The newest addition to 99.9 The Fan

Tim Donnelly. Welcome to The Triangle. Welcome to Raleigh.

Welcome to our Raleigh affiliate 99.9 The Fan. How you been? I'm doing well. Right now I wish my name was some kind of pun about a Harry Potter book, but unfortunately I'm not a Weasley. Well, you're not a Weasley. That's very good.

I don't know. You're not a long bottom. See, you're already too deep in.

I need to go back and watch. I'm more Harry Potter than Star Wars. Although I appreciate Star Wars, I've also reminded a lot of people, it's the same story. I've heard this.

I've seen the comparisons online. In that case, I'm not a Skywalker? I have no idea.

Vader, Voldemort, Darkseid, it's the whole thing. First of all, give me your radio passport. Where have you been? I've been basically two places. I've been Baltimore, here, and that's it. I have sold radio in Baltimore.

Sold radio? Sold as a salesperson trying to sell ads at WBAL. I worked. That's where I worked.

Exactly. And at 98 Rock, the little conglomerate there. That was fresh out of college. Then I was like, no, I want to do the on-air thing. Went back to a station in Delaware where I was football guy, sideline reporter, that kind of stuff. I played at the University of Delaware. You were a fighting blue hen. Fighting blue hen. Little bar piece of trivia here. Only female mascot in college sports because a hen is a female chicken.

Oh, look at that. One time to the women's basketball coach, I called him the lady hens, and she looked at me and said, that's redundant, you. Because she knew I played football. She said, you should be the men hens. Yes, I agree. And I went, that's actually a good point.

I actually have a problem with calling. We know, we can see. We can see they're women. Why do we need to call them ladies? They're not the lady, they're the Tar Heels. I don't need to call them lady. I understand that. In that case, we don't want to call us the men hens either.

Correct. So I avoided that one. But then I went to Nebraska, the world's smallest town. I called my Gladwellian 10,000 hours. That's actually the first time you and I spoke. You were in Nebraska at the time. And I was reaching out for, hey, how do I end up in the triangle? And eventually, 10 years later, I'm here. I had nothing to do with it.

You gave me all the best advice, and I've been following that for the last 10 years, like gospel. And that town, the way I tell it is, my high school had more people in it than the town I was living in. Wow.

That's culture shock. Which allowed me to make a lot of mistakes and get through it. Eventually, I went to an ESPN affiliate in Ithaca, New York, upstate New York, covered Syracuse. It was a Yankees affiliate. Then I made my way into the kind of region of the country that I hoped to stay in for a long time.

It was Blacksburg, Virginia, flagship of Virginia Tech, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Newport News area. And then two days ago, I drove here, and we're putting down roots. Here's family. What do you got? I have a wife and a two-year-old son. The family connections to here, I started writing them all out.

They get kind of crazy. My grandfather lived in Wake Forest. He worked for Carolina Steel and literally poured the concrete foundation for the Dean Dome.

Really? Very nice. So I like to tell people, my family's responsible for the foundation of modern UNC basketball. They don't know I'm literally talking about the foundation. My parents lived in Raleigh when they met. While they were dating, every year on their dating anniversary, my mom got my dad Duke basketball season tickets. Backs against the back wall, they could open the window in Cameron Indoor.

Nice. But it was mid-'80s, so it was Dawkins, it was Allery, it was Ellis. And then for the NC State, I like to tell all three in a group, so I have connections to all three. My cousin is who I believe is one of the best football players in NC State history, Mike Glennon. So I used to ride his coattails to a party or two back in the day.

Come to Raleigh and dueling pianos downtown and everything. Did he do dueling pianos? He was there. He was at that point the starting quarterback, so he had smartphones were a thing, so he would kind of sit there. But his teammates would get up on stage. Mike is a good dude. Yeah, yeah. I remember his, sorry Cam if you're listening, his center Cam Wentz on his birthday got up there. There may have been an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini ad lib.

Like there was a changing of the lyrics that was sung about Cam when he was up on stage. So there's the family connections to this area pretty deep. And my cousin's husband played baseball at UNC. Look at that.

Like I said, I want to make sure I get all three involved. Alright, I would not be able to work at a Yankees affiliate. I would be physically ill. I grew up basically going to games at Shea Stadium because I'm originally from New York. I don't know how I would last being at a Yankees affiliate. Well, I'm a Mets fan also. I grew up, part of my child was in Jersey.

So my dad wanted us to be the local fan, like wanted to be fans of all the local teams. So he took us to, we were in south Jersey, took us to a Phillies game. And in the first inning, Jimmy Rollins and Pat Burrell out there in left field called each other off on a routine pop fly.

It landed right in the middle of it. And I went, I was like eight at the time. I was like, oh, we don't do that in Little League. I can't root for this team.

Wow. And they were playing against the Mets. Mike Piazza had a home run off the foul ball pole and I was like sold. So then I ended up at a Yankees affiliate. And I just imagined I was talking to all my buddies that were Yankees fans and, you know, kind of played the, I'm going to rile you up and then hopefully you'll respect me. And we went from there with the Yankees fans.

I don't know if it worked or not. You live and you learn. But there's a lot of upset Yankee fans in upstate New York. See, here, I don't talk a lot about the Mets. And this is a good year to knock.

It's been a bad, it's been a really disappointing season. I'm going to ingratiate myself in this market so much so that I never have to talk about the Mets. And I'm only going to talk about local teams.

And that's going to be a survival thing. There are a fair amount of Braves fans. And I don't hate the Braves. Actually, I enjoy watching the Braves. The Braves are very good and they do it right. I appreciate that they kind of cultivate their young talent. They have so many guys that, like, when you're growing up a fan of their rival, you're like, well, it really would be nice to have a guy like that on the squad. You say that about seven guys on that team.

I'd take most of your starting lineup and we'd be all right. I don't like Braves fans, but I do like the Braves. Just in the interest of not insulting anybody like my first day. That was Adam Gold that said that. Well, they know that. I say that all the time. I have no problem with the Braves. I actually like the Braves. We'll eventually become friends to the point where I'll say that on air.

I'm not going to do it the first day. That is Tim Donnelly. He'll be on three to six right here on 99.9, the fan in Raleigh. So, college sports is a big deal. And having worked in Virginia Beach and at Virginia Tech or in Blacksburg, do you have a thought about what you see as where we are headed in college football specifically, but there's going to be a trickle down? Well, actually, I mean, the ACC to me is the most fascinating of the bunch because they're locked into their media contract till 2036.

So, everything else is changing around them and they're kind of either stuck choosing to be or just stuck by the way of contracts and legalese. But like the magnificent seven that we saw. What a silly name. Silly name. I don't even know what else.

The seven dwarfs. Kinda. I look at it like this.

Basically, you follow the bouncing dollar wherever it goes. And right now, it's all coming from streaming. It's all coming from television. So, the number one thing you can do for your program, for your conference, is be entertaining, be exciting, have personalities, put players in the NFL. And then the more people want to watch you, the more secure you're going to be. If you're a program and you're in the bottom half of a conference and you're not interesting, nobody wants to watch you, you don't have the quarterbacks, you don't have the head coach, well, you're going to be asking favors of the teams that do.

And I don't like depending on anyone else. Yeah, the... The league is in a place... You mentioned contract is up until... extends all the way through 2036. The Big Ten will negotiate again before the ACC does. Pac-12 might negotiate four times. Well, Pac-12 might not.

They might not have a deal, but once... I don't even know what the future of the Pac-12 is. I mean, I am not a doomsday guy. I think college sports will look drastically different, certainly ten years from now, than it does today. I think they'll look drastically different when you look at standings, when you look at polls, but I think Saturdays are going to remain largely the same. If you're at a game in the second quarter when it's third and seven or whatever, I don't think you're going to notice a difference.

However, just about everything else could be different. I think the way we're headed... Are you a playoff guy? I am. Okay.

I'm not. Eight is perfect. I think we're headed to 16. Which is too much. Yeah, I mean, I could argue that eight is too much. What Dabo Swinney said last year I think is true. I'm not sure it matters, but I think it's true. In that there aren't eight teams worthy of playing for a national champion who can legitimately say, we could win a national championship now.

There are, at best, three or four. Yeah, but there's not 64 teams or 68 teams that are in the running to be the best team in college basketball. I don't disagree with that. But what basketball has that football doesn't is really on any given day. Like, because the ball sometimes doesn't go in the hoop, and the three-point shot is the great equalizer, you could get... Just getting to a Final Four is a championship, right?

Yes. So you get a Loyola of Chicago. You get a Butler two years in a row.

You can get that. There is the upset factor in basketball that isn't going to ever exist on a consistent basis in football. So nobody is coming out of the 12 hole in a college football playoff and getting to the national championship game. But having covered, I mean, we'll just look at the ACC. I've covered Syracuse. I've covered Tech.

I've covered, now I'll be covering obviously everything here in the Triangle. I think there's quite a few teams in the Power Five that would consider making a playoff a huge accomplishment. 100%. So to me there are two different stories. What Davos said, there aren't 12 teams that can win a national championship, is correct. But for a lot of those teams, it's not about winning a national championship.

It's about making a playoff. Exactly. So, and I understand that, but we're asking so much from players.

Like, I do believe. That's a good point. The more games and how are you putting players' safety, there's obviously some hypocritical nature to asking them to play more games. I'm with that. We're still going to have opt-outs, I think. From the playoff? Yes. I think we're still going to have opt-outs.

But I'll add this. I played at the FCS level, where we have a true playoff. I was 24 when I played.

I think it's up to 32. We made it to a national championship my sophomore year. Don't ask me how it went. Maybe when we become closer friends, I'll tell you how we were up 19-0 at halftime and lost. But we played 15 games that year. And there are times when I hear, oh, if they have an eight-game or 18 playoff, they're going to have to play 15 games.

And I'm going like, yeah, I did it. App did it three years in a row. One of the years they beat Delaware when they were there. So, again, thanks for bringing that up. I'm kidding.

I wasn't there. That was Flacco. But 15 games, if you want to opt-out, if you don't want to play 15 games, do you really want to play football? For the vast majority of college athletes, I was told when I got on campus as a freshman, you're guaranteed 44 games. At the time, it was 11 games. Now they're up to 12. You're guaranteed 44 games. And I never once thought, I hope that doesn't go to 45.

It's everyone else. And if you're going to be a first-round pick, yeah, that's a completely different scenario. But there's only 32 of those out there. And most of them, or a majority, whatever, 50 percent, aren't going to be on the teams that are playing 15 games.

It's the guys that would kill to have one more game, which I'm like, looking back, give me two more games, I'd give a pinky. See, we can talk about this all day long. Oh, I look forward to it. Tim Donald. We have six hours a day starting on Monday between the two of us.

That is true. All right, well, I'll let you go. Well, you're not preparing for a show today. You start Monday? Start Monday. All right, so who's your first guest Monday? You don't have to tell me, because you might not even know yet.

I don't even know I asked. I'm looking to get quite a few college coaches on, and the order of which is still to be determined. You're starting at the right time?

The dog days, man. No, starting at the right time, because we get to, I mean, it's a long, long lead-up to football season, but we'll ride that whole ramp. We're not that far away from training camp.

ACC media days later this month. Oh, I can't wait to ask Jim Phillips. I've already got my hand up. I already have my hand up. Sir, I am just curious.

When you were the athletic director at Northwestern, what did you know about running? Do you want to role play this one? We're here to talk about ACC football and the future of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Please, will someone talk to me about media rights? Please. He will answer the question in a very, Jim Phillips is a great guy to talk, he's a wonderful guy, but I don't know that he's going to have a satisfactory answer for this. I don't know if there is one. Yeah, there isn't. It's an ugly situation. And Pat Fitzgerald is the best, maybe the best player, football player in Northwestern history, and certainly the best coach in Northwestern history, is no longer the coach at Northwestern. Alright, bad stuff to talk about. Tim Donnelly starts Monday on 99.9 The Fan.