Steamboat Willie

Well said, Starters first. Depth later. No more OL experiments.

The real solution is boring, logical, and therefore extremely unlikely: Expand to 16. Use actual data (BCS-style blends, efficiency metrics, SOS) instead of vibes. Keep the committee—but handcuff it. Seed the field, don’t decide who’s worthy of oxygen. Let the best teams in. If Duke gets smoked by Ole Miss, so be it. At least we’re arguing about football results instead of moral philosophy and “deservingness.” Blowouts happen in every playoff. That’s not a flaw—that’s evidence. And let’s not kid ourselves: no matter how clean the system is, ESPN will still stretch it into seven hours of panels, graphics, and manufactured outrage. Chaos isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the business model.

Go to 16 if you want, but let’s not pretend every résumé deserves a backstage pass. Expansion shouldn’t mean charity. An 8–4 team didn’t “just miss,” it just lost too many games. Set a floor. Nine wins minimum. That still allows a tough non-con loss, a conference punch to the mouth, and one bad Saturday without turning the playoff into a vibes-based participation bracket. Otherwise we’re not expanding competition—we’re expanding content. And we already know ESPN’s got that part covered.

Short answer: when ESPN finishes counting the ad inventory. Longer answer: sooner than later. The deadline slip to January 23 tells you everything—this isn’t about competitive balance, it’s about packaging the chaos without losing a single studio show. Nobody’s walking away from the ratings sugar rush. Translation: 16 teams is inevitable. The only suspense left is whether they roll it out as a “response to feedback” or pretend it was always part of the master plan.

I have to believe QB chaos always rattles the branches, but it doesn’t knock fruit loose right away. This doesn’t decide anything—it just keeps the "Baugh Watch" scrolling instead of ending the show. Until the portal actually opens and quarterbacks stop flirting and start committing, this is all leverage games, message-board tea leaves, and agents doing warm-up laps. Translation: mildly spicy development, zero final answers.

So, bottom line: fix the trenches, stabilize the run game, and add experience on defense. Everything else is additive, not foundational.

At this point, playoff expansion feels less like a debate and more like the inevitable next episode ESPN is already scripting. After this season’s mess, nobody with a straight face can argue the system “worked as intended.” When you’re excluding teams that could plausibly win the title, that’s not scarcity—that’s a math problem. Even the commissioners are now saying the quiet part out loud, which tells you how bad it got. The real tell isn’t the rhetoric, though—it’s the deadline. ESPN quietly sliding the decision date from December to January 23 isn’t about logistics. It’s about protecting the content pipeline. You don’t kill a controversy that drives ratings; you repackage it with more teams, more brackets, and more studio shows pretending this was the plan all along. And let’s be honest: ESPN isn’t cutting playoff ranking shows. Ever. They’ll expand the field before they reduce a single Tuesday night “who’s in at No. 11?” panel. Expansion doesn’t solve chaos—it monetizes it. So yeah, 16 teams is coming. Not because the sport suddenly found clarity, but because confusion tests better on television.

Not looking good so far!!!

Exciting Volleyball

Just for clarification sake, we are talking about the Ole Miss RB?

Sark’s “mystery search” turned out to be a seasoned SEC RB coach with deep Louisiana and Florida ties, a résumé full of 1,000-yard backs, and actual proof of development. Not a vibes hire. Not a splash hire. A grown-up hire. Florida didn’t fight to keep him, Sark moved fast, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they weren’t skeptical five posts ago. Bonus points if a certain All-SEC back “coincidentally” answers a few texts. Bottom line: this checks every box Texas needed—experience, recruiting footprint, and stability. Now please find a back who turns two yards into six so we can stop lighting candles for the interior OL.

Most if not all of it won’t happen. But the fact that it could is why college football never actually sleeps—it just doomscrolls and refreshes.

If a guy is an obvious, Day-1 upgrade, you don’t hold a symposium about “fit” — you go get him and sort the rest out later. Especially when the alternative is rerunning an interior OL experiment that already face-planted. And on Scudero: this is exactly how you end up watching a plug-and-play contributor help someone else while we congratulate ourselves on patience and development. Sometimes the easy eval is the correct one. If they make you better take the upgrades and move on!

You can respect the hustle and admit the math is brutal. One league consistently drives eyeballs, ratings, and conference-game demand; another keeps talking about “process” while hoping proximity to relevance pays rent. Markets don’t reward effort, nostalgia, or press conferences — they reward attention. So sure, everyone gets a slice under the current model. But let’s not pretend all slices are earned the same way. Some programs bring the viewers. Others bring a Venmo handle and a dream.

“Markets differentiate” means Ohio State and Texas get paid more because people actually watch them. That’s fine. That’s reality. “Monopolies protect incumbents” means the same people who built the system get Congress to freeze it in place so nobody — not schools, not athletes, not even other brands — can ever challenge it. The SCORE Act is clearly the second one. And let’s not pretend Cody Campbell is some free-market hero. He’s not arguing for markets — he’s arguing for his leverage. If Tech were printing SEC-level ratings, he wouldn’t be lecturing anyone about pooled rights and commissioner egos. He wants redistribution dressed up as disruption. So no, this isn’t about fairness. It’s about power. Campbell wants more of it. The commissioners already have it. And the SCORE Act is Congress being asked to pick a side — and pretending it’s “reform.”