What proposal was presented that may be the beginning of the end for this college division?

Chip Patterson joins us. Cover three podcast moderator, cbssports.com. How are you my friend? Busy.

Yes. Busy. It is a not insignificant week in the world of college football and college athletics. My, this thing has accelerated since we were, you know, enjoying our good friend Michael Felder, his hospitality. And that was when, you know, Colorado to the Big 12 starts. And, and my, how things have accelerated even since I guess that was less than a week ago. That's a lot going on.

I need to make sure that I haven't missed anything since the start of this show today. So other than Peter Collins, the board of trustees chair at Florida State, basically Finley lobbying, Finley veiled threat grenades at the Atlantic coast conference. Other than that, has anything happened other than Colorado leaving the pack 12 and going on a free transfer much like Killian Mbappe will go to Real Madrid next year on a free transfer to the, to the Big 12 for next football season.

Does anything else happen? Not since this morning, not since the beginning of the show, but Hey, look, are the most likely the place where we will have real hard news would be out of Arizona and potentially also including Arizona state and Utah. And the way that you mentioned it, the reason why Colorado can move quickly is because they do not have any contracts that tie them to the pack 12 beyond this football season. So they can just walk, you know, I mean, this is the, this is free agency, right? Like this is what every professional organization has to figure out in terms of how long are you under contract? Do we have to move the contract?

We have to pay off the contract. I believe, and I don't know how much you've discussed this so far, but I believe that the deal that the PAC 12 commissioner presented to its university presidents and athletic directors was the beginning of the end of the PAC 12 as we know it. And that two things are really, really damning about the proposal as it's been reported.

Number one, exposure. It is you're creating a hurdle, uh, to be able to find these games. And I know that there was a, an inclusion of maybe ESPN and Fox get a few marquee games along the way, but as sports fans, we are programmed to go to a few different places to be able to find our favorite sporting events.

And when you create that extra hurdle, it's going to be difficult. They boasted the 700,000 subscriptions that Apple has sold for its MLS package. And I'm just asking where Lionel Messi is in the PAC 12. How are you going to expect that you're going to get the same kind of coverage and the same kind of subscription boost as Lionel Messi, like the GOAT.

Maybe, maybe Messi comes into the, maybe that's the, the 10th team in the PAC 12 is either Lionel Messi or Inter Miami and Messi gets a full share, full share, full share of league revenues. Number one exposure because university presidents are in the mindset of increasing the bottom line and advertising their university. So they can drive up enrollment and be able to have more people interested in coming to your school. Bottom line, number two, how are you going to set a budget when the number that you know, you're going to get is so far behind your competitors and they're dangling out this little carrot. Do you want to work for commission or do you want to work for a salary?

Do you want guaranteed money or do you want something that's loaded with incentives? And I think that the idea again, that if you sell all these subscriptions, well then we'll be right there with the big 12. I think that's just going to really start to, you know, resonate with a lot of these universities.

I don't know what the timetable is. I imagine in the next two weeks or so, Arizona at a minimum, we'll be making a move and then all eyes will turn to Oregon, to Washington, to whether the PAC-12 decides to backfill with San Diego State SMU and then some maybe from the Mountain West, whether there's some kind of merger. That's why this has taken on a national picture because the PAC-12 was not able to deliver what its presidents and athletic directors had thought for eight months it was going to get, which is a competitive deal.

Yeah, it's obvious that it isn't. There were some rumors that I on TV, I'd never heard of that, was going to be part of it. And then once, you know, the CW might get involved, the CW is interested in sports suddenly, maybe the CW was going to get a PAC-12 game of the week, but the ACC is, we're talking with Chip Patterson here from Cover Three Podcast and CBSSports.com, the ACC has been sort of on the fringe of this conversation. There have been rumors about like a TV alliance with the PAC-12, maybe putting PAC-12 games on the ACC network to kind of get live programming on in the evening, you know, the late night hours. Could something like that help the PAC-12 and more importantly, could it help the ACC?

Right. So Ross Dellinger now with Yahoo! Sports put up a piece last night, sort of setting the table after everything that has happened for what is going to come next. He said, he did not get much positive feedback from ACC administrators about A, targeting any other PAC-12 teams for expansion to establish a West Coast corridor and really not even a lot of traction on that sort of television media merger. The idea being that as they've run their analysis, at least the way that I picked up on the reporting, there would not be a huge boost. So to answer one part of your question, would it save the PAC-12? Probably. Probably gives them more exposure than they do being on Apple Plus. But does it help the ACC? That answer might be no. Those hours in that programming inventory might be better spent being able to further promote the league.

I do not know how to run those numbers and those charts specifically, but I was surprised because those all seemed like common sense solutions to me. But when the administrators were given a lot of negative feedback there, but again, we could have a new scenario where if everything is splintering and if everything's going crazy, then maybe you have to adjust on the fly. And certainly that does seem to be the case right now with conference realignment. The way I look at it, I'm going to kind of pose something big picture about the ACC in a second. If the ACC were to add Oregon and Washington and Cal and Stanford and Sandy, I mean, just annex the rest of the PAC-12, right? If they were going to do something like that, I mean, I'll still cover the league and I'll cover North Carolina and Duke and NC State and Wake Forest and the schools in this conference, but I had no time for that kind of crap because that isn't what this is supposed to be about. And I keep hearing that administrators say we don't want to turn into the NFL, yet they keep turning it into the NFL.

So which way is it? And I'm going to talk to Bubba Cunningham about this tomorrow because again, all I hear, we don't want to be the NFL. I'm like, well, then stop being like it because that's all they're doing. This is what the NFL does. They reach for every dollar available regardless of what it does. That's all they care about is money. And that's funny.

You're running a business, but that isn't supposed to be what this is about. I'll tell you who shares your viewpoint is the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. We talked about it. He does.

He is in the same position that you are. I don't think his colleagues at the Power Conference commissioner level, many of whom have changed over, do not know if the New York businessman shark that is Brett Yormark or if the like brought up through Major League Baseball, Tony Petitti believes in that, or if Notre Dame's new athletic director who came straight from NBC Sports necessarily believes in that. We've got businessmen, not academics, not even a long time college athletics background, except for maybe being at the negotiating table for some of these deals.

It's a different enterprise. Dennis Dodd actually has a story on cbssports.com that went up right now about a meeting that took place in December of 2022 where the idea was pitched to billionaires of, all right, what if we want to invest in college sports at the ground level? What if we want to create our own conference? Let's see what it would take to be able to get everybody out of their conference deals and just create a new one. The response was, we really like that idea.

I just can't get my arms around it right now. But that's being discussed. The idea of investing, and this might lead to our next conversation, the idea of reaching out to private investments to finance college athletics in a way that is revolutionary. We've been living in this world of being in the financial system of the university with the booster clubs and now the different ways of charitable giving, air quotes, charitable giving, are able to finance this thing. And there are high-level discussions about ways to invest privately in college athletics in a way that would totally remove it from the university financial system.

I want to ask you about actual football in a second, but I brought this up sort of as a joke, but not really at ACC Football Kickoff and I brought it up in a casual conversation with Jim Phillips and then in an interview. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, right? We have Liv Goff on the CW. I've joked.

Liv, ACC Football. I mean, why not? So maybe it's not the Public Investment Fund, right? Maybe it's some other private equity fund. Maybe it was Clear Lake. Maybe it was Clear Lake. Is Todd Boley?

Doesn't he own part of Clear Lake or own Clear Lake, the owner of Chelsea? I mean, that guy's got billions upon billions of dollars. What if they decided to underwrite the Atlantic Coast Conference? Here's $100 million per school per year. Boom.

Done. Yeah. The first place I think you will see it will be not in the current structure of power conferences. I think we could see something along the lines of like the tens of millions of dollars being privately invested with a program, maybe even at the FCS level, that is going to be used for NIL to be like, all right, we're just going to take this program all the way to the top.

Maybe an experiment. Yeah, exactly. I would not be surprised in the next five years, if we see something like that, where somebody just comes in and says, I want blank school to be good, and we've got the money for it. And there's not enough of an infrastructure here to stop me, right? So I can just come in and buy it up. Because the very, very top like, you're not going to go to Georgia, and be able to disrupt. Now, even if you've got like the biggest checkbook, there's other things at play that are going on there that are going to be standing in your way, right?

I mean, I don't pay this money for this exclusive golf round with the head coach of Georgia football to be able to like all of a sudden get told no, right? I invest this money so that people say yes, sir. I think it'll be at a place that is not traditionally excellent, that does not have the infrastructure in place. A big, big fund ends up going in there and decides we're going to make it good.

And that's probably where I think you'll see it first. As a conference, you just described the ACC chip, Patterson. All right, I'm just going to tease what I'm going to talk about after I say goodbye. There are two things, in my opinion, two things that will change the calculus of ACC football financially, and only two things.

But I will talk about that after I say goodbye, because we only have a couple of minutes left here. And I want to ask you about the ACC's preseason poll. And I know it's not a surprise that Drake May was voted the preseason player of the year. But I do think it's a surprise that Riley Leonard got a vote for that. And I mean, seriously, I love Riley Leonard, but a vote for preseason player of the year. And the fact that Duke had three players on the first team preseason is somewhat surprising.

But your thoughts on that and the poll? I did not think that there was going to be, I thought there was going to be more of a Florida State push based on the buzz. It seems like the closer you are to the ACC, the more that you have at one and two, and not one A, one B, right? We go national, like we look at Lindy's, we look at Athlon, we look at Phil steel, we look at all the other things they've even got Florida State ahead. You know, Florida State in the eight, nine range Clemson around 11, not the case. Phil still has got Clemson number two, actually in one poll, but a few weeks ago.

Right. But the, the general consensus nationally has been that this is a Florida State a year and the poll reflects otherwise. So that was, that was one thing that I thought was significant. All the North schools in the state of North Carolina after a great season last year as a whole, while individually they all have some gripes along the way, some games that they thought, you know, went the other way, including within battles between those two pro those programs, and all being sort of near the top half.

That's something that's encouraging, especially for everybody in this audience. And then Drake May was the only sensible selection for preseason player of the year. The numbers that he put together, the stat profile that Drake May had during the 2022 season was along the likes of a Robert Griffin, the third, a Johnny Manziel, Deshaun Watson, Kyler Murray, like those are national champions and Heisman trophy winners. And the only reason why he didn't get individual accolades or more individual accolades was because North Carolina finished the year on a three before the final voting and then a four game losing streak, which included the offense kind of turtling up in huge, huge spots against Georgia Tech and NC state. Statistically, he deserved to be a Heisman finalists, but narratives obviously influenced individual accolades.

And I love that Drake May said that as well. He said, look, we win football games, the accolades will follow. And that is a cliche, but it is a hundred percent spot on because he deserved more national recognition than he got based on last year's performance. And some of that was just because of not being able to win football games when the spotlight was the brightest.

Yeah, he was definitely one of my, I think I voted him second in the Heisman voting. Yeah, we've known this for a long time. North Carolina, when the bright lights come on, they have not fared well as a team, regardless of whether it's the quarterback's fault or the coach's fault. Uh, they just, whether they don't have, how did I, I heard somebody say that they might not be mentally tough enough as a team. And look, I, I think that's a, that can be a harsh statement, but yeah, I don't, I don't know what you point to, to say that that team isn't good enough in the moment, but they have not met the moment at all. Yeah.

Yeah. So I've, I've changed cause that is like, there is evidence there, but on the human level, I've changed my tone to like, they don't finish well, cause that feels more tied directly to the result because to assume that you are, which you could argue is mental toughness, but for 18 to 22 year olds are putting their bodies on the line and going through the off season workouts and like getting crushed every single Saturday. Like I, the idea, there is a level of mental toughness that I do not have. Just to show up on game day, Joe up and play football at that level.

So I, the reason why I had that reaction is as a, the way that I talk about this sport and the human beings that are playing it, I'm trying to come up with different ways to phrase it because just to play has some level of mental toughness, but you were right. North Carolina has to finish strong and dad gum it. If they don't have the finishing power, then you're going to have two losses at the end of the season at Clemson and at NC state.

So they've got to reverse that trend for sure. Does Justin Thomas get inside the top 70, which means probably what a top 15 finish at Wyndham? No. Do you think so?

No, I don't. I don't think so, but he's still on the Ryder cup team. Chip Patterson.

I've got good juice. We look it's it's when if tiger wants to be involved in the PGA tour. No, no, no, no. I was talking about the Florida state board meeting. Oh, say that again. Oh no, I'm out of time.

Give me something about Peter Collins. Okay. So he, he's sending up a flare. He is trying to get, he's trying to get dance partners. They don't, I, I came into this being like, oh no, are we going to have a Florida state to the big 10 like emergency podcast this week? And I think that that answer is no, but I do think that what's said at this board meeting is going to be very specific, almost scripted, and it's going to be very specific. And it is trying to, it is trying to get dance partners to come and join them. Yeah. To, to the, to the point where they dissolved the entire league. So they don't have to come up with paying all that money.

So, but there's a lot of money going to change hands. I'll talk to you again very soon, Chip. All right. Sounds good. Y'all be well. You got it. Chip Patterson. We talked about a thousand other things. We didn't get to the Florida state stuff because I've been talking about it all day.