Steamboat Willie

I’m not rooting for OU or A&M. I’m rooting against the joy of everyone involved. Best outcome? They win just enough to annoy Miami and Bama fans, then get absolutely flattened later so nobody’s happy. Failing that, I’m with Team Asteroid.

This isn’t some mystery spiral — it’s aztec roster math meeting the modern calendar. Two upper-class linebackers are heading to the draft. One multi-year starter hit the portal after being told next year wasn’t guaranteed. That leaves the bowl LB room looking like: one returning rotation guy, one hybrid who’s been playing out of position, a true freshman with almost no snaps, and a couple depth bodies who’ve mostly lived on special teams. That’s not “culture collapse.” That’s December. Short term, it means the junior LB is now the centerpiece, the hybrid finally gets to play closer to where he belongs, and the freshman gets tossed into the deep end with the lifeguard on coffee break. Everyone else is there for reps, survival, and résumé building. Long term, it tells you exactly what’s coming: linebacker just moved into must-add territory in the portal. You don’t let an experienced upper-class starter walk unless you’re either confident in the youth… or confident upgrades are coming. The bowl game itself? Secondary. This is an evaluation scrimmage with a sponsor logo. Learn who can handle it, learn who can’t, then go shopping on January 2. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got Cheez-It dust on my shirt

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.”

The SCORE Act is being sold as the magic pill to “stabilize” college sports, which is adorable considering it mostly stabilizes the NCAA’s legal defenses and the conference commissioners’ job security. Enter Cody Campbell—Texas Tech’s billionaire booster, head regent, and newly crowned Patron Saint of Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud—who showed up just in time to point out that the emperors aren’t just naked, they’re also terrible negotiators. Campbell says the conferences could make billions more by pooling media rights, but commissioners won’t do it because they like controlling their own little fiefdoms. The commissioners, naturally, clutched their pearls and insisted they never said pooling would increase revenue, which is hilarious because the only thing more predictable than a commissioner’s denial is a bowl game corporate sponsor. So now we’ve got a full-on soap opera: Campbell yelling that the money’s on the table, the commissioners yelling that Campbell doesn’t understand the “realities,” and Congress trying to pass a bill that gives the NCAA antitrust bubble wrap while telling athletes they’re definitely not employees but should please enjoy these newly standardized NIL guardrails. If you squint, the SCORE Act looks like “reform.” If you read it normally, it’s the conferences trying to lock in their authority before Campbell shows up with a calculator and ruins the illusion. But sure—let’s pretend the real crisis here is protecting commissioners’ feelings while the industry drifts toward semi-pro status with an “amateurism” sticker slapped on top.

I’m not here to canonize private equity. Nobody’s confusing Bain Capital with the Peace Corps. But comparing PE in college football to the USFL is kind of like comparing a restaurant remodel to a meteor strike. Same universe, wildly different stakes. The USFL face-planted because a handful of billionaires tried to cosplay NFL owners overnight. Private equity doesn’t do cosplay. It does spreadsheets, leverage, and “please sign here so we can fire half your department.” Good? Bad? Depends whose ox is getting gored. What PE does reliably is take systems already drifting toward semi-pro reality and say out loud what everyone else is whispering: “You people are running a nine-figure entertainment product with the governance structure of a church bake sale.” That’s why this is happening. Not because PE is noble — but because college football created a vacuum big enough to pull in capital, lawyers, and consultants like a tractor beam. Will they get it right? Maybe. Will they price things “correctly”? Only if you think “correctly” means “in a way that maximizes returns and occasionally detonates traditions.” But here’s one place we definitely agree: Give it time — because nobody breaks things faster than private equity except college football trying to “fix” itself.

The playoff committee didn’t just bend college football — they faceplanted into it and then blamed the turf. They spent years preaching “strength of schedule matters,” then quietly revealed the real rule is “count the losses and stop thinking.” So now Georgia and Bama aren’t “scared,” they’re just doing math… and the math says cancel anything fun, risky, or remotely watchable. Congrats, committee. You’ve turned September into preseason, neutered marquee OOC games, and taught everyone that scheduling courage is for suckers. If this is “smart football,” then college football just outsourced its soul to an Excel spreadsheet

Private equity isn’t the cartoon villain some want it to be — but let’s also not pretend it’s Santa Claus with a balance sheet. PE does one thing extremely well: it professionalizes chaos. If an athletic department is already drifting toward employee compensation, revenue sharing, and semi-pro reality, PE just stops the pretending and prices it correctly. That alone makes people uncomfortable, because it replaces vibes with math. That doesn’t make it automatically good, and it definitely doesn’t make it automatically evil. It means incentives get sharper, accountability gets real, and nostalgia gets evicted. Some fans call that “destroying the sport.” Others call it finally admitting what the sport already is. The real risk isn’t private equity showing up — it’s schools wandering around in this half-legal, half-amateur gray zone with no structure and acting shocked when something snaps. Utah at least seems to be saying the quiet part out loud and trying to build guardrails instead of pretending 2012 still exists. No, this isn’t the USFL. No, it’s not BASEketball. It’s college football admitting it’s a business — and now arguing over who gets the keys, who sets the rules, and who gets paid first.

Nice move for him. That’s a clear step up and good for his résumé. Also… if one staffer leaving “hurts” Texas, then the whole operation was way more duct-taped together than anyone wants to admit — and that’s simply not how Sark runs things. This program isn’t dependent on one guy with a spreadsheet. It’s layered, it’s resourced, and it’s built to reload. If anything, this is just an opportunity to modernize or upgrade the role even more for the portal/NIL era. Wish him well. Replace him. Move on.

This portal cycle is already screaming one thing: availability ≠ fit. There’s a lot of movement, a lot of names, and a lot of folks getting excited because a recruiting profile exists. But Texas shouldn’t be shopping for interesting—we should be shopping for transformative. As Bobby and Gerry like to say: is the juice worth the squeeze? If the answer isn’t “this fixes a real problem immediately,” keep scrolling. A rotational DT who looks like three guys we already have? No squeeze. A WR who replicates what’s already in the room? Minimal juice. An OL who can’t move people off the ball? We’ve seen that movie. The only portal additions that matter right now are: trench players who change the physical tone a RB who actually scares defenses veterans who reduce downside, not add learning curves This is Arch’s window. Not a rebuild. Not a science experiment. Take fewer swings. Make them violent.

Definitely wasn’t fully recovered this year, the question becomes: will he ever return to his pre-injury form?

Hoosier Daddy