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from you. We got a couple from earlier on that we're going to answer. I want to start kind of by talking some national scene stuff. We'll talk some IU stuff, we'll talk some Bloomington stuff and hopefully kind of an array of things that'll be of interest to people. But a lot going on obviously on the national scene as we are still awaiting a ruling in the House case, which of course is the case.
That could end up finally pushing the NCAA a little bit closer into the direction of directly compensating athletes, but also has a whole bevy of issues that go along with it. And so, you know, where we're at right now is essentially that there's been a pause in the process. I remember talking like back in January or February about how the settlement date was supposedly set for April 8th, you know, which was the OR April 7th, I guess it was which was
the national championship day. That was supposed to be the day that everything got settled on this. Well, it didn't largely because the judge didn't like the roster limits that had popped up in the midst of all of this and then and didn't like the the general idea that people had essentially been pushed out of college athletics as athletes. You know, whether or not that's a primary concern, it's certainly a concern to the judge.
And I think, you know, one of the things with these class action lawsuits often times is, you know, if you agree to something that's already caused harm to a group of people, that can be problematic. And the problem, though, is like, you know, college athletics essentially just assumed that this thing was going to get rubber stamped. They'd already made a lot of roster changes. They'd already eliminated several positions.
And this is where I think, you know, college athletics continues to walk this razor thin line of trying to maintain whatever they're trying to claim amateurism is, while also simultaneously looking at their balance sheets because their businesses and saying, gosh, this isn't going to work. We got to do some cuts, especially if we got to pay 20 plus $1,000,000 a year in revenue sharing to athletes.
And so this is I think it kind of a curious spot right now for the judge to be in, for college athletics to be in. You've got in this situation essentially where so many of the. Things that we thought we're going to be settled by this point aren't a lot of the NIL deals that were being signed. Are now just kind of ensconced in in law like they're not going anywhere.
Whereas, you know, for a while there there was this mad rush to try to get as many as many nil deals signed prior to the settlement date because the theory was that there were financial rules were going to change. Now it looks like. The financial rules may not change, period. And it's interesting because there was a. I'm trying to get the best way to describe this earlier, but several people tweeted about
this. Essentially the nil clearing house that Deloitte, the consulting company, is supposed to be providing. First of all, they're calling it Nil go, which might be the single stupidest thing name wise I've heard in this entire process. Nil go? Like what that Darren Hytner on, on Twitter got a, a good joke where he's like, you know, what would you call something that's meant to stop NIL deals as much
as possible? Well, of course you call it NIL go because we are living in the upside down. But no, the Deloitte clearing house. I'm going to actually call this up and put it on the screen for those of you who are watching 'cause I think it's, it's interesting to kind of dig into this. Let me see if I can like zoom in on this a little bit so everybody can see what I'm talking about. Let's see, that is not really visible.
I apologize. This is what happens when I try to blow up something on Twitter. Let me go back and and not put that on the screen. It's actually more readable the way that it is right there. So summary of nil go. I can't believe I might have to call this stupid thing nil. Go. Purpose of nil go to efficiently clear legitimate third party nil deals parentheses contract slash payments with a total value of $600.00 or more.
To reflect. True. Market dynamics for NIL deals without arbitrary value regulation and to support enforcement institutions and student athletes as part of the evolving collegiate athletics landscape. So basically what they are setting forward as how this will work is that they're going to try to evaluate whether an individual or an entity is the person giving the, the, the payout for the nil amount, whether there's a valid business purpose verification.
I'm supposing that they think this is going to stop people from getting paid half $1,000,000 to like have their
picture on a website. And then a range of compensation analysis for every deal, a 12 point analysis assessing A compensation aligns with similarly situated individuals, incomparable deals, the primary user groups, obviously student athletes or just athletes as we should be calling them representatives of the athletes, institutional users and payers, which of of course of the people who are actually supplying the
money. And what's interesting about this, I think, is that the the, the deal review outcomes at the very end, you go through this process that I just outlined and this clearing house is supposed to give one of three statuses cleared, not cleared in review. I guess information needed is the 4th status, but that's like a kind of a temporary thing.
And if a deal is not cleared because it doesn't pass muster according to these totally not arbitrary things that they're putting down, they can do one of four things, renegotiate and resubmit, proceed at risk of eligibility consequences, cancel the deal or request neutral arbitration. It's interesting because this. Clearing House does not. Actually appear to have any power to stop deals themselves. All they can do is say, well, you might be ineligible if you
proceed with this deal. Which is a really. Strange loophole if you think about it, because that essentially means that this whole thing could essentially just be a facade where yes, we're going to have NIL deals and yes, there's going to be deals that we're going to say are not fair market value. But then what are they going to do? They're going to refer to the NCAA and the NCAA is going to try to turn around and tell an athlete, sorry, you are ineligible because you've been
given this deal. I see lawsuits out the wazoo on this like this is this this looks whoever at Deloitte signed up for this and signed up for the the amount of money they're going to be paid. To do this deal and to not have like executive authority to cancel deals unilaterally based upon the findings like that person deserves a raise, a promotion, whatever, because that is a smart cookie.
This, this looks very much like the NC double as legal approach with everything, which is we're going to throw a ton of lawyers at something and if we don't like the finding in court, we're going to throw even more lawyers at it. Which has led to, of course, 10s of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the last 15 years of the NCAA throwing money at lawyers to fix things. It's been great for the lawyers, hasn't been great for really
anybody else. But it's interesting because there was another piece to this that got revealed last week, which, you know, again, came from Deloitte as Deloitte I, I was either asked questions or was there was something going on? It was a meeting. I'm sorry. This was from Ross Dellinger from Yahoo. And so he had a tweet. On the 13th. So I think a couple days ago in a meeting. With Deloitte officials at ACC
spring meetings. The company shared with a DS and coaches interesting features on the NIL Clearinghouse, which is kind of what I just quoted you, but according to their analysis, based upon the criteria, 70% of past deals from Booster. Collectives would have been denied, while 90% of deals from public companies would have been approved. Now this is a really interesting thing because obviously you know
one of the things that makes. NIL work or dare I say it, one of the things that makes NIL go in this whole process is private donors, private companies, you know, organizations of people or people who are organizing themselves would be a better way of putting it. Who are putting money towards these NIL deals or individuals like the oil magnet at Texas Tech or you know, some other folks that we could mention?
Who are amassing significant amounts of money in order to pay for recruits, pay for transfers, pay for rosters and, you know, for the clearing house to be set up in a way where it says, well, sorry, the booster collectives aren't going to be allowed to do this, but public companies can. I think really is an interesting indicator of where the NCAA and the school's mindsets are at. Which is where. The money is at that these companies are looking for, or they did the athletic
departments are looking for. It's all from public companies, it's all from businesses. The money that the athletic departments would like to keep is the money from boosters. It's the money from individual. Because that's if. You know anything about college athletics, you know that, you know, varsity clubs and you know all these, all the revenue you're getting off of tickets and sweets and, and you know, special dispensations for tickets and things like that.
It's all coming from individuals, often times rich individuals. And yes, boosters have been used essentially as a gigantic slush fund. But that's because ultimately the power and how that money is spread around is largely laying in the hands of the the athletic departments and the individual schools and the coaches. And to watch that flip to where it's going directly to athletes, I think is is a real problem in the eyes of the NCAA.
So again, one of those things I saw that and I'm immediately like, there's no way that some of these private individuals or booster collectives are going to just sit back and allow the NCAA through this third party, you know, clearing house to say, sorry, your money's no good here. But their money is there's it's it's unenforceable. So we're going to wait to see what the final verdict looks
like in in the house case. They're they're supposed to be, there was supposed to be a ruling tomorrow or at least the final like rebuttal statements in what is supposed to be done about the situation involving the roster limits. But I don't know if the judge is going to find something there. There was an early statement submitted by the plaintiffs, which is housed and like that those lawyers saying, you know, this works for the majority of people.
Why don't we continue with this? It's very fascinating how all of this is is coming together. So I don't know if we're going to see a resolution on this in the short term or not, but that's kind of where things are at right now. And I'm still promising to do a large deep dive on this is a podcast series and just waiting for the dust to settle so we can have a sense of what we're looking at officially. But that's kind of where things are at with all of that.
And just kind of a curious set up here. By and large, I don't think anybody really knows where it's going to land. And so that is going to be quite fascinating. I did and we had a couple of comments here, William, saying ignorant fans will never view athletes as employees, even though that's exactly what they've become. It's why people like me catch up because I demand productivity and excellence. You know, it's, it's interesting.
I, I, I've often, often question this with the idea of, oh, you're an employee, you know, you need to produce at a high level. Like so much of this is now, I think, misdirected at, at the idea that athletes at the college level aren't trying hard. Like organizations make decisions about athletes and sport all the time. You know, and that isn't, that's not just a domestic thing in the US.
This happens overseas. Like there's plenty of roster spots given to guys who have a lot of value or good athletes. Maybe they're not playing well. But you know, the idea that I, I keep hearing floated about, oh, you're an employee, you're going to have to play or act differently. Like the culture of the sport is the culture of the sport.
And what I find interesting about this whole setup right now in terms of how people perceive college athletes and the idea that somehow that perception is going to fundamentally change if they're classified as employees. I mean, look, I like, I, I have employees that are students at Indiana in my roles by the various roles that I do in media. Like I have people that get paid to do work. You know, the idea that you're getting paid and not doing work
is just not realistic. And with a team and with a team full of, of athletes, a player having a series of bad games is not the same as not performing and therefore not deserving the money that you were you were granted. Like that's what a contract is all about. We, we pay you this money, you go do this and then we re evaluate at the end of the contract unless you do something egregious to break the contract. That's just how employment
works. So I I don't think that the employment switch over is going to make that big of a
difference. It's a lot more accurate to the actual situation with things with college athletics, at least at the the highest levels of revenue producing sports than what we have currently, which is essentially almost like, you know, I would, I would actually argue right now by not being listed as employees, by not having collective bargaining, you're letting more athletes get away with, you know, not performing or not doing what they should do because there is
no real way to officially say the money is tied to work. The whole idea of employment is, well, the money's tied to work right now. It's not. And you've heard these stories from around college sports, especially in the last year of NIL deals that were signed with no enforcement provision on the part of the colleges because they can't, because you, you're not supposed to be paying athletes like for all of this. Like we don't want pay for play.
Anybody that's a fan that says you don't want pay for play, you're, you actually do want pay for play Like you do want somebody to play and have money tied to their actual execution of that. You don't want a situation like you've got right now where you got unenforceable contracts because you can't tie it to the actual performance on the field or even the performance of going out and doing autograph sessions or whatever on behalf of the, of the university.
And so that's, there's a lot of paradoxes with the way that people think about this. And it really does require, for a lot of folks, I think, a real shift in mentality. And I don't blame people for being confused about it. It's just kind of a curious thing to think about in terms of the the public perception of all of this. Greg Lamont asks any thoughts on state legislation for NILIE, Arkansas? So, you know what, I've been fascinated. It's a great question, Greg.
I've been fascinated throughout the course of this entire saga about this idea of states trying to leverage NIL legislation at the state level to give the schools in their state a competitive advantage in recruiting or in the transfer portal or whatnot. And this happened before NIL was actually a thing, you know, so before the Supreme Court decision in Alston in two in 2021 that essentially threw the doors open, it didn't, it didn't start NIL.
It simply said you can't regulate this the way that you've been regulating at NCAA. You don't have any legal standing. But prior to that, you started to see and, and really in the immediate aftermath, a lot of states passing NIL laws that they thought were going to give them an advantage, but a lot of them had catches. Like, you know, Texas passed a law saying you can make money on NIL as a college athlete, but you can't make any as a high
school athlete. Which is what led Quin Ewers to decommit from Texas, graduate high school a year early, move to Ohio, commit to Ohio State, make NIL money there, only to then transfer back to Texas once they once he was eligible to make it, he made extra money that way. California had a law that looked like it was going to be inclusive, but there were all these restrictions in it.
The states that didn't have NIL laws that they passed, Indiana being one of them, actually ended up giving their schools a competitive advantage. Not everybody took advantage of the competitive advantage, but the the the states that didn't have laws essentially allowed the schools to make their own decisions about name, image and likeness and how that was going
to flow. And now this is a little bit of a different thing because what Greg is referring to about Arkansas was a bill that was passed and I think was signed by the governor of Arkansas that basically exempts NIL deals from state taxes and also exempts them from FOIA requests. So for those who don't know, a FOIA request is a Freedom of Information Act request. And essentially what that says is. Public records or records tied to public entities like universities.
Can be subject to open records request because they are in the the public sphere and and therefore are things that are of public interest. So, you know, you've seen a situation like it in Georgia where technically NIL deals are subject to FOIA, but the university has slow walked or just not responded to some of those FOIA requests. This actually ensconces in Arkansas law, you know, you know, basically publicity rights. And I don't think Arkansas may not have had any publicity
rights at this prior to this. A lot of states don't have publicity right laws. But basically it says if you make money through NIL now you cannot FOIA the contract and you also are exempt from being taxed at the state level off of that income. And, you know, I think that's one of those fascinating things where athletes might have a minor, a minorly less financial burden for a large NIL deal.
And and look, any money that's taxed is going to be some money that you're not having to deal with. But like, it's not as big of an advantage as people might think. For instance, like Florida doesn't have any income tax period. You know, Texas doesn't have any income tax. I think Tennessee doesn't have any income tax either. I think they've just got a state
sales tax. And so there's, there's already some protections built into some of the places that have income taxes about protecting money like this from those items. Greg, Greg apparently an expert on Arkansas income tax. I'll save a 4% income tax above 25,000 a year. Well, that's, that's a fairly sizable chunk of money. So this does help from that perspective.
I don't know that it's going to make that big of a difference though in as much as at the end of the day, you know, you're not talking about something that couldn't be overcome with a a slightly better deal being offered from somebody else. Like you're not talking about an insane difference in money.
You know, if you're, if you're going to give somebody say a $500,000 NIL deal and you know, you're looking at a situation where you need to overcome the fact that Arkansas isn't taxing them on the 4%, you're talking about extra $20,000. Now that does add up after a while, but how many, how many battles does every school need to win against Arkansas in
recruiting? So it might help Arkansas a little bit, but I think Arkansas, the, the city, the, the, the schools in Arkansas have bigger problems than just their income tax in terms of trying to attract talent. You know a lot of that being. You know it's. Just not a premier location in the SEC and you're fighting a lot of other reputational items there that that, you know, if you you get a small advantage. I just don't know that it's
enough. But I do think that you're going to see states continuing to jockey for this. And that I think is the most important thing is like what people don't understand. And, and this is where the, this, this Commission that Donald Trump wants to put together that would involve Nick Saban and others. It's, it's not something that can be solved at the federal level because there's no federal right of publicity laws.
There's no, I mean, you got federal income tax that applies to everybody, but every state has the ability to individually self regulate some of these things. You can't fix all of that at the national level unless you put in like a national right of publicity law, which is very much unlikely to happen given that right of publicity extends well beyond athletics and extends to things like acting.
And you know the? The other performing arts, you know, that's where a lot of this originally came from. So I do think it's going to be really fascinating watching all of this play out. I think the Arkansas things worth keeping an eye on. But like many of those NIL based laws that we saw pop up, you know, right around 2019-2020, 2021, I don't know that they made that big of a difference.
Like we haven't seen any states or any schools in particular, states making out like gangbusters because of the laws that were passed in their states. They're making out like gangbusters because like in Texas Tech's case, they have a rich guy who really wants Texas Tech to be good at football and basketball. And he's just, you know, essentially just making it rain in Lubbock. And that's bringing athletes in. That's really the big thing at this point.
The question is, how much are you making it rain? I mean, I don't know if you folks have seen this, but there was a note I saw the other day, I think it was Kurt Signetti that mentioned it. Like the salary cap, even though there's not supposed to be 1, but like, what's what it's costing to have a roster at the top levels of college football right now? Ryan Day two years ago said it was about 15 to $17 million. Kurt Signetti this summer said
it was 40 million. Dollars $40 million, I mean that's that's crazy That is that is a lot of money that's come in and it's one of those situations where that's got that's the thing that's got you got to get a handle on and I don't know I I I. I'll back up. I do know the NCAA and its schools are not up to that task because they consistently refuse to acknowledge what business they're in, except for maybe Kentucky, as Kent Beckman points out, Kentucky forming an LLCA viable alternative.
So here's the thing about the LLC with Kentucky Athletic. So for those who didn't see and don't know, like a limited liability corporation, this is a private entity which they are forming, which will allow them, they think to raise more money than they would as a public entity. And So what they've planned on doing, and I'm kind of borrowing this off of an SI article that was written by James Parks.
But so the the trustees of University of Kentucky approved a proposal to transfer their entire athletic department into a limited liability corporation, which they believe will allow them to explore things like public private partnerships, handling expenses, as you know, through that process rather than handling them as a public entity. And you know what I think is going to be fascinating about this? You know, Kentucky makes about $160 million in revenue every year.
They are not up in the Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, Texas A&M echelon. But there are solidly in that next year Indiana's in this tier as well. And what's going to be interesting with the LLC model? There are upsides and downsides to this approach. The upside is obviously you do have a lot more flexibility. Like I don't think people understand how absolutely complicated trying to do partnerships at the college level is if it's not directly related to education.
It's doable, but it's very Byzantine at at a bunch of places, Indiana being among them. And at the end of the day, an athletic department is not a for profit entity. It is a nonprofit entity. That's that's all essentially outside of the private schools who have a different model. Often times you're not supposed to make money as an athletic department.
This is always why, you know when when you'd get people who would loudly proclaim, well, nobody's making money in college athletics, like only 5 athletic departments were profitable. It's like, yes, congratulations, that's the point. What's like, Why do you think that that's a special thing for you to say? You know if. Indiana makes $100 million in revenue in athletics.
They need to spend $100 million in, in, in, in cash to demonstrate that they're not turning a profit because like the where else is it going to go? So what you've seen over the course of time is these athletic departments not being able to do what businesses would do and hoard cash or invest things or, you know, do the traditional capital improvements because they're they're supposed to be as close to budget neutral as possible. And So what you end up is, is with this situation where you
can't operate like a business. You have to operate in this weird nether region between a public entity and a private entity, but with all of the negatives of the public entity and none of the vantages of the private entity. Now, the the flip side of that is you don't pay taxes money, what you do have to do as a private entity.
And that's going to be kind of the interesting thing, you know, can Kentucky square this where they're not paying taxes on the money that they're bringing in through the LOCII? Don't think that's going to happen. But the flip side of it is, you know, there's, there's likely ways that they can attribute this to an educational process, provided we keep the current system where there's a direct connection in terms of enrollment and whatnot with the
athletes and the university. So I think it's an interesting strategy. I do think that the fact that maybe maybe there's another school that's done this, but this is the first one that I've seen, the fact that everybody isn't jumping on this bandwagon immediately should tell you that this is perhaps not a universally accepted or preferred method of going about handling this.
And I think it's going to be interesting to see how all that plays out as we see what the house settlement ends up being. So, So I don't know if they've actually done the transfer yet or if they've got the approval for it and they're just waiting. It could be that you've got other schools. Ready to do something similar to what Kentucky's doing. But gosh, who knows at this point. It's it's really wild. John Kaluter, our old friend.
True or false? All this nil miss mess can be traced back to Ricky Rowe and the tractor. I think maybe John Huber Ozzi chiming in. Oh, let me find this here. I'm old enough to know that unregulated commerce brings along thieves and scams. Who's looking out for the players? So this is an interesting thing. There have been no more strident opponents to agents in college sports than college athletic
departments. And this is something it's funny if you go back and you watch, I can't remember if it's the 87 semi final against UNLV or the 87 final against Syracuse. The Indiana games halftime show of one of those games. There's like a special that they do and it's on the the YouTube copy that I put up on on YouTube where they're interviewing like Dale Brown and a couple of other people.
And even during the game, there's mentions of like the agents, you know, Brent Musburger calls them flesh peddlers who go on campus and basically talk basketball players into committing for the draft. And then they never get drafted. And they're they're, you know, basketball dreams are over. It's a very parochial way of going about things and thinking about agents as being the evil ones. And you know, college was where
they were safe. College they were going to be taking care of. They were going to get an education. Everything was fought. Of course, this is also this is the mid 80s when you know, Memphis State has an entire team like not graduate. I think Villanova won the national title and maybe like half their players were epidemically eligible the next year. Maybe it wasn't Villanova, It
might have been somebody else. But you know, it's, it's hilarious thinking about that, thinking about SMU, thinking about the entire back story of the mid 80s and then all of this like, well, agents are bad. You shouldn't trust agents.
One of my big complaints through this entire process has been the unwillingness of colleges and universities to assist their own athletes in legal advice, tax advice, all of the things that you need and often times that not just an athlete, but an athlete's family is not prepared for. And this is completely on purpose by the NCAA. And its member schools, they want this to be as hard as possible. They want making money as a college athlete to be as hard as possible.
And they want to be able to turn around and say, see, we told you you're getting screwed by this agent. And and as Super Ozzy points out, rumors are players are paying like between 8% and 20%. Agents add taxes and family. You can see why kids want more and more. I mean, that's half of it. The other half is the price keeps going up because market value is much greater and everybody wants to win in college sports. So I don't think it's just the students.
Here we go. Devil D saving me here. It was the title game. He was referring to Derek Coleman. So there you go. But the but The thing is this like the the agent side of things, the NCAA wants to introduce like an agent registry and all of this, but they want to approve all of the people. And I think that a lot of actual agents who are representing athletes right now have made some really good points.
Which is that the NCAA is notorious for watching out for the NCAA schools are notorious for watching out for themselves. And this fiction that somehow you can't trust an agent, but you can trust the athletic department. And if you're an athlete is is silly. And it's not to say that all athletic departments are bad, but look, at the end of the day, it's business and business decisions get made. And the idea that, you know, that I've seen floated that athletes shouldn't be allowed to
have agents. It's like, so you want a situation where only one side has representation. I saw Bubba Cunningham had a quote about this kind of obliquely, where he's like, well, you know, I'm in favor of collective bargaining, but I don't think athletes should be employees. And it's like, well. Who are you collectively? Bargaining with then like what's the, what's the class of people that you're bargaining with at
that point? And if they're not allowed to unionize and you, you have to and then Bubarazzi just just brought that up. If you're not allowed, if you're not employees, you can't unionize. And if you can't? Unionize.
You don't have collective representation, so you want to have a situation where the colleges and the universities and their athletic departments have all of the power in the negotiation process, but the other party can't use an agent or has to use an agent that the other side has approved. That's that's take that out of college athletics.
And put it in any other form of business in the United States and tell me how long that lasts before getting sued into oblivion is would be what I would say there. These are again, these are emancipated adults. These are 18 year olds. And this is a business where you can make a lot of money and it costs money. I mean, anybody that's got money, like, I don't know, a millionaire that doesn't have an attorney and an accountant. You know, this is just, this is part of the cost of doing
business. But it kind of reminds me of that argument that I we heard for years that athletes wouldn't want to be paid because athletes would have to pay taxes on the money. And it's like, would you rather have the money and pay some of it in taxes or not have the money at all? I know which one I would choose.
So to go back to the original question about who's looking out for the athletes right now, sadly, it's only the athletes that are watching out for themselves because they haven't been permitted to classify as employees and have a union. And it would be a complicated thing to do. But it's why I don't really feel bad about these colleges and universities who are dealing with agents who are looking out for their clients. They're looking out for their
best interests. They're shopping them around. And, you know, we've gotten used to laughing at guys. There was one guy that just committed, I think to Vanderbilt who had been committed to Oklahoma, who had been committed to several other places. And people were joking about it. But you know, even with the amalavela stuff at the end of the day. A lot of these contracts aren't enforceable. And they're very one sided in as much as the schools have a lot of power to do what they want.
Athletes are exercising that power. And shockingly, the schools don't like that. So this is where, again, you either need as an industry, college sports needs to just agree that, hey, guess what? We're a business. These are professional athletes. They make money off of this. We have to set something up that's going to allow us to deal with it honestly. And we need to recognize that the people that are playing our employees now, it's funny, people are complaining about the
escalating costs. I, I saw something today that like the estimation is, I think it was Evan Miyakawa had this, that IU has spent like 10.1 million in portal signings so far, which is the highest in new portal signings. Obviously, you know, you've got players that are likely getting paid a lot of money to stay at their schools. But you know, the rumor that I think Boogie Flan might be commanding like 6 or $7,000,000 to go land somewhere at college.
And that's why I pulled out of the draft. I pull out of the draft too 'cause that's more money in one year than I would make in my first year. Really I think in my first two years as like a mid first round draft pick and and like more money you'd earn in three years if you were a low first round pick. And so the money is stupid right now, but people are missing why the money is stupid. The money is not stupid because
athletes are greedy. The money is stupid because colleges are stupid, OK, Colleges are acting stupidly about this and that, you know, we keep getting walked down this pathway of no return where you're going to have a completely unregulated marketplace and it's going to shove a ton of. Schools off the table who are just going to be like, we literally can't compete. It essentially is kind of what happened with European soccer where if you know, unless you are really lucky.
You the Champions League is off limits, your domestic league is off limits. There's a lot of that. You know, you really just need to take a hard, honest look at and standardize. And obviously a lot of it is waiting on what happens with this house settlement. Even if the house settlement gets blown up after a short period of time, you know, William saying how soon before school start trading athletes? I mean, that's, it's an
interesting question. It kind of comes along the same lines of one of the things I've floated on this podcast before, which is this idea of, well, maybe, maybe you need a developmental system much like you have in baseball or much like you have in soccer, where, you know, instead of a free
agency and a practice roster. What if Indiana, I'm sorry for those of you who have heard me say this before, what if Indiana in Indiana State got together and said, all right, we're going to recruit 150 football players to be part of what, you know, what we're doing. And we're going to send our developmental squad or our guys that haven't really performed over to Terre Haute and they're going to play in, what is it, the Ohio Valley Conference. I think they're going to play at
the one AA level. They're going to season, they're going to get better. They're going to get practice. They're going to play against live competition. And then we can call people up as we want to. We can send people down, we can do. The same thing with basketball. We got 20 guys, we got some developmental guys. They'll go play in the home and center. We'll have the rest of the players here in Bloomington. You know, that system kind of makes sense because there's no way in the.
Estate is going to be able to compete in this system. There's no way Ball State's going to be able to compete in this system. You can still get some good, you know, fringe players that fall through the cracks. But as we've seen. By Indiana's own roster, they are going to be tricky laid up. Why not have a more stable system, which is what the NBA does? You know, it's like there's so many examples in.
Professional sports of how to do this effectively that the NCAA should just embrace or a successor organization that says we can't keep doing what we're doing. We need to do something different if we want to retain the spirit of this as a developmental league that a lot of people really love because they have emotional attachment to the teams. They may, you know, they have emotional attachment with the players. But we also can't have Walter Clayton or not Walter Clayton.
We can't have Boogie Flan making more money than the first overall pick in the draft. Like, that's stupid, but it also kind of underlines how much of A business college athletics is the fact that Florida, who just won the national title, could scrape enough money together in NIL just to easily pay Boogie Flan $7,000,000 for one year and flush out a roster that's going to contend for. A title, that is.
Truly stupid, but it also truly indicates how much money is in college sports, and so let's just acknowledge it as opposed to keep acting like it's not existing would be how I would look at it. So anyway, I didn't want to talk all college sports on this. I didn't want to talk about a
couple of other things. One of them is the impressive week that we've seen out of IU basketball in terms of the offers that they're making across the board for those who have not been following IU, been throwing a ton of offers all out. And it just kind of it underlines, I think both the ambition of this staff and I think kind of how they are looking at moving forward. Like this is not, you know, we heard so much from the defenders
of the Woodson regime that. There was no value in going after high school players, right? It was just go in the portal. That's where you're going to find players. And as we've talked about on this show, you can do that to some degree and you're going to
have to fill spots. I think everybody's doing that right now, but the flip side of it is you got to get good young players like top level, you know, and again, this is you're talking about players one through 80, the the mythical sweet spot that Mike Weemuth talks about on X's and Joe's, a great podcast about college basketball that many of you should watch. It's on the back home network, you know, the, the, you have to have that mix.
You have to have top 80 players, ideally top 30 through 80, maybe slightly more because now you can pay guys. So now it's not a matter of you get a top 30 guys on it automatically going to commit to the draft. You can keep some of those guys if you got the financial wherewithal under the current system to keep them rolling.
But some of the names that Indiana's pulled in, and I'm going to credit Mike Schumann in the Daily Hoosier, they've been doing a good job of, of keeping a list of the offers that I use made. Latrelle Allman, 6 foot 8 forward from Virginia, Sammy Jackson, 6 foot 7 wing from Philadelphia, Ethan Taylor, 7 foot one center, Jordan Smith, junior, who's a guard out of Virginia. These are not places Indiana's been recruiting lately.
They can you can just absolutely feel the, the, the Kenny Johnson influence here. You can feel the Drew Adams influence. Prince Alexander Moody, 6 foot 4 guard from Virginia, 6 foot 8 forward from Florida. Caleb Gaskins, Davian Adkins, 6 foot 8 forward from Texas. Anthony Thompson. Now, no, not that Anthony Thompson, but a six foot 7 wing from Ohio. Tay Kenny 6 foot guard from Kentucky. I mean, and you've got rumors of other offers and these are all the 2026 class. So you've got like I.
Think it's like. 16 or 17 offers right now, like Indiana is really pumping these out at this point. And they're also looking at offering players in the 2027 class Ryan Hampton, Chase Branham, Jason Gardner, Junior. So this is a really, this is exactly what I thought you would see. And this is where we were preaching patients with IU, this idea that they were getting a slow start. They were really just getting
the the staff together. You know, you got Rod Clark in from Tennessee. Now you've got you've got a recruiting staff. You got a group that's out there hitting the pavement, selling the vision that Darren Devries has for what he wants this roster to be. And I think that what we're seeing. Out of all of this is that. Yeah. And it's, I don't think this is a Tom Crane approach as, as Super Ozzy just asked, I don't think this is a Tom Crane approach. It's not all for everybody.
What I think they're trying to do is get a sense of where Indiana's money and reputation are right now in this mix. And if you look at this roster, this 2526 roster. That Indiana's. Got this is probably the last time we're ever going to see under Darren Devries this type of an approach because they won't need it next time.
Like I, you know, let's be frank, like Indiana, the, the, the cupboard was really bare of players that matched Aaron Devries's system and matched, I think, his ideal of how players play together and work together. And So what? You've got is this situation where now he's got a chance. He's got a whole recruiting cycle in front of him. He's got ace recruiters who know different parts of the country can sell that vision, can get him in rooms with people.
And now it's a matter of they can showcase what he's done at Drake, they can showcase what he's done at West Virginia. But it'll take, I think, some initial looks at what's going on at IU to sell those guys on the idea of what it looks like for them in an Indiana uniform. And there's a lot of players here. I just don't think that you would have seen Mike Woodson and his staff offering because they were going off of a completely different model.
And I don't think that's the model that they were pursuing. Works in college basketball today. So I'm excited about the fact that you've seen this explosion and offers. It's like they hit the ground running as soon as May got started. I don't know what that's going to mean, but the one thing I'm noticing with a lot of these guys is, you know, with a couple of exceptions aside, it's a ton of guys between 6 foot 5 and 6 foot 8. They they all look like they can shoot and. Defend it.
It reminds me a lot of the way the Pacers put their roster together. And it reminds me a lot of this idea of let's have exchangeable parts, which we're we've seen in the way that Debris has pieced together his portal roster for this upcoming year. But we're going to call this the portal roster. I think from this point forward, this idea of you got a couple of ace shooters, you got a couple of guys that can distribute, you got guys that can run to the rim. You're going to focus a lot on
shooting percentage offensively. You're going to focus on tempo. You're going to focus on trying to create mismatches on the perimeter, which should open up the interior. And by doing that, you create a situation where you're very hard to defect and yeah, you're going to run into situations where you have a real big guy that's a problem or like a do everything combo guard. But this is a winning formula just in terms of what I'm seeing them offer now. Obviously they've got to land them.
But I'm really encouraged by what we're seeing with IU basketball and the way that they're doing recruiting at this point. So I'm excited to see where that lands. And you know, that, you know, I don't know that we would anticipate any commits anytime soon. I think that comes later on,
obviously in the fall. But I'm really interested to see who buys in early because as we've seen, that can really lead to getting a nice cluster of players that buy into the vision simultaneously, see how they work as complementary parts. And there's going to be playing time because one of the things that we've noted in this portal class is it's an old class, lot of 4th and 5th year guys think there's a sixth year guy. These are not players are going to be around Bloomington very
long. There's going to be a couple of pieces that should stick around for two years as a transition point. But I think what you're seeing out of these offers with additional portal signings next year, you're going to see a lot more of a mix. And so you know this approach. I think by year three, maybe even year 2, you could be a really, really competitive team athletically shooting wise. You know, I this could really accelerate the growth curve of what the debris era looks like
if it all fits together. And obviously all of this is speculative, but I like what I'm seeing so far. And at the end of the day, it's, it's May 15th. We've got plenty of time to kind of go through all of this stuff. Greg. Lamont asked. Curious when waivers will be determined. Unless it's early June, I wonder if Goody and Leo travel for the
summer trip. So, you know, the Leo and Goody things are fascinating from a, you know, I think I still think Goody has a better argument than Leo And you know, I, but I also think Indiana's pretty much done pulling people in right now. I think if they were going to pull a 12th and 13th person on the roster, they would have done it already. I still think Goody is going to get his waiver. I think some of the things that we're seeing elsewhere indicate
that that's the case. Leo, maybe, you know, and, and that's going to be an interesting one just 'cause I, I don't know that the NCAA is completely dead in terms of being able to say sorry that does that does count versus that doesn't count. I think with injuries it's a little bit different. Now Leo may have actually been
injured. There may be paperwork that goes along with that, but you know, this is where you really get into Gray areas as far as evaluating whether somebody was eligible versus whether they were not. And we'll see. But to your answer, your question, no, I, you know, I, I think that if they're, I think if they're eligible, they'll go to Puerto Rico regardless of when the waivers come down. I am anticipating we'll probably know something about goodies situation.
I have no inside info, but I think by I would be surprised if we didn't hear something by say, the end of May, maybe even the end of next week. Again, no inside info, just a gut feeling based upon some of the rulings that I'm seeing coming down, some of which I think look pretty favorable to the case. Of of goody. Chad asking, I'm not going to answer that, not let's see here. Let's switch to football real quick.
So Greg asks Illinois football seemingly riding the Indiana away from last year all the way into the top 15 of the early top 25 seems a little fabricated. It is interesting that when you look at the over unders that Vegas is setting and then you look at the top 20 fives, you can see like media tend to buy into narratives and the narrative all like coming out of last year. Coming out of bowl season was,
oh, Illinois is going. To be great next year because they bring back Altmire, they bring back a bunch of other folks and yet, you know, and they're ranked I think somewhere between 10th and 12th in most polls. I think I got 1 poll. I saw that in. 8th. Which like, OK, but then you look at the over unders that Vegas sets and you know, Vegas is paid to know how these things work. Brett Mcmurphy put this up the other day. But the over unders, Ohio State
and Oregon both at 10 1/2. Penn State 10 and then Indiana and Michigan are 4th and 5th. They're tied for fourth, I guess in the conference at 8 1/2 wins. Where is Illinois, 7 1/2 tied with Washington, who nobody's talking about as a ranked team? Iowa, who's on the fringes? Nebraska and USC get talked about because they're Nebraska and USC. But it is interesting, like we've seen polls where Indiana
isn't in them at all. And, you know, this is this is I I would almost liken what's happening with Indiana football in the polls to this is the backlash. And there's this idea that, oh, Indiana lost Curtis Rourke. They lost, you know, several key pieces. They're not going to be as good. Last year was lightning in a bottle. The schedule was too easy.
All of this. And realistically, when I look at what Indiana brought in, I mean, they've got, I mean, it is fascinating trying to take that narrative in the college media space where the frankly, it seems like there's a ton of people, especially at CBS, who have a vested interest in arguing that Indiana's not good. I don't get it. I really don't understand the mentality. But they they're, I don't know if there's like an internal like. Bonus pool that.
CBS is paying out. I'm mostly kidding about this, but like I I've yet to see any real good commentary about Indiana from anybody at CBS, and they almost seem like hurt that Indiana was good last year and they don't want to take them seriously this year. And yet you you bring in Fernando Mendoza, who after some initial confusion, people have largely settled on as being one of the best quarterback acquisitions in the entire portal, maybe the best one.
You bring in Pat Coogan, You keep Mikhail Kamara. You keep Aiden Fisher. You keep D Angelo Pons. You've got a really strong running backroom, you've got Elijah Serrat, you've got Omar Cooper Junior, you've got, you know, all of these pieces. And you know, even the parts that are concerning. And first of all, I wanted to say my condolences to Taylor Lehman. We were supposed to do a football Q&A pod Taylor out of death in the families tending to that.
We're going to get him on the pod soon to talk through recruiting in depth about IU and what they did in the spring session. But you know, the the thing about Indiana at this point, the thing that that I think most should be concerned about is even though Signetti, as I've seen in interviews, has been very sanguine about the offensive line, the offensive line is still a concern. You lose Mike Kadik, you do bring Carter Smith back, you've got Pat Coogan, you've got Mikalski.
You know, you've got good pieces, but you don't know if they're going to mesh together. But I would argue that most of the teams that Indiana is going to be playing have similar questions on the offensive line. Like there's very few teams that I look at and say that offensive line is going to be great. Ohio State? Sure, Indiana doesn't play Ohio State in the regular season. Michigan, OK, sure. Michigan always has a great offensive line. Indiana doesn't play Michigan either.
I have a hard time looking at Illinois's offensive line and saying that's going to be a great offensive line. Indiana plays them in Week 4 and you go down the list, Penn State, you know, Penn State, the offensive line is good, but they're protecting Drew Aller, who I, I mean, did you watch Drew Aller last year? And they don't have Tom Allen, who's a very good defensive coordinator.
I do. You know, there's, there's question marks about everybody that Indiana plays, including Oregon. You know, you look down the list. I mean, you know the, so Indiana, they play Oregon, they play Penn State. Those are two very tough games. They don't play Ohio State. They don't play Michigan. They don't play Washington. They play Illinois at home. They Iowa on the road and I think it's a winnable game. They don't play USC, they don't play Minnesota, and then they play Michigan State.
There's the over unders 5 1/2. They don't play Rutgers. They do play UCLA at home. Who's who's over unders 5 1/2. They do play Wisconsin at home. They're over unders 5 1/2. They play Maryland on the road. They're over under 4 1/2. They don't play Northwestern and they play Purdue on the road and they have the worst over under in the conference. So you know, Chad asked. What my opinion if I if I was as high on. Illinois as others. My thing is this, I think you can look at these teams in
isolation and you can say well. Illinois was really good last year. They didn't lose a lot of pieces. They'll probably be better. Does that mean that Illinois is going to be better this year? I don't know that it does because if you look at the Big 10 schedules for football across the board, it's a pretty tough row for Illinois to hoe. I mean, I'm going to call this up. I think I did this on a previous pod, but we'll do it again because it's my pod.
I'm going to do what the hell I want with it. But let me let me call up the Big 10 schedules here. Let's get this up. OK? I think, I think you can all see this and we'll zoom in a little. Bit just for the folks. Who can't see as well. So let's look at Illinois schedule because I think to me the the question Chad asked is a good one, but it's it's not really a question that you can answer without looking at the schedule. So what's Illinois got? They got Western Illinois week one.
They got to go to Duke. It's such a. Strange game for them to be doing. That's a tough game, actually. Potentially. They got Western Michigan at home. They got to go to Indiana. They got USC at home, which is not a cakewalk. Purdue on the road is a cakewalk probably, but they got a post Ohio State. They're going to beat Ohio State. At home, seems unlikely, could happen, but then they got to go to Washington and then they have a relatively easy stretch.
But they got that game at the end of the season out Wisconsin, which I don't care how bad Wisconsin is a given year, that's a tough place to play. So you can look at Indiana schedule and you can say, wow, they got four really tough games and they got, you know, Illinois at home and they got Iowa, Oregon and Penn State on the road. But I think everybody's got 3 or 4 tough. Games. Even Ohio State's got some tough ones. They got Texas at home.
They got to go to Illinois. They got to go to Wisconsin. They got Penn State at home. They got to go to Michigan. That's five tough games in the season. Michigan, we got to go to Oklahoma. I don't know who the hell scheduled that. That's a fascinating one. They got to go to Nebraska, they got to go to USC. They got to go to Michigan State. They got Ohio State at home. They got 5 tough games. And you can go down the list with the other. Contenders.
I mean, Oregon is another one. They got to go to Penn State. Before they play Indiana at home, they got to go to Iowa, they got to go to Washington, who always plays them tough. So these are the things that I think we need to keep in mind. And, and I was talking to Taylor about this the other day. My perspective on it right now is that Indiana has as good of a chance of anybody in the conference of making it to the Big 10 title game if you look at the schedules.
Because I think there's a real good. Chance of Indiana going 10 and two and you know, I think you know, 8 1/2's the over under at a lot of the books. I've seen 9 1/2 in a couple of spots, you know, and, and as as, as as pointed out by Hooperazi, 9 and three would be a
tremendous season 8 and four. Would you know, like Chad pointed out, if you if you were on Indiana, you know, sitting at eight wins, if Indiana wins eight games, it's one of the top five or six schedules in the school's history. And I really like the the fact that Kurt Zignetti's had a whole year to continue to mold this team to get new guys in. We continue to see some of the Allen guys like filter out. They've got a pretty strong roster.
Is it a perfect roster? No, they've got questions at offensive line, they've got questions in the secondary. Those are questions that have got to be answered. But I love their skill position players. I love what they've got, you know, in the pass rush and the linebacker, you know, interior both lines is an open question. But I think that a lot of teams have that question.
And I think you look across college football right now, they're just are not a lot of teams that I would look at and say, you know, undefeated, undefeated. It's very much not like last year where you clearly had like a big echelon of top teams, Indiana being one of them and then a bunch of of fall off around 11 or 12. So look, I, I like what I'm seeing. I, I don't buy the Illinois hype. I think Indiana has as much of A justification for being ranked
in the top 15 as Illinois does. But I also like the fact that Indiana's going to be able to go into the season with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. That is really helpful. So that's something that we'll keep an eye on as we move forward. And I love the fact Indiana's got a nice long runway as they get into things. You know, they've got those three games at the beginning of the year to iron out the kinks. HWF 3 notes. I wholeheartedly believe last season team goes 10 and 2 with
this schedule. I think you're right. Like, you know, that's the thing. I I don't think as much as Indiana got criticized last year for not having a tough schedule, I think it, it underrates how unlucky a couple of the teams Indiana played were Washington and Nebraska specifically, who probably should have had a couple more wins than they did. But I also think Indiana, you know, the take the Ohio State game aside, Ohio State won the
national title. They didn't really get a chance to play against anybody of high quality. I think Indiana last year could have beaten Iowa at Iowa. I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying that they would have, but I think they could have. I don't think that that was out of the question. You know, I, I'm very, I'm still, I'm always going to be curious how Indiana would have fared against Penn State.
You know, and if the draw had gone differently and Indiana played Penn State in the first round of the College Football Playoff, I think that really would have been a fascinating 1 to see how that would have played out because I think Indiana had some things on Penn State that they just. Didn't quite have against Notre Dame for a variety of reasons. So we had a lot more to talk about with football. I wanted to save some of the football talk till we got Taylor
back. And and so we're lame for that next week, obviously. But I appreciate all all the comments and questions. And we've got a big deep dive into the roster coming up here relatively soon. So look, you know, 9 and 310 and two, eight and four. I'm still riding that. Like I was curious how spring was going to go. I like what I saw out of spring. I like what I'm hearing the coaching staff talk about and particularly Signetti. It's a long summer.
And I think it right now, like, you know, it's it's film study, it's it's studying tendencies of opponents, you know, Signetti breaking down everybody on this schedule, not taking anybody for granted. You know, I mean, this is where you make your money as a football coach. And I think that the mentality shift that Indiana went through last year is still something a lot of us are trying to get our heads around with this idea of how much do you trust an IU
football team? A lot of people I know still feel burned by what happened in 2021. But that was a much different mentality as far as that football program was concerned than what we see right now. And at this point, I think they've earned the benefit of the doubt. And I think the fact that there seems to be a lot of juice on the recruiting front. Again, I'm I'm we're holding our powder until we get Taylor. But man, IU has been making some nice moves in state in
recruiting. Like they have been cleaning up in a way. I have not seen an IU program clean up since like maybe the 80s back before recruiting rankings existed. I think it really bodes well. And let's give Greg a round of applause. First time football season ticket holder for Greg. Nice, good. Good on you Sir. We will see you in Memorial Stadium. I did my season tickets yesterday, same section. If you know where I am in the stadium.
I'm not. I'm sadly not above the Astroturf cut out this time, but I'm right over to the right of it, so I'll look forward to seeing you all there. It should be a lot of fun. We had a couple of quick other questions that came in earlier today on Twitter that I wanted to hit. One from Huperazzi, actually. Can Max's Place help to save the pizza scene in Bloomington? In my opinion, the pizza in town is the worst it's been in decades. Well, we lost Cafe Pizzeria, that hurt. I will.
I do heavily recommend going to Max's Place, the revitalized Max's Place, which is located at 17th and College. So Roddy's are coming into town. It's where swing in pizza had moved to and then gradually got taken over by that whole Hank's pizza Mac catastrophe. The pizza's really good and they've got open mic night. It's a nice relatively cozy space. It's it's it's relatively new. It's right next to square Donuts. Go check it out. I do think that they they do a
really good pizza. The pizza scene in Bloomington's fascinating right now because it's really split into a couple of camps. You got your stalwart, you know, you the pizza X is still here and that has the lion's share of the market. You've got avers, which is kind of on the fringes a little bit now. I think you've got Nick's, which just Nick's pizza.
I Nick's a pizza and I like we split up a long time ago, but then you've got a lot of smaller scale pizzas like for my money, like pound for pound, I actually think the best pizza might be at Davinci in Bloomington right now at 3rd and Washington. I think Austria, you know, behind mix has a good argument, but they're cooking a different style of pizza. They're cooking, you know, the, they're not doing the big industrial size stuff they're doing. They're not personal pizzas. They're big.
They're kind of in the mix. There are in the middle, you know, and then you've got, you know, the, the, the ones that haven't changed much and you either love them or you hate them or, or like them or hate them. You know, like the, you've got Bouchetto's, you've got I, I actually kind of, I, I know, I think D'angelo's pizza is a little bit underrated. It's just really expensive.
You know, if you can get it on a on a on A2 for one deal, which I think they have on a Monday or Tuesday, You know, we got a couple of other notes. Quaff on Big Woods is still an anchor. I really, I really like Big Woods pizza. The one thing about it is the crust is is almost like a pretzel crust. It's it doesn't taste like a pretzel. But it's got. That kind of consistency to it, it's a little, it's hard to describe, but it's like, it's like a soft pretzel almost as a pizza dough.
I like it. I just don't like it every single time. Baldies baldies is is like. Kind of the stealth one. But baldies, as Superazi mentioned, is is pretty far away from everything. Some people live in Bloomington, have lived here for years, have never even heard of baldies. You know, you've got not a lot else at this point. I would say the tap, I would say their pizzas kind of regressed slightly from what it was. I really like their pizza when it first came out.
It's still good, but it's not as good, I think as it was. But it's kind of it goes up and down in quality. You know, Yogi's has got the Tavern style pizza, which if you get the right mix of toppings, can be relatively good. But look, ultimately, as someone pointed out, I think Jennifer pointed out, like all pizzas are personal. It depends on how hard you try, But it's also, I'll say this, the flavor that you like is going to be something that is predicated on what you dig as an individual.
And so, you know, when people come into town and they're asking me where to get pizza right now, I normally direct them to Davinci. I'll I'll direct them to Big Woods. I'll direct them to a couple of other spots. I still like mother bears, but again, I feel the same way about mother bears, the same way that like their pizza that I feel about Big Woods and like, it's a style. It's a particular style. Yeah, I know they have the thin crust.
I'm I'm I'm excluding that from the conversation for the moment because the pan pizza style of mother bears, it's like that was such a popular style for pizza in the 80s and 90s. And it's kind of because it's so doughy. I think for a lot of people in this generation, it's not as attractive because it's so doughy. And and I think, you know, the more artisan style pizzas generally go over a little better. I would be remiss if I didn't also throw Lenny's into the mix.
I think Lenny's does a pretty good job with their pizza and I think that low key they might have the best Strom in Bloomington. It's I kind of go back and forth with them and a couple of others, but I like what they do there. Chad asked. We're just doing food talk now. What's what's the chat's favorite sub in town? Mine used to be Dagwood's when it was in the basement. So to me, by far the best Subs, the best sandwiches are at Austria Rago.
And it's a shame. They used to have this amazing lunch deal, which doesn't exist anymore. But if you go to Austria and get one of their sandwiches, it's it's life changing in a lot of ways. It's it's awesome. And they've got like 9 different styles. They've got really heavy Italian ones. They've got ones that trend more towards they've got like a praise sandwich.
It's really, really good. Little Italy Market is a great call by Huperazi. Little Italy Market, for those who don't know where it is, there's like 2 really good places to eat in the shopping center. And it's the shopping center where 3rd St. and Dunn come
together. It's a complicated place to get to because both of those streets are one way right in front of it. You know, Dunn is one way coming off of Kirkwood going South. And then third, that's where Third splits off and kind of heads up and it's still one way at that point, but it's right before it merges with its, it's, it's eastbound South. But yeah, Little Italy market has great Subs. You order them at the counter.
So I recommend those two places primarily as places to go for sandwiches like that, like sub sandwiches in Bloomington. But Austria is my, if you get it, Austria, bring a friend. I, I'm a big guy. I have a big appetite. I cannot eat an entire Austria. Sub in one sitting without either like really feeling bad about myself or just not finishing the damn thing and having to take it home with me. And, and no, I have, I have not gone to Chalubi's yet.
You know, I keep dancing around the place. I haven't quite been there. Thank you for that question. Anyway. Those are me. What I would say on that front. I'll also say just in general, I get asked a lot of times what, you know, what do we feel are, you know, places that people haven't been to that they should go to? Da Vinci's a good one. If you're going to go to Da Vinci, go in the summer.
It's almost impossible to get in during the school year because it's a favorite amongst the sorority crowd and for good reason. Good. They have good taste in the sororities if you haven't. Been to the Elm yet? I recommend going to the Elm. Great ambiance, really nice bar area. The food's really good. We actually had our back home network get together meal there back in February when everybody came into town. And they have do a lot of seasonal menus, but they do them right.
I've yet to have something that I didn't. Like at the Elm and it's interestingly located. It's in Elm Heights. It's it's essentially it's the second and Henderson. It's like a block in for those who lived in Elm Heights or in that general vicinity just South of campus in the 80s and 90s. There used to be a grocery store there and that it's changed to something that's really, really good. And there's obvious as you know, there's a lot of good other restaurants in various shades.
You know, 4th St. stuff is all really good as. Well, so there's. Ton of places in town to go and, you know, the summer's a great time to explore them because generally there's very few weights and you're going to get a chance to sample a lot of good food. I think there's a taste of Bloomington coming up at some point in the summer, late July, maybe early August. But if you're not in Bloomington and you want to come back at some point, that would be a good place to go.
And, you know, it's interesting watching the the restaurant game turn ever so slightly in Bloomington, as, you know, you start to get the cycling in and out of certain places over time. You know, there's still a bunch of open questions. Thank you. The taste of Bloomington is August. 2nd so put that on your calendar. I'll I'll be around if anybody wants to grab a beer. Or a sandwich. Or pizza as as as we would have it there. Anyway, this went longer than I
thought it would. I thought I was going to aim for 45 minutes. We've been going for 70. A lot to talk about though, but we had a lot of the topics that I I know were of interest to people and had a great time with the folks in the chat. Had a great time with the questions off of X and would love to do this again. We'll do this again sometime soon. We'll get Taylor on the pod. We'll talk some football next
week. We'll keep an eye on the waivers, we'll keep an eye on recruiting, and we'll obviously keep an eye on what's going on in the college sports space as we're going to be talking about this stuff all summer. We're also going to be doing some other cool things on the back home network. We got some interviews coming up we're going to try to hit and there's going to be some other things we'll do this summer. Content wise, I think you guys will enjoy. So a little tease there for you.
Next week, Scott will be back with me. We might actually have two separate podcasts. We're certainly going to talk Indiana Pacers as wow, what a
run so far. And who knows, maybe they're playing the Knicks, maybe they're playing the Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. We've got the possibility of one of the most unique things I think that you could do in sports, at least in Indiana. Game three of the Eastern Conference finals are going to be at 8:00 PM the day of the Indy 500. And I am planning on doing the double try to do both games or both both events in the same day, which might be really questionable from a health
perspective, but will be a lot of fun. So we're going to talk that we're going to have a separate pod where we give our Indy 500 read and that's going to be a fascinating race this year, or at least it better be. The rest of the season in any car has not been particularly exciting, which is disappointing because that's really the main thing it's got going for it is the competition. But it's been pretty much the Alex Pelo show throughout the
course of the year. So we'll talk about both of those things next week and maybe have a couple of other things as well. Anyway, I salute all of you folks for joining us here on the Back Home Network. And if you didn't watch that video that IU Athletics put out today, watch the video that IU Athletics put out today. Anyway, we'll catch you folks on the flip side, on behalf of Home field apparel or presenting sponsor on behalf of the entire Back Home Network, I'm Galen Clavio.
We will catch you folks on the flip side. Stay never daunted. Bring back the bison salon, everybody.