This is The Drive with Josh Graham Podcast. Three internet sensations, guys! Tune into The Drive weekday afternoons, 3 to 7 on WSJS. And we're on a Monday drive. It is WSJS, News Talk Sports for the Triad, where it sure is tempting to spend the next three hours talking about SNL 50 from over the weekend.
Shout out to Post Malone, or should I say Post Nirvana? Yeah, we'll find time to hit on that, but not right now. We must first hit on some local college hoops. Let's check in on Wake Forest, who going into the season had lofty expectations attached to them. NCAA tournament streak, the drought, let's end it.
Eight years is long enough. Best Deac team in 15 years. A lot of hype. And over the last couple of months, maybe it was the bad metrics stemming from tight mid-major wins, some of the early losses that they had on the road. Maybe it's just the nature of the ACC being down from what we're accustomed to. The reaction by a lot of fans is that this team's been largely underwhelming. However, after Wake's impressive win at SMU over the weekend, this team's actually on track, or a lot closer than you might think, to meeting those high expectations that were set before the year. After that win at SMU, they are in the driver's seat to make the NCAA tournament.
But don't just take it from me. ESPN did the obnoxious thing that we hate it, that they do. They insert Joey Brackets into the broadcasts. Wake Forest facing SMU. Both teams were on the first four outline going in. And Linardi said he was locked into the game and that the winner of this basketball game would be in the field of 68 in his next projection. The goal for this team started and really ended in a lot of people's minds with the NCAA tournament. Get to the tournament for the first time since 2017, that team that won 19 games with John Collins as a sophomore. Those 19 wins, by the way, the most wins a Wake basketball team had all of last decade.
It's worth noting, with the win at SMU, Steve Forbes has hit 19 wins for the fourth year in a row. Relatedly, this still looks like the best Wake Forest team in 15 years. John Collins team lost in the first four, which means it's if Wake Forest plays a field of 64 basketball game, plays a first round game, it will be the first time they've played a field of 64 game since 2010.
Yes, 15 years. And this Deacon team has the chance to win an ACC title because what gets overlooked, because all the attention seems to be funneled to your NCAA tournament case or your bid or your resume, however you want to put it, that win Saturday pretty much clinches the Deacs having a double bye in Charlotte. And think about what that represents. Last year, Wake Forest was fifth in the ACC standings. Something that when Steve Forbes took the job, you'd say, oh my gosh, that would be such a massive win if we could have a top five team in the ACC and do this on a regular basis. If Wake is a double bye team, that means they're top four. And they don't have to play until Thursday of the ACC tournament. And if you are a double bye team in Charlotte, you have a shot at winning the ACC tournament in a way that Wake Forest just hasn't in recent years.
Don't forget. So they had the West Coast trip last week. They go to Dallas over the weekend. Now they do not have to leave the state of North Carolina. They do not have to board an airplane until after the ACC tournament.
This is what they have left. No midweek game this week. Then they go to NC State on Saturday. Then next week, they're at home against Virginia and against Notre Dame. And then they're at Duke, home against Georgia Tech. And yes, the ACC tournament once again is in Charlotte.
They do not have to get on a plane the rest of the year. But before we push things too far ahead, let's just go back to Saturday very quickly. That might have been Steve Forbes' finest moment as Wake Forest coach. And what's great about it is it comes after what he called maybe his worst loss as Wake's coach.
Collapsing, blowing a 16-point lead in the final nine minutes at home against Florida State. You win on the road, a place that Wake has struggled to win the last couple of years. You do so against a team that had a really good record.
And you can add it to your resume. That win at SMU, good with the Stanford wins, the Pitt and North Carolina wins who are also on the bubble. And of course, beating Michigan in the Greensboro Coliseum the first week of the season.
That's really strong stuff. And it was decisive. They never really felt in doubt in the second half. And it was done without your second best player. You don't have Cam Hildreth, who last week was named the ACC Player of the Week.
Parker Fredrickson, who had really struggled this year, hit a bevy of threes stepping up when you really needed him. So it's a strong win for Wake. And even though it's easy to just have a snap reaction to what a team has been for or was for the first month or two of the season, the season's longer than that. And sometimes you need to pause and take inventory and reassess when you get new information. And where things stand right now versus what the expectations going into the year were, it's not that far off. Wake Forest is on track to meet those lofty expectations set before them going into the year.
Will Dalton, he's the executive producer of this show, taking your calls at 336-777-1600. W.D., what did you find yourself watching this weekend between the college basketball, All-Star weekend, the Daytona 500, SNL 50, the Four Nations tournament, which we hadn't talked about at all, but man, hockey can find a way to be interesting if it wants to, and it certainly did. What all did you watch this weekend? You know, I honestly kind of found myself snacking on everything that was going on. Like I took a little bit of everything, didn't watch the whole thing of anything. I did watch The Godfather again, though.
What? Yeah, I was in the mood. Did you watch Bridesmaids?
Nope. That's tonight! Well, Duke Virginia is also tonight. Yeah, a lot of hours in the night. We go to bed late. So you watched the three-hour Godfather movie, you don't watch the movie that you're supposed to watch for the show, and you watched the All-Star game, too?
That's probably the thing I watched the least of, to be honest with you. Let's put a pin in that, we'll get to that in a bit. Let's talk about your college basketball team.
By the way, we're streaming video on YouTube, on Twitch, on X, however and wherever you are listening or watching, we greatly appreciate that. The legendary WSJS. Correct. The North Carolina Tar Heels beat Syracuse over the weekend, so it was all good, right? Well, there was some good, there was some bad, there was some ugly to get to from the Tar Heel basketball weekend.
Let's get to these agenda items. The good? Ian Jackson? More like Ian Back, son. I'll show myself out. I'm a dad now. I can make dad jokes. It's okay.
It's acceptable. He had 23 points. How impressive is 23 points for Ian Jackson? That exceeded the scoring outputs from his previous four games combined. He hit five threes. That matches the number of threes he hit from his previous seven games combined. This is good news, because there were questions with his minutes going down. Maybe this is a guy who's checked out, looking ahead to the NBA. As Hubert Davis would say, well, distractions with agents in the league, all these things. Ian Jackson went in there, had a big game.
Hopefully he can start to piece these types of performances together, play with more consistency, like he did at the start of the ACC season. So that's the good. The bad? Carolina let another team get back into a game that they had no business getting into. They almost lost the game.
Almost. See, this game was 78 to 68 with four minutes left to go. You're up double digits with four minutes to go against a team with a losing record. Yet, in the blink of an eye, with more than a minute to go in the game, it's 82 to 80. It's a two point game. Thank goodness for Elliot Cadeau, who for all the negatives you could say about Elliot Cadeau, he's made big plays in these type games, whether it be the four point play at Notre Dame, to rescue North Carolina, or having the spin move drive layup to make it a two possession game, a lead that North Carolina would eventually hold on to.
But how does this lead get, you know, withered down again? Three missed free throws, a missed layup, and there you are. And if it was just a one off, that'd be one thing. But the fact that they've had four one score losses this year, and this was a week after nearly fumbling away that game against Pitt at home, where you had those two missed front ends on free throws, that's some bad, it's a bad trend for Carolina.
Which then leads us to the ugly, which technically is not over the weekend, it's from this morning. Hubert Davis, he was on the coach's show a few weeks ago, right after the Duke game, saying, we have to make some changes with Carolina basketball, and one of those changes is we need to hire a general manager. And everybody said, yeah, Hubert being proactive, Hubert progressing, this is what you want to see. So he was asked today, naturally, what are you looking for in hiring someone in that position? And Hubert said this, I'm going to stay away from those comments in regards to a GM.
I feel like over the last couple of weeks or two and a half weeks in response to my answer to a question on a radio show, it's, you know, it's been twisted in regards to supporting different narratives. And my focus right now is this team and coaching this team and trying to reach our full potential and trying to become the best that we can become this season. He makes it so hard. Not as quite as long of a pause that time, though.
They won the game on Saturday. That lessens the buffer time in Hubert Davis. So this, of course, is fueling the criticism where people are saying, see, see, he can't say what he wants to do in hiring a GM because Bubba's told him he's on the outs.
You see? Also, narrative, a word I hate, gosh, a word that's used way too much. Hubert, one of the things he says so often to the point where it's become a cliche is I'm not on social media. I don't pay attention to what people are saying.
So what I would think if it wasn't virtual or if I were in the room like Hubert, how would you know what these narratives are if you're not, you don't pay attention to any of the outside noise? Just an interesting thing to say there. So there's some of the ugly, which leads to speculation and things that aren't so pleasant surrounding this Carolina basketball program as they get set to face NC State and Virginia at home later this week.
You think that's bad, though? The NBA says, hold my beer. That's next on The Drive.
Back to The Drive with Josh Graham. This weekend, we saw an example of proactiveness going well in professional sports, and we saw an example of proactiveness going incredibly poorly in major professional sports as well. The example of it going well was in the NHL, where you might have noticed instead of an all-star game, you have the four nations face off, Canada blitzing Finland right now four to nothing after it had lost on its home ice to the Americans Saturday night in Montreal. You boo the American national anthem, we're going to fistfight you three times in the first 10 seconds and then beat you at your own game, which the Americans did do.
Sweden and the United States will meet on TNT tonight at eight o'clock. This is a very cool event that I poppooed last week saying, I don't care about this, I'm not going to watch. And then, it's amazing what getting your best players engaged in something and having them care about something will do for interest in the sport. Because ultimately that's what we want. We like the idea of, in hockey, Sidney Crosby on a line with Connor McDavid and Nate McKinnon going up against American players that I recognize, including Carolina Hurricanes star defenseman Jacob Slavin. We like that. It's great. So that's an example of it going well.
The example of it going poorly is whatever the hell that was from the NBA. This weekend, WD, mark it down, is the weekend that the NBA all-star game died. It's dead.
It can't be revived. It's over. And the league deserves some blame because they set this game, this iteration of it, to fail. See, just like it was foolish, we'll say, to place the NBA's trade deadline, the week of the Super Bowl, where all the national shows that you want talking about the NBA at the deadline were in New Orleans talking about football. Just like that was foolish. It was incomprehensibly dumb to have this game on this day, yesterday, at the same time as the SNL 50 show. Which we've known about for longer than we've known when the all-star game's gonna tip off. You could have had it earlier in the day and it's bad luck that the Daytona 500 gets delayed where that's also running up against you as well.
That doesn't help. So you're gonna get an all-time bad rating. It might be the worst rating that the NBA all-star game ever has had because you're going up against that SNL 50 show and the Daytona 500 and the format's wonky.
And by wonky, I mean stupid. Hey, we got the young stars gonna play against a team that Charles Berkeley's drafted against a team. And in the other game, you're gonna have a team that Shaq and Kenny have put together. And then when somebody actually did this, when you break down the three-hour broadcast, 80 minutes of it, commercial breaks, only 42 minutes of it was basketball. Because you had all these interjections where you got Kevin Hart doing some weird things and you got all this other stuff that's not basketball. To the point where Draymond Green is on the actual broadcast. You know, the guy who's supposed to be really super psyched to talk about the thing he's getting paid to talk about from the NBA and from Turner. And Draymond Green said this. You work all year to be an all-star and you get to play up to 40 and then you're done. This is so unfair to Victor Winbyama who just took this game really seriously. Shaq Gil just Alexander who just took this game really seriously.
When you talk about chasing after the points record, Melo, Kobe, and all these guys who've had great scoring nights, they don't get the opportunity to do that with this game. Also, we can watch some rising stars. We're about to watch the Olympic team.
Now we get the treat of watching the Olympic team play against the U19 team. Come on, what are we doing? On a scale of 1 to 10, your thoughts of the format? Um, 10 being the best? Yes.
A zero. Sucks. Draymond. So the NBA set it up to fail with this format that isn't great.
So that's bad enough. Now you got people on the broadcast nuking it. And naturally somebody from the NBA had to have heard that and said, could somebody on the broadcast please stand up for the format and just pretend to like it maybe? And then you got Charles Barkley on the broadcast firing off at his fellow broadcast mate, Draymond Green, in the second half of this, of one of the games. You know, I'm going to disagree with Draymond a lot, you know, it's, uh, listen, we're trying to do anything, you know, I use the analogy like when your kids mess up the house, you make them clean it up and they complain and they mess the game up.
That's why we're trying to kamikaze and stuff out here right now. So his generation messed the game up. So don't act like he's mad because they tried to use rookies and we're doing every type of trick to make this weekend exciting. Notice Charles didn't actually defend the stuff out there. No, he didn't. He said, you guys ruined it. You guys ruined it.
And now we're trying all this kamikaze stuff as he put it to try to make it better. Uh, and here's the thing, Draymond's right and Charles is right. Multiple things can be true. They're both, they're, the NBA players are to blame. See, Michael's generation, they felt an obligation to play in this game and play hard for the betterment of the league.
They felt an obligation to do that. Lebron's generation hasn't felt that way. And as much as you will always stand up for your boy, uh, the fact that Lebron's never participated in a dunk contest is stupid. I agree with that. It's stupid and it speaks to this point.
People want you to do a thing and you won't do it. Why? Why? Why? Because that would be good for the NBA that he did it, a dunk contest.
Are you kidding? But no, the week of the All-Star game, he'd always like get in the layup lines of the game before the dunk contest and show you that he can do these amazing dunks and not ever compete, not ever do it. And then, case in point example, two hours before tip of this game, the biggest star in your sport says, nah, I've got some leg discomfort. And he's not even going to participate in the game, which from a league perspective, to use Draymond's word, sucks. Just to use his word there, but also, it sucks as well for the guy that isn't at the All-Star game, that could have been in the All-Star game, if Lebron had let us know that he has discomfort.
You know, he took away a spot for somebody else that could have been in this game. And that's not cool either. It isn't. So a lot like the regular season. If you don't care about this thing, don't be surprised when the customer doesn't care either. So what should you expect to happen? The NBA, because Adam Silver is a reactionary commissioner who isn't particularly good amongst commissioners, has done more harm than he's done good as the commissioner of the NBA.
You should expect him to be reactionary and take notes from what the NHL has done, and probably create some type of international competition where it'll be Team USA facing the world. You could do that. That actually might not be in the American's favor, though. I know. So maybe you'd make it Team... Isn't Shaye Gilges-Alexander from Canada? Yes. So maybe we do Team North America. North America against the world. But then again, I don't know.
Is Canada the 51st state? Yeah, we'll see about that later on. Boo! Where's Gary Hahn when we need to... Boo! Let's go to the sidelines, Tony Haines.
World versus USA, because a lot of people are saying that they think the world talent and Euro talent has surpassed the USA. That could get chippy. That's what I'm saying. That could work. Give us something.
Actually, the more I think about it, that could work. That's what I'm saying. So that's what you should expect to happen. That's what you should expect to happen because the All-Star game died and the player...
The current players killed it and the NBA finished off the job. Sucks. This weekend. Tonight, you can watch again Sweden and the United States. Canada's leading 4-0 against Finland in that 4 nations face-off. Also, right here on WSJS, Duke at Virginia. Don't be so quick to say that this isn't going to be a game. You're laughing at me, Will.
I'm just seeing the Duke blow out in my head right now after this. Can you? Can I make the case? No, of course.
Can I make the case? So this is the third time this year, Will, that Duke has had the one-day prep or the two-day turnaround. Are you following me or are you checking out on me right now? No, no, no. So third time this year, they've had the two-day turnaround. Do you want to know how the first two went? The first one was against Incarnate Word and Duke, with a minute left to go in the first half, was only leading by three points, 24-21, before ultimately blowing them out in the second half. The other time they had this happen was when they played NC State. And you remember that game, the first half, NC State's leading against Duke by four points.
And what did those two games have in common? They were both at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Tonight, JPJ in Charlottesville, you're going to get their best shot, and Virginia kind of sneakily. They've won three straight games, including against their rival, against Virginia Tech, on the road at the castle on Saturday. They've won four of their last five. I'm just saying. It's worth keeping an eye on because, do you know, the last time Virginia was in the game, it's worth keeping an eye on because, do you know, the last time Virginia had the two-day turnaround?
I don't. They went to Pittsburgh and beat them by 16. I'm just saying, don't write this game off before the game's even played. Might place a token on Virginia's first half.
That's probably what we're going to do. WD, topical today. Sabrina Carpenter, after she opened up SNL 50 with Paul Simon last night, not a good segue from that to Brendan Marks, who joins us now from The Athletic. But Brendan brought it in the way of journalism because he has the story on Cooper Flag on The Athletic, along with Brendan Quinn. While reading your story for The Athletic on Cooper, which was Cooper's first one-on-one interview since arriving at Duke, I was thinking about something that's become a modern-day folktale regarding Zion Williamson six years ago. The way the story goes, and has been relayed to me multiple times, is that the night before Zion had to decide whether he wanted to go pro or return to Duke for a second year, he told his parents before bed he had decided to come back to school. Then the next morning Coach K said, that would be too great of a risk, advised him to go into the draft, and the rest is history. However, many people at Duke believe that if NIL existed then, Zion, he might have been back for a second season in Durham. In your story, when Cooper was asked about his future, he told you, quote, bleep, I want to come back next year. So Brendan, are you telling me there's a chance? I am not telling you there's a chance, and I can't tell you how many Duke fans have asked me that exact question via phone call, via text, via DM, via everything.
Everything's sort of a carrier pigeon, Duke fans have chimed in saying, well is this real? And I think, again, it speaks to the sentiment that Zion had, the sentiment that Paolo Benquero had to a lesser extent, that these guys, they know coming in that this is going to be a one year stop off, and they know they've got 11 months to make the most of it, and while they would love for it to endure beyond that, part of what makes their experience so special is the fact that they know going into it, it has an inherent expiration date. And so as it was with Paolo, as it was with Zion, when you are going to be the number one pick in the draft, you go to the draft. If there was going to be anything that I think would make this even more of a story than it is now, which is nothing, it would be if the NBA draft lottery comes out, and it's a team at the top who Cooper and his family are not thrilled about the infrastructure or whatever, the only way I could see this ever possibly becoming a thing is if that team and Cooper could not come to an agreement and you had an Eli Manning, Philip Rivers sort of situation. Something we might see with Sanders this year in the NFL draft, is Dion going to be in a situation where he prevents that from happening?
But again, the long term ramifications of that, of what Duke would do with NIL, what Duke would do with Cam Boozer, it's not happening, I am in no way saying it is happening, Cooper Flagg is going to the NBA, Duke fans enjoy him while you can. You want to know the type of journalism you can find from this story Brendan Marks worked on? Cooper Flagg's fall break plans, including barbecues at John Shire's house, comments from Cooper's parents, their lease in Greensboro, you learned about, they're currently renting there. There's a lot I want to get to, I don't want to give away the whole story, I'm not in the business of that, read it at The Athletic, but I do need to ask about Cooper Flagg's class schedule, 8.30am writing course, a health and nutrition seminar, sports business, that could be useful, makes sense, and a musical history course on the origins of hip-hop. Did he have anything to add about his course choices?
How did you learn this? You know, we were asking Cooper about his college life, and part of that is classes. One thing, and I forget if it even made it into the story now or not, but this is the first time in Cooper's life that his parents have not directly been overseeing his classes and his class schedule, and where the report cards are coming home basically, because obviously that stops once you're in college. And so a couple of weeks into January when we sat down with Cooper's parents, and they said, yeah, we learned last week, multiple weeks, maybe even a month after the fact that Cooper got a 4.0 his first semester, but he never actually told his parents, so the whole class thing is fascinating. The one addendum on that hip-hop class, beyond the fact that I would have loved to have taken that when I was in college, was that class is taught by 9th Wonder, who is obviously the Duke superfan, the Grammy award-winning producer who's worked with basically all the most famous rappers in the game. So obviously some practical classes there in terms of nutrition, in terms of sports business. Last semester, a sports leadership class, but obviously also some fun ones, like when is Cooper Fly going to get to learn about the origins of hip-hop otherwise? So I think things like that are humanizing, and as much as we talk about Cooper as his transcendent talent, he is a recently turned 18-year-old kid who is probably enjoying some of those college things, and also probably dreading the fact that he has an 8.30 AM writing class. The Pride of Winston-Salem 9th Wonder, who, friend of the show, once upon a time told us when John Shire took over at Duke, that conversations were at least had to see if he was interested in moving off of some of the traditional songs that you hear at Cameron with some other ideas. But maybe we can get to that at another date.
Brendan Marks is joining us here from The Athletic. You know, let me just go into this note, because again, that didn't make it into the story. It's a thorough write-up on Cooper. I'm sure there are details, quotes, anecdotes that didn't quite make the cut. What's something that you were told that you just couldn't throw in there, or there wasn't a place for? Something that was left on the cutting room floor? Oh boy.
There's a decent number, though. I think, you know, the one that I had really hoped would make it in, and we ended up just not having a natural place for it, was, you know, obviously Cooper, because of NIL, is being handsomely compensated for his one season at Duke through his various deals. You know, he's got Gatorade, he's got Fanatics, obviously New Balance, and the shoe deal is the most prominent one.
You know, but I think the thing that people forget about that is what it does to the power dynamics of a family. And so, you know, it was funny that we asked Cooper's parents, you know, like, what did you get him for Christmas? What do you get for a guy who can buy himself anything?
And they said, you know, it's actually really hard. And so, you know, basically, they just got Cooper some like personalized golf stuff. I believe he got an engraved putter, you know, like a custom done putter.
But other than that, like, what are they going to buy for him that he's not already got? So that was one thing that I thought was really interesting. And like, again, we don't think about we think about, especially in the NIL era, we think about these college kids is like, you know, grown adults, and they very much are not but the introduction of, you know, in Cooper's case, generational wealth, it changes those family dynamics.
And I thought that that was a fascinating little tidbit that we tried to sneak in there, but just ultimately didn't have room. We see a lot of his parents on the TV broadcasts, and a lot of stories come out of that as well. His high school number was 32, because that's the number that his mom wore, and we've heard these stories for a long time now. In terms of getting this one on one interview, how much of it was through Duke? How much of it was building relationships with the family?
And what did you learn most about that dynamic between parent and Cooper? Yeah, you know, so I, you know, I've been lucky enough to have been, you know, covering Cooper even going back to high school. So you know, it was with him at Peach Jam last summer.
So summer of 20, summer 23, actually, it would have been summer 23. And I really, you know, kind of met him for the first time. I mean, I remember watching, he had a 50 point game, you know, sitting with John Girod, baseline, and just like, wow, this guy is special.
And John's like, Yeah, I know, what do I get him? And you know, I think so since then, like having gotten to spend some more time with the family, I did have the good fortune to go up to Maine in January of 24, got to go to his hometown. So again, have seen him have covered him a little bit, certainly, I think those things played a factor in us helping get it done. You know, the one thing that I would say about about Cooper's family and about his family dynamics that I don't know people, I know you, you're right, that we see them on the broadcast a lot, Kelly and Ralph. The way they have brought him up is remarkable to me. I mean, I think they have done as good a job as you can possibly do in this situation like, because realistically, their kid is a $400 million investment, you know, in the future, if he becomes the NBA player that everyone thinks that he will become, he's going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the next decade.
And they have never enabled any sense of entitlement in him, any sense of I'm holier than now any sense of I'm better than you know, superiority, no, you know, talking down to people like none of it, none of it. And that is so so rare for people who have been as ordained, and basically anointed as long as Cooper has. And so like, you know, the idea that, like, you know, we talked to them after Cooper had a couple of turnovers against Miami, and, you know, his mom, when he walks into the postgame room to talk to him, you know, she's like, you know, what the hell is that?
Like, that's a hangover game, you know, like, how are you? How are you, you know, you should be disappointed in yourself, like, the standard they hold him who and the way they have brought him up to be responsible and accountable and to treat everyone equally. It's in the story, you know, before he leaves breakfast every morning, he gets up and he gives the cooks a hug goodbye, like, those things are authentic. And I think it's the reason why even, you know, Duke has this team with guys who are established and guys who have been in college for forever and other guys who are going to be in the NBA. And the reason why they've all gotten in line behind Cooper flag is because of that. And it stems back to the way his parents raised them.
And again, those things are hard to quantify. But I just really think that Ralph and Kelly deserve a lot of credit for the way that they raised him, the way that they brought him to be like the human being he is, because it has directly correlated to him being able to take over on basketball court. In the next write-up, I'm going to need you to tell me what Greensboro food spots that Kelly and Ralph frequent and Ace will have to figure that out next time. Brendan Marks joins us here from The Athletic.
Make sure you check out that story. Getting into other college basketball matters, even though it got exciting down the stretch in Tuscaloosa, the reality is that Auburn led that game wire-to-wire. J'Nai Broome was on one leg in the final 10 minutes of the game, a couple of key players fouled out, and they won in Tuscaloosa. So I think it's them and Duke in my mind that are in a tier of their own atop college basketball. Would you add anybody else to that top group? I mean, I think what Alabama, you know, the fact that Alabama lost at home to me does not necessarily prevent them from being in that group.
Like I would agree with you. I think Duke and Auburn are in a class of their own. I think they have been most of the season. I think Iowa State belongs in that mix when they're healthy, but obviously they were not for a little while and had some, you know, had a three-game losing streak.
Unfortunately, two of them against teams that we would have liked to have seen them at full strength against. I think Iowa State can get there. And then I think there's a really strong, like if that's the 1A tier, 1B to me is Iowa State, Alabama, Florida. I think that Duke and Auburn have clearly separated themselves just in terms of having the national player of the year candidates, having these multiple ways that they can beat you.
Obviously you mentioned Jen Ibrun. He was great, but that game was not solely him. I mean, Denver Jones was terrific in that game.
Tahod Pettiford was fantastic in the second half. And again, with Duke, like yes, Cooper Flag can obviously beat you, but Con Knipple can beat you too. We've seen games where Tyrese Proctor has beaten you. You know, there are games when it's Malik Brown defensively.
I mean, the Auburn game, Malik Brown, I think you could argue would have been the MVP if not for Cooper Flag. So like both of those teams have multiple ways to beat you. If we get a rematch in San Antonio, be it in the Final Four, be it in the national championship game, it would remind me very much of last season when we got Purdue and UConn, two of clearly the best teams in the country. We got them once. It was an incredible game.
I am so, so, so strongly rooting for the rematch in San Antonio. Okay. Let's play this game then. If I said Duke and Auburn against the field, what would you take? I'd take Duke and Auburn, 100%. I'd take them comfortably.
Yeah. If I get both of them. I mean, if you told me I get like one of them against the field, I'd consider it. You tell me I get both of them.
Like both. I mean, I don't see a way that they are not. There's no way. I mean, I don't see a way in which at least one of them is not in the Final Four. I'd be shocked if it's not too, like, you know, I think back to when Duke lost at Clemson.
Okay. Cooper Flag was sick and they played terribly. They were missing Mason Gillis.
They're on the road, raucous environment. You know, Clemson shoots the best against any, you know, against Duke from two as any opponent in the country. Duke still leads with under a minute to play, has the ball with 15 seconds left and a chance to tie or go ahead. And Brad Brownell said after the game, that's the best we can play. Like that's what it took to beat Duke by a couple of possessions, shorthanded and hurt. Like that to me just speaks to how good both of these teams are. Again, I think they're still getting better.
You know, Jen Ibrun is getting healthier. Cooper Flag just continues to ascend. Malik Brown being back is huge for Duke. You know, Caleb Foster finally got a little bit of burn.
We'll see if that continues to grow confidence for him. I mean, I think those two teams, it's like last year. It's like Purdue and UConn.
They are so far ahead of everybody else that if you're saying otherwise, you're lying. This will be a lot of fun, like listening back to this conversation if Duke slips up at Virginia tonight. We got Brendan Marks, who's with us here.
That game he's referring to, I mean, Little John could be a very difficult place to play. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to do that.
That's fun. Brendan Marks, getting to another newsworthy subject from over the weekend, the NCAA selection committee did reveal its top 16 seeds a month out from Selection Sunday. Bubba Cunningham is the chair of the committee this year. He wouldn't say Duke's name. People got mad at that. It's all good fun. Bubba, we know he likes to have fun.
Cut off sleeves, the whole deal. What was most noteworthy to you, if anything, from those rankings? Yeah. I mean, obviously, the SEC's continued dominance, the SEC having over the five of the top 16. That is obviously incredibly notable. The one thing that I thought was interesting and that I will certainly be watching for the rest of this season, and Bubba Cunningham even was asked about it directly by Seth Davis on the broadcast, was Duke is the third number one seed right now behind Auburn and Alabama. Florida is the fourth number one seed in fourth place. And that was before Auburn, Alabama, of course. It was.
It was. And Seth Davis asked Bubba Cunningham if it was possible, surely through the schedule that is left for both of those teams, where Duke is not going to play a ranked opponent the rest of the season until it gets to the ACC tournament, if it plays on the ACC tournament, that is, versus Auburn, Alabama, and Florida obviously having multiple more games against ranked opponents, multiple more quad one opportunities. Their quad one record is going, they're gonna have so many more quad one wins, partially because they're incredible teams, but also partially just because of the schedule than Duke will. I am fascinated to see if those three teams surely through an accumulation standpoint can pass Duke and drop Duke to the fourth number one seed. I think that's really notable because if that happens and you have the SEC get all three of the top three seeds, in theory, that would leave Duke to go to the west region rather than being in the east. There is obviously a huge difference between being in Newark, you know, right in the heart of Duke North, and being all the way out on the west coast in San Fran. The last time that Duke went to San Fran, it made it to the Final Four, so that's okay. But I do think that's notable and something that I personally will be watching over the next month, like, because it's going to have a major impact on seeding, and it's going to have a major impact, I think, in a way that the bracket ultimately falls by and large.
Closing local with Brendan Marks of The Athletic here. Where do you stand on Wake Forest? Because just in the last week, they gave you all the reasons to believe in them and all the reasons to doubt them as well. Yeah, you know, like, unfortunately, the predictive metrics and the analytics are still not great. You know, obviously, beating SMU on the road is, you know, man, what is that, is that Wake's second best win this year? It is.
I would say that it probably is. You know, obviously, the pit loss doesn't, or the pit win doesn't mean nearly as much as it did previously. The one thing is, obviously, you blew the card of not having any bad losses. And the way that that Florida State loss played out was really damaging. You know, to me, like Wake Forest is a word, it's like a watered down St. John's, where the defense can really be there.
They can turn you over, you know, they've got size, but the complete dearth of three point shooting in St. John's case, they overcome it because they dominate the boards. That's obviously an area where Wake Forest struggles. So I mean, I don't think Wake Forest is, you know, decided one way or the other. Obviously, they're going to come to Cameron the first Monday in March.
That's a huge, huge game when that one they're in, like when that one and they're in my eyes. The rest of the games on the schedule, you can't have any more Florida State slip ups, assuming that Wake Forest runs the table beyond the Duke and that it goes, you know, it finishes out the regular season with all wins except for that game. I still think the Demon Deacons need to probably win a game or two in the ACC tournament to feel safe about their chances.
Just because, again, those predictive metrics have not been kind and you've lost now the no bad losses card after the Florida State game. Brendan Marks, you're a gym, my friend. Before no time, you, I, Connor O'Neill will be doing, you know, oh yeah, there's that too. Drafting brackets.
That's what we're going to be doing, or not brackets, drafting a team for the ACC tournament in Charlotte. It's going to be fun. And I appreciate you spending the time. In the meantime, congrats on the story on Cooper. Thank you.
I appreciate you guys having me. Introducing the world's greatest entertainer, the hottest working man in show business. Ladies and gentlemen, the star of the show. Now back to The Drive with Josh Lam.
I want to say what I do best for the skin, I feel best when I grow, it's always been and always will until the end. A lot of mixed reaction to Post Malone performing with the remaining members, living members of Nirvana, Adam Sandler introduced them as Post Nirvana. I thought it was great, but a lot of people did not. This makes me feel better about my prediction Post Malone to be next year's Super Bowl halftime show, do something else like that. But you might be thinking, Josh, I watched the SNL 50 show last night on NBC. I don't remember seeing Nirvana get together and Post Malone performing. Did I miss it?
No you did not. That was actually from the Homecoming concert that they had on Friday. You might remember on Friday we were talking about a problem that SNL had. That's a good problem, but an uncomfortable position that Lorne Michaels is in as the guy who runs the show and knows everybody.
The studio in which the show airs holds 300 people. You can't fit all the former cast members over 50 years. You can't fit all the celebrities. You can't fit everybody in that one place.
So what do you do? You make a full weekend out of it. So at I believe Radio City Music Hall, they had an exclusive show on Friday and this aired on Peacock where they brought everybody back. Anybody who was a former cast member, you could bring your wife, you could bring your husband, you could bring your friend, whatever. And they had a Homecoming concert that just was awesome. It opened up with Jimmy Fallon doing the Blues Brothers, paying tribute and there was a lot of great things from it. But what struck me watching that back and then watching Sunday's show, the Homecoming concert was better than the show that aired on NBC last night because what dawned on me and this is sad because I really like SNL.
I have my entire life. SNL in today's culture, today's pop culture, they've become a dinosaur and they've become two establishment and that's the problem. And I'll give you a good example of what I mean. They had a Q&A session where you get the show off, you get the flex, all the celebrities that are in the room. So you have people ask questions such as former cast members, you had a funny moment with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a dog and Adam Driver. That was great. That was funny. It was a highlight from last night. But there was one point where Ryan Reynolds asked a question and you had Blake Lively next to him and Tina Fey asked, hey, how are you doing?
And Ryan Reynolds is like, oh, we're good. Why do you ask? And that's kind of the joke, oh, ha ha ha. They're going through like a lawsuit. It's a big deal.
Okay. That's their way of clowning it. In reality, this should be something that SNL made fun of every single week. The fact that Ryan Reynolds likes SNL enough to show up to this thing with Blake Lively amidst them being in the headlines of this whole deal tells you that SNL has become two establishment.
Like they used to be cutting. My parents, they watched on Saturday. I didn't stay up for this.
Saturday, they had the first, they aired the original episode from 50 years ago, which by the way was the same day as the 75 World Series, the classic between the Red Sox and the Reds. And what my mom's reaction was, this is incredibly edgy. You couldn't do any of this stuff nowadays. And again, that's what the show used to be. It used to be edgy and it used to like cross lines and cross boundaries.
They don't do that anymore. And part of it is you don't want to tick off your celebrity friends. You know who's very close friends with Blake Lively?
Taylor Swift. How many Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey sketches do you remember seeing the last few years? They're right at the center of culture and they're not making fun of them.
Why? Because they want them to show up to the after parties. They want them to show up to these deals. So in that case, it's establishment, but you still should be able to pull off a night like last night when you have Eddie Murphy on stage and you have Will Ferrell letting loose and Kate McKinnon and Kristen Wiig. These are incredibly talented people and I was entertained to watch it. But another thing dawned on me, Eddie Murphy was very much restrained.
So is Will Ferrell. It seemed there was a level that they wanted to go to that you can't go to for FCC reasons on network television. And that just doesn't work for comedy nowadays. Like take again the event on Friday night, Will. Because it was on Peacock, there are things you can do that you can't do on network television. So they had this amazing, and this might have been the highlight of the weekend if it wasn't the music, a medley of all the Lonely Island songs. And you had T-Pain, you had Bad Bunny singing I Just Had Sex. Like you had this whole thing, Lady Gaga singing a song, I can't say the title for, that Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake did together in a sketch Once Upon a Time.
And you did this whole thing and it was the best thing of the weekend. And you could not do it on the network TV show. You just couldn't.
You couldn't do it. There was a sketch where Will Ferrell is making fun of the Drake, Kendrick Lamar song. And it was very funny. But you probably couldn't do that on the Sunday show either. So you just look at where comedy's at today. I don't think a network TV slot constrained by FCC rules is the place for a, I don't want to say the word transgressive, but for an edgy, risk-taking comedy show, I don't think that's the proper space for it. So my prediction is, like this is SNL 50 and I love the show, I don't think we're going to see an SNL 60.
I don't. Because when Lorne Michaels steps down, you're going to have NBC execs saying we're paying too much money to do this show live and Lorne's been able to fight those people off because of his stature over the last 50 years. And also you have Ted Sarandis at Netflix and all these others who are like, we don't want to create a Saturday Night Live show out of respect to Lorne Michaels that essentially takes their show out of business.
But when Lorne steps down, you're going to start seeing the Sharks, if not sooner. Like if, why hasn't Netflix created a Friday night whatever and done that where everything, you can be unfiltered and you can, and they obviously have a great interest in comedy. I don't know. I wonder if any of those platforms would like buy SNL or tried to. Maybe.
Maybe something to consider. But yeah, SNL, it's become a dinosaur. It's become too establishment. I did like the show. I thought Bill Murray doing his top 10 SNL anchors or weekend update anchors was great. I thought Steve Martin's monologue was fantastic. Adam Sandler's song was very heartfelt, very good. It's kind of crazy that you didn't have anything with Chevy Chase paying homage to him, even though he was there. And the same thing kind of with Dana Carvey, who I don't think was there or really anything with Dan Aykroyd. But I thought the Friday night show was better than the Sunday show.
And I think it's because of the restraints of network TV and the FCC allowing you to do certain things and disallowing you to do others. So that's what I thought. But the music was the highlight for me the entire weekend, whether it be Lonely Island's medley or post Nirvana or even during the show last night, Paul McCartney not doing the on the nose Hey Jude or Paul Simon doing the on the nose The Boxer, getting Paul Simon together with Sabrina Carpenter, the oldest of the best, the youngest of the best together performing a song great, Paul McCartney doing Golden Slumbers, Carry the Weight, The End. A medley of that was great.
Lil Wayne doing the halftime show that he would have done if he was given the New Orleans Super Bowl halftime show a week ago. We got to see what that looks like. I just thought it was fabulous. I really did. From a music perspective, I enjoyed the show. I did. Another thing I enjoyed as that was happening, not the NBA All-Star game, William Byron winning another Daytona 500.
Want to be sure to give William Byron a shout out, a former guest of the show, friend of the show. My brother was actually at the Daytona 500. But he didn't stick around because Ryan McGee put this well at ESPN. It was hot at the start of the day and then you get the rain delay. So then you're wet and then it got cold at night. So if you stuck around for the whole deal, good on you. My brother was not one of those people, but William Byron, he stuck around, he ended up winning the race at Daytona Motor Speedway.
