“This is an incredibly bad look for Florida”

We get to say hi to my friend Chip Patterson, CBSSports.com Cover 3 Podcast, not wearing a sport jacket today.

Appreciate you dressing down for us. By the way, we had somebody who was disappointed that they could not watch us because we're not on like over the air anymore, but just go to the WRAL News Plus. You can find us. If you want to watch us, you can watch us.

WRALSportsFan.com. Just get the app. Everybody's got a smart TV now. Now I'd watch everything.

Just get the app. Now that I know we're not over the air, I can dress really good. Yes, absolutely. I want to see you in a tank top next Wednesday.

Okay. Do basketball jerseys count as tank tops? Do adult rec league basketball jerseys count as tank tops?

Because that's about the most thing I've got. Or pantless. We just talked about not wearing pants today. Well, we can't tell. He's probably pantless right now. I'll never tell.

All right. I started with the Jaylen Rashada story. So what does Jayden Rashada?

Yes, my eyes, not good right now. Walk us through. He was a Miami commit, flipped to Florida for a massive promised NIL deal, which has, according to the stories, fallen apart. Florida terminated a binding contract. Do they have lawyers at the University of Florida? The Gator Collective has terminated the contract.

All the way back. Jayden Rashada is from California. Nothing says college football's gone national like a blue chip quarterback out of California has become the hottest battle between Miami and Florida, but committed to a battle between Miami and Florida. He's committed to Miami and in the midst of a lot of other battles that include Cormani McClain, who also might now be going to Colorado as Deion flips one of the top cornerbacks in the 2023 class. In the midst of all that, during the fall, there was all of a sudden this late shocker of Jayden Rashada. We thought he was committing to Miami.

We were ready to go with this story. And he commits to Florida. And as we've started to peel back all the pieces, I'm starting to believe that we might have a perfect example of why we actually need more communication between the schools, the coaching staffs, and some of these collectives. Because some of the state laws, which again are different all across the United States, really don't allow the schools and the collectives to be working together or the coaches and the collectives to be working together.

And Andy Staples suggested this first, so I've got to give him credit here. But he pointed out that based on some of the ways that the Gator collective has been publicly handling business in these recent days, of course, with the drop ad date coming and going without Rashada enrolling at the University of Florida, that this might have been promised by somebody going rogue. That in the midst of all of these heated recruiting battles, that in the midst of, you know, just like being frustrated about losing recruits, that somebody who may or may not have had the authority to do so reached out to somebody within the camp of the Rashada family and made a promise that they weren't ready to sign off on.

And that's where I think I would actually like for some of these state laws to allow for more communication between university and university coaching staffs, collectives, instead of trying to create this church and state barrier, because that can prevent some of these communication breakdowns from happening. Thirteen million dollars is apparently a part of the contract that has been obtained by multiple media outlets. We discussed today on the Cover Three podcast, that's got to be like one of those contracts where if he stays four years and wins a national championship and wins a conference championship, you know, there's no way, based on the deals that we've seen from other quarterbacks even within that class, like the entire package for Niko Imeileva at Tennessee, who is a better quarterback than Jaden Rashada, a higher rated quarterback than Jaden Rashada, is around eight million dollars for the entire package.

And so what I think has happened is, number one, we don't have proper communication between people who are supposedly representing the NIL collectives and people who are supposedly representing the player. And then number two, that this 13 million dollar number that we have is a little bit of, it's like an NFL contract. Yeah, but how much is guaranteed? Right. Some of it's for injuries, some of it's for, yeah.

Right. But this is negative recruiting. Like, Florida looks broke. If you are an SEC coaching staff and you're trying to work on an NIL deal, it's like, I heard they were bouncing checks in Gainesville. It's an incredibly bad look for Billy Napier.

This is an incredibly bad look for Florida football. And now Jaden Rashada, like, he could end up on the West Coast. You know, some of those Pac-12 schools have quarter systems. So maybe he does try to get in in a way where he could enroll and still get on campus. He likely is at this point not going to sign until the signing day in February. He probably won't be on campus until the summer at this point in the process. Florida does have a five star quarterback, somebody who is rated higher than Rashada, already committed in the 2024 cycle. But given what Florida's got going into next season, they might only be a seven win team next year.

Are they going to be able to hold on to DJ Lagway moving forward? I mean, I don't know how many different ways you want to attack this, but there's a lot. Right. So let me let's go much going into this Jaden Rashada story, a player who and I will say this again, is not even one of the best quarterbacks in this class.

The the 13 million dollar number to me was always fiction. And I realize it's it's over four years and whatever 13. Like, no, we have NFL quarterbacks who don't make hope, don't make their payment. Yeah.

In which case you don't want Jaden Rashada to be like checks. Yeah, it's all it's all right now. So but you mentioned more communication, state laws, state laws are all different. And I know that the the collegiate system is begging for congressional intervention to uniform the law, which isn't going to happen because they don't really care about it on Capitol Hill. And I'm not going to make any editorial comments about what they do care about, but they don't care about that on Capitol Hill. So the federal government is not going to bail out the NCAA here. But to me, it's more about that the NCAA doesn't want and even though there's really no way they can stop it, they don't want NIL to be used solely as a recruiting inducement, which is what they have said from the beginning. So with that said, with that said, they really can't encourage any communication between the universities and the collectives.

And this is what I know. The universities aren't supposed to know or they rather the collectives aren't really supposed to know even though they do. How do they know? Because they know who is supposed to be getting what, who are the priorities.

So I don't know how you communicate when you're not supposed to. Right. Without the ones like you who work tirelessly to keep things running, everything would suddenly stop. Hospitals, factories, schools and power plants.

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Call clickgrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. The idea that NIL is not used for inducement is one of the most fantasy land theories that we have within college athletics. And it's only recent, but it is not realistic at all to think that that is not going to be a piece of the equation, especially when we're talking about some of the most prized prospects who are going to be quarterbacks. And especially when we're talking about some of the programs that will do anything, anything in order to try to keep up with the best programs in the country, the ones who are competing for championships. And there are only, what, eight, 10, maybe 15 programs we have in this category. We tried to make that list last week. But this is going to be a case that we see a lot. I just, I think that this is a really, really bad look for the Florida coaching staff, for the infrastructure around that place.

And other schools, collectives, coaching staffs have found ways, whether it's winks, whether it's nods, don't use a university computer, especially if you're a Michigan co-offensive coordinator. My gosh. I don't know.

I truly don't know. And you figure out ways to have it not fall apart this poorly, because this is the cautionary tales, the unintended consequences. Remember, you and I always talked about this. I said, well, let's live through the unintended consequences, because you know what will happen? We'll learn. We'll learn lessons and we'll adapt and we'll move forward.

And one lesson that I've taken from the Jane Roushada story is we cannot let the collectives be going, well, we're going to not let the collectives be going totally rogue or even like I mentioned at the beginning of this, someone from outside the collective being able to strike up a deal with a representative of a player to try to put all this together in a way where they haven't even checked to make sure if they've got the money. I mean, it is. Right. Because that's it. Because if Florida could have guaranteed 13 million dollars to Jaden Roushada, they wouldn't have had to terminate the deal. Right. If they could have guaranteed it.

But clearly they didn't have it. And again, just as the Gator Collective had to terminate the deal, the University of Florida is now likely going to grant a release from the signed national letter of intent that Jane Roushada did sign on National Signing Day in the early signing period in December. Because if I'm Florida, I don't want to sue. I don't want to counter sue. I don't want to become a headline. I want this all to go away. So you just let the player go and unfortunately miss out on a blue chip quarterback being on your roster for the 2023 season when your quarterback room's not great.

I might have been able to use him in some way, shape or form, but you just you don't want to drag this out at all. And as Andrew Brandt, former NFL executive and writer, likes to say, there will be lawyers there. There will be a settlement between the collective, maybe the university.

There will be there will be lawyers. All right. When we come back, I want to talk about the transfer portal, which is about to close. I believe it's the end of the week. It's going to close today. Oh, today is the final day. It was the 18th, but it could be. Well, you would know.

I definitely don't. Also, Maryland is keeping their quarterback, who we saw very impressive, by the way, in the bowl game. And I'm going to ask you about what Jim Harbaugh and was their interest or was their only interest from Harbaugh?

With Chip Patterson next, Matt Weiss, who has the was the co-offensive coordinator, computer access crimes. I don't believe it's anything lewd. It almost seems to be financial. What what's going on here with with Matt Weiss? I specifically I don't want to speak to it because the range of outcomes here is from like horrific to benign or relatively benign.

It doesn't help that they also raided his house. So not good. All I can speak to two levels of this. Number one, two levels of this. Number one, just in general, not a great sort of couple of weeks ever since the T.C. loss. We've got the you know, the Jim Harbaugh flirtation.

Will he won't he with the NFL? You've got this going on as well. And we remember that this that this Michigan program also had an very important defensive lineman catch a weapons charge later in the year. But that didn't come out until after the regular season was done.

Just not a. Oh, oh, oh, and the NCAA violations. Oh, granted. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

You know, it's a timing violation. He was it was during during the pandemic where he also bought a burger for a recruit and lied about it. A burger. I mean, let me listen. Thirteen million dollars reportedly for a for a high school prospect, but Jim Harbaugh bought a burger for a recruit and lied about it. The problem was the the investigators didn't speak Harbaugh.

OK, you got to understand that guy uses language differently than the rest of us human beings. And so he wasn't lying. He just was misleading.

You know, the NCAA is really mad about you misleading them. It's very parental. It is.

I was going to say the same thing. And I get mad when not that's not what you did. It's the line. Exactly.

Really breaks my heart. NCAA violations, weapons charges for an important defensive lineman that conveniently weren't really mentioned or didn't come to light until after the Ohio State game. And now this and the NFL flirtation is not all that great around Michigan.

But here's the football side of this, because I can't approach the football side of this with expertise. He is co offensive coordinator. He shares that title with Sharon Moore. Sharon Moore is the offensive line coach. The Michigan offensive line has been awarded the Joe Moore Award for the best offensive line two years in a row. And we have seen what that offensive line has done as they paved the way to two Big Ten championships. Additionally, you are also talking about being a co offensive coordinator on a Jim Harbaugh coach team. And if you don't think Jim Harbaugh's got his hands in on that offense, well, then you've lost your mind.

So the when I plug into this from the Michigan side, I'm hearing a lot of we have no idea what this is. We hope it's not anything that is like really, really bad. But if they need to part ways with them, we've still got our offensive line co offensive coordinator, and we've still got Jim Harbaugh. We don't think we're going to see any major changes to the Wolverines offense heading into 2023. Right. So to Jim Harbaugh, my read on this is that the NFL teams that he already met with, Carolina, because he talked with David Tepper. And it wasn't an interview.

And Denver, I believe also that he talked with weren't really interested in him. And so I don't understand anything beyond I just need to be loved like my dog. Earl desperately needs me to pet him. Or just as we're walking back to the house from the barn.

He likes to walk into my legs. So I know he's there as though I didn't already. That's my read on Jim Harbaugh. He just needs to have his name out there as though there is NFL interest.

But there really isn't right now. I don't think that there is NFL interest for what Jim Harbaugh wants. Because at the time that his 49ers tenure, which as a whole, was wildly successful, and then just kind of fell apart late in the game.

At the core of it was a lot of head budding with the general manager. Right. So what my colleague on the cover three podcast Tom Franelli has said from the very beginning is that he thinks that Jim Harbaugh did not get the Minnesota Vikings job because he would like to be the head coach and the general manager.

Right. We'd like to be the person in charge of everything, only answering to ownership, making all the personnel decisions and being able to totally control the franchise. And Tom goes on to continue over the last several weeks or so that I don't know what NFL teams would do that. But the second that one NFL owner is cool with doing that, we might see Jim Harbaugh go back. Not that he is running away from college football, miss me at this point, but that he is continuing to chase the Super Bowl because he is someone who still values the National Football League and all the capital F football guy kind of NFL disease brain that we have.

He thinks that that is the greatest competition that you can have in all of football. It is willing to trade what he has going at Michigan unless he can get that perfect scenario of being totally in control, not answering to anyone but ownership. It didn't happen with the Vikings.

He did not get offered the job. They probably realized that from the jump. Then here in this case, we've got a couple conversations and it didn't go any further than that, probably because Harbaugh was like, here's what I would like, total control. The ownership was like, that's not how we do it anymore. That's kind of an antiquated notion. And so one day down the line, that might happen and we will see Jim Harbaugh leave Michigan.

But until that happens, I think we're just going to be dealing with this on a year in, year out basis. Now, this is where the interesting thread is. Jim Harbaugh talked about an incredible conversation with the university president of Michigan and how excited he was after that conversation. You know who he didn't mention?

Athletic director Ward Manuel. Oh, really? Yeah. And you know what the university president said in that statement? Right. I'm so excited, but Jim Harbaugh, he's going to be back. And I went on to tell Ward Manuel.

Yeah. I think Jim Harbaugh doesn't want to answer to his boss. I think maybe he's not his boss. I think that Jim Harbaugh, just like in the NFL, only wants to answer to the very, very top. I think at Michigan, he and his athletic director are kind of buttonheads and he and his athletic director buttonheads goes back to the very end of the 2020 pandemic shortened season where Michigan went two and four in the six games that the Wolverines played at that time. Jim Harbaugh had zero wins against Ohio State as Michigan's head coach, and he agreed to a new contract with a chopped salary and proceeded to go on, beat Ohio State, win the Big Ten, make the college football playoff, come back twice to a slightly raised salary, win the Big Ten, beat Ohio State, make the college football playoff. And I think that in these conversations with the university president, I don't like to count people's money. I don't like to say, oh, money doesn't matter to him, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I'll tell you what, there's some ego to this. Jim Harbaugh is one of the top five coach in college football, and he's not currently being compensated as such. And I, I think that there's probably a new contract that comes along with these conversations with the university president and whether or not this new contract is something that excites athletic director Ward Emanuel, or whether or not it's something that excites athletic director Ward Emanuel, who was not mentioned in the statement by Jim Harbaugh.

Just, just interesting tea leaf reading. There are, there are obvious like flow charts of organizational flow charts, and then there are actual organizational flow charts. I'm sure that any, I'll just use Duke University here, Duke University flow chart from who's in charge had Kevin White ahead of Mike Krzyzewski. I'm sure it, I'm sure of it, but I think we all understand that it probably worked the other way. Not that Mike would abuse it.

He may have, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying this to, to be accusatory or controversial. I think we would all have a hard time believing that Mike Krzyzewski did not call the shots about what happens to his program, and it wasn't necessarily a Kevin White thing. And I hope that nobody's offended by that, including Kevin White or, you know, the new AD, Nina King at Duke. I hope that nobody is offended by that. I do think that Nina King probably calls his shots over John Shire, and that's probably right because John has not achieved that level yet.

It probably shouldn't have even gone to there, but that's okay. I want to get a couple more things in, or maybe one more thing. Nina King on line 4. Nina's great.

She's dynamite. Look, Coach K was, and Roy Williams the same way at North Carolina. Transfer portal. Who's done well?

Who has gotten hurt in the portal? Florida State's done very well, and it's very interesting because Florida State has used the transfer portal first out of necessity because Mike Norvell wasn't having winning seasons. He wasn't making bowl games, and so he had to use the transfer portal to be able to get talent in because it wasn't working recruiting high schoolers, and he needed immediate results or else he was going to get fired.

Well, that plus the great finish to the season that they had in 2022 has led to more success. I mean, Fentrail Cypress, the defensive back from Virginia, was one of the top overall talents in the transfer portal. They went and got some guys from South Carolina. I mean, they continue to not only get Jordan Travis to come back, not only get Johnny Wilson, the wide receiver, to come back, Jared Verse, after a great season has decided to come back, but they've gotten even more instant impact from the transfer portal in a way that I think is really significant. I think that Penn State did a really good job, again, not only having some players who could have gone pro stay, but then going to the transfer portal to be able to get replacements for players who did leave early. Parker Washington's gone.

You bring in Dante Cephas. This is a Penn State team that has been circling 2023 for a really, really long time. And then in terms of the schools that lost a lot of players, some of it really, it takes a fine tooth comb to go back and realize that while Texas A&M lost a lot of players that had blue chip ratings coming out of high school, there are also some of the players that caught a couple suspensions during the season or driving a car 100 miles an hour through a parking deck or weren't playing over the last four or five games of the season. Some of those exits were a little bit, clearing the numbers out.

Being able to tighten things up just a little bit. So transfer portal losers, at this point, doesn't feel like we've seen any major, major exodus that wasn't also tied to a coaching change, at least not one that I could come up with. All right, let me ask you about Mike Morvell at Florida State.

So they're doing well in the portal. I've seen a bunch of way too early where Florida State is picked in the top 10. I've seen a couple in the top five. Is that possible for Florida State? And is Mike Norvell the guy that can legitimately build FSU back into, I mean, I'm not saying what they were under Bobby Bowden, because I don't think people really grasp what that was to turn Florida State, which was never a power, into one of the superpowers of the sport for about a 15-year block.

It was amazing what Bowden did there. But is Norvell the guy that can get them into the national top 10 on a yearly basis? He could have Jimbo Fisher level of success.

Christmas tree on the curve by December 1st? Well, like win ACC championships, build your way up to, you know, winning a national championship. And especially when we think about the future expanded college football playoff where getting in will be easier and, you know, getting lucky might be as much of a contribution to winning national championships. Florida State in my lifetime has won three national championships under two different coaches.

It is a place where you can win titles. And Mike Norvell has the support and the backing, not only of the administration, but of some of the like key power players. So like when Dion has started sniffing around before he got the Colorado job, long before he got the Colorado job, they're like Mike Norvell had convinced the people who matter that he's got this thing going in the right direction.

And he was able to deliver this season with that really, really strong finish. Now we have to deal with Florida State and expectations because our last memory of Florida State and expectations is them falling very, very, very short of those expectations. So there is a little bit of the lose big, lose small, win small, win big, you know, moving goalposts that Florida State is going to have to deal with.

But to answer your right off the top, is that possible? Yes, I think Florida State can win the ACC. I don't think that Florida State is the sensible pick to win the ACC, but I think that Florida State and Clemson is where the conversation for the ACC championship starts, especially in our first year of not having division for the ACC championship. And I think that being in the top 10 regularly, being in the top 15 regularly is something that Mike Norvell can do with this Florida State team. So I think that Florida State already is back at the top of the ACC. So in that sense, he's already gotten Florida State back to a place where it wants to be, which is not playing second fiddle to Clemson and certainly not being picked fifth. Because let me remind everybody on this unprecedented statewide platform that the Florida State Seminoles were selected fifth in the ACC's Atlantic division, heading into the 2022 season, that same Florida State team that finished as the highest ranked team in the final AP poll. Yes, but we all thought that BC was going to be good. No, they finished ahead of BC and Syracuse.

That would be maybe behind Louisville. Right. Oh, gosh. Well, Malik Cunningham, you know. I know.

Malik Cunningham was a fun player to watch. All right. Do you know where the CW is on your TV, Chip?

Do you think that's paid programming? All right. So for the reference I just made, I mentioned the story yesterday. There's a story out. I mean, I've seen it a number of places, but front office sports had it, where we're nearing an agreement between live golf. And we're actually going to talk to AJ Perez from front office sports a little bit later, where live golf is nearing an agreement with the CW, which is a network which has programming that I don't recognize, but is a network.

Oh, now listen, shout out to 7th Heaven, shout out to Gilmore Girls. I've been on since it was the WB. It's channel 22 in Raleigh. It's channel 22 WLFL, which used to employ our friend Mike Salarte. So it's over.

You can find it. It's an actual network, the CW. I can't imagine there's a lot of money changing hands here between the CW and live.

But live golf is hopefully, for them, nearing an over-the-air network. I'm not sure why they want one, but I think it would be much better just to sell subscriptions online if you did that, or just keep showing it on YouTube. Just keep showing it.

Let's put it up there. Let people watch it. If the product is good, the product wasn't bad last year, if the product is good, maybe people will tune in. And then once people start tuning in, because it wasn't great last year, then maybe people will watch.

And you can get a real network, not the CW. Well, yeah, you said not a lot of money changing hands. And that was the conversation. When the news story broke, I cover a lot of different sports on CBS, which means I get to lurk in a lot of different newsrooms. I just kind of keep my mouth shut, sit in the corner. It worked out really well throughout my time.

You get to learn a lot. But that was the conversation. It's like, hey, do you think this is paid programming? Because when we think media rights deals and this modern era, we think about companies like Disney or CBS or Fox showing out hundreds of millions of dollars or a billion dollars a year or whatever. But CW just doesn't have that.

And Liv doesn't demand that in the market. And so was this a move where they looked at each other. It was one 59 a.m. come on and Liv was like, I mean, and CW was like, yeah, you know, that was that was how you came to be.

I understand. Yeah, it might be paid programming. I think they could have probably gotten that from like Fox Business, to be honest, on a weekend. That's where I really thought that they were going to end up. I thought they were going to end up at something like that, something that's on everybody's cable station. Right.

And if you have a cable package or if you have YouTube TV or Hulu, you probably have Fox Business. And I thought there would be some sort of a, you know, we'll buy the time. I mean, they only need four hours. Right.

Because it's a shotgun start. They know. And I mean, is Fox Business really killing it in ratings on Saturday and Sunday afternoon? So I think the CW isn't over the air. Like, if you have an over the air antenna, you can. Yeah. No. Channel 22.

That's 22 in Raleigh. You needed you needed to be able to get golf fans who don't have cable. Yeah, but those people are not watching golf, I don't think.

I don't think I just I just think about the classic like fall asleep on the couch to watching golf crowd. You know, I'm just putting it on Channel three because that's where the golf is to Patterson. You're the best man. I'll talk to you next week.

Sounds good. You'll be well. We'll talk to A.J.

Perez about this coming up later on. It is like the product is good in terms of the way it's presented. I had zero problem. I know the guy who is in charge of the production. I legit legitimately know who he is. I speak with him a fair amount. He's doing as good a job as he could do.

The product, as it's presented, is very good. I don't know if the golf is, but the product is the draw. There's no drama. There's zero drama of any live event, anyone, because the outcomes don't seem to matter. It's just when you're playing for guaranteed money, it just doesn't seem to matter. There's no pressure. Right.

I got paid already. Yeah. Right. So there you go.