--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chris Vannini covers college football for The Athletic. College football is complicated. Chris, you cover it for a living, and even you think it's complicated.
--:-- Chris Vannini: College sports has always been built differently, run differently. It would be impossible to explain it to anybody outside of this country, I think.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But on Today Explained, we're going to attempt the impossible. We're going to try to explain college football to people inside and even people outside this country.
--:-- Chris Vannini: But why, some say, explain college football? Why choose this as our goal?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why climb the highest mountain? Why does Rice play Texas?
--:-- Chris Vannini: We choose to explain college football on today's show and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. And the others, too.
--:-- [Support for this show comes from ServiceNow.]
--:-- ServiceNow AI Platform: AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
--:-- ServiceNow AI Platform: And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent.
--:-- ServiceNow AI Platform: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now.
--:-- [Support for Today Explained comes from Sierra AI.]
--:-- Sierra AI: We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained! My name is Chris Vannini, and I'm a senior writer for The Athletic who covers college football.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And something is amiss in the college football world right now. Well, the season has finally started. Welcome to Fort Worth, folks. This is the one the college football world has been waiting for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's kind of tail-ending what has been conference realignment the third summer in a row.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The ACC just announced that they're inviting Stanford, Cal, and SMU to join the ACC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yay! Where geographic movement of teams within conferences has kind of upended the sport.
--:-- Chris Vannini: People saying maybe the ACC should now be the ACPC. The Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast? Yeah, yeah, ACPC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then you have SMU. Moved schools that have never really played each other into the same conferences moving forward.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Why would Oregon State play Oregon? I know. It's dumb. Washington, Washington State. Even dumber. I know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All in the name of television money, and it's created an uncertain future for basically everything beginning next year when a lot of these changes go into effect.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So while fans are excited that football is back and they can watch touchdowns and everything, a lot of fans are worried about the future of their school and their conference or where they sit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: An uncertain future for basically everything piqued our interest. We asked Chris how much everything he meant by everything.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Certainly college football realignment won't affect the price of blue heat talkies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the SEC and the Big Ten have become the two most powerful conferences in the sport.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That's the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten, which was once based in the Midwest, but is about to stretch from New Jersey to Los Angeles now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as they have accumulated more money, more membership, there's a much more uneven playing field than we've ever had before.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And so it's just uncertain of, will these conferences want to abide by the same rules as everybody else in the future? Will they want to stage their own postseason instead of competing with everybody else?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a lot of unknowns, but these are some of the concerns and things that people around the sport are talking about because the talent on the football field and the money is being consolidated more and more at the very top within these two leagues.
--:-- Chris Vannini: If they eliminate divisions and you add Oregon, Washington, UCLA, USC, you know, what happens to the Wisconsin's? What happens to the Michigan States? What happens to those teams that are really good programs, but they're just a notch below?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do they drop even further below in the conference now?
--:-- Chris Vannini: But of course, that's not everything. It sounded a lot like conference realignment was mostly going to affect college football.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we asked Chris if people who don't follow the sport will notice.
--:-- Chris Vannini: I don't think casual observers will notice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that's kind of the point. College sports have had conferences, geographically based conferences, for more than a century.
--:-- Chris Vannini: These were formed when your team traveled by bus and when your school worked with the nearby schools for academic purposes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These conferences were largely geographically based, but now they are not so much.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Now you have teams from Los Angeles joining the Midwest-based conference. The Atlantic Coast Conference is about to add Stanford and Cal from the Pacific Coast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it doesn't really make sense if you think about it.
--:-- Chris Vannini: But if you're someone who doesn't really think about it, if you just want to watch the biggest games, if you just want to watch the teams you've heard of, this is probably good news for you because you're going to get more of those games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The concern is who gets left behind, who are the schools that are not among the biggest brands that will not be making as much money in the future.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And as this game of musical chairs, as it almost feels like, as that winds down, there are schools, there are fans of those schools who worry about getting left behind and what it means not only for their athletic departments, but in some cases, the university as a whole.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So a bunch of big, important college football teams are bailing on a bunch of other pretty big, important college football teams.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And if this is a pattern that were to continue, it could throw the whole system into flux, leaving morale in American colleges at an all-time low.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked Chris how we got here.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Well, schools have changed conferences over the decades. You might have a South Carolina go from the ACC to the SEC or Tulane pulled out of the SEC many decades ago because of academic reasons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they were largely minimal type of moves.
--:-- Chris Vannini: But in 1984 the Supreme Court decision between NCAA versus the Board of Regents changed the rules for television.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The NCAA's argument that its television plan can have no significant anti-competitive effect since it has no market power must be rejected.
--:-- Chris Vannini: As a matter of law, the absence of proof of market power does not justify a naked restriction on price or output.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as a factual matter, it is evidence from the record that the NCAA does possess market power.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Instead of the NCAA doing the television deals, conferences and schools could now do their own television deals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And ever since then, there's been a huge explosion in money directly with the conference and the schools that are making this money.
--:-- Chris Vannini: There used to be many, many independent teams that weren't in a conference, Penn State, Florida State, Miami, they were football independents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then it became more valuable to be in a conference because that's where the television money was.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So everybody kind of retreated toward their geographic-based conferences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as the SEC and the Big Ten, with their larger fan bases, with their larger alumni bases, with their larger TV viewerships, they're starting to get more television money because they draw better ratings.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And then you have schools who are not in those conferences want to get in those conferences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Southeastern Conference said Texas A&M is set to join the league next year.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That gives the SEC 13 members and its first edition since South Carolina and Arkansas in 1992.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Aggies who play Arkansas Saturday in Arlington give the SEC entry into major TV markets such as Houston and Dallas.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And now the Pac-12 conference, the Pacific Coast-based conference, is on the verge of collapsing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's only two teams left because everybody else has left.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And so it's getting consolidated. These conferences that used to be 10, 11 teams are now 18 teams.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's really kind of a new frontier.
--:-- Chris Vannini: How did the Pac-12 basically implode?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, this started in 2021 when Texas and Oklahoma announced they would leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference.
--:-- Chris Vannini: These major brands that were stuck in the conferences that they were stuck in, getting shares that were going to be significantly lower than peers that were in the Big Ten and the SEC, they really didn't have a choice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that threw everybody into a panic about what other big moves could come.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The next year, USC and UCLA announced they're going to join the Big Ten, the Midwest-based Big Ten Conference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Both teams in Los Angeles, the closest school in the Big Ten to Los Angeles, Nebraska.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That is how far away those two teams are from the rest of the Big Ten.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That left the Pac-12 down to 10 teams.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And at that point, you could either expand and try to backfill and get some spots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the conference didn't want to do that.
--:-- Chris Vannini: It decided not to add other Big 12 teams.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And instead, it went through its media rights negotiation in a very vulnerable position.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The school presidents also believed that they could get more money than the market kind of determined.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They passed on a deal last year with ESPN and Fox that would have paid them about maybe $30 million per year.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And when the Pac-12 passed on that, the Big 12 conference jumped ahead of the line and said, basically, we'll do that deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll take that contract.
--:-- Chris Vannini: ESPN and Fox agreed to a media rights deal with the Big 12 finalizing the proposed agreement that will renew the partnership through the 2030 to 2031 season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And suddenly the Pac-12 was left without many suitors.
--:-- Chris Vannini: It, a couple weeks ago, presented an Apple TV-based media rights contract to its schools.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It wasn't appealing enough to those schools.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And so a few more of them, Washington and Oregon, went to the Big Ten.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado went to the Big 12, leaving only Oregon State and Washington State left in what is now a two-team conference.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So are they going to change the name to the Pac-2? It's unclear what the future of that is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They could backfill by adding a bunch of schools from the Mountain West Conference.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They could just straight up go join the Mountain West Conference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's unclear yet how much money is available in the leftover Pac-12 brand and what else they have.
--:-- Chris Vannini: But there's not a lot of time because this all goes into place next summer and there's no TV deal in place for the Pac-2.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they need to move pretty hastily to figure out what their plans are, either completely abandon and finally end the conference or try to rally and pull some other people together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Clearly, this is all about money.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Can you give us an idea, Chris, of how much money is on the table here?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, this is solely about television revenue.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The Big Ten last year announced its new seven-year TV deal with Fox, NBC, and CBS worth about $7 billion in total.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The individual schools could get upwards of $80 million per year or more.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The SEC, the Southeastern Conference's deal with ESPN, could pay schools upwards of $70 million per year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a lot more than the Big 12 or the ACC, the Atlantic Coast Conference, where schools are making about $30 million per year.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So that Big 10, that SEC number, that has risen dramatically over the last decade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's why those conferences have become the place you want to be if you're a school, because you're just getting so much more money.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And that money is more important than the legacy of your college football team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The standing you have in a league that you've established over decades.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The feeling is, if you're not finding ways to make more money, your competition is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just like anything in business.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And instead of these schools and conferences viewing themselves as business partners, they view themselves as competition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as a result, it gets extremely cutthroat.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And you have these century-old rivalries like Oklahoma versus Oklahoma State, Washington versus Washington State, Oregon versus Oregon State, that are going by the wayside now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it ultimately because they believe it a game of musical chairs and you just want to have a seat at the table whenever that ends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: College sports is going through some major upheaval right now.
--:-- Chris Vannini: We may be in a few years in a spot where college athletes are getting paid from the schools.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if the schools have to pay the players, you want to be in a spot where you have enough money to do that.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So the bigger television revenue, the bigger television spotlights on the weekends, and having the money you need for the future, that's leading these teams to basically throw all kinds of tradition out the back just for the sake of money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remind us who's losing here?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Well, the biggest losers right now are Oregon State and Washington State, who no longer really have a conference to compete in right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they're going to be making far less money in whatever they end up doing.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That's less money that can pay off facilities debt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's less money that can go to benefits for the athletes.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And it's difficult for their fans who want to watch their teams play in bigger games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now they won't be in as many of those big games.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They won't have their rivalries with Washington and Oregon State.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Other victims, so to speak, are the athletes.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The Pac-12 student athletes now are going to be traveling across country to New Jersey, to Boston, to Orlando, to play conference games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That becomes very difficult for their families to come watch them.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And so it's all of these changes are being made around the athletes, and they're the ones who are impacted the most, yet they're not really receiving any of the benefit of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so Chris, if the fans are losing and the teams are losing and the players are losing and their families are losing and the schools are losing, that kind of sounds like if you just go to the wrong school, literally everyone in your orbit is losing.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Is the system just broken?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, college football is not broken.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And that's the biggest, I think, frustrating point out of all of this is that it didn't need to be changed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Attendance went up last year for the first time in a long time.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Ratings are spectacular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: College football is the number two most popular sport in the country when you look at all these different kinds of metrics.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And so the sport's not broken, but it's going to look dramatically different next year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you do start to wonder if fans get turned off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so college football isn't broken, but money is threatening to make bigger winners out of the winners and something akin to losers out of the lesser teams.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's just call them the losers here for short.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to ask Chris if what we're seeing in the Pac-12 is going to happen everywhere else.
--:-- [Support for Today Explained comes from Chime.]
--:-- Chime: Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Chime gets that, says Chime.
--:-- Chime: Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage.
--:-- Chime: Getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.
--:-- Chime: Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can work on your financial goals through Chime today.
--:-- Chime: You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's chime.com slash explained.
--:-- [Support for Today Explained comes from Apple Card.]
--:-- Apple Card: Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The titanium Apple Card is no different.
--:-- Apple Card: It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes.
--:-- Apple Card: Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Terms and more at applecard.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're five feet nothing, a hundred and nothing, and you got hardly a speck of athletic ability.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And you hung in with the best college football team in the land for two years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you're also going to walk out of here with a degree from the university.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back with Chris Vannini from The Athletic.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The Pac-12 has been gutted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked him if other college sports conferences can look forward to a similar fate.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Well, these big movements always come at the end of television deals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's when you're free and more able to move to another conference.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And the next time a lot of these deals are going to start coming up is the early 2030s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So while realignment probably pauses for a bit here, it's going to come back.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And it's going to come back in the early 2030s when these television deals come up again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, we don't know what the television world is going to look like at that time.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That is a big part of this as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cable subscribers are going down.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Streaming is not exactly filling it up at the level that it was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: ESPN is making dramatic cuts.
--:-- Chris Vannini: You know, does Apple buy Disney at some point?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, like we don't know what that future is going to look like, but that's the next time stuff is going to happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People wonder, will the Big Ten or the SEC or those schools break away from the NCAA?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Will they go do their own thing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will they create their own league, their own conference separate from that?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Could college sports separate from college itself and become semi-professional where they're simply leasing the identity and the markings and brandings of these schools.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everything keeps changing.
--:-- Chris Vannini: The world is changing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The television world is changing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we'll see in seven, eight, nine years how different everything is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why do we have this system?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Why is it so complicated?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why isn't this just like the NFL where there's like, you know, one league, two conferences?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Nobody runs college sports, and that's been a good thing and a bad thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when you're facing crises like you are now, it's very much a bad thing.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Conferences were formed a century ago when geography was the most important thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know when college football wasn't on television coast and what was more important is getting fans to your games.
--:-- Chris Vannini: You wanted to have games against schools where your fans could travel to and the other team could travel to so you could fill up your stadium.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As television got bigger, as college football became televised coast-to-coast, it opened up the doors where that wasn't needed as more.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Now, Alabama recruits players from California to come play football.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's just it's a thing like transportation is a lot easier than it was in 1905.
--:-- Chris Vannini: You know, so it just the world has shrunk.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as a result, these conferences are now losing their original identity and kind of their original purpose.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They still exist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the NCAA exists really as a heat shield.
--:-- Chris Vannini: You know, the NCAA has the insurance.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The NCAA kind of just protects the conferences, the conferences then protect the schools.
--:-- Chris Vannini: If schools were to break away or if conferences were to break away, they would still need to create their own organization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They need somebody to enforce the rules.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They need somebody to cover liability and all these different things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's a lot harder to simply break away because you also have conferences and schools that very much do not agree with each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This crisis, though, as you explained, it really affects more than anyone.
--:-- Chris Vannini: These two teams that are left in the Pac-12.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that going to be a big enough stink to promote change in this system?
--:-- Chris Vannini: Well, the change would come from the schools just in the NCAA and the schools are the one making these deals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The NCAA has no power, no control, no influence over what the conferences do.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And the court system has implied recently that the conferences may be the ones with all the power anyway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that's where a lot of the decisions are being made.
--:-- Chris Vannini: That's where the power lies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just, it's a very messy structure of governance because of how college sports was formed.
--:-- Chris Vannini: It wasn't formed as a professional league and you had 10, 15 teams and then two leagues merged into a 30 team conference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was always, you had people over in the Southeast, you had people in the Northeast, they played different amounts of games.
--:-- Chris Vannini: College football for a century didn't have a true national championship.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was determined via a sports writer poll, you know, like that's how we determined it because there's so many teams you can't play everybody.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Only in the last, you know, 20 plus years have we developed a real postseason, a real playoff, a real structure to how some of these things work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So college sports has always been built differently, run differently.
--:-- Chris Vannini: It would be impossible to explain it to anybody outside of this country, I think.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, no. We're hoping to do that right now.
--:-- Chris Vannini: But that's also the charm of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For anybody who has gone to a university, like universities play such a different role in this country than they do everywhere else from research, from camaraderie, from pride.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Like you go to a college and most people, you go to a big state school and you've got a sports team and you want your college team to win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you graduate and maybe you go back for homecoming and you just, you keep that connection there.
--:-- Chris Vannini: And it's always been very, very unique in the entire world of sports.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as television money has become so big, as coaching salaries have become so big, it has felt inevitable that we are inching closer and closer to a professional model because there's so much money and very little of it is going directly to the athletes.
--:-- Chris Vannini: So the future of college football is more and more money everywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As long as the television money is there, and that is kind of uncertain with the way that world is going with ESPN making cuts with mergers potentially happening down the road.
--:-- Chris Vannini: It feels like there is a bubble that is going to burst as it relates to TV rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing is sports is the only thing keeping cable alive, but I think college sports and sports in general have a major problem with the next generation of fans.
--:-- Chris Vannini: You're not going to create the connection that previous generations had when all you had was a cable bundle and you could watch your local team every day or every Saturday when they came on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I got to say it's been a minute since I've watched a college football game, but I'm about to become the biggest Pac-2 fan this world has ever seen.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They are going to be America's darlings this year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oregon State in particular should have a pretty good team.
--:-- Chris Vannini: They look like a top 20 team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think if the season plays out in a way where one of them has a chance to win what is in its final year as the Pac-12, you're going to have a lot of college football fans rooting for the Beavers and rooting for the Cougars.
--:-- Chris Vannini: Go Beavers, go Cougars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm all in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chris Vannini, TheAthletic.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, who was a Division I third string linebacker back in his day, and Siona Peterous, who wasn't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hadi and Siona had help from Laura Bullard, Amanda Llewellyn, David Herman, and Matthew Collette, who once made an entire podcast about college football It's called The Season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was only one season. Check it out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from This One's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and Doug. Lemu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But now, we want you to feel it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cue the emu music, Lemu.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save, we say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That may have been too much feeling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Only pay for what you need at libertymutual.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Savings vary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It never looked so good.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You look the same.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with this camera, everything looks better, especially me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Selfies? Check, please.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: New and existing customers can get the new iPhone 17 Pro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With eligible phone trade-in and unlimited ultimate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Any condition guaranteed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Best 5G source, route metrics, data, United States, 1H, 125.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All rights reserved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trade-in and additional terms apply for all offers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: See verizon.com for details.
