What about the conference has Dan completely confused about? Dan talks expansion of the tournament and what that would mean for the sport.

Some collection of college football playoff people are meeting in a hotel somewhere. I don't even know what the reason for the meeting is. We already know it's going to be expanded to 12 teams.

I know they're trying to figure out the structure. Maybe that's what the meeting is for. Maybe Dan Wetzel, national columnist Yahoo Sports, knows what the meeting is about.

I just listened to the latest College Football Inquirer in which they talk about home games being of paramount importance. So let's talk about that with Dan Wetzel. How are you sir?

I appreciate your time. I am well Mr. Gold. They're in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Hyatt, I think, or Hilton. I don't know if anyone wants to fly over there and say hello. I just did a, I shouldn't say a bit, although I was really making fun of the NFL owners meetings at the whatever the whatever hotel they were at in New York where the cheapest room starts at like $755 a night and it just seemed like a perfect place to just get together and bash Dan Snyder, which I think should be, everybody should do. So let's talk about what this playoff is going to look like. I know they're going to try and pretend that this isn't about money, but we all know that it's entirely about money.

I'm not even, I'm not even mad at that. It should, the only reason to have it, it should be about, right, it should be about money. Otherwise, I mean, we're just adding games that we're probably gonna end up with the same four teams at the end, or at least three of the four, just about every year anyway. But if they're, and you're, the thrust of your conversation to start the podcast was about getting these games on campuses more, not just the opening round, but doesn't that get in the way of making more money for everybody?

I don't think so, but you could crack that out, I don't know. Yeah, they're gonna have a 12, so they're gonna have a 12 team playoff. Six automatic bids, top six conferences get a bid, and then six at large, and the way they're gonna break it down is the top four teams get a, get a buy. So then in the first round, five, six, seven, and eight will host on campus nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.

Right. But then the winners of those will go meet one, two, three, four in a neutral site bowl, bowl place. So is there more money if you play neutral site? I don't believe so because you're sharing revenue with the bowl directors and the bowl, the bowl industry, which makes a ton of money. You're basically outsourcing the running of your most valuable product, which is this.

If there was more money to go neutral, the NFL would do it. Those guys didn't get into that 750 night hotel by being stupid. So I don't think there is, but my main thing is like, I've been arguing this for years, but just think of last weekend, the amazing scenes from campus environments. Most notably the one in Tennessee, which was just, you know, just captivating to watch and broke through to the national concert. Like this is absolutely crazy.

There's all these bands, it's orange. There was a similar scene at TCU. Less people were watching, but they beat Oklahoma and they stormed the field.

They have a purple out. There's one later that night at Utah when they're all dressed in black and they run out in the field after beating USC, Michigan was all in yellow is incredible scene there. One of the best parts of college football is the stadiums, the environments, the traditions, the uniqueness of each place.

All around the country, people fly to different, Hey, let's, let's have a 40th birthday. Let's have a guy's weekend. Let's do this. Let's go to an LSU game. Let's go to an Alabama game. Let's go to Ohio state, whatever it is, fly all over the country, seeing these venues.

It's so tremendous. And yet college football wants to move those games and put them in Miami gardens or, you know, Glendale, Arizona and stuff like that. And these antiseptic NFL stadiums far away, where only the richest people with the most time off can go to like nobody, even an, even an Alabama fan. Now maybe Nick Saban will want control, but even, even an Alabama fan had to watch the scene from Knoxville on Saturday night, say, yeah, this is, this is college football perfection. No one would say, I wish this game was being played in the Alamo.

Don't. And yet the people running this thing are saying when they do this playoff, and this is what's kind of exciting is for that five, six, seven, eight, it's going to be the biggest event to ever happen on campus. And it's going to be the biggest event to happen in a lot of states and places like North Carolina or North Carolina state. It's not out of the question, no offense to Duke, maybe even Duke, um, to get a, get seated five to eight and host the playoff game.

And imagine the scene on campus of getting to host this incredible game. Imagine if a Michigan had to come down and play you in your stadium or an LSU had to come to your stadium, like the on-campus stadium is why you would ever turn away from that to go neutral site makes no sense to me. It doesn't really make financial sense.

There's not a big windfall. It's just done because the bowl industry is entrenched and that's kind of the tradition. And some coaches, like I had an AI set on the podcast, you know, there's there at one 80 told me their coach would take 12 neutral site games. He'd give up his home games if he never had to go on the road. Right.

But like that, that's like, that's no, it might be smart, but it's no imagination. So on campus is the way to go and they should do it like the NFL on campus all the way until the super bowl or the championship game, then go neutral site, but make yourself earn that that home field advantage. And then again, like nobody sits at arrowhead and watching the bills and the Chiefs in the playoffs that boy, I wish we were in Miami gardens and, you know, neutral site.

It's just so much better at home. You know, it really comes down to the difference between college and pro football. And this is the way I boil it down on taking completely out of the picture this particular NFL season, which has been terrible. I mean, the quality of football has been way down this year versus last year, even the pandemic year was better than what we have seen in pro football. Um, but for the most part, the football is better, except when you add in all of the other things that surround college football, it's a much more entertaining product, uh, than the NFL has to offer. Because I used to go to NFL games all the time. I was a kid who grew up going to jets games at Shea Stadium versus and I actually liked Shay better than the Meadowlands when the Jets moved to the Meadowlands closer to home, but would much rather go to Shay. Um, the NFL is in an antiseptic environment. There's maybe three environments that are really good for NFL football, and there's probably 53 or more that are great for college football. Why don't they? Why don't they highlight that more often? Well, I mean, that's that's what we're talking about, right?

So why move from these incredible venues and put them on in an NFL stadium? And it's the whole scene. It's the whole weekend, right? When, when, when you're on campus, you, for most of the places like Tennessee, let's just say Tennessee, you walk outside, you're on campus.

You carry the goalposts and threw them in the river, right? You have, you got your dorms there. You can walk to the campus bar where you used to go.

There's, there's a whole, there's just a whole thing. It's a beautiful place. It's you walk outside MetLife stadium. It's a parking lot. Right. Walk outside, uh, you know, Arrowhead stadium's incredible environment to watch football. And then it's a parking lot on interstate. That's it.

So you have these incredible things play them on campus. This is simple. Like nobody would start this if they were like, Hey, let's have a playoff. Okay. Two 12 teams, six.

Okay. You know what we'll do instead of playing them on campus, like every other sport, let's, let's see if we can find these weird guys in these various cities around the country to host the games instead and take some of the money. Like nobody would do this. If you went and asked Roger Goodell, can we take the NFL playoffs and move them to neutral sites? He throw you out of the office.

You wouldn't get a meeting. Nobody would do this except college football. So put them on campus. What's going to happen. The beauty of this is what's going to happen is we're going to play that first round and it's going to be unbelievable scenes because winning a college football playoff game will be such a big deal for any team that wins one.

And that's the excitement you're adding. Even if you're ending up having to go to Alabama and eventually lose, even if you're not going to win the championship, just winning one game on campus will be one of the biggest events in the history of that campus. And so let's say you have whatever Michigan's got to come to North Carolina to play this year and North Carolina wins that game. The whole place goes crazy and it's an incredible environment and you got recruits around and all this stuff. And then you go play in a neutral site against Georgia. Georgia's going, how come we can't have the fun and put it on our campus? We have a great campus.

And so eventually they're going to do this, but just do it now. I just, I don't know what, I don't know anybody who's ever said, I wish we were, we weren't on campus right now. So who has the photos of the people who run college sports to stay? Look, a good friend of mine, Gary Stokin, runs the Peach Bowl, runs the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.

So I'm, the last thing I want is to damage his business. But what we're saying here is that we're ultimately going to remove the bowls, especially the top bowls, from the college football experience, which I mean, maybe what needs to happen. I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing inherently wrong with a bowl, but like, again, why?

What, this is a better product. Okay, you have to, you want to watch a movie on Friday night, you have to go down to the store and go through the aisles and figure out what movie you want to watch. You know, nothing against Blockbuster, but you don't need to exist anymore. The bowls will still exist, they'll just take all the other teams and people will watch them because we, you know, two and a half million people watch the New Mexico Bowl. We gamble.

We gamble, right? You'll have a business, but why would you take your most exciting games, your most anticipated games and put them at a neutral site? And why would you decrease the importance of the regular season by taking home field advantage out of the equation? Because right now it doesn't matter if you go to the 14 playoff being number one or number four, it doesn't matter. You play each other on a neutral site, right?

So you, but, but in the NFL getting to be one, the, the, well, they do a one and two, cause one's the only one to get to buy. But right now you would fight to be in the top 12 to get in. You'd fight to get in the top eight. So your host, you'd start fighting at the top four. So you got to buy, fight to get to the top two so that you are posting all the way at no point in the entire season is anyone like, oh, we're good. We're going to get in either way. It doesn't matter.

Every single game will matter no matter how good your team is. It's just inherently a better system. It's just inertia. It's cronyism. It's a lack of imagination. And it's some of these coaches that just sit there and say, I don't ever want to play on the road. Well, tough break.

Okay. There's a reason you're making eight, $10 million a year. And it's because the fans and the customers want something. And this sport is so much better when it's played at Clemson. Let's play it at the horseshoe. Let's play it in Norman, Oklahoma and all of that.

All right. Final thing for Dan Wetzel. And I appreciate your time at Dan Wetzel and the College Football Inquirer is great.

At some point, Yahoo! Sports is going to lose title sponsorship of that. You're, you're outnumbered two to one by Sports Illustrated people, but that's fine.

Pat Forti and, and Ross Dellinger are great people. They, so let me ask you this because this is kind of new about college basketball. Now we're hearing advocates for 128 team tournament, which is, I mean, on so many levels, idiotic. Because for those people who follow it, and I follow it not as closely as I do in terms of the nitty gritty of who gets in and who, who gets in and who, who doesn't.

When I did it on a regular basis, when it was just 64 teams, there were, when you got down to the last couple, like nobody was that good. I just, at some point we got to stop making it bigger, but money gets in the way. And if they can get another, I don't know, few hundred million dollars from CBS and Turner, they're going to get it. So initially this move won't make any more money. This thing's like locked into 2032 and CBS does not have to give more money and Turner and they won't because this is, they, they signed a deal that is extremely advantageous. Now, what of Mark Emirates? Great moves like signing a long-term deal where these television rights might not go up. I love, I love college administrators that bet against people wanting to watch television. Uh, yeah. All right. What country are you living in? We're all going to go back to taking a books.

I wish I write books, but that ain't going to happen. So anyway, they're not going to get any money originally. Um, it's about access. It's about you get more teams in and also those little shares the window and you're going to get more of your shares.

You might get a little more high again. Dumb idea. Have you heard any, you ever sit around with college basketball fans and have anyone sit there and go, gee, I wish just the 68.

Yeah. I wish we had 128. I'd like to see a five and 11 conference team get it. The conference tournaments mean everyone can play in.

You can go. Oh, and 28 in America East. And if you get on a roll and you win the entire American East tournament and then all the games in the NC tournament, you're the champ. It's it's, it's, it's not like there's lack of chance.

Anybody can do it. You can go, you can, the regular season, literally, you don't have to win a single game and you can win the national championship, but it's just, it's just access to bad teams. We don't need this and anything that threatens the three weekend schedule.

I think it's absolutely idiotic. It is a rhythm that we all know. We love the customers love it. It's it fits. You add another weekend to it.

It gets swindled down. You start making Tuesdays, Matt. Oh, you got to watch Tuesday, Wednesday.

Now you're asking me what college basketball six days in a row. You want people to skip work six days and that's not going to happen. Like it, it's, this is a solution that nobody is arguing for. I'm I'm with you a hundred percent.

If it doesn't fit on an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, it shouldn't be. If you are the NCAA basketball tournament. Who is calling for this other than some coaches who think, well, if I get in, I won't get fired. Do they think you'd still get fired?

No one's going to be like congratulations. You made 128. I mean, yeah, one point seven. Good job.

If you're, if you're the 30, uh, that's like the thirties, 30th seed in the east. You get fired automatically. Yes.

I mean automatically. What are these one verse go to be? I don't know. First one 40. I can't, I can't even, it would be one versus 30, 32. Yeah. One.

No, it doesn't get doubles. A one verse 32 matchup. What is that? Uh, that would be, I mean, this whole thing is just, again, I college sports, you just, you just stand around and go, wait, this is your, like, we're not sure about the, we're not sure if home field college football is a good thing. Wait, what? You know, we should do though, let's expand the tournament. So everyone, including Gary's tractor trailer school of, uh, of, uh, Fort worth makes it, you know, like what, what are we doing? Well, they play a good schedule, so, uh, they deserve a break. Uh, Jerry Palm, think of this, uh, apology is out. Everyone's in. Look, I like Jerry Palm. We need to keep Jerry Palm employed, but Palm needs a job. Yeah.

He does. My friend, uh, at Dan Wetzel. I appreciate your time, man. I'll see you soon. Hopefully you got it. Take care. Dan Wetzel.