Are we getting Wes golf tips?

We're all out of basketball teams here.

Actually, we're not completely. In the state of North Carolina, in the Triangle, we're out of basketball teams. But in the ACC, we've got one left.

Just one. And it was the team I thought was the best team from start to finish in the ACC, the University of Miami. Jim Laronega's team is still kicking. Of course, they get Houston in the Sweet 16.

I wish you guys luck. Let's see if West Durham feels like the Hurricanes have a shot. West, we're out of basketball here in the state of North Carolina. You've been out of basketball for a while, is what you're really saying.

Well, even the women. We lost both Carolina and Duke yesterday. Now that, that was surprising.

That was surprising. I mean, it wasn't a great year even for them. I know Duke's record was great and they got a fourth seed, I believe.

But it seemed like every time I turned around when they played a good team, they lost. I don't know. I don't know why that was. So we're done. Did you bring me on here to talk basketball or do you want to talk about tips from the team? See, I was thinking that now that basketball is over, because I know you're playing golf tomorrow, you should do that. You should give us West Durham's golf tips. A stroke saver, if you will.

I would be just piling on somebody else and I'm not doing that. I gave you an IG. If you follow me on Instagram and you follow my stories, I gave you last night me at the PGA Tour Superstore, which, by the way, I hear there's one coming to your area. Oh, really? Yes. I've been told by authorities within the corporate heading of the PGA Tour Superstore that there is a PGA Tour Superstore coming to Raleigh. Excellent. I will just tell you, you will soon learn while I call it the crack house.

Here's my problem is that I have so little time to play. I would only go there to buy clothes. Well, I'm going to tell you this.

If you go in there and you get out for less than 100 bucks, you consider yourself lucky. All right, man. Vicki will say, where are you going? I said, I'm going to go to the Superstore. She goes, oh, no.

And I write, yep, that'll cost you $100. She's bankrolling it. Very nice. Just on basketball real quick. Is it a theory?

Is it too young? It was just one of those years. Last year, we overcame it.

Duke had Paulo Bancaro and some other good players. And Carolina was on a heater at the end. Miami's been good. Six weeks of a heater. And Miami's good, too. Miami's good this year, too. But that was basically it. And this year, we just didn't have the postseason success.

Any theories? Well, first of all, I think we have finally have to respect if they're going to continue to use the net, we can, as my grandfather used to say, we can bitch and gripe about it all we want to. But they're still going to use it.

You ought to own up to what it is and react accordingly. Right. And we have to remember that the the net measures every game is a slice of pie. It's not holding one game over another. Right. So what you can't do is you can't go and have a bad nonconference season. Right.

And you've got to schedule. You can't beat three hundreds. OK. Right.

And here's the other thing, too. You can't have three hundreds in your league. You can't have two hundreds in your league. And this year, the net put, for the most part, three teams to twenty five or worse for a majority of the season, not the conference season, the whole damn season. Right. And so we got to get teams from the bottom to be better. And the ACC twofold here. And aren't we fortunate that this all happened within the window frame of the 20 game conference schedule?

Yes. Which we all loved. Remember, we all loved it. We did.

And for good reason. I hate it. You did. Did you really? Yes.

I've never liked it ever. OK. Fewer conference games is better than more. Well, and here's another element to it. I don't know that we can go back, but we certainly got to look at the rotations. Well, why can't we go back? I mean, we can't go back. We didn't go back because it's because it's part of that geo or that you've got to twenty thirty six. Right.

But but wasn't it. Oh, so that's all tied in. You have to stay at 20 conference games for basketball. You have you have. Well, we are talking about revenue, you and I, occasionally in this process. Yes. That is part of the revenue plan, I'm sure. So you can't go back.

All right. Because my feeling was that if replacing these games because it's a guaranteed loss for somebody. So why would you guarantee yourself losses?

Why would you? What you also have to do, A.G., is you've got to think about your non-conference schedule, too. And as I've said, you know, give Kevin Keats credit, give Mark Godfried more credit, his predecessor, because Mark Godfried actually had a plan when we had the RPI. He knew who you could play and couldn't play. Right.

Yes. And other coaches, Brad Brownell, I've had long conversations about RPI as opposed to net and things like that. There's still that one piece of the net, as I've told you, I'm not totally comfortable with because I think there's something they're not telling us. But outside of that, we can't be bad. And you've got to win your non-conference games. The Big 12 had an 80 percent win rate in non-conference play.

Yeah, 80 percent. The ACC was in the 60s all year long. Yeah. And they lost to some bad teams. And you set the table, by the way, for your league long before you ever got to the league.

Correct. That's the problem that the net has created with the ACC. So unfortunately, I think you've got to look at your rotations in conference play. You've got to make sure good plays good. But then again, preseason 14 was in the hunt for the regular season.

Preseason 10 was the third seed in the tournament. So be careful how you create the rotations. But you've got to go back and look at that. And you've also got to win your non-conference games against quality opponents as well. I agree. The reason I never liked 20 was because if you weren't going to get to a full round robin, then we can accomplish what we want by being better and less rigid in scheduling. And I had this idea a long time ago. You take your best teams and you make sure that they're playing your best teams. Create the best television package.

I totally agree. And then you have the middle. You have the middle play, kind of a mix of the middle and the bottom. And yeah, you play some of the better teams because you want to create the best possible records for you. The bigger problem this year was that Louisville was horrendous. Florida State, injured and bad.

Horrendous. Boston College, for the most part. Georgia Tech. They did. BC had a chance to go above 500 at the end. That is correct.

To me, that was the bigger issue. Schedule better outside of the league, obviously. Louisville's not going to be that bad again, right? I'm not going to say. I made a promise to myself last week. I'm not going to say anybody's going to be anything this year.

Because I clearly I clearly don't know now. And that's fine. I'm OK with the new college basketball once I got it sorted out, I guess. But when you mentioned Florida State, Georgia Tech, Louisville, those were the three worst teams in the ACC based on the net majority of the year. Louisville spent more often than not in the 300 deep into the 300s. Georgia Tech was 250 to 300 most of this year.

Florida State was 210 to 290 most of this year. You can't live in that neighborhood. No, that's just can't happen. That's Southland Conference neighborhood.

All right. Let me go to one pocket theory here real quick. I don't think Conference USA is crazy for what they do, where they hold their schedule for three weekends a year and they kind of schedule teams against each other.

I actually like that idea. And I think that's one. If the net cannot be more congruent to the ACC, the ACC needs to do it.

Well, because here's the story. And this goes to your point about the ACC Big Ten challenge. And we're moving the SEC deal into the same time on the calendar, not into January where they had the Big 12.

I think personally, that's a mistake. You ought to play it in January if you can. They're not going to do that. They're going to play it between Thanksgiving and the football championship game like they've done for however many years. But I think then you have to react accordingly by saying, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to take three Saturdays, the first three Saturdays in February, and we're going to play the teams in staggered formation over those three Saturdays that are against each other, because what's that going to do? It's going to give you a chance to play teams that are going to be quad ones if we're going to keep that concept alive, whatever the case may be. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of things that we can do also to jazz, make the schedule more fun. Like you and I are both fans of English football, right? Yes. Yes. How about like an FA Cup style thing where this would allow, let's just say West Ham gets relegated, because it might happen. Right.

I know you're a West Ham fan. I'm just sorry to poke you. That's fine. Go ahead. Just keep rubbing it down.

That's fine. But just create a system where you're playing for a cup within the season, just to create more excitement, and also you get teams who are playing better, maybe, and give them additional games against better teams within your league. Maybe you can go back to a 16-game schedule and have something like that within your league, and then maybe, even when you get to the conference tournament, there's not 15 teams that show up.

But maybe eight. And unfortunately, I think we have to be able to go comfortably outside the box, Adam. And we have to understand that this is the way the game is now going to be played. It's not going to be played in the traditional format of the past. And college basketball is basically, I mean, it's an open box now.

We're getting ready to see things. I mean, look, we're talking about going to 96 teams, which is just, to me, I get it. And it's about, don't forget how much money the organization is making in these three and a half weeks now. More than three quarters of their budget is being churned out in these three and a half weeks. You know that better than I do.

I mean, you know, you talk to those people. And so 96, why are we going to go to 96? Because guess what the NCAA can do?

Make more money. They think they can. I don't know how much more money they can make because I'm not sure how much more CBS and Turner are willing to pay for some of these games. They're going to put it on Paramount Plus, coach. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Hey. No, no. Absolutely. Well, get me watching Champions League.

That's fine. I mean, where else am I going to get Napoli into? So wait to the 91st seed team makes it to the sweet 16. You saw what Tobin Anderson did, right? Oh, yes. Barbecue in the tournament net cats coaching Iona. Good for him, man.

I tell you what, nobody says more words in 10 seconds to Tobin. Look, it's it's Cinderella for not only the players and the teams, but the coaches, too. Absolutely. Good for a good good.

Like anybody that can improve, you know, their lot, their stature in life. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Rick Pitino. I do want to talk to you about that in a second. Well, let's just do that. Let's just do this now. He's going to restore St. John's to greatness based on academics. Wes and culture. All right.

OK, where do you want me to start anywhere you like? OK, first of all, he signed a six year deal, which will make him 76 years old at the end of that deal. Coaching St. He's going to coach until he can't breathe anymore.

I totally agree. I feel very comfortable telling you that the human victory cigar, Stephen Masiello, will be one of his assistants. Yes. And that was his nickname when he was a walk on really at Kentucky, because he only came into the games that the cats were winning comfortably. He was the human victory cigar.

Nice. And Masiello was a ball boy at the garden when Pitino coached the Knicks. OK. And Masiello had a interesting abrupt end to his Manhattan career as head coach. Right.

Maybe you also might remember and you can Google this later at your office or place of business. Google Masiello in South Florida to see how that ended. OK.

The USF, basically, he was being hired as a basketball coach at USF. OK. Look, Rick Pitino is a showman in the best and sometimes the worst ways. Yeah. But Chris Mullen, Mark Jackson, Walter Berry. Do I, Willie Glass, remember those great names?

I do. Are we are we expecting that to come back through the door? Carne Seca, Ron Artest, Ron Artest. I mean, are we expecting that? Bill Wenington. Look, I grew up watching St. John's basketball.

I know you did. So it's great. It's got an unbelievable tradition. But this is a different Big East than the one he coached at Providence. It's a it's a different Big East. The city schools across the country do not do well anymore. St. John's. I wish Ed Cooley all the luck in the world turning Georgetown into something again. It is so hard to do with city schools. Why?

I don't really have a great answer. I have I sort of have an answer for St. John's. They used to have an advantage at St. John's because they were allowed to provide money to kids in lieu of housing because they had no housing because there was the basketball players couldn't live on it. There was no campus. So there was no there were no dorms. So they would basically say this is what it would cost for you to live here.

Here's this money. So all those kids were from Queens. So they all stayed home and they pocketed the money, which was illegal back then. So that St. John's has they built dorms. Now St. John's doesn't have a team.

So, again, times are just very different. These kids don't stay in the city anymore. They all leave town. They all go somewhere else. I think that he will impact the Big East.

Oh, he'll be able to find there. As I understand, Ed Cooley's move is based on the landscape of Providence College more than it is anything else. Yeah. And it has to do with the world we now live in. More than anything else that five years ago we didn't have. And that's name, image and likeness and the money involved in it. Yep.

And again, as I've told you before, I think we've had this discussion in longer form. There are some institutions that are just not going to play. They're going to we're going to have a team and here's our team and we appreciate everything you've done.

Oh, seven figures to hand out to players. Nope, we're not doing that. And I'm not surprised at all that Providence College, a non football private institution, is doing that.

To be honest with you, Adam, I'm not right. I agree with you. And I think Georgetown, by the way, had to get in the game.

If they wanted to be big time. Yeah. Well, and Georgia Tech started doing it three weeks ago.

I was going to ask you about that. I know Damon Stoudemire has been kind of this rising star in coaching. I think that's a very good hire for Georgia Tech. If he does well there, I don't expect him to be there very long. But Georgia Tech is a place that you can win. They should be able to do well. It should be an NCAA tournament team pretty much every year.

No, it should. But I will say this. The institution itself, the athletic department itself. I give Jay Bat a lot of credit coming in here in the fall as the new athletics director. And now assessing things in a very rapid fashion in order to make a football change and a basketball change.

Right. And I think Jay has come in here and looked at what Georgia Tech wasn't doing as much as what they were doing. And I think he moved fast. People have asked me for the last 10 days, how did Damon Stoudemire get hired in 90 hours? Well, the reason Damon Stoudemire got hired in 90 hours is because Jay Bat knew he had to have a guy Monday, because if he didn't have a guy last Monday, he might lose his whole roster by Wednesday.

Absolutely. And then if you don't have a guy within a week, you might not be a factor in the portal. So you couldn't wait around on some of these other guys. And he made a smart, shrewd hire in time. And he probably got him at the right rate. That's the other part Georgia Tech had to consider. And that's how Brent Key probably ended up with as much momentum as he did winning four games, knowing he wasn't going to cost him $5 million a year to be the football coach. Right.

Yeah. And I think there is some logic in this, but you're right. If they win, you've got to have the money to back them. But Georgia Tech did not have an NIL dollar on their football team or their basketball team last year, Adam. Not a dollar.

Cost of doing business. You've got to get in the game, man. If we're going to play this game, we've got to get in the game. Are you ready for spring football?

And then promise not to take our shirt off. See, I don't have a problem with that. He wasn't embarrassing for a guy in his 50s, right?

Nados is in his 50s. He's repped by the same guy that reps me. I like Eric Musselman a lot. I don't know that I have done it. Of course, America wouldn't want me to do it. I misspoke.

I said NATO. It's Eric Musselman, who, by the way, is a dynamite basketball coach. Very good basketball coach and, you know, grew up the son of a coach. Bill Musselman was a savant. His dad was a savant.

And Eric, at times, you look at that basketball team he's got, you see a lot of his old man in it. But then again, I can relate to that. I get told that a lot. All right. Are you going to any spring football? No, I'm not going to do any spring football games, despite the fact the ACC, I think, is playing nine of them on one day.

Yeah. Believe it or not, we, Vicki and I, scheduled a little vacation that weekend before we knew that they were going to play 35 spring football games. They're 19, just so everybody knows, they're 19 ACC and SEC spring games on the same day. 19. I will miss all 19 of them proudly.

Yeah. I look, I'm excited for where football is going. I'm really excited to see kind of year two with Elko. Also really excited to see Robert and I and Raleigh and the Carolina. If the Carolina comeback is to be built, I understand where you are offensively. I now want to see where you are defensively in year two with Chiz.

Yeah. Defense. What is that? We haven't seen it in a while. We haven't seen it since Butch Davis.

No offense, but we haven't seen defensive football here in Chapel Hill since Butch Davis. Meanwhile, tomorrow at 930, West's tips from the tee will not be on social media. Top flight stroke saver, I dare you. I dare you, Westerum. If I do it, you will air it on your show. I will. I will.

It'll be Monday because I'm going on an eighth grade voyage to Washington, D.C. Let's let's just. Are you going to stop in and say hello to Ed Cooley? I might.

We might. We might venture out to Georgetown. You got to take the kids down to College Park.

No, no, no. We're not doing that. That's not in D.C. We're going to be right on the mark. I said, are you taking the kids down to College Park?

The eighth graders need to see where Adam Gold cut his teeth in American sports media. I could I could show that I could I could also show them some places I frequented in Georgetown and then take them to the other place. You got to take them to go to Foggy Bottom for a little bit.

We'll be good. No, it's been some time. The place where you and SVP used to buy pictures. Oh, yes.

No, the rendezvous does no longer exist. I think Scotty was more of a Bentley's filling station. He was a Bentley. I was not a Bentley's guy. I actually just it was too high class for me.

I was I was not a high class guy in college. I always like to go to Reardon's in Annapolis. Oh, that's a that's Annapolis is a great place. Yeah, it is.

Absolutely. Also Carol's Creek Cafe in Annapolis. I've been there. Now I got to go. Now I got to go. West Durham, you're the best. Take care, guys. See you soon. Thanks, Adam. You're the best.