

Frankly, they could afford for quite a few things to go wrong and still be okay.

Your margin for error is just greatly lower.

That's all it is.

That's all it is.

Speaking of predictions, I don't even know if we stack the show like this, but it worked

out well.

Mark, from Sandpoint, Idaho said, what are your worst college football predictions you've

made?

Why are we doing this?

We get to select the questions on the show.

Florida was not good last year.

Florida didn't make playoff last year.

DJ Lagway was not the number one quarterback in the league last year.

Why am I mentioning these things?

Well, it's because the staff has gleefully decided to put on the screen my SEC preseason

quarterback rankings from a year ago.

It's a disaster.

DJ Lagway was number one.

You know, I don't need to read any further.

This is one of those where I hope most of you are listening on podcasts and not watching

on YouTube.

We would certainly hate for this to be screen-shat and posted all over the place.

Well, so I guess this was really all tied to my belief that Florida was going to have

a good year last year.

I believe that Billy Napier was going to quiet his critics because I believe that Florida

was going to be a fringe playoff contender.

And because of that, that meant I believed in DJ Lagway and it was just whiff, whiff.

Everything with Florida was a whiff last year.

We did pick him to beat Texas.

That was our one shining moment.

And I do mean one shining moment with Florida.

So that wasn't a fun ride last year with the gators, paid state negators, trust issues.

Now that's what John Summerall has to overcome.

That's his biggest challenge.

Also you'll remember two springs ago.

This was when the spring portal, like the second portal window right after spring practice.

That was coming up and I had listened to some of the wrong people in the winter and those

wrong people had told me this post spring transfer portal window is going to blow up.

It's going to explode.

It's going to be like nothing the sports ever seen before.

These people were idiots, but I was an idiot for listening to them.

And unlike these people who are anonymous, I have a microphone in front of me.

And therefore when I said it, I became the face of the failed prediction that the post

spring transfer portal was going to go ballistic.

It's all on me.

I take responsibility for it.

And then when it was just crickets largely in the post spring portal window, everyone

started coming at me as I would if I were them saying, well, where's all the fireworks?

Where are they at?

What's happening?

And I hid bunker mentality.

I didn't even come out of my apartment except to do the show.

That was a failed prediction.

And then of course, who could forget 2023?

The national championship game featured Washington and Michigan.

Yours truly here went a combined 0 and 7 picking against them in regular season games.

As it turned out, they meet each other in the national championship game.

And so then it's up to me to pick the winner.

Thankfully, I picked the winner, but it didn't matter, Jesse.

The diet was already cast as me more would say by that point because when I got home from

the national championship game, I think it was from the national.

I had gotten home from one of these teams playing a game and we had mail.

We always get excited when we get mail at the office.

And so when they told me I had a package at the office, I'm like, great, what is it?

We open the box and this is what we got.

And then come to find out, I fly all the way across the country from LA this morning.

I get back home and someone has shipped a box of clown noses to the office.

And if I find out who did this, you're going down.

I still think inside job, but we'd never found out who did the director Colin perhaps.

I don't know who has seen director Colin lately.

That's very mysterious.

That's conspicuous.

Director Colin's fine.

He's doing fine.

Healthy and happy.

Yeah, so that was a bad deal, but I did pick Michigan in the end.

So I went 1 and 0 in national championship play with those teams that year.

And then in the interest of full disclosure, transparency, and just bearing my soul to

the world, yes, I thought Brian Kelly would do okay at LSU.

Yes, I thought it was going to be a great fit down there.

In my defense, there is no defending me, but in my defense, I do think Brian Kelly didn't

do what I assumed he would do.

I assumed too much about Brian Kelly.

I assumed that he'd walk in and readily embrace all that is Louisiana, all that is LSU.

And it turns out he wasn't really interested in that.

Now had someone told me that at the beginning, yeah, I would have tempered my expectations,

but I didn't want to because this show does really good when LSU does good.

I'm not saying we play favorites.

I'm just saying that LSU is one of my favorites.

There's a clear distinction there.

You just have to really read between the lines.

Yeah, so that didn't work out.

Florida and Lagway didn't work out.

Michigan and Washington, Indiana last year.

It was just so fresh.

We didn't even want to bring it up.

But yeah, we still got the box of clown noses.

I've used it a couple of times since them.

I'm not perfect.

I have flaws just like everyone else.

Those were four of them.

Let's move along.

We had a friend from Moore, Oklahoma, home of Toby Keith, only town that's been hit

with two EF5 tornadoes in my lifetime also.

He said, who has the toughest first five games in 2026?

I will proper.

It's the first time that word's been used in the mailbag.

I will proper the University of Oklahoma with week two at Michigan, week four at Georgia,

week six versus Texas after the buy.

That's a good submission.

Okay, let's start there.

Yeah, I would say that if you're playing Michigan, Georgia and Texas all away from home

in the first half of your season, that qualifies.

Nice little tune up against Utah and then it's Oklahoma leaves home a lot this year.

Yeah, that's three top 15 teams in the first six weeks.

Also, you do play Florida Ole Miss in Texas and in Missouri to end the year.

You have to afford yourself some wiggle room.

You can't be walking the tight rope already before mid-October.

I'd say USC belongs on this list a little bit.

USC, it's weird because they open with three games you won't pay attention to.

They open with San Jose State, Fresno State, Louisiana.

All right.

Now, here's what's interesting.

People will see Rutgers on there and they'll say that's a fourth easy game.

Remember, this is USC.

So they have to fly two Rutgers for a conference game, what a sentence.

And then they've got Oregon at home the next week and then Washington the next week

and then at Penn State the next week.

So that's, I'm going to count Rutgers in the difficult game discussion there because

that's boom, boom, boom, boom, two cross-country trips, two, three time zone trips, whatever

we want to call that.

We need a term for that.

And then remember, kind of like I said here, there's going to be a familiar theme.

You got to win these games because you've still got Ohio State and Indiana in the back

half.

Do you got to have some wiggle room?

What about LSU?

We're talking about them a second ago.

LSU opens with Clemson at home.

They play Adolf Miss and Texas A&M also in their first four games.

Now LSU schedule is like two seasons.

They got three loosable games there, really.

And then they'll go off the radar for a little while, McNeese and Kentucky and Mississippi

State.

And then they'll come back on the radar and it's Ad Auburn, Bama, Texas and at Tennessee

before they finish the season at Arkansas, back-to-back road games there to in the year.

LSU doesn't have it easy, Texas doesn't have it easy, Texas had a little run these first

two years of the difference and scheduling of having a little bit easier time maybe.

And that's come to an end.

They got Ohio State at Tennessee, Oklahoma in the first few weeks and two of those are

away from home.

Those are all top 15 teams.

And you're going to find out how dynamic Texas is there.

Look, if they roll through those three undefeated, then it's look out time.

But if they stumble, nothing is really lost, but at least it puts a little chum in the

water for people to think, oh, Texas, same old Texas, same old Texas, now they'll probably

just talent their way to a seven seed in the playoff, but Texas is going to get bounced

again.

That or who can even compete with Texas, probably something in the middle of that, Florida State,

no breaks dealt to Florida State.

SMU, they play in week two, is that week two just here, week one?

That's week one.

So they got a week zero game and then week one, they play SMU, week two, they go to Alabama.

And then to start October, there's this line of Virginia at Louisville, at Miami, Clemson.

The Miami game is week seven.

So they will have already played really one, two, three, four, that's their fifth loosable

game in the first seven weeks, first eight games for them.

If it's going to go downhill for Mike Norvel, it's going to go downhill early.

And remember last year was the year where we had all the firings in October, if that's

going to happen anywhere, it could happen at Florida State this year.

So that's something to keep an eye on.

And in the interest of not making this just a couple of conferences, we talked about FSU

there.

What about Colorado?

What about Deon and Colorado?

They open on the road at Georgia Tech and then a couple of weeks later, they got to go

to Northwestern and then they go to Baylor.

So there are three road games here and they're first four and then what do they get for the

reward?

They get Texas Tech in Boulder when they come home.

Not a lot of noise around Colorado right now, but the schedule makers did not forget

they're out there.

Let's move along.

Got a couple of things I still want to get to here.

Ryan in San Antonio, he said, if you were the ACC or Big 12 commissioner, would you want

Miami or Texas Tech to dominate and give you one legit national title contender or would

you want parity in the conference?

Very easy answer.

I want both.

These don't have to be mutual exclusive, mutually exclusive.

Here's where my mind is out on this, easy answer.

I look around if I'm the ACC commissioner and I love that Miami is elevating.

I want them to be as good as possible.

I want them to be dominant.

They can win 13 national titles in the next 15 years for all I care.

That doesn't mean the rest of my conference has to fall by the wayside.

Same thing if I'm Brett your mark out in the Big 12.

Yeah, man, go spend as much as you want to as long as the rules allow it.

Build a powerhouse out in Lubbock, but how foolish of me to think that that has to come

at the expense of the rest of my conference.

No, here's what I want happening.

In the ACC, I want people in Clemson and in Tallahassee and in Blacksburg and in Atlanta.

I want them watching Miami and saying, wow, we're feeling a lot of heat because of them.

Wow, we're feeling a lot of pressure because of them.

How about this mentality?

Wow, if they can do that, why can't we do that?

And in the Big 12 especially, if I'm in, oh, I don't know, Waco, Texas, if I'm in

Stillwater, Oklahoma, if I'm in Tempe, Arizona, it's a free NIL shout out here for Kenny

Dillingham.

Give people, give, give, give.

If I'm watching what's happening in Lubbock, why do I have to just resign myself to the

fact that, oh, they're good again.

Oh, man, they went and got a bunch of players again.

I guess that's curtains for us.

It doesn't have to be that way.

It's not that way in the SEC.

It's not that way at the top of the Big 10.

Did you see Indiana look around and say, well, Ohio State's already good.

And man, Oregon's already in the league and Michigan just recently won a national title.

We can't do anything about that.

No, they just did something about it.

And then they went and won a national title themselves.

So in the SEC, do you see anyone looking around, saying, boy, Georgia, Georgia and Kirby

as long as they're there, not much we can do.

Nobody thinks that way.

And Josh, they just have more money to spend in those conferences.

You don't until you do.

Don't act broke.

Stop that.

No, you've got, you got money.

You got money.

You just got to go to the right people who are willing to spend it.

That's what Texas tech did.

That's what Texas tech did.

Whomps amongst us doesn't have a billionaire cousin that we couldn't call and say, hey,

we need money for football.

We need money for football.

I know I would.

I am not the billionaire, but I would make the call absolutely would make the call.

So yeah, I want both, man, I want both of them to be dominant.

And then I want it to have a downstream effect in the positive on the rest of my league.

Move it, move it, move it.

The mailbag has a good tempo about it, by the way.

We don't drag one segment or one thought on too long.

Jake from Lincoln, Nebraska, where spring ball is already concluded.

He said, who is your biggest influence for your love of college football?

Oh, I'd say dad.

I think a lot of dudes would say that.

I would say my dad, because I always had a stack, probably higher than that, a stack of

VHS tapes.

When I grew up that some of them I used to take him and record Monday Night Raw over them

did not go over well.

When you record Monday Night Raw in 1998 over Alabama and Nebraska from the 77, yeah.

Now, come to find out down the road.

There would just be limitless copies of these games out there, but he didn't know that

at the time.

So anyway, yeah, I just watch all these old games.

I mean, I'd watch, I'd watch OU Texas from back in the day.

I'd watch John McKay from USC.

I'd watch Bowen Woody from Ohio State Michigan, because I mean, he had it all recorded.

So I would just watch that stuff.

I remember thinking to myself, if this was like the year 2000, let's say, I'm thinking

to myself, man, 1977 feels so long ago.

And now we are further removed the opposite direction from the year 2000 than 1977 was

from 2000 when I was there.

The math makes sense on that.

So that's depressing, but what was really fun is growing up in the south, growing up

immersed in college football culture.

College football culture is different than just being around college football.

Those of you who are of that life know it.

So yeah, I would definitely say family and then social circle, you know, like I'm going

to, I went to Harris County High School.

I went to Harris County Carver Middle School.

I went to New Mountain Hill Elementary just so we've never talked about the elementary

school level here.

There would, briefly, I was an out of district kid.

Yes, I went to school in Phoenix City and then someone ratted us out and I had to move

to Harris County.

Good move overall, better baseball in Harris County.

But yeah, everybody watched college football.

Everybody was immersed in it, not just me.

Speaking of which, now this is not necessarily talking to you kids in elementary school,

but your parents, Fandall, has odds on pretty much everything this whole.

See that was not on the copy here, not at all.

We had a meeting with Fandall earlier today.

A lot of good productive conversations and Fandall, you know what, they came to us and asked

they said, hey, what else do you want this fall?

And then I said, settle in, I just read off the list.

And I think they'll come through on it, Fandall, good people.

But in the meantime, what you may want is you may want the opportunity to go bet Gunner

Stockton for Heisman, not David Pollock.

But if you're a close friend of David Pollock, they want to shove it in his face when Gunner

Stockton balls out this fall.

Go do it.

He's like the ninth best odds to win the thing right now.

You can do it at Fandall.

You just go bet Georgia to win the conference.

You can bet Georgia to win the national championship.

I don't think Georgia plays a noteworthy game in week one.

So I don't think their game is on the board, but several other teams games are on the board.

Fandall, the exclusive odds provider of Pate State, and we appreciate them for that.

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Last up.

This is not a mail, but I guess we did get a mail back for it.

Jack said, I like your truth teller series, but you know you're going to have to kiss

up to Stark if you do him because you've done it since he's gotten to Texas.

Really?

I haven't criticized Steve Sarkiesian enough.

Is that the claim?

Jack from Norman, Oklahoma, by the way, let's not just leave the geography out of this.

The truth about Steve Sarkiesian, you want the truth?

I don't know if you can handle the truth, Jack.

They may win the national title this year, may, but that's not the truth about Sark.

That's the truth about his team.

The truth about Steve Sarkiesian is that I think he is at another of several inflection points

in his career.

Now, Sark's been around a long time, so we've been able to observe him for a long time,

but he was fired at USC in 2015, and then remember Sabin just grabs him off the scrap

peep as Sabin did in those days.

You got Steve Sarkiesian as an off-the-field analyst, and then Lane Kiffin does what he

does and gets fired the week of a national title game, and Sabin just tosses Sark up in

the booth, and so he's calling plays in the national title game, and then he goes to

the Falcons, and then he comes back to Alabama as the offensive coordinator and engineers

that 2020 season, and then he gets the Texas job.

There's a lot of inflection points here.

Texas was also lied about, though.

If we're calling this the Truth Teller series, and if we're trying to tell the truth about

Steve Sarkiesian, well, let's also tell the truth about Texas, because for a long time,

people kept lying about Texas.

They kept talking about how loaded Texas was, about how Texas had all the players they

needed.

No, they didn't.

Texas had one double-digit win season from 2010 to 2022.

Who could forget that magical run Tom Herman took us on?

Who could forget that?

Well, me, because I had to go look it up, but maybe you guys hadn't forgotten.

No, Texas was not just loaded to the gills with the kind of players they have now.

Now they are.

I was looking at Sark talking to Chris Lowe yesterday.

Now they are.

Texas didn't look like that.

This Texas team they're about to put on the field this fall, that's a national championship

caliber team.

They didn't have that, man.

They didn't have that at all.

Here's what they did have.

They had some highly rated kids at certain positions that made recruiting classes and

recruiting rankings look fat, but they weren't well proportioned classes.

Texas on the line of scrimmage was a joke for a long time.

So now they're not.

So, I think the most important chapter of Steve Sarkiesian's book probably hasn't even

been written yet, because if they were to win a national title at Texas, this year or

just in the next couple of years, or maybe they win several, maybe they win multiple, think

about the story that you tell about him and how different it is with that added into

it.

Okay, then think about how different it could be moving forward.

Think about what it entails.

Think about being the guy that finally got Texas back to win in a title, because the last

one was 05, right?

So the last one was over two decades ago.

Imagine being the guy that pulls that off again, and what kind of legend you are.

And then imagine it's not some hot shot coordinator that was 32 or 33 years old.

Imagine it's Steve Sarkiesian with the story that his life is, and then closely correlated

with the story that his coaching career is, I think it'd be incredible.

And we don't know, because see, here's the downside.

The downside is they don't come through, they don't follow through on the potential.

And then the book is, Steve Sarkiesian was a really brilliant offensive mind, but as a

coach, he could never get over the ultimate hump.

That could end up being what that chapter or final few chapters sound like.

I just find it fun, I find it a little interesting that, like I said, Sark's not brand new to

this.

He became the head coach at Washington in 09.

So we've known about him for a long time.

So to be sitting here in 2026, saying, boy, I think the most important chapters of his career

have yet to be written, that's kind of a crazy thing.

You could say it about landing, landing's a new head coach.

You could say it about like Alex Golis at Auburn, his head coaching career is just getting

started.

Sark's been around a long time.

Appreciate you guys watching.

Make sure you are subscribed to the channel.

And if you think you are, check and make sure it helps us out a whole lot.

We will be not doing a show Thursday because we'll be on the road.

We're not doing a show Sunday.

We never do a show on Easter Sunday.

It'll be all the way next Thursday until we're back.

But don't worry, the speaker series is there to keep you company in the meantime.

Appreciate you so much for Director Bradley for producing Jesse, I'm Josh Payt.

Take care.

Have a great rest of your week and God bless.

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