How college football is impacting other college athletics?

Coming up, we might mention the House of Representatives, albeit will have nothing to do with former LSU coach Ed Orgeron. I bring that up only because I saw it at the top of Matt Brown's timeline. Publisher, Extra Points, the newsletter. If you are interested in college sports, but the stuff that we don't see on the field, then you need to subscribe to this newsletter. Matt Brown joins us on the Adam Gold Show at Matt Brown EP on Twitter until Twitter goes away.

Thank you very much for the time. I think we're all going to be on Thread soon. We need Threads as a desktop option.

Otherwise, we're all going to be out of luck. I talked to Mike Oresko, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference yesterday, actually ended up being a pretty lengthy discussion just about global issues in college sports. And, you know, he brought up student athlete welfare and all of that.

And I found it fascinating. You basically turned it over to an athlete from Washington State, a track star. Track star is probably the wrong way to put it.

She's a hammer thrower from Washington State. And now she's I guess she's already transferred to Villanova because we when we talk about student athlete welfare and conference realignment, we always seem to forget that the other athletes, non football, even non basketball, but that the non football athletes have a very different college experience than the football players. And we forget about that. I don't know if you saw Brett McMurphy did a thing like a a mileage study about how there would only be X amount of miles. But he forgot to point out that none of these athletes travel nonstop on charters. And so it makes everything so different. So what was your takeaway from what you got, what you had published today?

Yeah, no, I remember that tweet that you from McMurphy a little while ago. And you're right. And even if you are on a chartered flight, what I think it's important for fans to realize and anybody that travels extensively for business knows this, too, is that not all travel is created equally.

If you're traveling from the West Coast and you're flying out to the East Coast, I remember we all made the jokes about body clocks from Stanford, you know, lost Northwestern a couple of years ago. But, you know, when I talk to athletes, that's a real thing. You know, Alex Payne, the young woman who wrote the story here for me, a really good hammer thrower. And if you're going to be a hammer thrower at the Division one level, you got to be a big, strong, tough person. And she said, I never felt more physically drained and tired than after I had a long flight, not after I competed, not after I practiced seven days a week.

It was after I had a tower flight. And that was the most different travel was still in the Pacific or mountain time zones. So as we shift to these nationalized conferences, whether that's the ACC or the Big 10 or the Big 12, I know that commissioners and athletic directors, I think intellectually do care about this. And they're quick to point out that we know we're going to try to change scheduling models to be as accommodating as possible. But the experience of the football team and the experience of literally everybody else, including basketball, is going to be very different. And that is not just that doesn't just impact their mental health. It doesn't just impact their academic performance.

I mean, this Alex is telling me how she missed the pop quiz from having to travel, even though the professor knew about this ahead of time. And I've heard this from lots of other athletes. It will also impact their literal athletic performance. And I don't think this is something that should be minimized, even if it is unavoidable.

Matt Brown, publisher of Extra Points, is joining us here on The Adam Gold Show. What's interesting is that I'm not trying to disparage any football player academically here, but we all we all know the drill right there. They are primarily here to play football. And what happened at the University of North Carolina is a glaring reminder that that's the priority. But when we are talking about the Olympic sports, it's the academic side that is a priority. And it's almost exclusively from the athlete's perspective, too. Right. Because they understand that that's why they're here. They're going to use track or field hockey or tennis or whatever to to get an education. And because so it does impact them academically. And all of this travel. With SOTIC-2 for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, you could show off your skin again.

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Call 1-888-SOTYKTU to learn more. You know, that's not generally how track schedules work. Those are typically invitational based. Um, and you know, I, you know, administrators at Oregon and Washington, I saw the talking points from the ACC office are pointing that out too. Like, you know, that's, that's up to those, those programs to make those decisions. I would imagine that, that Cal and Stanford are going to schedule events, at least one or two, um, to help their athletes acclimate to competing in the East.

Um, but we'll, we'll, we'll have many events, you know, at Arizona or Oregon and everywhere else. The reason we don't do this for every sport, um, is really ego and television plays a part of it because if, you know, if the ACC was to theoretically let people play soccer or softball or baseball or anything else, wherever, even if the NCAA allowed that to happen, you know, then you're losing control over some television inventory for the ACC network. And it's not like this stuff is worth a lot of money for the, the, you know, the, the thing, everything that's going to get sent over to ACC and plus or, you know, kind of deep cut broadcast, uh, you know, tonnage, but I've had television people and leaders at other conferences, you know, mentioned that's part of the reason we don't do this.

The other is about ego and it's, and it's about control and it's about prestige. And the concern is if you, if you, if you make a couple of exceptions and let somebody play in a more geographically centered league, for one thing, you give a mouse a cookie, it's going to be something else, even though you and me and, and, you know, probably Jim Phillips and probably a lot of other people look at this and recognize, yeah, it would be better for, for the athlete experience and for the fans. If most of these games weren't played cross country, and they're going to try to write, you know, alleviate those concerns. They best they can with the ACC schedule and, you know, go with God. We'll see what that looks like, but, but there, the, it's one of those there's, there's so many, there's a handful ideas in college athletics, where if you get an administrator at the hotel bar after NACDA, or if you get a commissioner with their phone and you promise to have your phone turned off, there's a couple of ideas that most people are going to agree, yeah, those are really good ideas, but they won't happen. And this is one of those things. Because of, because of ego, it would be good to get, to get administrators, maybe after, who knows, after a company Christmas party.

That would be awesome to just see how, how loose they might get. I think they, in like, I've spent some time with Jim Phillips, the commissioner of the ACC. His heart's in a great place. He's an idealist when it comes to, right? When it comes to college sports, he wishes that it wasn't happening like this. But if you don't, if you're not ruthless, because as I said this to Michael Resko yesterday, to me this is much, what's happening with conference realignment is like the banking industry. They're just swallowing the competition whole. Nobody cares about the greater good. They only care about what's best for my league, and I get it, that's who you're, you're the frontman for, but it's not good for the sport nationally, it's just good for you.

Yeah, and I think, I think you're right. And one of the frustrating things about college athletics, and this has really kind of been beaten into my head now, you know, this is my beat is that a lot of people at various levels in this whole enterprise realize, Hey, we're going down a path that's not good for athletes. It's not good for our staffers. It's not good for consumers. And I don't really feel good about it myself. You know, you'll, you'll notice no one's throwing a pro ticker tape parade to welcome Cal into the ACC.

This is a begrudging fine. I guess we'll have to go make chicken salad out of this chicken excrement, but it's not, it's, this is not a hail Jim Phillips, the conquering hero kind of thing. But even if you recognize on the macro that we're going on a wrong path, the individual autonomy of one AD or one commissioner or one president in most cases, it's pretty minimal because even, you know, and for Jim, I think that I think your description of him is exactly right. Like I know that the last couple of months have been really hard on him personally. And I know what his ideals are. And I know people that are close to him, but he, you know, he answers to the, to the league president. And if he decided he wasn't going to go in one particular direction and the league presidents thought that was best for their own interests, they would find somebody who would. And that makes it very difficult to shift all of college athletics, I think, into a different direction because this kind of decentralized leadership structure makes it very easy for ethical people to feel constrained to make unethical decisions and perpetuating a system that nobody really loves. Yeah. And then try to explain it to the point where you don't feel dirty in how you explain it, because I don't know that there's any way to explain it without, if you, if you are an idealist like Jim Phillips without feeling dirty, it's also bad for fans and it's bad for students who make it, who it becomes more difficult to get to games. Matt Brown, publisher of Extra Points. And if you get, if you are a fan of college sports and all the stuff that happens off the field, it's a great newsletter to subscribe to.

Real quick, two more things before I have to say goodbye. A transfer portal, the NCAA has shrunk it from 60 days to 45 days. I don't like taking athlete freedom away at all. I don't know that this is a big deal. How do you view this?

That's kind of how I feel too. In practice, I don't think there's a major difference between 60 and 45, particularly in the major revenue sports where a lot of that activity is happening in the first two weeks. Anyway, what's more concerning is that these decisions are happening without athletes themselves having really meaningful voice in, in, in, in that policy. And that, that's partly because, you know, the only athletes that are involved right now are in the SAC groups, which are hardly independent voices. And then you have to organize athletes.

And that's really extremely difficult right now, given that the interest and needs of a Duke basketball player and a Clemson football player and a Wake Forest softball player are very, very different. Yes. All right. Now final thing before I let Matt Brown go. Every single college administrator, every single commissioner has been begging the US House of Representatives and Congress to come up with a federal NIL plan.

My argument has been why? We don't need any plan. Just let the market work.

The market will work. Any plan is going to contain restrictions, except of course, the ones that have been pushed forth that they don't want, that don't contain, that have more restrictions on the schools than the players. Do we need any federal legislation to govern NIL?

You know, I am going to differ from many of my reforming brethren here. I actually think there could be a positive role for the federal government. And the biggest thing right now would be in regulating sports agents and sports financial advisors. Because if you want to be an agent to represent a professional athlete in the NFL or the NBA, you have to be certified by that union. You generally have to have a law degree or equivalent experience, and someone has to certify you're not some predatory yahoo. But if you want to be a college agent, all you have to do is change your Twitter bio and say you're a college agent.

I've talked to people who say they're agents and they're undergrads, that they're uncles, that they're the kind of people that we would kind of pejoratively refer to as runners, and putting athletes into predatory contracts. I mean, just look at what happened with the Michigan State NIL Collective last week that just decided, surprise, we're canceling all your contracts and we're allowed to do that because that's in the form. The federal government already has the purview to go after a lot of those guys, and they're just not doing it. They're not enforcing the rules that are on the books. I could see some level of actually useful consumer protections, and I am sympathetic to the frustrations that we have 27 different state laws which can make nationwide recruiting and roster management really difficult. But what the NCAA is legitimately really asking for here has far less to do with NIL than it does about making sure that athletes are not defined as employees. That was the biggest part of their federal legislative push here because they know that the court system is going to do that in the next two years, whether that comes from the NLRB or whether that comes from Johnson v. NCAA or House v. NCAA.

And then all of the NIL stuff is moot because we're going to get rid of the collective system anyway if we move to a direct employment model. Matt Brown, at Matt Brown, EP. Extra Points.

Go check it out. You will thank me later. You'll thank Matt. I appreciate your time, sir.

We'll do it again. Of course. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on today. You got it.

Matt Brown. Extra Points is the newsletter. There's a lot of things going on behind the scenes. I think if you're a college fan, you would like to know a lot about. A lot of interesting stuff as well in the newsletter.