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Just right off the freeway. We are switching gears here in this three o'clock hour talking a little bit with Chris Camaranie of the Athletic c K Weekly Chat.
Appreciates you for stopping by. How are you friend?
Happy Friday man? How are we doing doing well?
Doing well?
Appreciate you for joining us, of course, as you do each and every week, a lot to kind of get
to and cover, But I wanted your thoughts. I know you don't cover the NBA, but I'm sure you saw the sports world kind of going back and forth on the Jazz and the Ace Bailey situation, the agent who has been involved with him, and it does have a tie in, think with college sports and with NIL because this is a guy who's been representing him through that process, and Chris, it's an agent who is not licensed and not experienced in this field, and it's something I see
quite a bit of in today's college football world.
So I wonder.
How you kind of consumed that news cycle, knowing what you do know already on the college side of this.
Yeah, much of the last year I've spent, you know, researching and trying to dive into the world of NIL agents at the college level, mainly college football, but even you're seeing that expand into college basketball, softball, baseball, gymnastics. It is a wide ranging kind of area that people who passion themselves as agents have been able to kind of get their hooks into players and their families, and it seems to.
Be that the Ace Bailey situation is.
Something that has been percolating, you know, for a while. I think there were a lot of reasons why people might have had some red flags regarding Ace during the pre draft process. And listen, we can you know him and haw all we want. I think eventually this will die down. As soon as you know, the Jazz get Ace in town with Walter Clayton Jr. And the other dude they drafted and hold up the jerseys. I think
it'll be put behind them. But it is an unnecessary kind of distraction for a franchise that generally prides itself on being fairly low key.
But that is the business that you choose.
When you, you know, are are getting into the world of drafting high profile players, and this is this is not something that happens very often in basketball. We see it in football quite a bit when some players are trying to maybe steer.
Where they'd like to go.
But yeah, it's it's it seems like Ace and his family have been steered wrongly by the folks who are you know, quote unquote managing his day to day operations.
But as you saw, you know, the head of the agency went on I think with Front Office Sports this morning to do some damage control and said Ace is stoked to be going to Utah, And Frank Rerek, if you're a guy like Ace Bailey who wants to be able to put up twenty shots a game, and what I think the Jazz and vision him as you know early on in his career, you know, Utah probably makes sense because if he would have gone to a place like Philly or somewhere else, probably not going to get
as many shots, or the offense won't revolve around you the way it probably will when he gets to Utah.
Now, I'm going to follow up here with the agent stuff because the one thing about the NBA that I think kind of helped this situation along, and you know, only last a few days, is that, well, you do have to have agents that are certified. Ace Bailey has a couple of those, and I feel like maybe voices who know what they're doing kind of stepped in at a certain point and clarified this whole thing. Well, that
doesn't exist at the college football level yet. Now we have a revenue sharing agreement, we have some clarity in college sports, but none of it is in the NIL and agency space. How muddy is that going to continue to get knowing that there's still a lot to figure out legally rule whatever the NCAA decides to do as far as enforcement goes.
Yeah, I mean this goes back to a topic that we've been covering on the show for years now.
Until there is a.
You know, a database where people can you know, officially become licensed until they register themselves, until they take the proper course trainings the same way so many people have to, You're going to see folks who fashion themselves as agents when they are not necessarily always acting on the best interest of the athlete.
And you know, granted I think that they.
Are those bad actors are in the minority, But like, what what can't go like unnoticed or not talked about is the fact that so many of these eight quote unquote agents are taking such a high clip from so many of these college athletes in the in the NIL world because a lot of these athletes don't know what the kind of the normal prerequisite take home is for
an agent. Like a story I did on the World of Nil Agent's last spring, like there were guys that say they take as much as twenty percent from a college athlete, and you know, not everybody is making ajdbants money like some guys are making you know, ten thousand, five thousand, one hundred thousand, and like, not to say that that's not nothing, but you know, twenty percent when more often than not, a lot of all these guys are doing is facilitating something fairly easy and something that
you know a lot of people could do.
It is a world that needs to be regulated.
And I don't know now that we're entering this new you know, realm of revenue sharing and you know, NIL will still be part of the conversation because it's going to be its own separate entity now away from the school. I wonder if the NCAA if they're going to have the wherewithal to try to tackle the issues that have clearly been you know, rising to the surface at the college level the last couple of years.
And not only that, I've heard of stories of kids who have these quote unquote agents in college and they're not nfl PA certified guys. So they go to those student athletes and they say, hey, let's get into the transfer portal. Every single year of their contract that they're at college football player, so that they can get that twenty percent cut every single year that they make a new deal for these guys and kind of just get as much out of them as they can while they're
still their agent in college. Just a crazy world that we see, Chris, I want to shift over and talk about Sacramento State and what's going on with the PAC twelve with them adding Texas State as well.
What you were able to talk to a.
Couple of officials there at sax State, So give us kind of the background of what they're looking at and trying to go FBS Division one football, and then give us a little bit of background on what we saw with the move to Texas State and the PAC twelve reaching out to them and are they connected in any sort of way.
They are and they aren't at the same time, if that makes sense. I mean, like you're seeing the Group of five level and the PAC twelve is now the
group of five level. The Mountain West and the PAC twelve, the newly minted PAC twelve be the last kind of two conferences that are trying to sew up their long term plans in the wake of the massive conference realignment that started really three years ago and you know, the PAC twelve went out and poached the Mountain West Conference teams and they're they're planning on adding Texas State, which you know is an is an interesting addition considering you know,
the geographical name of the PAC twelve. But obviously we know that means nothing with Callent Stanford being part of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Nothing really matters on that front anymore. It's just it's who makes the most sense for your bottom line. Texas State has been a successful football program in recent years at the level that they've been competing at.
And the tie in with Sacramento State is Sacramento State has a very ambitious school president who is a two time alumni, who once he was hired a few years ago, realized that, in his mind, the most optimal way to get Sacramento State on the map nationwide is to increase its athletic footprint. And and you know, Sacramento is such a fascinating place for a multitude of reasons. You're near the Bay Area, but you're not in the Bay Area. It's kind of like it like a Salt Lake.
It's a small, big town.
It has an NBA team, but they're the biggest media market in the country guys without an FBS program, which is crazy to think. I mean, they're a top twenty media market and they don't have an FBS program. But the problem for Sacramento State is the NC DOUBLEA doesn't want to green light anybody who isn't part of an existing G five or P four conference to join the FBS. And Sacramento State has been at the FCS level now
for thirty years. And the Sacramento State, through its leadership, filed a waiver to the nc DOUBA Division one Council asking them to make a special exception for them, and they want the NC DOUBLEA to believe in all the aspirations that they have. They hired Brandon Marion, who is one of the top offensive coordinators at the G five level last year for UNLB, helping them get to back to back Mountains Conference title games. They hired Sacramento Royalty
and Mike Bibbie. We all know that they were in talks with Michael Vick last year before he took the Norfolk job. Norfolk State job hired Shack as an unpaid volunteer general manager. So it's a very small, obscure school that's making moves at a time when if you want to be relevant, you kind of have to be loud and you have to be kind of braggadocious about what you want to do.
But unfortunately for them.
Like the NCAA Division one Council denied their waiver requests. So twenty twenty five will be there last year in the Big Sky Conference, and you know, folks like myself and Stuart Mandel and Chris.
Banini and supported that.
You know that they've made overtures to the Mountain West Conference as a potential you know, late stage addition to try to get to the FBS football level starting in twenty twenty six, but as of right now, they don't have their you know, ducks in the row, so to speak, to be able to achieve the goal that they set.
Out for themselves.
So loudly original, Yeah, it seems like you hired a bunch of business guys and they recognize the market they're in and kind of went all in on making this a Division one product with Division one type personalities and people at the helm and the the actual practice of that takes more time on the academic side than it does on the business side, and they're kind of running into the complications there. I do wonder, Chris, change in college sports, and change in sports in general, is a constant.
It is something we cannot avoid. It's something that will always be part of sports. But in the college sports world, it does at least seem like historically there's been peaks and valleys there right where you have a bunch of realignment, you have a bunch of rule changes, and then there's a little catch your breath. It feels normal. It feels the same. For a while, we went through the BCS era, we went through the the P five era. Those felt
like eras. Now we're in a moment, Chris, where it seems like, regardless of the day, regardless of the week, it's just pure chaos. It's waiting on court rulings, it's waiting on the next realignment news to drop, It's waiting on the next you know, big nil drama or controversy to drop. I know that this is not new in college sports, but it feels.
It feels a lot.
More like this is the normal, and that we aren't going to be reverting back to one of those times that I mentioned.
How used to this.
Are we going to ask you'll, I mean, you'll have to get used to it. And it's clearly it's it's become cyclical, and I don't know if it's going to have I don't know if the cycle is going to be broken until the powers that be decide that there is a top down power structure and that there's a regulated set of rules in place and these are the abc D and you know, rules that people need to follow.
Until then, it's going to be chaos because more often than not, the power brokers, the people who can you know, swing the haymakers behind the scenes, they have the most power and they make the most money, and those it doesn't behoove everyone else to have a regulated system when the folks that bring in the most money for college athletics, the two major power conferences, the SEC and the Big Ten, have the ability to kind of sway which direction the future of college football especially goes.
When we zoom in locally Utah BYU, they have had different approaches to a lot of the way they go after prospects and the way they're recruiting. What is your read on where BYU and Utah And we'll get into maybe some of the smaller schools that are also dealing
with realignment and this chaos as well. What does your read on on how both UTAH and BYU are handling this ca of the off season and where they are positioned today, Chris, to capitalize on what we saw last week, which is a revenue sharing agreement that is now in place twenty point five million dollars directly from the school two players. It seems like that will help with some of the I guess very baseline, right, your your scholarships, your your dodge ram deals, that kind of thing. It's
all of the other stuff. It's it's the boosters, it's the fundraising, the stuff on top of that. How is BYU and Utah set up as of today to capitalize on that?
Well, from a pure revenue sharing standpoint, everybody gets the same amount. So if you're going to distill it down to Utah versus BYU, BYU doesn't have to necessarily explore or publicly, you know, explore how they're going to dissect everything to the public because they're private institution. Utah, on the other hand, does, because you can be able to request a Freedom of Information Act or a grammar.
Request to the school. Because they're a public institution.
It sounds like based on me reading some press releases and stories in local media. You know, Mark Carlin and most folks up of the will eventually do that. I don't know when that's going to come down, but ultimately, guys, this is how athletic departments are going to be judged, like a basically on a success level. Like previously it
was wins and losses. Now it's wins and losses as well as how you decide to distribute your twenty point five million, how much you're going to give to football, basketball.
Women's sports, Olympic sports.
Utah is a very unique school and that you have a sport like gymnastics that has been filling its basketball center full of fans for you know, decades now, whereas
the basket of all product hasn't been doing that. So how does how does Mark Carlin and his team decide to split up a large portion of that twenty point five million to a sport that has been a revenue generator unlike the previous you know, like the normal revenue generated sports at basketball for BYU, it's I would imagine, like a lot of I would imagine like every other
school a lot of it will go to football. But BYU is unique in that they've had a lot of you know, boosters and donors in the NIL realm be able to already make a massive historic impact on the basketball side. So if you're Bye, if you're Brian Santiago, do you tell those donors please keep donating to the basketball team that that way we can find a way to you know, relay more money to the football team
because there's more players, more need there. We're very much in the infancy stages of knowing how this will all shake out. Uh, you know, from the and their rival schools that have a lot in common, but they have a lot not in common.
And the fact that.
BYU doesn't have to necessarily disclose how they're going to go about it might make this conversation a little more difficult to really dive into as we move along.
I'm curious to know a little bit more about the contracts that are being signed between schools and these players.
In terms of revenue sharing agreements and whether.
Or not there's the availability to go with multiple year contracts to keep these guys from just jumping into the transfer portal afterwards. And then also in that same space if a contract is broken, will we see a school go after a player in the court systems and sue and it gets really messy after that, Because we've seen Wisconsin as they're getting ready and preparing and trying to
sue Miami for poaching one of their players. I'm curious if you've heard anything in that space in terms of those contracts and some of the specifics that are going on between these players and schools.
I haven't heard specific regarding anything contract wise, but I would assume that, and this is my total assumption, it would probably make sense for all parties to go on a year by year basis to start, depending on the position, depending on the caliber profile player. I don't think the revenue sharing system will necessarily immediately change the you know, every player is basically a free agent at the start of every new season or off season.
But I could be wrong, you know, I don't know.
I think, like I said, we're very much in the infancy stages of learning how all this stuff is going to shake out. But I don't think we're out of the woods when.
It comes to.
You know, schools doing the Spider Man meme at each other and pointing at each other.
And say you did this, No, you did this.
I think that's going to continue to happen because, again, going back to what we were talking about a minute ago, there is no regulation in this realm, so people can kind of do what they want and build a sleeping
dog's life. Ultimately, you know, and the MPT Double A or whomever is going to be in charge of this whole thing has to get their hands around it because this, like Quorter mentioned earlier, it just adds a potent another potential chapter chaos as we enter this new realm of the revenue sharing.
Well and Chris, we've entered a place where the NC double A has lost a lot of credibility. They number one, were illegally operating in antitrust, yeah, territory for however long when this body, you know, whatever it looks like, comes down, that is able to put some organization, some regulations down. What does the enforcement look like to all of these schools who Now, if you're in the Big ten, if you're in the SEC you kind of think you run the show.
Well, you absolutely do, because it's you know, the first rule of the drive, Quorter, the man with the gold makes the rules.
There you go, but he has.
Nobody has more gold, right, how then those two conferences and like, I mean, just look at what happened in the last couple of months, Like they're basically driving, you know, potential change for them getting more automatic qualifying bids for the future playoff system, whether it stays at twelve or goes to fourteen or sixteen.
Like there's no.
Reason for them to currently want to open up more seats at the table to people that they believe to be less powerful or less.
Impactful than they are.
Granted that that could and I mean it should and it could change if you have a power structure in place where somebody says these are the rules. You have to follow this blueprint or else you're going to be dinged, You're going to be fined, You're going to be this, that or the other. But until then, these guys are calling the shots. And whether people in the past, in the Big twelve or in the ACC whether they want to be up and arms about it or not, that's just the reality everyone faces right now.
What do you see as the next I don't want to say seismic shift, but it does feel like with the PAC twelve, the new iteration of the PAC twelve with a little less chatter around ACC instability obviously that the teams that did join the Big Ten last year, it does feel like we're at least pausing on a little bit of that news. What do you think happens next now that now that we've seen some teams sign their contracts for new conferences in the last couple of weeks.
Is it the ACC, is it the Big twelve? Where do you see the next big change? And I'll leave it to some of the bigger schools and definitely Division one.
That's a tough question. I mean, if I'm if I'm going low.
Hanging through, I think the easy one is I think you'll see a continued playoff expansion.
I think that's that's the first one.
But when it comes to conference realignment, I think I think, like what you said, Port, you'll have a kind of aligning low within the next three to four years. And then we'll have another, you know, group of schools who decide that they want to chase the dollar bills.
And I don't know who that is. I don't know if that's.
You know, some folks in the Big ten wanting to offer some schools that they more may be interested in the previous cycle or the ACC realizing that it doesn't make sense at all to have two teams in the Bay Area be part of an Atlantic based conference. Maybe they want them to leave and have them join another conference,
join the PAC twelve or whatever. But I don't I honestly don't know what schools could potentially move because I don't know how many true power players are out there right now for the Big Ten and the SEC to really make a move toward like if we're going to if we're going to be simple and see like if you want to chase the money, Yeah, the SEC could go after a school like Texas Tech, which is, you know, spending oil money at equip at no other school in
the conference or in the country can. But beyond a school like that, I just don't necessarily see really anybody else out there that's going to be that appetizing for those two power conferences right now.
Health of the Big twelve obviously, Utah and BYU have found themselves firmly together in this conference for the I'll I guess I'll say short term because we just don't know going forward, what does the Big twelve partnership with both these two schools locally look like long term and how healthy do you think that conference is in football and basketball and then probably more generically or generally some of the some of the other Olympic sports and whatnot.
Well, I think in basketball it should be fine.
Men's basketball, it's proven to be one of the best conferences in the country.
Football is a total.
Coin flip because I think basically Utah thought it was leaving the Pac twelve for something different, and it basically joined the New York version of the Pac twelve, whereas the Big twelve just basically cannibalizes.
It's up every year.
And maybe I'm wrong, maybe ASU comes out this year improves that they're going to be the dominant program of the conference.
I don't see that see that being the case.
I just think there is no pre eminent program right now that's going to instill fear in the other two conferences, even the ACC like I don't think even like a Clemson or a Florida State is shaking in their boots thinking of the prospect of playing at BYU or Utah or Colorado or Kansas State or Iowa State.
It's just for U t on BYU.
It makes I'm of the opinion it makes sense for you to be in lockstep with your rival and any
conference that you chieose because it benefits everybody involved. But the long term effects of where the Big Twelve is going when it comes to our two local schools, who knows brett yor Mark has been very bombastic and very forward facing saying that, you know, he believes that the Big Twelve is going to rival the Big Ten and the SEC in the coming years, But I kind of have to see it to believe at first, and so far I have that seem anything concrete enough for me
to say, like the Big Twelve is making in road in terms of potential, is de throning the two power conferences we've been talking about.
Yeah, as long as there's this like hegemonic power battle going on between SEC Big Ten, we're just gonna have to look at everyone else as you know, waiting that out and seeing how it unfolds, because obviously, if those two leagues expand or turn into something else entirely, you're gonna be you know, you're gonna want to be in on that ship, regardless of out healthy the Big Twelve is,
and regardless of how healthy the Big Twelve. Basketball is football is kind of seemingly the uh, the decider when it comes to this conference stuff.
C K appreciates your time.
As always, we'll check with check in with you next week. I'm sure catch up with Spence. Let the folks know what they can look forward to. Any feature stories, any interesting stuff coming up in the Dolgrims of summer.
Yes, yes there is, but nothing I can tease currently because it's very much in the early stages, but definitely stuff we'll be talking about Santa.
Now, did you see that one Trevor Riley had been named the GM of a local I guess prep college adjacent program here in town.
I did, I did? I did?
I need to get in contact with our guy to see what that job and what that team entails. It seems like there's always a new pop up semi pro football program in the state and all I know, everybody misses the Stallions, including Trevor, so I'll have to figure out what he's doing with this new venture.
Yeah, that'll that'll be interesting as all conversations with Trevor Riley are. Hopefully we'll get him on the.
Station sometime soon as well.
It's Chris com Ronnie of The Athletic at Chris com Ronnie of course, easy way to find him The Athletic. Go there, subscribe and support our colleagues there.
C K.
Appreciate your time, enjoy your weekend.
Thanks, guys, appreciate it.
Back on the other side, we have a PGA Tour leader board update. Paul Pugmeyer of Utah Golf Radio will join the show. We still have a college football and college sports at large conversation with our friend Matt Brown still to come, of course. Matt Brown of extra Points and extra Points dot Com. He is the conversation we just had with Chris a little bit on the business side, the off the field, off the court side of college sports. There's no one better in the business than Matt Brown.
Maybe Chris Camronnie. Yeah, we got the two best guys to talk about it, between Chris of The Athletic and Matt of Extra Points