Has The Current State Of College Football Turned You Off? (Hour 3)

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If you got a smart speaker, ask the speaker to play the Infinity Sports Network. In 20 minutes, we'll have a conversation with former NBA champion, coach, analyst, Avery Johnson is going to join us here on the JR Sport Brief Show. I'm going to ask him everything going on, about everything going on in the NBA. We've been talking some NFL too. New York Giants, will they take a quarterback? We don't know.

They like their quarterback room, that's what they say. Aaron Rodgers, he spoke to Pat McAfee today. Didn't provide any additional clarity as to what will go on. Will he play? Will he not play?

We have no idea and neither does he. Damian Lillard. Lillard has been cleared from the blood clot in his leg. The Bucks feel optimistic he can return here in the first round. Meanwhile, you got John Morant, sprained his ankle against the Golden State Warriors a couple of nights ago. He is a game time decision, whether or not he's going to play tomorrow night against the Dallas Mavericks.

Whoever ends up winning that game, well, you get the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the NBA playoffs. So good luck with that one. You want to be a part of the show? You can. Here's the number 888-710-4ISN.

That's 888-710-4ISN. Man, before we get to Avery Johnson, there was a point in time, you might recall, you might remember, where Avery Johnson, who has been, I mean, he's been around. This guy's played. This guy's coached. He's had his share.

He was a coach of Alabama basketball a few years ago. He got out of it before things went into the toilet. When I say go into the toilet, I'm referring to to NIL, all these deals, people moving around, people just bouncing left and bouncing right and getting paid. I saw a report today that said we got college basketball rosters that when you think about payroll, how crazy is that? It's not on the school's payroll, but this is actually coming down to the collective's that we got rosters that are rosters that are approaching and surpassing approximately 10 million dollars. And this is just in a few years. We went from players being not being paid. OK, you get my drift, not being paid. And now we got guys who are getting paid above board to the tune of 10 million dollars for the entire roster. OK, let's let's be real.

Even forget basketball. Over the past week, dating back to last week, we all heard about Nico Iemaliava. This man left Tennessee or his dad basically said, pay us more money or we leave in Tennessee, said, no, thank you. And so as a result, we got all this news about Nico Iemaliava and he's going to UCLA and, oh, well, his dad is screwing him up and he's hunting for the money and he is well within his prerogative to look for the money.

I think anybody old enough to get a paycheck, go out there and get one. I thought it was ridiculous for all these years that college athletes weren't allowed to pocket a check just in the name of amateurism. That's not amateurism.

That's just pure robbery. And so everybody says UCLA, Nico Iemaliava, it's not a done deal, but it's likely to happen. And good luck if it does, because looking at UCLA last year, they didn't have the best year kind of popping up their first year in the Big Ten. They had Deshaun Foster. You might remember that was his first year as a head coach.

They went five and seven. And if I got to think about the past couple of years, as far back as I can remember, recent years of UCLA, they've been kind of they were whatever with Chip Kelly. Jim Mora had some good years, but I don't know if if Nico playing at UCLA is going to develop the way that he would have at Tennessee.

I would I would certainly think not. You playing in Tennessee and we know the Big Ten has some of the the best players in the country as well. It goes from coast to coast. But there's so much of a concentration in the SEC. And for a team like UCLA, like the roster surrounding him is I don't know. It just feels like a bad move all the way around for Nico Imalieva. He hasn't officially you know, signed up with UCLA yet.

It just seems like a bad overall deal. And someone who doesn't like you know what we have is someone familiar with basketball as well. His name is Jay Billis. He was on Sirius XM and he says, you know what, whether it's basketball, whether it's football, what we need from the student athletes are for them to sign contracts if they want to be paid.

And by the way, Nico had one. He just wanted to renegotiate. There's no there's no standard for this yet.

This is all new. Listen to Jay Billis. If they would just sign the players to contracts, if you don't want to collectively bargain, if you if you collectively bargain with players, you can certainly do all the things that the NBA or the NFL do with salary caps because you're in a partnership with players. But if you don't want to do that, all you have to do is sign them to a contract. But the NCAA won't allow that right now. But if you were recruiting me, you'd say, hey, we're willing to offer you a three year deal with an option for a fourth. If you get arrested, we get to terminate. You have to it's mandatory class attendance.

You have to do this, this and this. And there's going to be a buyout in there. We negotiate the amount of buyout.

So if I wanted to leave, go somewhere else, I'd have to pay the buyout or my new school would have to pay the buyout. It's pretty simple. It's really not that big of a deal. Yeah. You know, it's typically and we've had this as well. When the coaches leave, the players can go out there and leave as well. Should the coaches have more flexibility and the coaches have buyouts if they decide to go on to greener pastures? Hickey, what do you think about what Jay Billis said?

I completely agree. I think that's the answer. Like like they have NAL contracts right now, but like sign a contract with the school similar to what pros do. Again, you negotiate. Maybe it's just a one year deal.

Prove it. Two year deal, three year deal. And maybe outside of, hey, the coach leaves, right? Something like that. You're locked in there. So if Nikko signed with Tennessee a three year deal, you were at Tennessee for three years.

Period stuff. So you can't jump in the transfer portal to leave every semester. You can't jump in the transfer portal to hold your own team hostage. Like it brings some stability to where the players don't get paid, but the coaches can have, you know, you're not always looking over your shoulder of who's staying, who's going.

I think it works best for both sides. Yeah, I just, I feel that like what he said, it's hard to do. Contracts are just, I don't want to say they're made to be broken, but depending on your performance and who does what on each side of the contract, what they deliver, what they don't deliver, what they say they want to do, contracts are always up for renegotiation. And because there are no, there is no outside, you know, influence here. When I say outside influence, Jay Billis had brought it up, the collective bargaining. Like there's, there's no group here that's managing this.

So it's really the wild, wild West. And so even if Nikko had a contract with the school, who's to say that he can't break that? You know, I mean, it's one thing to say, Hey, you guys said you were going to pay this much money to me. And now you say, you don't want to pay me more.

So screw you guys. I don't want to make any more money. They don't pay him anymore.

And he goes and he gets it from somewhere else. Like nothing is stopping him from that because there's no, there's no regulation of it. So we would need, we would need a big brother and the NCAA should have been that, that big brother. We know that they're not, they sure as hell did not care about making money when the athletes were able to make money on the outside. The NCAA basically ran away and stopped caring.

I just think that's tough to execute unless the players unionize. But then even then, Hickey, it's almost to the point of, there's so much, so much here. It's almost like baseball with no cap. Like the Major League Baseball players, they love it, but they don't because you can get a Juan Soto who makes 765 Hickey.

Did I give him every dollar? You nailed it. You got Soto who's making 765, which is great. But then you got guys on the lower end who they're disappointed.

They have to wait until the end of almost, I don't want to say, well, the beginning of spring training before they get their deals. It's like people are fat and rich at the top. The guys at the lower end are making more money than ever before, but there's a massive discrepancy.

And hey, if they had a salary cap, maybe it even out a little bit more, but they don't want to chop themselves off all the way at the top. And so while things in college athletics are in such a free for all right now, I can get my money here and I can hustle this school for my money. I can try to get money from this school. It's tough. It's tough to put regulations on it because there is none.

There are no regulations. Like nobody gave a damn. They're just like, oh, we got to pay the kids or we got to let them make money. It was screwed.

You know, I don't think this is every time I talk about this, it becomes more of a disaster. It's like the kid from UNLV who just said, I, y'all ain't paying me. I'm out.

And now we got Nico Yamalaya. He's like, hey, Tennessee, y'all paying me. You're not going to pay me more. I got you up. You know, we got practice tomorrow.

They're like, we don't care. Leave. And it's done. Like, what's next? Are we going to have a guy who's going to go through spring practice? Is he going to go all the way up until August, like right before game day and he's just going to quit on the team? Like, we ain't going to have nobody go that far, right?

I would assume not. But I mean, I also didn't think we'd get to this day where the starting quarterback of an SEC team that just made the playoff last year would leave at a time that is not beneficial to him and end up at a school where they're projected to win four games. There's not a lot of talent around him at all. And his reputation's in the toilet. They're projected to do less than a five they did last year. Their win total, according to Vegas, four and a half.

Ouch. Yeah. When they hired Deshaun Farr, no disrespect to him. I've never seen a guy coach nothing.

I just remember his introductory press conference. Wasn't he kind of, he was, he sounded more lost than, who's who's the Eagles coach? Nick Sirianni. Yeah. He sounded more lost than Nick Sirianni. Yeah.

Nick Sirianni came out. He's just like, oh, we got to process. We want guys to do less thinking, more acting, more reacting, less thinking. That's what we want.

And we want talent to take over. Like Nick Sirianni sounded completely lost in his introductory press conference. What we got from Deshaun Foster, he was answering questions he wasn't even asked. He was nervous as hell and I get it. Like we got a lot of coaches, public speaking isn't their forte.

But I don't know. I think for me personally, and I look, I've never been a coach or anything. I think that I do, I do talk, I speak for a living. I do think there's a correlation between people who are good public speakers and then being able to go out there and lead a group. Like maybe you can be the coach and you can talk to the locker room, but talking to the public isn't your thing.

Like every time I hear Mike McDaniel from the Dolphins is like, I'm listening to Doogie Howser with a dissertation, but I guess his message gets across in the locker room. We'll see. But yeah, things, things aren't looking good for UCLA on the football front. Things aren't looking good for Nico Iamaliyava. And it's not even a certainty that he's going to end up there. But at this point, at this point, where the hell else is he going to go?

It's just a bad, sad, miserable situation. Hey, good luck to Nico Iamaliyava. How about this? I told you in about eight to 10 minutes, we're going to have a chat with Avery Johnson. We're going to talk some hoops. We're going to talk some basketball.

We already talked about how crazy Matt Ishbia is going through his third coach in three seasons. I'm definitely going to get that question out to Avery Johnson. Of course, I want to get his thoughts on what's taking place in the playoffs, what we should look out for.

And then how about this? A team that he used to coach, the Dallas Mavericks. He has a very good idea about the fans in Dallas and how they feel about everything that's going on.

Man, I got a chance to actually still get into the playoffs tomorrow. We'll have that chat with Avery Johnson as well. And then with the Nico Harrison situation, I don't even get that. It's just wild all over the place. Hickey, I heard that Dirk Nowitzki doesn't even want to bother with the Mavericks anymore.

How do you do that? That's probably as bad as it gets. When you turn him off, there's no coming back from that. Well, I can't say that.

We went through a top six last week. Yogi Berra got ran off. Well, he got ran off. He got fired from the Yankees.

I'm trying to remember a retired player, a retired legend. Well, Kevin Garnett wanted nothing to do with the Timberwolves. That's probably going to change now because of how they did Flip Saunders' son and even gave Kevin Garnett that he was supposed to be a part of the organization. That's a beef.

Yeah, Hickey, I guess it has to start at the top. It has to be ownership. And we all know about James Dolan kicking Charles Oakley out of a basketball game. Are they still in litigation? They're going to be suing each other forever, right?

Yeah, I think that's just a never-ending cycle. It's just the happiest people in that are the lawyers. Yeah, the lawyers are just ringing up the checks, man.

Ringing up the checks. It's wild. So we're going to take a break. When we come back, we'll have a chat with NBA champion, former coach, current CBS sports analyst, Avery Johnson.

He's going to come by. We'll have a chat with about everything from the Mavs to the Suns to the coaches to the Playins to Davis to Luka. Avery Johnson will answer it all here on the JR Sport Reshow, the Infinity Sports Network. You're listening to the JR Sport Brief.

It is the JR Sport Brief show here with you coast to coast on the Infinity Sports Network. Man, we're down to the final games of the Playin' tomorrow. We got the NBA playoffs that get started on Saturday. We got coaches that are just getting the boot.

We got GMs who are getting fired as well. We're right now to talk about all the action, good, bad, everything in between going on in the NBA. There's someone who played in the league. He coached the league. He won a championship as the lead point guard on the San Antonio Spurs. Right now, he's an analyst.

You can catch him on CBS Sports. It is Avery Johnson. Avery, how are you? I'm doing wonderful. How are you doing?

I'm excellent. Thank you for taking the time to join us. As we get started, I do want to jump into a little bit of news that we got this afternoon, this evening. That's that Damian Lillard has been cleared for action. And we know he had the blood clot in his leg.

You played the game, you coached the game. What do you think we'll see out of him? Or if we will see him based on his conditioning level? Yeah, I think that she is, you know, blood clots are always scary. And that's one of the things, you know, that the Spurs are dealing with right now when they can win the Nama.

You know, those things could be, you know, life threatening. So I'm happy just to hear that they got it under control. And if they have it under control, then obviously with Damon Lillard and Damian Lillard in the lineup, it just takes their offense to a whole nother level. He gives that rivers more opportunities to expand his playbook. He's got a guy that can pass dribble and shoot and create his own shot, especially at the end when the shot clock is is down. So I think this is great news for Milwaukee. And even if for some reason he's not at his best, you know, early in the series, you know, they're not in the play in.

It's not a do or die situation. So they'll have a chance to to really, you know, have him with upward mobility and he can get better and better as the series moves on. The Milwaukee Bucks, they are in action against those Pacers starting on Saturday. Avery, another point guard, he's going to play tomorrow. Well, he might. He's a game time decision for tomorrow.

That's John Moran. So we got the Grizzlies and we got the Mavs. It's kind of crazy. The Mavs are are even in this point, given everything they've gone through with Luka Doncic, Niko Harrison is I don't know, should he feel vindicated about what's taking place right now? Well, I think with the Mavericks situation, you know, with all that's going on, they're just trying to win this game. I don't know about vindication just for winning that 19 game. Let's see what happens against Memphis and if they can string together some sort of a long playoff run or, you know, if they make it upset Oklahoma City, you know, there's still a lot of basketball left to be played if they can win this game tomorrow against Memphis.

But right now, I think they're just trying to figure out if they could make some shots. Klay Thompson. Brandon Williams was outstanding off the bench. Those three threes he made in the first half. This young man who just recently signed a new contract was great. Klay Thompson, who struggled in that building during the last playoffs. Anthony Davis was terrific.

So I think we'll see if the healthy Josh shows up tomorrow and if the Mavericks can if the Mavericks can string together some sort of a winning streak. Avery Johnson here with us on the JR Sport Reshow. Man, I remember when you coach for the Dallas Mavericks. Talk to us about that fan base, because they've been they've been kind of tough on everybody since Luca got moved. And again, that's a situation where, you know, fans are real passionate about their star players. I saw it when I was coaching here with Dirk and when I played with Dirk, you know, I witnessed it when I was in San Antonio with Tim Duncan and, you know, the Dave Robinsons of the world, Hakeem Olajuwon and Houston, you know, so I've seen it. You know, I've also seen it on the college level, you know, Colin Sexton, you know, when he decided to go to Alabama when we were coaching there and trying to get that that program out of the dungeon and and get it back running again, how passionate they were about him.

And we made it to the NCAA tournament back in 2018, eventually losing to Villanova, the eventual champions. So fan bases can really are really passionate about their superstar players. So if those star players have to move on sooner than what fan bases think, then obviously they're they're they're going to express their disappointment.

Avery Johnson is here with us on the JR Sport Reshow. Last question on the offseason before I asked you about the playoffs. The Phoenix Suns, you want to talk about moving? I mean, we heard from their their owner, Matt Ishby, earlier today. We know that Duran is likely to be moved. Same thing for Bradley Beal if he decides to let go of that trade clause.

What's going on? He's about to have four different coaches and four different years. Yeah, that's a tough situation, but I will give him I will give him an A for effort. The guy spent a lot of money on this team, luxury tax. You know, he's lowered the concessions at the arena, you know, put games on TV for free. So he he's done a lot of things just on the court product has struggled. He thought there was a path forward in terms of hiring certain coaches and firing certain coaches, bringing the new ones. But it wasn't because he was trying not to get to a championship level. I think legitimately he thought he was trying to move the team in the right direction.

And unfortunately, you make those moves. It's like a 50 50 success rate. And none of those moves worked on the court, but they've transformed that arena in Phoenix. They just haven't had the on the court product catch up with a lot that they're doing off the court and with fan experience.

But it hasn't been for a lack of effort. Hopefully they'll get the right coach in place that they can help them get to the next level. But, you know, obviously they're paying three, two or three different coaches. That's a lot not to coach.

Yeah, that's a lot of money to throw around. Matt Ishbia got plenty of it. When you think about some of the teams that will be in action this weekend, starting off the playoffs, we got a great, great series that I'm looking forward to between the Nuggets and the Clippers. I think the Rockets and the Golden State Warriors will be a fun one. What matchup are you looking forward to, Avery?

Wow. You know, it's kind of that Rockets Golden State Warriors one, you know, two versus seven, because remember Draymond Green promised us that they were going to win a championship when they traded for Jimmy Butler. So and they're coming out of the play in and you got a little bit of a younger Rockets team in certain positions. So we'll see if they can kind of protect their home court. The worst thing I think they want to do is get a split or allow Golden State to come in there hot and heavy and win those first two games. So I think that's the one that I have my eyes on to really see if this Jimmy Butler effect and playoff Jimmy can work the same way it did in Miami. Avery Johnson here with us, NBA champion with the San Antonio Spurs. When you think about who might hoist that Larry O'Brien this season, is it just OKC and the Celtics?

Do you see it being any different? No, I got definitely Boston repeating. Now this is barring any injuries. You know, everybody's healthy on Boston. You know, Jalen Brown and Porzingis is not their different story, but if everyone is healthy on Boston's team, relatively healthy, playing in games, you can survive one playoff game without somebody.

They did it with Porzingis last year. I have Boston repeating and then I have the field against Oklahoma City in the West, but I don't know exactly who it is. Maybe the Lakers. We don't know, but I think there's another team in the West in conference that's going to represent the West against Boston. But I got Boston repeating.

Avery Johnson here with us on the JR Sportbreeze show. As we get ready to let you go, you mentioned your time coaching at Alabama and from your time even four or five years ago to what we have now, we've seen the explosion of NIL, the transfer portal, NFL, NBA, or excuse me, football or basketball. We see players just moving around willy nilly. What do you think can put a cap on this? Because there's no continuity in college athletics right now.

Yeah, I think you said the word cap. I think we need to have some sort of a one time transfer rule. I'm I'm a little bit more concerned about the transfer, unlimited transfers and waivers than I am the NIL.

I think the NIL situation will settle down. But yeah, we need to have some sort of a transfer, a one time transfer rule or not. You got to sit out or if you leave after a team is invested in so much money and you maybe, you know, there's some sort of a buyout from the team that you're going to sign with. There needs to be some precautions and guardrails that make the penalty for transferring so easily, some sort of a price that you have to pay. So I don't have all the answers. I just know what's going on now isn't working with all the unlimited transfers and all these players moving around so easily. Yes, it's the wild, wild West.

Hey, Avery, I thank you for joining us with your perspective. Coaching, playing. Where can people follow you in all of your work? We see you on CBS all the time. Fill us in. Yeah, I'm on CBS Sports HQ a couple of times a week covering now the NBA. I've been on CBS Sports Network. You know, I call, you know, a certain amount of games every college basketball games. But I'm on social media. Coach Avery six.

Coach Avery number six on all forms of social media. I'm normally there daily posting some different content. Avery, thank you so much. We look forward to having a chat with you down the line and join your evening. Okay. Okay.

Thanks a lot. Thank you so much to Avery Johnson. I like his perspective. He played, he coached, he did it all. He's an analyst. He was a champion. He's had a great career. And for a man his size, Avery Johnson is sub six feet. He wasn't expected to be balling out in the NBA. And he just ran the ship. You don't hear a lot about Avery Johnson when it comes to, you know, being one of the spurs, but I remember him just running. They call this guy a little general. He was out there running the show.

And thank you so much to Avery Johnson for coming through and joining us. We do know this. We need some structure in college sports is it can't just transfer willy nilly and make the money. Yes. But can we get some continuity?

I think that's a big part of things that turn people off about the game. And so first of all, we Hickey, let me try to list this. If I miss anything, let me know.

Okay. I'm thinking about things that, that, that just don't feel right about college athletics. So many transfers, right?

We've now reached the negotiating stickup period where you got Nico Yamalaya. The fact that the conference realignment has kind of shifted and shaken up some rivalries. We have the adjustment or the continuous adjustment of the college football playoff. They're eventually the schools sooner than later are going to have to just flat out pay the players in addition to whatever they make for marketing agreements.

That's going to cause a big fit as well. Am I missing anything? One, two, three, four. I wrote down five different things. I think you nailed it for the most part.

And you can, we can even dive deeper into any of these five. So it is just five on the surface with multiple layers for almost everything you hit on all stepping back from the NCA's greediness back in the day of just profiting off the kids thinking the day that they get paid will never happen. And now that it is happening, they had zero plan. And I think we as fans and I think kids as well are paying the price for it. Yeah. It's just, it's everything goes. It's like every, it's like a street fight with no rules. It's like one guy brings out a hammer. You can't say, hey, I thought we said it's fist and no hammers. And the guy's like, hey, there's no rules.

And he hits you with the hammer. Like anything goes, it is it's too much of a free for all. And yeah, the games go on. The money gets made. Everybody makes money. You know, we enjoy sitting down and watching the games, but everything else surrounding it at this point in time is it's loose.

It's wise. It's like you, Hickey, do you remember when the UFC first started? Like when it first got going?

Not too much. I was pretty late to the game on that. When they had like the first UFC, it was literally let's take fighters from different like spaces and genres and disciplines and let's just have them duke it out and see what happens.

It wasn't. So nowadays there's structure to the UFC. The fighters are more well-rounded.

Sure. One guy might be a better wrestler than he is a boxer. He might be a better boxer than he is a wrestler. He might do Taekwondo. It is Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You have to be well versed in a little bit of it all to go out there and compete. You got to grapple as well as your standup and some better than others striking. Having said that, the first UFC, like some of these matches were just Hickey like, hey, we got a sumo wrestler over here and we got some Bruce Lee lookalike on the other side. And let's see what a 600 pound guy does against a 200 pound guy.

And it just, it was crazy looking like that was like UFC in its early days before they started to say, you know what? We need weight classes. We need structure. This is what college athletics is missing right now.

They had structure. The structure was let's not let the students make money. Let's control it all.

And now that the students can make money away from the school, it's just gotten real nutty. And we need weight classes per se. As an analogy, we need weight classes. We need the visions.

There needs to be some structure here. And when you think about it, we're going to have more we're going to have more change. Like we're going to continue to see conference realignment. We got conferences who are like, oh, let's have our own playoff. We got kids who are sticking schools up. The students are about to get paid revenue share deals from the universities and the colleges. It's just not going to stop.

We may not have any solid set structure. It may take a decade. This is a crazy time. It's the J.R. sport re-show on the Infinity Sports Network. 888-710-4ISN. That's 888-710-4ISN.

Hey, you know what? The phone lines are open. It's a simple question. What don't you like about how college athletics has changed? What drives you crazy about college football or college basketball?

What can't you stand about how the game and how college athletics has changed? 888-710-4ISN. That's 888-710-4ISN.

I don't think Nico Emaliava will go ahead and give us a call, but the phone lines are open if you want to talk to us. Avery Johnson has some interesting thoughts that I want to expand upon as well. You're listening to the J.R. Sport Brief. Hey, thank you so much to former NBA player, NBA champion, coach, analyst Avery Johnson for joining us in the last break. 888-710-4ISN. That's 888-710-4ISN.

Look, it was good. Avery Johnson, it don't matter if it's basketball or football, he knows about the transfer portal. He knows about NIL. He had to coach college basketball down in Alabama. And man, right after he left is when things totally, totally switched up.

I don't want to call it pay for play, but things, the floodgates are pretty much opened up. Here's something for you before we talk some more basketball, because then we also discussed the Dallas Mavericks. He played with Dirk.

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Power beyond belief. We're a week away from the NFL draft. In presumed top 10 pick, Boise State running back Ashton Gente. This man wrote a letter to NFL teams explaining why he should be drafted. In his letter, Gente said that it's tackle football and teams should draft the guy that nobody can tackle. Ashton Gente is widely believed to be drafted by the Raiders with the number six pick. Hickey, if they do that, at least the Raiders will seemingly have a good guy, right? They're not drafting one of these, I don't call them knuckleheads.

I was going to say numbskull, but that sounds worse. Yes, that is true. On the surface, seemingly a good guy that you don't have to worry about getting in trouble in a city that, really, Temption begs you to get in trouble. Yeah. And that's, I give him credit for that. That's kind of unique. You know, a lot of times we get the players and we get guys, I don't, they do it in interviews to have a dude write an open letter to teams.

This is why you should draft me. And he talked about his childhood. Nobody could tackle him when he was a kid and he was beating the kids that were older him, the older kids couldn't even take him down.

I appreciate that. I appreciate something different, especially in a time where, and it's, it's mostly for the quarterbacks. We really don't hear this about wide receivers or any other position guys get, get beat down on the way to the draft. Now that we're only about a week away, I can really say we haven't had that, that vitriol. Like the most, the most that we hear are people who are taking a crap on Chidor Sanders.

And to be honest for what people could be saying, I mean, in regards to making stuff up or beating down Chidor because his dad is Dion, I don't think it's, it's reached that. We haven't gotten any dumb stories about, you know, some guy's hands, Kenny Pickett didn't, well, Kenny Pickett, you know, no, no Kenny Pickett like stories. His hands are too small.

He needs to stretch his hands out. We didn't hear any stories about somebody's mother. Hey, what does your mother do for a living? None of that nonsense. So I don't know. Maybe things have changed as we get ready for the NFL draft. Maybe things are just staying the same. Maybe we get to next Thursday and we get a, a gas mask story. Maybe somebody's stock falls because they're, well, the green is, is very legal in many places. So maybe we don't get the gas mask story, but I think things all, all things considered have been pretty quiet on the draft run.

No stories, no controversy, kind of wild. 888-710-4ISN. That's 888-710-4ISN. John is here from Connecticut. You're on the JR Sportbreeze. Show us up, John. Not much.

Pleasure to speak with you. So you, you had, you had posed the question, what don't you like about college sports? And I, I don't consider them to be college sports anymore. I'm not saying they're flat out professional sports, but they're close to it.

I mean, there's no transparency to it anymore. There's gotta be some sort of regulatory body that tries to control some of the payments, some of the rules, because how are you going to compete with a huge state university? I mean, they virtually have unlimited funds.

There's gotta be something that somewhat levels the playing field amongst at least the top 50 schools in the country. Uh, it's just, you know, it's who can pay the most. I don't know. Well, I think that's, that's free market, free trade. I don't know if I agree.

Well, I don't know. I don't agree with the fact that there's, there's no transparency. I mean, we can think about all the scandals that have taken place in college athletics over decades to go transparency where, whether we look at, at SMU with their football program, I mean, we can go to the running rebels and basketball. Like we can go up and we can look at Rick Pitino in Louisville from almost a decade ago. Like that's, that's not transparency. But now when you absolutely agree with you on that, absolutely.

But now when there's money that's upfront, you know that there's backroom when it's, when it's okay to have money involved in the, in the programmatic, in the scheme, you know, there's so much more going on beyond the scene. Uh, well, uh, I don't know about that. Like we, so for instance, the story we just got with Nico Yamalayeva and thank you, John, for calling from Connecticut. His father went on social media and basically said, Oh no, my son doesn't want to leave.

Whoever wrote this is lying is full of crap. Well, where's his son? He ain't with Tennessee no more. Oh, he's happy here.

No, obviously he's not. That was all a lie. That was, that was crap. And so yeah, in business, you're going to have people who show you all their cards and some that don't, I wouldn't call that transparency.

I call that business. I mean, what we got in the NCAA was a massive front for all of those years. We're doing this for the students and this is holy and this is pure.

And this is, you can do this on the Saturday and it's so great. And the students are getting an education and we love the sports and all this is so awesome, but they couldn't get paid, which is dumb. I mean, we've gone through this plenty of times and so now they can make money freely. It just needs structure. I don't think transparency is the key there.

How much more transparent do you need? Come on. We just had a guy who tried to stick up a college, stick up a university because he wanted to get paid more money. And so what are we going to do?

And by the way, yeah, we have that already. It's the big 10 in the SEC. Those are your top schools. And I think when you think about competitive sports, it doesn't matter the level, university, college, school, pro, semi-pro, you're always going to have the haves and the have nots. I mean, even if we think about things on the professional level, I mean, I can go year to year to year and just go. Even in an NFL where it's pretty much built for parody, your owner has to be a complete jackass for you to not at least hit a stretch. Like the league is built for you to suck and then maybe end up with a great player, maybe one of the greatest.

And then your dumb ass should be able to ride that wave. But of course, you're going to have teams like the New York Jets and the NBA. You're going to have teams like the Kings and Miami. You're going to have teams because of ownership. They don't know how to get out of the way, but you're always going to have the Lakers and the Celtics. And then you're going to have, I don't know, the Kings. OK, that's it. In the NFL, you are always going to have, I don't know, Hickey, what's a good, the 49ers, right?

I don't know. Good, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You'll have the Niners and then you'll have a team like the Jags, you know, and maybe, maybe the Lions have hit another stretch where they're going to be great for a long time. Or maybe this is the biggest blip before they go back into the toilet. Like you are always going to have the top and then you're going to have the bottom feeders. You would just hope every now and then a team that you don't expect comes out on top, whether they got lucky, management went on a good stretch. That's the pros that's in college.

And in that aspect is there's no difference. 888-710-4ISN. That's 888-710-4ISN. It's tricky putting rosters together, at least in the pros, they're getting paid by the teams. Colleges can't pay the athletes. Not yet. It's the JR Sport Reshow, Infinity Sports Network. Don't move.