Josh Pate | College Football Insider

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The Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day. Really excited to welcome Josh Pate back to the show. He's driving. He's on the move from college football site to college football stadium.

And so thank you. Late kick Josh is how you can find him on Twitter. Josh, I get the question all the time. It seems like it's still the big shadow over the sport of college football, even as games are going on. So how about the update?

What is the latest with the college football playoff expansion? Well, everybody thinks that they're on the right track with it. And a lot of people who, you know, kind of came to a head and then walked away from each other in January are back in the same room now. So the thought is some of the tentative sign off has been gotten. Some of the final sign off is still to be gotten, but will be gotten. And when I say will be, I mean, over the coming weeks and maybe next month or two. And you know, I don't I don't necessarily cover that day to day because I really like the lock in and the season, but a lot of our writers do. And so I talk to them all the time about it because I do want to be up to date on it.

And the feel is yet coming. But at the same time, you've got people in the room right now with each other who know full well conference realignment is not done. You've got people in the room who know full well.

There are member institutions in your conference that are talking to member institutions in my conference. So it's really convoluted. You got everybody with their own special interests and you're trying to get them on the same page. But here's what really sort of calibrates the process, Amy.

When you start talking about billions with a B, that kind of calibrates the process and gets everyone on board. So it will happen. And I think it'll happen. I think you'll have an answer on this by the time we play this year's national championship game. Ultimately, when it comes to the realignment and conferences looking so completely different than say even five years ago, what impact does that have on the playoff but also college football itself? I think a lot of maybe what you grew up on, if you're let's just say if you're over 30, much less if you're over 50 or 60, what you grew up on the territoriality, the regionality that was baked into the fabric of the tradition of college football, I think you'll still have that.

But I think parts of it will be bygone in nature. The next generation of college football documentaries, if you think about it, are being lived out right now. And we've lived them out over the past 10 years because really the past 10 years, as it turns out, were some of the final years of college football kind of quote unquote as you knew it. And you don't even have to just look at realignment for that. You can talk about what the transfer portal has done to the sport. You can talk about what NIL has done to the sport.

And so I'm not saying all these things are bad things, but they are definitely different things. And with conference realignment, I think also what it's done, and I don't necessarily know that I love this aspect, is it has nationalized the sport much like you would see in the NFL. In the NFL, it is nothing if you were to tell me the Chargers are playing the Jets Sunday. But it is a huge deal if you tell me UCLA is playing Rutgers Sunday or Saturday because they're on opposite coasts. That's just not the way college football has normally worked. Or if it does, there's very much a novelty aspect because it would be an out of conference game. Well, that matchup I just gave you, Rutgers-UCLA, will be a conference matchup in a few years. And so the territoriality, that's out of there.

And here's the other thing. When I say Southern football, when I say Big Ten football, when I say Pac-12 football, right now that means something to you. You get an idea in your mind of what the style of football in that region is. I don't know what that means five years from now because there'll be teams coast to coast in several of those conferences, so it just kind of is football. And then you throw in the NIL and how that's impacted college sports, not just football, though it is primarily football and men's basketball. And you're right, it feels like the wild, wild west where anything goes right now. Let's just say you're in the room as a power broker where they're trying to decide what the playoffs should look like, Josh.

What type of a bracket, how many teams would you advocate for? Oh, you don't want me in that room. I would not be good for business at all.

Yeah, I would be terrible for business. They don't, look, they won't even let me come on network at CBS and talk about this because they know what I'm going to say. Oh, come on.

Give it to me then. I, here's what I love, and this is going to sound very, very out of left field. I know I'm in the minority here. Amy, I don't even really care about the postseason that much in college football. I love bowl season, but I don't even, I do not center my thought process around who the national champion is going to end up being.

I watch the game, I go to the game every year, I cover it, I love it, I get it. But our sport is so disproportionate to other professional sports. In pro football, in baseball, basketball, everything is centered around the postseason with good reason because the entire sport is built for that. Colleges existed long before college football existed. Then some of these places decided that they wanted those extracurriculars attached as an appendage to the school. And some of them existed in 1913, some of them popped up in 1960. Some conferences have money, some don't.

Some have academic institutional limitations, some don't. There's no perfect balance in college football, yet it kind of gets hodgepodge and it gets kind of crammed into this postseason model where everyone is seemingly supposed to be judged on the same scale. And I know that sounds like word salad, what I'm saying is I love Saturdays in the fall. That's what I love. I mean, I live for them.

Those 12 Saturdays that you're going to give me, I love it. I do not need to watch Tennessee at LSU this Saturday. I don't need to go to A&M Alabama this Saturday. I don't need to watch Utah, UCLA this Saturday and have someone every 15 minutes wondering in my ear, how's this going to impact the playoff? It's impacting my Saturday.

That's what I care about. And so my answer to you in a very long-winded way is I very much miss the day where it was just kind of that BCS model. And a lot of people didn't like that because they didn't like the concept of a computer deciding things.

Well, let me tell you something. In that era, the phrase bowl opt-out never existed. The phrase meaningless regular season game or meaningless bowl game never existed.

That's only been a recent kind of college football era phenomenon. So the answer to a lot of folks when I say this, the answer to them is, yeah, well, so now that the cat's out of the bag, you've got to expand it so that you can have more meaning on more games. And I get that logic.

Here's my counter. How do you know when you increase the quantity of playoff spots, the value of making the playoffs is going to remain the same? That's right. That's right. It's supply and demand. It operates in every industry in every corner of our world. That's college football, which is apparently going to be immune to it.

So I remain skeptical there. We're so excited to spend a few minutes with Josh Pate. He's got the late kick with Josh Pate.

Whenever we try to reach out to Josh, it seems like his schedule is jam full. So this is a treat for us here on After Hours on CBS Sports Radio. Josh, in the first, let's say five weeks or so, what have we learned about college football? It seems like it's the same teams at the top.

You mentioned a few of the matchups that we've got and we dive into conference play now. What's different though about this year that we didn't have last year? Here's what we did have last year. I kind of started calling it a Renaissance season because going into 2021, you were being told same old teams make the playoffs every year and there's no competitive balance, blah, blah, blah. And it was the craziest year last year since 2007. 2007 is its own universe.

Nothing will ever top that. But 2021 was very, very wild. And I think that people kind of thought that was a one-off.

And I was one of them. I just did not believe that we were going to get that level of crazy this year. Amy, 10 of the top 25 teams in the country lost just last week. And that's been happening all year. And I know right now it feels like Bama and Ohio State and Georgia and the rest of the pack.

And I do agree with that for the time being. But Ohio State showed vulnerability against Notre Dame in week one. Bama had Bryce Young go down last week and they still rolled. But look, they had to survive a scare against Texas. Georgia has looked, as Meemaw would say, average as grit two weeks in a row. And so I think that when you get out of that top three, here's where it really gets fun.

We do our own power ratings. But if you were to have a Vegas odds maker, someone who sets the numbers on this show right now, they would tell you the same thing. Number four through number 30 in college football right now.

However you want to kind of put them in there. There is like a 10 point gap between those teams. It is so crazy how balanced the second tier of college football is right now. So that just means crazy Saturday after crazy Saturday.

Who are a couple of teams, at least right now at this point as we launch into October, that you consider to be dark horses or teams that maybe will use this next month to kind of put themselves into that conversation or maybe separate themselves from that pack you just referenced? I think it's a huge weekend for Utah. I think if people were honest with themselves, anyone driving around listening right now, if you're honest with yourself, you watched Utah play Florida in week one and they lost and you probably hadn't watched them again. And that's okay because you got a life to live. But I don't. So I've been watching them for you. They are one of three teams in America that are top 12 in total offense, total defense.

Okay. And I think that about them because you kind of cast them off. They're a Pac-12 team. They lost in week one. You probably said to yourself, there goes Utah season.

Well, no, that was never the case. They're playing really good football now. Now why I say this is a big weekend for them is because they go on the road to UCLA, a team also playing the best football they've played under Chip Kelly.

If they can get that one, that sets up that date next week in Salt Lake City with USC coming to town. And Utah, unlike the other teams out there, they're already kind of in wounded animal back against the wall mode because they can't afford to lose again. So I'd look at them and I'll tell you the most underrated team in the country right now is Mississippi State. People aren't going to pay them any mention because they're in the wrong division. So they're not going to top Alabama.

So they're not going to Atlanta and therefore they're probably not going to the playoffs. Mississippi State is very, very underrated right now. So those are two teams I have my eye on. I always enjoy the Red River rivalry, Texas and Oklahoma. I know they're not ranked this year, first time in quite a long time. But I just remember that atmosphere at the Texas State Fair being there for some of their glory days. It's odd though, right?

Because they're getting ready to jump ship. But that rivalry to me is special and I kind of love that. Getting into the month of October where we have more and more of these games that truly do have history and bring that incredible element to it. I hope that doesn't go away, and I'm not just referring to Texas, Oklahoma, but that's part of my challenge with conference realignment is to not get upset when we lose some of the great rivalries in the sport. Yeah, and you know, I went to that game last year.

It was the first time I'd ever been there covering it or as a fan. And some of my buddies from back home, I grew up in rural Georgia. So we heard about the Red River game growing up, but it was always Iron Bowl.

It was just always SEC for us. And so, you know, they're still where they were in high school and middle school. No one moves from my hometown.

They all just live in my hometown. So I'm the only one that gets out in the world and experiences it for everyone. So they asked me, what was that game like? And they got insulted when I told them, oh, it was every bit of what the Iron Bowl is.

I loved it. It was such a unique atmosphere. And at halftime, you know, you've been there, so you know, you can just walk up that tunnel. I mean, Amy, at halftime of the game, I walked out of the stadium, went to the fair and got a corn dog and a funnel cake and got right back down on the field before the second half started. Yes! So that was great.

Absolutely. I've never been to a game like it. And just remember the noise and also the way that the stadium is completely divided, where you've got half in burnt orange and half in the crimson and cream. There's so many things about it that were tremendous. Josh Pate is with us after hours on CBS Sports Radio. Congratulations on signing a new deal with CBS Sports in 24-7. Your show has exploded in such amazing ways. It's so much fun to kind of follow this meteoric rise, Josh, with your show. What does this mean to you to have not just the job security, but the ability to continue doing what you love the way that you want to? Well, it means everything. And I sort of came up envying people who were responsible enough in high school and college to get in that either multimedia or journalism or broadcast track, go for four years and get pumped out on that assembly line right to a job waiting for them and start working their way up the rung of the ladder.

I didn't do that. I was not the greatest student in the world. I spent a large portion of my early and mid-20s having no clue what I wanted to do and where I was going. And I remember pretty vividly someone telling me one day, I said this on the show the other night when we made the announcement, they said to me, you need to learn that a job doesn't have to be something you hate.

There actually are careers at the intersection of your talent and your passion. And boy, that clicked with me. And I mean, it didn't happen overnight, but I got myself in gear. And the fact that in this country you can get paid to talk about college football all year is mind boggling to me. But yet we can do it. And so we have a ton of fun with it. And Amy, I noticed about six or seven years ago, I just didn't think that the overall college football media industry, whatever you want to call it, was putting out the kind of content I liked.

And I didn't think I was alone. And so I said, well, let's do something about it. And so it's nothing else. It's no pro. It's no politics. It's nothing else.

It's just college football. And we have fun. We think it's a pretty good product.

I had a great staff, full support of management, and it's been a blessing. And I think we've only just begun, to quote the Carpenters. Well, and considering everything that's happening in college football and the fact that it is changing at light speed, as I said, this is a perfect time to be able to settle in for the long haul. So you can find Josh on Twitter at Late Kick Josh, but the show is called The Late Kick with Josh Pate. It's live on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, 8 o'clock Eastern Time.

If you head to his Twitter, there's links there. And again, congratulations on being able to get this deal in place, but also to have the creative control. That's amazing. I'm so happy for you. I really appreciate it. I always appreciate being on. The last time we talked, I was driving home from the national championship game.

So I think we'll do this again before seven months from now. Some fans gear up for game day, but some fans follow their team every day. That's why the Lockdown Podcast Network has a daily podcast for your favorite MLB team. Every trade, every overtime win, every game. Our local experts cover the biggest stories around your team every day. Search locked on plus your favorite MLB team on the Odyssey app or wherever you get podcasts. The Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day.