Bobby, how are you, man? I'm doing great, thanks for having me on.
Well, thank you again for taking the time. You know, before we get into a lot of the other matchups in addition to the Ohio State University, just a few minutes ago, not too long ago, and this is not a surprising report, but apparently Carson Beck is not going to be ready for the college football quarterfinal, that matchup against whoever comes out of Indiana and Notre Dame. We kind of knew this was going to be the case. We all heard about it.
What does this mean? What does this mean for Georgia and their playoff chances with Gunnar Stockton back there? So, Gunnar Stockton came in, played pretty well. I mean, he took, obviously, a big hit in that SEC Championship game against Texas, but I don't know if it changes a ton, even though you looked, obviously, at Carson Beck and how good he has been last year. This year he's been up and down, and he's been playing a little bit better. He's been managing some things with him, but a lot of people that I've talked to, it doesn't really impact what they think about Georgia anymore. I mean, with their pathway, who they're playing, and the fact that a lot of people have a ton of confidence in Gunnar Stockton, and they said he's just announced he'll just be out that first week, we'll see.
I can't imagine him being able to come back and play at any point, but I think for the first round, or that second round, I guess, since they have a bye, they should be fine. Bobby Carpet, they're here with us. Well, if we talk about the game that is going to determine their opponent tomorrow between Notre Dame and Indiana, not a lot expected out of Indiana, especially this first year on the Cignetti. We see them now here in the playoff. Notre Dame, I don't want to say that they've kind of gone under the radar, but after losing to Northern Illinois, people have kind of just gone, okay, let's see what Notre Dame can do. What are your thoughts on that matchup that gets us started tomorrow? I think Notre Dame is playing probably as well as anybody across the country, and you mentioned the fact that after they lost that, I won to Northern Illinois.
That was obviously rough. They beat A&M, and it looks all good. They have the letdown. That's something they've had the last couple of years. So it was on Marcus Freeman to kind of steady that shift and turn it around and play Miami, Ohio later.
It's not great against them. They ended up winning, I think, by two scores, but it wasn't a dominating performance. But since that point, you could look at how they played and how Riley Leonard has played, and Mike Denbrock, their offensive coordinator, it seemed like they finally got on the same page. Part of the reason for that was Riley Leonard had two or three ankle surgeries this offseason, so it took him some time to kind of get settled in to figure out what he did well, how they could mesh the offense to what he does. And then you look at this run that they've been on, offensively playing really stinking good football. Now, they maybe don't throw it for a ton of yards, and Riley Leonard probably isn't the best passer you're going to find, but he's pretty darn good running the football. They've got a pair of good running backs. And then on the other side, and their defense is great, the other side, Indiana, it's going to be cold. And thank goodness for Curtis Rourke, he's from Canada, plays Ohio University, so he's a cold-weather guy. And the question will be for them is, can they get Surratt and get that, make enough plays in the passing game to be able to have some explosives and to be able to move the chains on third down. I guess Ohio State, they got bogged down on third down, weren't able to move the football effectively in the second half. Some of that was due to crowd noise.
And Cignetti talked about they were going to get that corrected. It'll be loud up in South Bend, they'll have to contend with that, but I honestly think that's going to be one of the most competitive games we have in this first weekend. Yeah, Bobby Carpenter here, the JR sport reshow coast to coast. You talk about competitive games. This is the game that I'm really looking forward to.
I know you are as well, you won a national championship with Ohio State. What are your thoughts on what this game will look like? And ultimately, there's so much pressure on Ryan Day, especially after losing to Michigan. What do you think about the criticism that he's faced? Is there a legitimate chance that, depending on how this game and the playoff goes, that he's not coaching into the future? Well, it's interesting.
The ADD Ross Bjork came out and actually was on my local show in Columbus on the fan and we had him on. With that, we asked him, is there any scenario where you see Ryan Day not returning next year? He answered it very eloquently and it was a pretty definitive no.
People have asked me that even before Ross came out and said it. The only way that I think they even entertained that is if it was an embarrassing defeat. I mean, it's one where they looked non-competitive, uninspired, and you were embarrassed to be associated with Ohio State.
I don't see that happening in any way. After a couple days, the Michigan loss, the players started moving on, coaches move on, you get the rankings coming out, you get your marching orders with Tennessee, you realize you have a home game, it's a prime time slot on Saturday night, and that's a shot of adrenaline in the arm. So the Ohio State team, they've obviously had a Michigan issue, but outside of that, Ryan Day has been tremendous. I mean, that's basically half of his losses have come at Ohio State to Michigan.
That's something that he's going to have to correct, but there's nothing you can do about that for 350 days. What you can do is go out and try to win a national championship. And I feel like there's an acute sense of purpose with the seniors that came back. They had a ton of guys return, and their goal was to beat Michigan, win a Big Ten championship, and ultimately a national title. And the first two parts of that are gone. The last part is still out there, and while their path might not be the yellow brick road to Atlanta, it is a manageable path.
It's one that they can handle. And if they play well, they're as talented as anybody in the country, and they should be okay. Well, Bobby, it was certainly a shock last week when Bill Belichick decided to head on down to North Carolina. It looks like his well kind of dried up on the NFL side. Mike Vrabel doesn't have a job. We know where Mike Vrabel was two decades-plus ago. Do you think there's a real possibility that he might entertain going to Ohio State if the job were to open up?
I was joked about on Pat McAfee with Dan Orlovsky, a friend of mine, and Pat's on there, AJ, my former teammate. Dan was alluding to Mike having already had an opportunity in something that's probably fairly well-greased for him. I don't think he was insinuating at Ohio State. Mike coached at Ohio State. He coached here for two years when he got done playing. And when he left, he said he didn't want to have to deal with recruiting and he didn't want to coach in college. So I know Mike a little bit. I'm not going to speak for him on what I think he would or wouldn't do, but just knowing kind of what he values and how he likes to coach and what he's looking for. He's going to have NFL opportunities, and I wouldn't say it's zero percent, but I'd say it's pretty close to it. Yeah, we know he is a damn good coach.
I think he'd work on any level. Bobby Karpets are here with us on the JR Sport Brief Show. What other matchups this weekend are grabbing your attention? We know we get Clemson, we got Texas, we got SMU and Penn State earlier on in the day. What are you expecting?
What are you paying attention to over the weekend? I think that Texas Clemson game could be entertaining. And for this reason, I mean Clemson kind of backdoored in there. They were able to win their conference championship and get in, but they lost a couple games in the ACC. They lose the final game of the season to South Carolina and still get in the ACC championship. They have a great first half. SMU has the ferocious comeback, and then they kick the field goal right before the end to win.
And they're a little bit of house money. They've got a good quarterback in Cade Klubnick. We'll see what he can do now. So they're running back.
He's a big, powerful dude. His shoulder, you can tell that ACC championship game wasn't right. Has it been long enough to get healthy? The recipe for them to win, they've got to run the ball effectively. They're going to have to have some hits over the top with Cade Klubnick, keep him clean. But on the defensive side, they're able to get enough pressure on Quinn Ewers. And Clemson for a long time, they're calling card with that D line. They were ferocious up front. They're not quite as good this year.
They're not quite as good against the run. But if they can find a way to get pressure on Quinn Ewers, because it looks like that ankle is still bothering him, the one problem is they've got Arch Manning there. That's a great problem, but it's a great thing to have. It's also an issue because it'll be interesting to see if Sarc, if Ewers struggles, when does he go to Manning?
Does he use him just to run to get him in there? And when you start going back and forth, you know, if it's not working and then it works, then it doesn't. You lose the direction a little bit of your team and people maybe start kind of questioning and wondering what's going on. So if Clemson can find a way to get a lead and pressure that quarterback situation to make Sarc have to make some uneasy decisions, I think that would be their pathway to have success. Well, Bobby, if Texas is to advance all the way to the championship, do you think if you've got to take some odds, do you think Arch Manning would be a part of that in some type of way?
Or do you think Quinn Ewers would just kind of drive the ship all the way? Well, they've been playing ours and putting them in to run. They've had some different stuff that they've utilized with him in some different packages. But they go ahead and have him throw the ball a lot outside of what he was throwing in for Ewers when he was hurt. So, you know, he'll be a part of it. It's just a question of how big a part of it is he and is there a hook for Quinn or is it just something that's going to be scheduled where Arch will have packages and come in and let him play? Because if they get down and it looks like they're not moving the football, do you make a move? If you make that move, I think it's permanent. I don't know if you can go back from it. And then you have a guy who's a first year starter, albeit with a famous last name and a ton of talent, but then you've got a young dude who really hasn't been the guy all year. That would be tough. That would be a tough one to figure out on the fly. Well, we'll see what happens.
Looking forward to that one. Not a lot of attention paid to what Boise State is doing, has done. Yeah, we've got to wait another week and change before they play.
Ashton Gente obviously did not win the Heisman-Arizona State own running back. People are looking at them, not getting a lot of attention. What are your thoughts on how the seedings have played out and is that something that needs to get adjusted into the future? Yeah, I think they will.
People that I've talked to, they said they're going to take a look at it now. What are they able to change in this first year? The college football playoffs is essentially a two-year agreement.
40-26, I think it will get ripped off. I don't know if they add teams, how they do, what they do. They'll do a decent amount to it at that point. But right now, the question is what all do they have the ability to get done and can they change the seeding process so that it's a little bit more level, I guess, and there's not these pathways where it's more advantageous to be the five seed than maybe the one seed. Those are questions that they've got to figure out. I think they're going to try to, or do you re-seed after the first round, like the NFL does.
That's a realistic possibility. Those are questions that are going to come up, and I've heard people talk about it that are in positions of influence with that, and they don't even necessarily know what the contract always says. They're going to have to try to figure that out and see what it is.
And man, we don't know what anything looks like. It seems like every day something new is changing and different here in college football. Bobby, what are your thoughts, I haven't said that. Alabama, the athletic director says, hey, I got an app, I need the fans and everybody to donate money to NIL.
What are your thoughts on how that has changed? Alabama would be the last team, I would expect, but it appears that they're a little desperate. Everybody wants the cash because the players are bailing. Well, it's a money situation. It's like the NFL, but it's not because there's no contracts. It's a year-to-year thing. It's free agency every year for the players. The roster management aspect of it is getting incredibly difficult. There's a relationship and trust element that's important, but trying to figure this out has been wickedly hard, and everybody's just trying to get cash.
Alabama, the program that people love in the state, but it's not that big of a state. There's not a ton of industry there, and so it's hard. This is a couple years in and people are starting to get tapped out of being able to donate these big dollars. Now they've got revenue sharing coming in, but there's still going to need to be money on top of that that they're allocating to players, and they've got to figure out a solution for it. Well, Bobby, do you think at some point, I don't know, five, ten years from now, we'll have more stability in college football as it relates to NIL, transfer portal, what have you? Or are we in for the wild, wild west, a different change in every element, playoff, money, two to three years? It seems like it's just all wide open and up in the air.
I hope that we do, and I hope it's quicker than five, because if not, this is an untenable situation. I don't know if you saw Vanderbilt's quarterback, Diego Pavia, just sued the NCAA and won. Just so that his junior college years don't count anymore, so he can keep playing. Because the reality is there's guys that can make more money in college than in the NFL early on, and maybe they don't even really get a shot in the NFL. So now you have guys that are hanging around playing for even longer, and it's just making everything more and more difficult. So it's a very, very difficult situation that they're in. So they need to have someone that can finally put this thing together and have rules that everybody can agree on.
And I don't know when that happens, how that happens, but hopefully it's within the next year or two. NFL vet, former player for Ohio State, Bobby Carpenter here with us. And to kind of wrap things up, well, we got a quarterback that has been around a long time. His team is seeded number one. Would you favor the Ducks to go out there and win the championship in about a month? I think that they have as good a shot as anybody. I think Ohio State's got a pretty good shot. I think Georgia has a decent shot.
Texas, I think, has an okay pass. And Notre Dame, depending on how they look, if they look like I think, I think they've got a pretty solid shot as well. So there's a number of teams, I think, that can win it. This is as flat as college football has been at the top in a long time. There's a great degree of parity within the top five or six, seven, eight, seven teams. And it's just how they're playing on any given day. If they play well, they got a great chance of winning.
If they don't, well, they can lose to anyone. Bobby, I appreciate that, Tom. I know you're going to be locked in and glued to the television just like everybody else, watching all the games. Hey, are you going to be at the shoe? Are you going to watch Tennessee, Ohio State in person? Are you going to be there? Yeah, I live about a ten-minute drive. I saw two miles to my kids. Anytime I'm not working, we ride our bikes down in there and go.
My kids are juiced up about it, so we all have my three, my three kids, three oldest kids down there. We're going to go check it out and hopefully be watching the Buckeye win in the cold. Hey, hey, Bobby, you enjoy it. Thank you so much for the time.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, all that good stuff. Where can people follow, listen, and keep up to you and all your good work on the radio and elsewhere? Well, I'm 97 with a fan in Columbus. I do a couple days a week on Sirius XM Show 84. I've got a pretty great college football show that I have on YouTube, at Bobby Tarpe Show. You can follow it there. It comes out daily. It's about 50 minutes. We have great guests from AJ Hock, Anthony Schlegel, people from around the country that come through, so it's a lot of fun. Hey, Bobby, thank you so much. Enjoy the game on Saturday. We'll catch you on down the line, okay? Yes, sir. Thank you.
