Master’s overview and an update on the ACC

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Call clickgrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger. For the ones who get it done. Wednesdays are hump day, but they are also Chip-O-Litics days. The Chip-O-Litics were not, I mean, the Chip-O-Litics probably said that Scottie Scheffler is the easiest bet in the world last week at the Masters. Here's Chip Patterson.

Cover three podcast, CBSSports.com. Shane Lowry didn't like his own Chip-O-Litics. I liked them, but Shane Lowry didn't.

Shane Lowry, Seewoo Kim. I mean, Tommy Ladd did some good work for me late. You know, like it was a tough go for the fighting chips out there, but the wise words from Joe Musso, CBS Sports HQ, stellar anchor. I was sitting on the desk with him on Monday night, national championship game.

Sure. Yukon's running away with it. I'm waiting to do the postgame show with him and we're talking about it. And he says, Chip, I just, I think 450 is the best number you're going to see. Cause I was talking to him about, Oh, you know, like, well, what if Scottie goes out and shoots a 71? He was like, I don't think he's going to shoot a 71. I think the 450, if, if you want a piece, you got to get it now. And like, that's, I was just looking at the PGA championship odds and Valhalla where he could absolutely mow it down.

Um, is it, I was asking myself that same question is four 50, the best price you're going to see. So you might as well just go ahead and grab a piece because if you want to have anything that cash is at the end of the 72nd hole of the PGA championship, do you just go ahead and grab it? I don't know. I think it was a legitimate conversation when handicapping a major championship. Now we are very close.

We're not there yet, but we are close to. Tiger versus the field territory where we literally had that. And the smart move was tiger. That would be, that is actually something that had happened in 2002, 2005, 2006 tiger versus the field was, Oh yeah, tiger. What are we talking about? We're, we're, we're not there yet, but we're close with Scotty because Tina green, he is at around the greens. He's better than almost everybody at those individual disciplines with margins that are bananas.

Absolutely. That's what we, I think really are getting into like unpacking the greatness of Scotty Scheffler to me is about appreciating one of the sports greats in his peak because the ability to go back and take all the information and to be able to say, this statistically tiger woods was at his peak in September of 2001. I get that near the end of 2001 season. That was as good as tiger got. And historically, that is the number one. Now you can go through and you can say that Vijay Singh in 04, uh, Phil Mickelson, I think at the end of 2010, no, even like David Duvall for that short run in 98, 99, like statistically, he was so much better than the field. And Scotty Scheffler in this moment is in one of those peaks that put him above a David Duvall, a Vijay Singh, a Phil Mickelson and second only to tiger woods in terms of his dominance against the field on a shot by shot basis.

Um, that I am in an appreciation standpoint because Scotty will level off. I mean, it will not be this dominant compared to the rest of the field. He will continue to be fantastic. And we will talk about him for a long time, but we thought that Jordan Spieth's run would be forever. Or Rory McElroy's run would be forever, but history tells us they, you come in, you have your peak and you might spike again for a tournament or a little blip, but I'm appreciating Scotty Scheffler's excellence because I know it's not going to last forever. And every, all the data tells us this is historic. Oh, there's no question about it.

And by the way, he and his wife are about to have their first child. Uh, you're not as good as you used to be, right? What? At golf. At golf? At golf.

I'm not as good as I used to be. Yeah. It's probably not relatable.

Yeah. It's probably not relatable. I guarantee you that, um, I, there is no way that even on some, um, relative scale, the number of rounds per year played by Scotty Scheffler before and after children is going to compare to the cliff that I've experienced of rounds of golf per year before and after children. Actually, you know, as you get children get older, you actually play more golf if they're into it. And look, I will be there and like happy birthday to my youngest. You know, my youngest is turning two today, but you know, we're at three and a half and two. All right. So we don't have a lot of that time.

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They're all very nice. Yeah, you know, we lay. Okay, good.

Mom and dad still got to work, okay? We still got to do some stuff to be able to allow for everything that Punt and Pooch are able to experience in this life. All right, let's get to stuff that I know you've talked about on the Cover Three podcast. There is a Twitter handle called, I think, Big, you know, Inside the Big 12 or something like that.

And somebody, I have no idea if he's really got insider information or not, but he has a, this come, I think this came from like Thursday or, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday of last week. And it is a detailed plan of how ESPN is bringing the ACC, Florida State and Clemson to the bargaining table and crafting this plan to get Florida State and Clemson to the Southeastern Conference, leaving the ACC with their league as it is intact, but with a diminished value to ESPN. So reworking the contract, all of that. And it certainly makes a lot of sense in the in the macro if the ACC looks at and says, well, this is what's going to happen going forward.

These two schools are going to leave. Nothing we can do about it. So we're going to make the best deal we can possibly make, except that if ESPN orchestrates this, I'm not sure the ACC doesn't have a legal fight against ESPN for doing that, for diminishing the value of that deal.

How did you guys discuss it? What are your thoughts on what we've seen? Oh, it's thrilling fan fiction. I mean, it just really is like I mean, like, you know, the true fan fiction where we take the characters and we put them in places and scenarios that seem plausible. You know, we see the big franchises, you know, always come out with a lot of fan fiction, whether it's from fantasy or science fiction. And to me, this falls into the number one rule of conference realignment in our current state.

Do not trust anybody. Right. Because the truth of the matter is the people with power don't know. And they either don't know because they're waiting on someone or something, or they don't know because they haven't decided what they're going to do yet. And I think that any reporting as to what our two big primary networks, ESPN and Fox, any reporting as to what they are going to want to do is fan fiction. Because I believe that there are options. I believe that there are brainstorming sessions and discussions.

But if we knew what they wanted to do, then it happened by now. I think there's a lot of conference calls. I think there's a lot of kick in the can down the road. I think there's a lot of let's put a button in this and circle back to it because no one wants to do anything tough. Everyone in college sports is hesitant to make any big glass shattering move because then it may be perceived that you're the one at the end of this that is going to get the blame.

I have heard that there is not a desire in the Big Ten of the SEC to expand. Right. But within those conferences, there's level two and level three of the discussion that says, yeah, but well, it's available. Yes. And to keep them from the other league. Right. It's not just that we want them. It's to keep them from the other league. I don't want to like beat this topic to a pulp like I have been probably over the last six months.

I really have just two questions about this that I want to hammer out and then we'll we'll move on to more chip politics or something. We thought hockey. John Swofford saw the future now back. What is it 20 years ago?

The O for the first right with Miami Boston College and it became Virginia Tech, but it was supposed to be Syracuse. So he saw the future. The future was about, hey, we're moving this way. We need to expand.

So we stay viable. He saw the future. Then he got a lot of pushback from it. He was blamed for ruining college sports.

I'm not even going to get into that. Maybe. Maybe he is the reason. Right. But he saw the future. It was pretty clear that going forward, it was going to happen again. There were opportunities for the ACC to go west, that maybe not all the way to the other coast, but to go west, that the ACC did not put their hammer down on, whether it was Texas and Oklahoma back when or all the way to California for Southern Cal and UCLA back then.

But they could have done that. But I don't think John, as you said, I don't think he wanted to be that guy that destroyed the fabric of college football, of college sports. In 2019, John Swofford caught me as I was sort of trying to unpack, I was working on a story about that expansion and sort of about the way that everything had gotten there. And he was like, I mean, it's all of college football history is realignment.

I mean, it's just every seven or eight years, there's at least one really big shakeup. So, you know, this like while I was sitting there trying to pinpoint the 04 expansion as, you know, yes, being great vision and everything else, but as it being something larger. And he seems to, you know, change my focus, like, no, that was just our chapter in the reoccurring history of conference realignment in college sports at the highest level. And to take that approach and realize nothing's going to keep going on locked in forever, then, yeah, I think that you can, that's why you get this kind of realignment fan fiction. And I do want to go back to that because whether it's the people from the ACC side of things, people from the Florida State side of things, Big 12 fans who just want to see the world burn.

Like, I just don't trust anyone because I truly believe that at the highest levels, it is a lot of kicking the can down the road. Now let's wait and see, let's wait and see, because it's let's wait and see on the court cases. Let's wait and see if there's something that is so seismic, it undoes everything in terms of our current conference landscape. And that kind of stall ball, I guess I would say, you know, that kind of four corners approach to conference realignment leads me to believe that anyone who puts out these long threads, you know, whether it's your MHV or whether it's your Big 10 information guide, genetics 56, or whether it's inside the Big 12, like I see them all.

The algorithm feeds me every trending thread. One of these proposed realignment know-it-alls. And I just, there are pieces of all of them. I'm like, oh, I could see that.

Oh, I could see that. Sure. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But it's just you start to fact check this and I just I think that they are all coming from the same kind of sit back, kick around ideas, discussions that happen during down times with knowledgeable people.

And it fits the it feeds the narrative of the people who want it to burn. Right. Yes. They are of the mind that, yes, there's no doubt Florida State's out, Clemson's out, oh, this is how they do it and this is how ESPN helps because it doesn't hurt ESPN and they'd be all for it, except they forget that the legal exposure for ESPN forcing this would have to be massive. Right. To ESPN.

And I'm not even saying from North Carolina, but if you're Boston College, what is that? What is it worth to you? Right. You you might say, I'm not signing off on this and that fact that ESPN were to, in theory, have orchestrated all of this.

I just think that it would be a legal quagmire for the worldwide leader. Do you think this is my last question about it. Three years from now, are Clemson and Florida State in the ACC? No. Is there an ACC? Yes. How does that work if you're the ACC? You're going to negotiate a settlement for those two schools? I don't know.

I mean, how did they get out without it? I believe that there is there is an appetite to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference and how that's funded. I don't know. But I think there's an appetite for it. I don't know if there's an appetite for it here in the state. I think that there's an appetite for it in Tallahassee. And so, yeah, there that's the greatest curse would be for Florida State to swear that they could never compete for national championships in the ACC and pay hundreds of million dollars to leave and never win one again.

I mean, that's some real gift of the Magi stuff right there. I just think that if you're the if you're the Atlantic Coast Conference, if you allow if you negotiate. I think you're done. I think if you if you negotiate a settlement, unless the settlement is super prohibitive. Like, hey, Florida State, you got five hundred million dollars. Yeah, you can go. Clemson, you got five hundred million dollars.

You can go. But ultimately, if ESPN can walk away from the deal and you don't have one because you've lost your two biggest football brands, then your league is over. So I just that's why I said within three years, because that's I think that's the look in apparently with ESPN. Right. I think they have to make the decision. The look in is twenty twenty seven, but they've got to make the decision on it by the end of by sometime in twenty twenty five.

I'm not quite totally locked in on my details here. But we would have an answer on that before. It's not like there's a ticking clock for twenty twenty seven.

And then we either see white smoke out of Bristol. These things are a little bit planned in advance. I believe that the the requirement for inventory to generate revenue at the college sports level will keep the ACC alive. And I think that the distaste to try and organize ballooning twenty four plus team conferences will prevent be part of preventing that.

And I think that the conferences shutting out college sports tomorrow and signing a deal for the college football playoff through twenty thirty one. Without the ones like you who work tirelessly to keep things running, everything would suddenly stop. Hospitals, factories, schools and power plants.

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Call click Grainger dot com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Keeps us from going full Super League until the early twenty thirties. Yeah. Who knows what it's going to look like? It's but it's it's not going to look like what it looks like today. And the conversation that you and I have had might as well have been the conversation that led to inside the Big 12.

I like to be at the forefront of it. Yeah. You know, let me ask you real quick about the the transfer port, which is open again. Like how is the transfer portal window ever closed transfer window of a soccer guy now is the transfer window ever closed for undergraduates? Yes. It's if you're a graduate student, you can transfer and enter the portal whenever you want, right?

If you are an undergraduate, then you can transfer without penalty by entering your name into the portal. It opened yesterday. It will be open two weeks here in the spring window. And there's still a very important Saturday to get through.

I mean, a lot of teams have spring games this Saturday, the 20th. And so we'll see after that. But one of the takeaways we've got from the first twenty four, twenty eight hours is the lack of buzz. And I thought Bud Elliott made a great comment earlier today.

Covered three podcast just published to your feed before I hopped on here. That's a good thing for college football that schools have enabled. Like there are players whose agents are shopping them, you know, pre portal.

Right. Just what the appetite is out there or to ask for their own school to be able to to counter or re up. And some of those players so far have not entered the portal. College football is going to be worse off if there's only 15 to 20 schools playing the NIL game and they just constantly get to shop every transfer window. When you've got mid tier power conference schools retaining talent, that is a good thing for college football as a whole. So we'll see.

We still got 13 more days left. But of the players that are entering, we are not seeing game changing quarterbacks. We are not seeing superstar skill position players. We are seeing a lot of players that are honestly getting cut. Right.

Like all of a sudden, you know, this this team needs to get under eighty five. I don't know. We got to get you out of here.

I'm sorry. You might want to seek options elsewhere. So in general, if this is a college, if this is a transfer portal spring window that does not have a lot of heavy, heavy hitters.

And this is really important. Not a lot of power conference to power conference transfers. Like if you're transferring out of Arkansas because you want to go play at Texas State and that's your best chance to be a starting quarterback. That's what the transfer portal is for. In my opinion. When you are an all star defensive tackle at Kent State and now all of a sudden LSU and Arkansas and Auburn all need defensive tackles. Hey, capitalize.

That is a good use of the transfer portal. But when we don't have power conference staffs rating each other's rosters, I think that's a good thing overall for college football. Chip Patterson, you're the best Chip Olytics. Always enjoy your your week, your weekend. Happy birthday to youngest Patterson. And I'll talk to you next week. Sounds good. You'll be well. We're getting there is just a tap away.