What keeps bringing Chip back to sports?

How are you, sir? I'm doing well. I'll ask you this. Should I feel conflicted that I spent a good portion of the Fourth of July when we declared our independence from Great Britain, watching a tennis tournament held in Great Britain? No, you shouldn't feel conflicted. Also, since my son is an absolute soccer snob, my wife got him a Union Jack rug for his room.

So, he has often slipped into walking around the house speaking in a fake British accent. You can't do that on July 4th. I don't know. I think you can. That's going back and that's giving Duke the win in Coach K's last home game. I can't do that. That's a very good point.

But I don't think you should feel conflicted. Were you watching American players? Of course.

Sofia Kennan and Coco Gauff. That one was yesterday, right? Or was that Monday? Monday, I think.

I don't remember. I haven't watched any. I actually have Djokovic on in front of me right now. I am not diehard on the tennis circuit.

I'm not watching even Indian Wells. But this actually goes back to something that I realized during the pandemic when we had college basketball games and even some college football games with limited fans. Then the NCAA tournament in the bubble. Throughout all this time, one of the things that keeps bringing me back to sports, as jaded as I could become as I continue down covering this stuff professionally, it's the environments. And there is really high quality tennis, especially at a place like Wimbledon. You get the oh, oh, oh, oh, and just sort of the back and forth and the long rallies.

And you can sense the tension and you understand exactly the stakes of the moment. I love parachuting in on the tennis world for major championships, Wimbledon especially. So I just throw on the main feed and just let them take me to wherever the best action is. Have you ever been to the U.S. Open? No, it's during football season.

I get screwed out of it. It's not shameful that you haven't been to a U.S. Open. Shameful that they put the U.S. Open during football season, especially college football, which is the last week of August. And that's when the tournament starts.

Usually the Labor Day is the middle weekend, if you will, of the U.S. Open. It is one of the best sporting events I have ever been to. We used to go every year. The year that Jimmy Connors made his run at age 39 to the semifinals before getting curb stomped by Jim Currier, we got a chance. I was at the Open that year.

We got a chance to see Connors play one of his, I think it was his third round match against somebody named Paul Harhouse. The place was, it was a rock concert at a tennis match. Best atmosphere. It's a college football atmosphere, so you will appreciate that. Let me ask you a couple of college football-ish things. So, what do you think, do you think there is any self, we'll use a football term, is there any self-scouting being done at the NCAA offices before they send out a memo to all of their member schools saying when it comes to name, image, and likeness, you are a member, you are an at-will member of this body.

Ignore state law and abide by our rules. Do they actually think these things through? Because there is no chance that Alabama or Florida or Texas is going to say, well, we're really worried about the NCAA. We know we have this, what are they thinking? Show me the rap sheet, because the NCAA so far has one set of violations that it has brought.

It was against Miami basketball and the Cavender Twins, Miami women's basketball, and it was for an assistant coach connecting John Ruiz with the Cavender Twins for a dinner. There's nothing else. They could have gone after Texas A&M and the way that the Texas A&M collective is set up. They could have gone after numerous collectives and the way that they are set up.

But you know what I was thinking? I was thinking that let's live in the world where we're going to use the NCAA's language. The NCAA is just this willing membership, this club, and we're all in it together.

I think some members are like, hey, you got to go stop them. The NCAA, knowing it's toothless, says, okay, you know what we'll do? I'll write a sternly worded letter.

And that's all you can do. I really think that the NCAA issuing this memo is not the NCAA trying to threaten Texas A&M and some of the other programs that have set up their collectives and the relationship with the university in ways that abide by state laws but break NCAA bylaws. I wonder if this sternly worded memo was really just to appease other NCAA member schools that are trying to say, hey, stop them.

Don't let them go do that. Has the Charlie Baker, right? Yeah, the NCAA president. Yeah, the former governor of Massachusetts.

Has the Charlie Baker era started off well? Well, listen, he has not officially taken an offer, but he's made two trips to Capitol Hill to try to get federal NIL legislation, and there's just absolutely no movement on that. And it was suggested that the NCAA might try to go after state laws, which, okay, I guess the Washington generals can go try to play the Globetrotters once again. I understand that all those losses in court technically are on Mark Emmerich's record, but you're still coaching the same program right now. You're still going to be walking the NCAA into a situation where judges at all different levels of this country have all been ruling against you and the efforts that you're trying to make.

And so if they want to try to sue the state of Mississippi because Mississippi state laws are not with the bylaws and this, that or the other, they're going to lose that court case as well. And so Charlie Baker, when he was named president, the suggestion was because we're getting somebody from politics, he's going to be able to get some federal NIL legislation. And the fact that it hasn't happened to this point after all of this lobbying tells me that it's just not going to happen.

And that's because of something like, I don't want to end the conversation because I really enjoy conversations with you. But in the back of everyone's mind is the stuff that Mac Brown talks about, which is like, we're only a couple of years from professionalization and you know how it's set up. We all got to figure it out. We don't know yet, but no one is going to put in federal law. No one's going to put in the effort for federal law that is going to be totally meaningless and not even apply to anything in 24 months. There's no appetite on Capitol Hill for something that deals with intercollegiate athletics. There's just zero appetite for it. And I wish that the people who run college sports would have realized that years ago.

And look, the last thing I do on this program is pat myself on the back. But I've been saying this for a long time. In addition to this, the 32 states that have NIL laws on the books, why do we need them? We don't need them. We don't need any laws. The market will work.

Just let the market work. College football coaches are more successful than Charlie Baker because they've been going to their state houses and they've been lobbying and campaigning and they are getting wins that the NCAA can't get. College football coaches greater than the NCAA. I don't know about former college football coaches, but I'm going to leave that.

I'm just going to leave that over here. Former college football coaches. Former college football coaches that got up from a recruiting dinner and walked away from the table to go take another job.

Certainly not those. Not good. So a couple of weeks ago, the San Diego State alerted the Mountain West Conference that they were leaving. And now they're staying for at least one more year.

What is going on? Did San Diego, is this a Pac-12 thing or what is San Diego State doing here? Are they about to go independent?

What's up? Oh, Pac-12 owes them some money. They really messed up. They said Pac-12 hit them with an oops.

They thought that they were going to have their media rights deal pulled together by now. And San Diego State needed to be able to have just a little bit more time. And they caught themselves in the legalese of their current contract with the Mountain West Conference.

And with this at least one more year type situation. My expectation is that the San Diego State believes that it will be asked to be a member of the Pac-12 in the somewhat near future. But because the Pac-12 doesn't have all of its business tied up right now, they couldn't do it quite yet. And so, yeah, the difference between the $6.6 million that San Diego State is not getting, I hope if I was just going to say balance the scales of who owes who, I hope that all the real estate that they sold from the poor investments in San Francisco offices, I hope they can peel off a little at least six to be able to throw San Diego State's way. Because the way that I read this is that the Pac-12 not having its act together just cost San Diego State $6.6 million. Oi, that's a big chunk to San Diego State. Yeah, to the Mountain West Conference. I love the Mountain West Conference.

You understand as much as I do that nothing brings me more joy than tucking myself in on a Saturday night, the Instant Reaction Podcast, which we record live on YouTube at 11.30 p.m. Eastern Time. I get done with post-show, it's about 1 a.m., and then I just snuggle in to watch Nevada and Colorado State. And there's debris flying around. It's not really well attended. But it's football, and they care out there. And it's a really, really rewarding way to end an exhausting college football Saturday.

But I think that their per-school payouts are such that not being able to have that is going to be really significant to your revenue. The good news is as long as you are confident that the Pac-12 payday is coming, you're set for a raise. And the reason that the Pac-12 payday is coming is that you have been in a position where your football program has been incredibly consistent. And your basketball program just made a run to the national championship game. Like, things are generally on the up and up, but boy, this is a financial speed bump for the Aztecs here in the summertime.

Yeah, and I know Paul Finebaum on a podcast the other day, he was on with John Orand on the Marsha and Orand podcast. He basically declared the Pac-12 in on life support. And I'm not even arguing, we'll pick that up another time. Real quick, because I want Chip Patterson's thoughts on this.

We have like two minutes before I guess the meter runs out. So Tiger Woods had words put in his mouth on a memo that the PGA Tour, I think, leaked about how they were going to approach, how they were going to counter the Public Investment Fund. The PGA Tour was going to jump and basically take over the DP World Tour. They called that a merger.

They sort of do run it now, to be honest. It is a feeder tour for the PGA Tour. But Woods came out and said, I have no idea what you're talking about. I wasn't at any player meeting at the time of the Travelers Championship, which was last June.

I wasn't there. I have no idea what you're talking about. What do you make of that? Well, I'm actually pretty well versed in this. Remind me to take July 3rd and 5th off next year, Adam, because your boy found himself as the only writer with 12 competency over the last couple of days.

But here's what I've got. So antitrust lawsuit down in Palm Beach County in Florida, you know, 347 pages and a big filing. And within that are talking points prepared for a players meeting town hall style with Jay Monahan before the Travelers Championship in last season, 2022. The importance of this is this is between the first live event, which had Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, that first wave.

But before we'd had Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, everyone else, the second wave really declared that they were going to be leaving. This is when PGA Tour was at its most combative. This is when the PGA Tour was really trying to muscle up in terms of public relation arm. And I just think that they showed their hides here because they tried to put together talking points for Tiger Woods for a meeting that he did not even attend and he was not even at. And in those talking points, they were asking Tiger Woods to tell the Saudis to go blank themselves.

Yeah. What? They were asking Tiger Woods, according to these talking points, to prop up his son Charlie as a mascot for the future of golf. Charlie Woods may be the future of golf, but you know, that's another occasion.

And it was just like all of these, like all of these, like really fluffy, like just feed it into the machine. And as much as Tiger Woods can seem robotic, I just thought that that was a really poor look on the PGA Tour. And granted, like a lot of the talking that the PGA Tour did during those early months of the live experience really taking off has come back to bite them as now they are in bed together. And so, you know, these the documents that were released here, and this is how I know that they know that they showed their hide because now they have filed a court order this morning to get those documents sealed. So now they are trying to cover that up, cover that up. They went to court to put the toothpaste back in the tube? Yes.

I don't think that's going to work. Well, it probably means that there's other documents. That's right. Probably.

Yes. There's other there's even more embarrassing documents for the PGA Tour, especially ones that might even hamper their current finance, their current framework agreement. Oh, that's going to that's in trouble anyway. That's in trouble anyway because investment with PIF and the world.

There's so many so many problems. I said this at the at the initial release of their agreement with the PIF was that I don't know how Jay Monahan keeps his job. And my guess is we will have a new PGA Tour commissioner inside of eight months. Just a guess.

Maybe, maybe, maybe sooner. I do not know how Jay Monahan goes on as the commissioner of the PGA Tour. One more thing in there, just because all of this has driven. This is a Kyle Porter point, of course, like some of my best Kyle Porter. Some of my best golf takes come from my friend Kyle Porter.

But all of this madness because you're right. The deal might not go through and things might get fragmented and weird and we might be in for a murky couple of years in the golf world. But all of it is driven home how important the majors are like that.

It's the only thing that matters is the only thing. Every professional golf is very, very fun to watch on television. It is incredibly fun to lay on the couch, watch beautiful scenery and incredible golfers. But if you really want to get fired up for golf at the highest level, the only thing that matters are the major championships. They have survived through all of this madness.

They will continue to survive in the future. There's about seven events a year that really matter. The four majors, the Ryder Cup, the Players' Championship and maybe there's two others. Honestly, I'm not even going to mention them. Chip Patterson, as always, my friend. I'll talk to you next week. Sounds good. Y'all be well.