Tim Brando, Fox Sports, on his view of where college football/sports is going

But we're also huge college football fans, and there is a very different future coming to college football. One with a 12 team, soon to be 16, I believe at times, in time, 24 team college football playoff. And who knows what the whole structure is going to look like, but somebody who has been, I think, as loud, as boisterous as anyone who cares as much or more than anyone about college football.

My friend, Tim Brando, the voice of college football on Fox. How are you, sir? So my reputation still precedes me, I see.

Of course it does. Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. First of all, I'm really stunned that you're not on the first tee.

Was it an English trace? How are you not playing golf? Southern trace. It's a little warm. It's a little warm. And I got plenty of golf in. Last week I was honing my game for the Celeb Am Pro-Am there at Memphis at the FedEx St. Jude's, which by the way was another magnificent time for my wife and myself. We just, we love going there.

It's been about probably, well, since they became part of the playoff and the World Golf thing happened since the event was moved from June to August. I'd not been back there. And it was just great to be back. Hospitality, the cause, everything about it was wonderful. And I played pretty good. Good for you. We played Spring Creek Ranch at the Celeb Am, got over to TPC Southwind to watch a lot of it on Friday behind the hole at 18.

And then I saw some of my family in Mississippi on the way back and watched a good friend, somebody I think a lot of, pull off the unthinkable. That was incredible to watch Lucas Glover do what he did at age 43. So I'm happy for him. He is on one right now. If we had time to talk about anything other than college football, you and I could have a discussion about whether or not Lucas Glover is going to be on the Ryder Cup team. We can't even start that. We're not going to start that. We're not going to start it because you and I disagree. But he can make the team on his own.

He can make the team outright, continue playing well. So let me ask you about college football, Tim Brando, the voice of the sport on Fox. So let me just broad brush it. Your thoughts on everything that has happened over the last two years. We lost a major conference. The Pac-12 is not coming back.

It is not regenerating. That is a major hit to the landscape of the sport. Where are we as an industry? The mid Pac-12 ain't coming back.

What do you think? No, it's not coming back. It's not coming back in its truest form, but let's not, let's hang on just a second.

Let's pump the brakes a little bit. Remember, remember the Big East wasn't coming back either in basketball. Remember that? Right, but that was just the basketball name really.

No, no, no. I know. I understand that. But what I'm saying is we, we had it dead and buried at one point and I'd say it's come back and I would say that the American, I would say that the American conference was dead and buried in it. It has certainly flourished and it was part of the reason the Big East was having to reform.

Listen, these things happen. I realize we're talking about a league that's over a hundred and five years old and the Pac-12 has tremendous history and rivalries, the whole Rose Bowl. By the way, the Rose Bowl, I got questions about that. The Rose Bowl had already taken itself out of the Pac-12 loop contractually. So there's a lot of things fans that, you know, get through the cracks and they don't recognize. Listen, the Pac-12 may come back in some form or it may not. Those teams may have to connect with either the Mountain West or the American or a combination of the two. Who knows? Or we could see them find their way through with, with maybe bringing in a cobble of other teams and holding onto the name.

It depends on how much the name is worth. You hear that statement all the time, Adam. Politics is always local. The Pac-12 for a long time hasn't been what the Pac-12 historically had been looked upon as being. Stanford, when Christian McCaffrey left, hasn't been what Stanford had traditionally been, you know, in the days of Toby Gerhard and further back John Elway. I mean, I've been to the farm for a Notre Dame game.

There were more Notre Dame fans than there were Stanford fans. Schools like Cal and Stanford have not reinvested into college football. They're basically in Palo Alto and in Berkeley don't particularly care about college football.

And as a result, they are left behind. And the sad, I'm more concerned really with Washington State and Oregon State because those are two programs that have flourished that are in difficult spots geographically. And they actually are putting a lot back into their football program and have good teams coming into this season actually. Oregon State might win the Pac-12.

That's how good a job Jonathan Smith has done since coming over. But listen, football, I've been saying this for years, college football has been so far behind in the 21st century and in the business of running college football. And the NCAA kicking the can down to the curb with Mark Emmert as its president on NIL for 15 years certainly didn't help, particularly those that were weaker. And we know that the big kahunas, the SEC and the Big Ten were going to survive, but everybody was on the clock this year. The Big 12, I would submit, took bigger hits than the Pac-12 ever thought about. They lost two of the biggest brands in the history of the sport.

And what did they do? They went out and got four legitimate teams, one of them has an international following in BYU, three out of the American that have flourished, one that even made the college football playoff a couple of years ago in Cincinnati, UCF, a team that was so good a few years ago when I defeated and won a New Year's six game, they claimed the national title and printed T-shirts to say such. But he went out and got these teams, all right, to supplant the losses of the two blue bloods.

And guess what? The leftover membership of the Big 12 is making more money annually with Oklahoma and Texas out of the league than they were when they were both in the league. So credit to Brent Yormark for being a really good businessman, a hell of a promoter, and a guy that was able to get his presidents and A.D.s to all buy in and make all this happen while the Pac-12 just kind of hung out there saying, well, our presidents and our boards of regions are all meeting to discuss the potential. Well, you know what?

While you're doing all that, Yormark is already out to sea, OK? He's out there with a contract, by the way, that didn't need to be done until the following year. OK, the Pac-12 deal was up before the Big 12. And yet the Big 12 said, that's no big deal. We'll jumpstart this.

We'll go and make our deal right now. Because Brent Yormark knew that post-Covid, everyone had taken a financial bath, including my industry, our industry, television. There was only so much money to go around. And after the Big 10 and the SEC got the Branson armored trucks, you know, to the front door and got their cash, the Big 12 had to scramble to get whatever they could get. And they got it. They absolutely got it. Linear deals with both ESPN and Fox. And that saturated that particular financial till for two of the largest and most aggressive companies in sports, Disney and Fox News Corp. So there you go. Now what's left for the Pac-12?

Well, Klyavkov and his presence were all, they're all speaking, they're all speaking whatever their own language is. Well, I expect the deal to be done. Well, we think that the longer we wait, the better our TV deal is going to be. Do you really think, do you really think that a guy that's 55, 60, 65 years old, that's the president of a university in the Pac-12, can go to his board with a incentive-based digital-centric deal and say, well, we might make $25,000, but we're only guaranteed $20,000 and the distribution is going to be on, you know, an iPad or a phone.

Come on. This is, I mean, digital is there for the future, yes. But it's not making the kind of money now that people thought it would.

Just ask our friends at the Worldwide Leader. It's not making the kind of money now what it will in the future. But in the here and now, people are accustomed to watching and the buying public is accustomed to watching their big games and their part of the world on Fox, ESPN, CBS, NBC and ABC.

Simple as that. And so for Kliavkov to think that that was going to work, I mean, fool's gold, I say so. But I mean, the problem for them, Adam, excuse me, but the problem for the Pac-12 started a long time ago when you had an ego maniacal president that when he didn't get his way and couldn't get Texas an OU because ESPN stopped in and said, you know what, we got a $300 million mistake here that we're going to put in play called the Longhorn Net. And it's going to keep you from getting your 16 teams.

That's going all the way back to 2009. He decided, well, I'm smarter than you. And I'm smarter than DirecTV. And I'm smarter than the people at ESPN and Fox. I'll start my own network. I'll own it.

I'll set up shop in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, where it's really costly to operate. And I will drive this entire league right into a financial ditch. And that's exactly what he did. And Klyavkov just didn't have a lot to work with. And then he got beaten to the punch by a far more aggressive capitalist, Brett Yomar. That's what happened. No question about that. And losing Southern Cal and UCLA completely damaged their bargaining power to get a better deal. I have to think that if UCLA and USC had stuck around, then they probably would have gotten a deal on par with what the Big 12 got.

But obviously they did not do that. I want to ask you about Brett Yomar. And we've got about five minutes left and I want to get one more. And we haven't even talked about the playoff yet, so I might even skip one of the other questions I wanted to ask you. Because Yomar said on the Marshaan and Oran podcast yesterday, which I'm sure you listen to. I love a lot.

I have a good relationship with John. And Yomar said that we had to do that, meaning we had to add, it wasn't just Colorado, but Arizona, Arizona State and Utah. And I would argue that you didn't have to.

Have to and want to are two different things. Because it didn't make Kansas State more money. The money stayed the same. Basically ESPN just paid for those other teams. It didn't really add to the other schools' coffers. Did it create a more stable environment?

I'm sure. But I don't think they had to. And I think that we're watching the conferences being treated like banks.

And the banks gobble up smaller banks to become bigger banks. And that's basically what's happened. Okay. Well, listen. Let me just point out a couple of quick things.

Alright. Yeah, USC and UCLA were off the table. But Kliadko should have known that the most watched teams left Oregon and Washington are wavering. You better go and secure that.

You better go and make sure that you secure them. When the Big 12 lost OU in Texas, they didn't screw around. Yomar went to work. And he's still working. He's trying to create new revenue streams by playing games in foreign sources. I'm all for that. Why not? Because if you're not making what the Big 10 and the SEC are making, you need to stay relevant. How are you going to do that?

You create some new revenue streams. Look, our friends in the media that are talking about network television being the culprit, that are saying that a group of really smart TV people, either at the place I work for or Burt Magnus and the people up in Bristol that have been the worldwide leader as they claim for some time, that we are plotting to control college football. That is a joke.

That is a complete crock. All right. There's so much that we don't control. But yes, we've got tremendous influence. There's no doubt about that.

But when you're in the business of survival, and these schools, these institutions have one thing in common, Adam, and it goes all the way back to my days when we started game day in 87. And Beno Cook and I were talking about the explosion of college football, what needed to happen while we needed a real champion. He, of course, was against it. I was very much for it.

He was like, well, that'll happen, Brando. That'll happen because of the albighty dollar. Well, the schools have one thing in common, an insatiable appetite for money. The greed, the money, the greed and the money is about academia and the institutions of higher learning that are not in the business of educating first. They're in the business of making money.

That's been the case forever. Television is only doing its part to subsidize their needs and at the same time run outfits that are in the business of also doing what? Making some money while televising national sports. College football is going to be fine. And when we get the by the way, the networks are running out of money because they're saving for what?

The expansion, the conversation for expansion. And we're going to have more than one TV network. ESPN will not have total control. I don't think they'll have total control.

OK, I agree. So we're going to have more games, more inventory and more revenue to come. Where is it going to come from? The expansion and those schools that are left out the so-called group of five and whatever is going to happen with the four left in the Pac 12. Once they get into a league and get themselves set up, they're going to have a way of getting in because as I don't think 24 is going to be the end. I think 16 is going to be the end. But we will go to that once they see how successful we are with 12. Remember next year when we go to 12, it's the last year of the ESPN deal. The negotiations are going on now for the new television contract, which will start in 2026. And that's when I believe we'll have really more college football to consume.

The sport will be in better shape. And yeah, those kids deserve the money and they're going to get it. And the only way they're going to get it is if television is out there helping to supplant them. These guys that are, and many of them I respect, that are writing that television is responsible for all of the greed in college sports. That's baloney. It's the people that are in these educational priorities are not the key at many of these institutions of higher learning. And for anybody naive enough to believe that that was ever the case, I'm sorry.

A little realism is something you need and you need it quickly. Jay Billis has told me last week, said you guys could say no. You guys could tell the networks no, we're not doing that. We're not playing at 9 30. But we pay more money when you play at 9 30.

You will play all the games at seven if you don't want as much money. By the way, great Beano Cook impersonation. It took me back to the time that I had Beano on my show. And this goes a long time ago. And yeah. And Beano called me a Homer.

It didn't make a difference whether he was right or wrong, but he called me a Homer, which was hysterical radio. Final thing, I will ask you one more question if you can promise to do this in 60 seconds. You think you can do this?

All right. Is college football going to separate from the other sports within 10 years? No. Well, let's see. When is the basketball contract is up in 32, right?

So, yeah, it may after 32. The NCAA tournament is worth too much right now for anybody to leave. But if if the NCAA doesn't get its act together, if Charlie Baker, who, by the way, I think could do a really nice job, Republican governor from a blue state, he had to navigate his way through up there to get it done.

He's got a willing ear. I'm not going to begin the damage. I'm not optimistic. Mark Emmert drove that that that association into the ditch much as as Larry Scott.

Scott did the back twelve. But yes, it could change. But only after the new television contract has to be negotiated for the NCAAs.

Not until then. You're a gentleman, Tim Brando. I appreciate your time, sir. I'll talk to you very soon. I appreciate it.

We'll talk again. Always a pleasure. I give my best to everyone along Tobacco Road. You got it. Tim Brando here on the Adam Gold show. Absolutely.

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