Time for some updates in the college sports world!

Chip Patterson, my friend.

Cover3 Podcast, CBSSports.com. What soccer shirt are we wearing today? Fiorentina takes on West Ham for the Europa Conference League Final today, 3 p.m., streaming on Paramount Plus.

Is that a Fiorentina shirt? Oh, absolutely. For Teviola.

Come on. Of all the Serie A Premier League battles that are happening in the next week, certainly this is the most important. Not enter against Man City.

Definitely not that. It's on Paramount Plus at 3 p.m. And look, I say this, you know, with a little, I'm getting a little choked up because this might be the end for Vinny Italy. Vincenzo Italiano has done great things for Fiorentina and he is rumored to maybe be the next man at Napoli. Well, Napoli might lose Osiman. He is a hot rumor to maybe even head to Manchester United, who is desperately seeking a striker. And I don't see Harry Kane leaving Tottenham to go to Manchester United more so. He's just out?

He's just like, OK, I want it. That's fine. I'm going to I'm going to take a year off.

Vout Veghorst is going back to wherever Vout Veghorst came from. All right, Chip. Our friend Andrew Carter from the News and Observer has been writing a series of articles.

And I always, by the way, the the incoming, if you will, because they haven't yet had the ceremonies. North Carolina sports writer of the year, Andrew Carter, to give him a shout out for that. But he's writing a series of pieces about the soul of the Atlantic Coast Conference, essentially.

Now, you and I have talked about this before in the last couple of, you know, conversations. We've talked about, you know, what some of the power brokers in the ACC would likely look like going forward. Smaller, more traditionally, although we kind of leave Wake Forest out of those conversations, even though we probably shouldn't. Is it even and this is my argument with the Greensboro people and we need the headquarters in Greensboro. We can't be we can't bring the ACC basketball tournament. We shouldn't be in New York. We shouldn't be on Saturday nights. Is it counterproductive to be so. Bent.

On maintaining all of the traditions. No, there is one example. You and I disagree here. Well, there is one example recently that and I haven't thought about this a lot till you just mentioned it. But you and I have a thought provoking friendship.

We provoke thoughts. But I think the Big East is rebounded. Now, the problem is where is a lot more that needs to happen, you know, for the ACC because Clemson and Florida State and Miami are not in this to be the premier basketball conference with must see conference college basketball games. But that is an example of a league that was at the top of its sport, literally collapsed and has come back in a way that I think is incredibly strong, that one top to bottom in the standings. Everybody is good.

You know, you everybody lifts each other up. Butler can have a bad team. But Butler still is a draw and interesting and competitive, even when they are the ninth or 10th best team. You know, Georgetown.

We'll see what happens with Ed Cooley. Rick Pitino goes to St. John's like the the Big East is an example of, I guess, recapturing memories of old and actually making it work. The problem is the ACC has goals that are not in the ACC's history, that the ACC wants to compete at college football at the highest level with ACC as a conference has not been at the top of college football. There have been programs that have had obviously Florida State sustained success and Clemson a recent run. But the culture of the ACC is not college football success at the highest level. Yeah, which is why, in my opinion, trying to cater to the soul of the ACC is not only counterproductive, but it's probably economically foolish. It is economically foolish.

So counterproductive and economically foolish. I just think there is a path for the if the ACC wants to become this incredibly collegiate basketball forward conference and who cares about football, then you're probably going to say goodbye to some schools eight, nine, ten years down the line. But you could do that. You could have that kind of reputation.

You're just going to be a loser at the bank and be saying goodbye to some of your premier brand. Here's what's interesting is you talked about Big East and they don't even play football as a league anymore. And I saw Brett McMurphy from the Action Network tweet yesterday that intimated that the schools in the Big 12 are all interested in adding UConn, which just went back to the Big East. And I have of the mind that one of the reasons that they returned to the top of men's college basketball is because they went back where they belong, playing in that conference. But even that conference isn't that conference anymore because it's going to sound weird. Creighton and Marquette don't scream Big East basketball to me, nor does Butler. But I get why they're all in the same little bit basketball oriented schools.

That's fine. But it's just funny how the even that league has shifted in in many modern ways. The to me, we need to get out of the mindset in the ACC. I want to maintain scheduling traditions. I want to maintain some of those rivalry traditions.

But if we focus too much on the other stuff, I think it works against us. Greensboro is cute. No, I'm not trying to offend Greensboro. The Coliseum seats 20 some odd thousand people.

That's awesome. They run it great. But that should be kind of a special occasion stop for the ACC men's basketball tournament.

You got to take it to destination cities and destination venues. No offense to Green. I'm not trying to to say we're better than that. But the city of Greensboro, the league has outgrown Greensboro. Thank you.

All of our sensibilities have to change. I like Greensboro. I like it, too, whether I like it or not. But I I think that you could still make the argument that whether it's Virginia, Virginia Tech, whether it's Clemson, that you still are talking about. Nearly half of the conference can get in a car and drive.

Sure. No, it's you know, it is a super convenient is a central location to be able to get fans there. And I think that was my that was me getting turned off from Brooklyn. You know, like I would like Brooklyn, I would take D.C., for example, if you want to go major city, because then you still have, you know, the opportunity to be able to.

Or, you know, as as I would do, get on that train and, you know, take it on up to D.C. There is a driving that's we did a draft your ideal conference on the cover three podcast and the conference that I did that. We did it.

I'm trying to think how many years ago we did that on the old afternoon show. So I was the 10 hour conference. I put together a 14 team league where every single school was within 10 hour.

Everyone was within a 10 hour. Get in the car and drive because I'm trying to bring back the road trips to road games. And so like I had Georgia and I had Clemson and I had Tennessee and I had Florida and I had Florida State. We didn't go north further north than Virginia Tech. And we did not include Miami.

It did have a lot of ACC, but everyone was within 10 hours of each other trying to bring back that region and now regionality. So I will say that if we're talking about the ACC tournament or other events like that, I think the football championship game is perfect in Charlotte. Yeah, I would like for it to be a car ride, a road trip to as many as many schools as possible, because as we have continued to work our way down the line and college sports has become less regional, I will hold on to as many as much regionality as possible because the fan of college sports wants to live around other fans of their team. And more importantly, I would argue the rivals of their team.

I agree that whether you're going to the office, whether you're going to church, whether you're at your kid's soccer game or at school, that other people around you are also interested in the same stuff that you are. And you've got that competition that bleeds over because, look, we talk about college football for 12 months and there's only 12 dadgum games. You've got to be able to preserve the rivalries so that the passion can be something that is not just seasonal and social. You and I are in agreement when it comes to scheduling, we need to be smarter to preserve the rivalries, because for the most part, these create interest among the fan base. We want those games sold out.

And we want those games also to have some television interest to drive television ratings up. My plan has always been D.C. and Charlotte. Those should be the two main hubs for the ACC men's basketball tournament. Greensboro, you go to anniversaries, 75th, 90th, whatever. You know, we go there on special occasions. But D.C., Charlotte.

D.C., Charlotte. Maybe it's a couple of years here, a couple of years there. Occasional one offs to some, hey, let's throw it to Atlanta one year.

I know some people are laughing. Atlanta can do a good job if they care. Throw it to Boston one year, whatever. Don't throw it to Boston.

OK, you're probably right there. The only way I would go to New York, the only way is Madison Square Garden. I wouldn't go back to Brooklyn again. Talk about Seoul. There's no Seoul at Barclays Center. Zero.

None. Greensboro is special, though. Of course, there's Seoul there.

There is some Seoul there. I'm not into that. But so I'm I'm kind of of the mindset that right now the identity crisis is in part so fundamental that you can't change it. That on one level, the makeup of the conference includes schools that do not look like the massive state schools that overwhelm the Big Ten and the SEC.

You've talked about that a lot. The other piece of the identity crisis is that when the ACC was the wealthiest conference in college sports, with more money off its television deal than anybody else in college sports, the media rights partners who set the market and determined the costs. They valued basketball more than they valued football.

And that has flipped. So fundamentally, these things have just created like the soul, the identity, the the genes and DNA of the conference are things that do not carry the same value as they do in the current market. By the way, it's about twenty two years since the ACC was paying out more money. It's not that long ago when the ACC was the wealthiest conference, but at that point it was like nine million dollars per school in shared media revenue.

All right. We don't have much time left, but you and I are big fans of the game of golf. So when the news hit yesterday, I don't know if you did a CBS Sports HQ hit on it, but your thoughts on the working agreement, I guess, between the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund. Each week, we dive into the mind of the con artist and covering the secrets behind the biggest Ponzi schemes you've never heard about. We're not talking about Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi.

That's right. Those guys have been covered to death. The Ponzi playbook will focus on those fraudsters who have swindled millions from unsuspecting investors.

Subscribe to the Ponzi playbook wherever you get your podcasts. I think it's going to be very, very tough to continue to deal with the frustrations from the players who at most straight up turned down money at minimum. If they weren't turning down money, they were at least putting themselves at risk of criticism for capping up and supporting the PGA Tour.

Rory's using terms like sacrificial lamb. He did today. And according to reports in that players meeting yesterday with Jay Moynihan, there's been a standing ovation when someone called for a change in leadership. This is going to be very, very difficult for me to see the PGA Tour getting through this without there being some L's or at least some leadership changes. Somebody's going to have to end up taking charge because there does appear to be a big, big, big leadership vacuum.

Okay, next thing because I know we're way past injury time. I like Kyle Porter indicating that the Saudis really wanted to be in golf. They didn't care as much about Liv specifically as a league. They just wanted to be in golf at the highest level.

They've got that. What does that mean for Liv? What does that mean for those who were a part of that tour?

If there's a way to reapply, do they even want to reapply? Does everything that Dustin Johnson said about not wanting to play the same kind of schedule, does that all get thrown out the window and now all of a sudden we see a full schedule for Dustin Johnson again? Well, all of those reasons were all BS anyway. We all knew that. I saw Dustin Johnson looking at his career and at what Dustin Johnson likes to do and the idea that you were going to be forced to play X number of events per year.

I saw from Dustin's perspective that this was an attractive opportunity. Yeah, but it's basically the same because it was a 14 event series. It was always, it was supposed to be 15 initially. So that plus the four majors plus the plus the playoffs, it's about, it's basically the same. So playing less was never, this was always about, oh my gosh, you're going to give me $200 million upfront to do this?

Yeah, I'm in. So that's what it was about. It was never about anything but money.

I'm not saying that's bad or not. That's just always what it was about. This is not about growing the game. This is not about any of that. It's about the PGA tour needed to, they needed an influx of cash. Oh, and are you still in on the idea that the lawsuits and the Department of Justice investigation, like if you didn't have great legal standing and I'm not a lawyer, but at least it was going to be headaches and like costing a lot of money to go through all of the different process in this? Because that was so prominently placed in the press release with line four, paragraph one. Lawsuit's over. This ends all litigation in the letter to the players. Point number one, this ends the lawsuit. It sure seems to be a big selling point at a minimum. The lawsuits are over, but the more I read about this, that doesn't mean that the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, isn't going to come in and say, you know what? That is a monopoly.

Oh, the new entity. Right. So no idea how that's going to play out. They might just say, whatever, it's professional sports. You could probably say the same thing about Major League Baseball or the NFL, blah, blah, blah. But it is.

But at least the lawsuits are over. PGA Tour was afraid of losing tons of money. And and frankly, I think what you said a second ago is that the Public Investment Fund didn't really care. They didn't care about Greg Norman's vision to destroy the PGA Tour. The 54 hole idea or anything else.

They want to be in golf at the highest levels. And this was a path in. And like, what if what if this is also what Jay Monahan sort of saw the entire time?

I don't believe Monahan saw this. I believe. And here's the thing. I believe that they still in their hearts believe that they were on a good path. And the more I hear is that they financially could not pull off what they were trying to pull off. And sponsors were worried that they could not afford what the PGA Tour was asking of them and that they were running the risk of losing some some major sponsors. Because if you're jacking your purses up like they were, that's where the money is coming from. The money is coming from sponsors. They could not compete with Saudi money.

But I think the Saudis also didn't want to be just lighting money on fire, even though they could, because the sovereign wealth fund just regenerates all the time. But that's what that's why I think what we're what we're going to see is what we're what we're going to see. And I don't know, live might live might be done after this year.

And then we have other store. We have other issues with how do those players get reincorporated into the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour or whatever. So does this save the Ryder Cup?

Can they get it done in time? Because honestly, I don't think it does. OK, I couldn't think of any euros that I was excited with word.

Maybe be a part of it. I mean, Sergio is a mascot. None of them are none of those European players are playing well enough to be part of the European tour. There'll be an incredible addition, but kept because Koepcke would be eligible. Koepcke and I believe Dustin and Dustin Johnson might not be because Koepcke is a member of the PGA of America by virtue of winning the PGA. Ah, so I think both Koepcke and D.J.

and there's not that rule. There are loose rules, but I personally I think D.J. and Koepcke would have both been on the U.S. team. I don't know what the European side is going to look like, but I mean, Rom's good. It's good. Rory's good. They've got some good players. Rory, Rom, Fitzpatrick. I mean, we're talking about top top shelf type guys and and the coward Terrell Hatton just in there being a thorn in your side.

He just played better when it mattered. He's a little too wound up. Chip Patterson, as I am every every Wednesday when we speak. Chip Patterson at Chip Underscore Patterson, CBS Sports dot com. Cover three podcast. All right. You and I will we'll talk more about life next week. It's been a real cavalcade of stars today.

If you haven't listened, we're not going to go check out the podcast. And goodness gracious, college world series with super regional managers. And God, listen, it's I feel honored to be a part of this bill. And October 22nd, by the way. Yeah. October 21st. Enter Miami at Charlotte FC.

Lionel Messi. Hey, listen, let's do another unsolicited plug for Amtrak. Hop back on that train for the for the match. All right. Good luck to Fiorentina today. Sounds good. You'll be well. All right, man.