See the Allison Chains has aged fine, you know, excuse me, I'm not speaking for the entire catalog. Matt Brown might be close to my age. I think I'm older than Matt. I feel like I'm older than Matt. But you know what this, it feels like your dad at some point may have gone through at Allison Chains phase.
Is that? Is that fair?
They were in there for sure. He was like the more early eighties hair metal, and then there was a bunch of bands that tried to like keep that going kind of as the grunge and alternative thing kind of blew up, so that they were in there for sure.
Let's ask our guy, Matt Brown. I'm guessing Matt that I'm older than you. But my producer, Porter, who I love, is a child. He is a young and so he asked me. Yeah, he asked me a very fair and honest question. I was very introspective. How has the music that I loved from the nineties aged?
So?
How would you answer that question?
Matt? Oh that that's a really that's a really good question.
It is.
Yeah, I don't know if much of it has aged all that well. It's funny I was having this exact same conversation with my wife a couple of days ago, like one of the commercially biggest bands of the nineties was Blues Traveler. Yeah, who's like now doomed to play like the Canton, Ohio State Fair circuit and if you play run around I think on the radio and I
were like, what is this? What am I doing? I mean, there's a couple of bands that are going to be on the Classic Rocks, you know, circuit for our grandkids. But I think there's a lot more tumblewombas in there than maybe we might care to admit.
Blues Traveler.
As Porter points out as an excellent example, because Matt I am old enough to remember nineteen ninety four, I was at a music festival where Blues Traveler was the open excuse me, the closing act at a festival have included Fish and Dave Matthews band Blues Traveler was the closer.
I am almost positive I went to a concert where Dave Matthews opened for Blues Traveler and not the other way around.
That sounds right, Yeah, it was horror festival, that's right. It was Fish, Blues Traveler, widespread panic and Blues Traveler was the main act that. That is an excellent one, my friend. I'll give you a lot of credit for that one. That's a good one.
Yeah, I I'll have to think about this a little bit more. I mean, like, there's there's some classics there, there are some bands that went to the Hall of Fame, but there was a lot of forgettable moments. I mean, people forget this. But if you were around in the nineties and early two thousands for like nine months, and I'm guessing in Utah was probably a little bit longer
than nine months, Like swing music inexplicably became extraordinarily popular. Yep, they let they let Big Bag Voodoo Daddy play the Super Bowl. Everyone just got watched Swingers and had a collective panic attack.
That's what it was. These things happened, That's that's what it was. It was the Swingers Call and kid. Swingers is a movie with Vince Vaughan. Okay, everybody, calm down, Okay, just get your heads out of the gutter. Great movie, but that ultimately launched the Big Bag Voodoo Daddy's ex pull. Now you're on fire today already, Well.
I listen. I may or may not have been somebody who was swept into that too, right, because if you know, if you're like one of the nine LDS kids in Columbus, Ohio, and you're like, oh, I will for some inexplicable reason, I already learned how to swing dance and after on Wednesday Night mutual.
Now I can.
Finally participate in popular culture and that poof it's gone.
Yeah, there were yep, remembered it, two LDS kids in my high school, me and my sister, and so I was able to introduce a lot of my classmates to the Lion King soundtrack and the Saturday's Warrior soundtrack.
Now that was my addition to the music scene.
Sure, sure, yeah, I know it's amazing that we weren't more popular if your kids, oh.
Well said speaking of the LDS folk and our friends down south. Tom Homo has announced that after twenty years on the job, Matt he is electing to find something else to do with his time. And I've got to say I've often said this, and I don't know if being the athletic director at by U is the heart hardiest job in college athletics administration, but it's a it's among the hardest jobs.
I Mean, look, as you.
Know, you have to align with the institution while running a department that is probably least naturally aligned with what BYU is as a university. I think Tom did a remarkable job. He has earned his flowers on the way out the door. So your thoughts on the news that Tom is stepping down and who do you think BYU looks at now.
Yeah, it's funny I wrote about this. I think I think earlier this week that I the longer I do this job, the more hesitant I am to publicly proclaim somebody to be a good athletic director, because I feel like I've been burned by this a couple of times, and like, oh, this guy made a couple of good hires and he returns my phone calls he must be a good ad, and then he ends up like a gigantic scandal, like six months after he gets the plaque at NACTA. And so I tend to try to, you know,
be hesitant about that. But I'll say it on the radio. I said it in print. I think I think Tom was excellent, and I think he was excellent for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned, Like he didn't just do the things that we can commonly associate with ads making good hires, which at EYU is hard raising money, you know, building a culture that develops other
coaches and other administrators. But one of the things that I really admire about him, besides the fact that I think he's like legitimately good human being, is I think it was really important to him about to to find ways to make BYU Athletics to be a front porch that made that was accessible to everybody, even if those people might have had complicated feelings about the sponsoring institution or didn't want to sign up for maybe everything else
that comes with with with YU fanhood. Right, Tom is not a ninth generation Pioneers Science Camp person. He's a convert. He's in charge of the department, which I think is inarguably the most diverse and least LDS part of the church education system, and has to learn how to speak the language that maybe comes a little bit more naturally to people like you and I, and I think I think he did a great job. It's very difficult to
navigate conference realignment. It's difficult to operate a methodic department where their resources don't match fan expectations. And I think that was true for BYU for a long time and to do all that and to still have almost everybody that knows you and has worked with you, and even if they're not from the state, say you're a good person.
That's rare. And I think as somebody who just who cares about this industry, like not because I care about BYU, like specifically when we're another I'm sad he's gone because I think there's some really difficult or leaving Like he's not dead, but he's he's leaving this industry because there's some really difficult questions that I think would benefit from good human beings. I think Tom is one of those good human beings.
I agree with you, and he's always been good to me and the opportunities I've had to interview him and off the air as well. So I think BYU lost a good one. So during the press conference to announce it was very reverend. It was a very reverend press conference to announce that that Tom was stepping down the
president of BYU, Shane Rees. See Shane Rees gott to have the sea you know this matter, you got to have the see president c. Shane Rees went over his list of you know kind of criteria for who he would look at next for Tom and it was the standard bring him young answer that you would expect to align with the institution, even said, you know, he's got to lead with Jesus in mind. You know the things that they say, and it leads to the question, who do you think they look at next? You think it's
in house. President Rees said it was going to be a national search. Who do you think they land out? Give me give me your thoughts there, Matt.
So, I'm told it is a national search. And I could be wrong here, but this is the first time that I can recall since I've been doing this professionally that BYU has retained the services of like a third party search firm. Normally you don't need to do that because you and I could sit down here and I was like, there's only six LDS coaches, right, we can
figure out who the list is is. It's not rocket science, And it's true there's not a lot of people that have the college athletics industry experience and presumably a Temple recommend right, I want to say there's five, maybe six sitting Division one ads who are LDS and for a variety of reasons, be that age, your personal preference. Most of them are not going to be candidates for this role.
I think there's three really excellent, very capable people, at least three, maybe more everybody at b YU, but at least three capable internal people who could do this job. But the fact that they're working with an outside firm makes me think that BYU is going to seriously consider a lot of folks who are not currently working in college athletics. The Marriott School of Business is good for a lot of things. There's a whole bunch of CEOs out there, a whole lot of attorneys that have worked
in the entertainment industry in some capacity. B what you've done this before. I would be pretty surprised if the AD is not either, you know, one of one of the two or three people that are currently on staff. Like if it's not somebody that's already in the athletic department, I think it's going to be somebody that most people listening to this have never heard of. Because it's not going to be a senior associate, a d at Kentucky or the number three of Utah or anything like this.
This is the kind of world where I think they're going to look at you know who am I Jet blues because this role is changing so much, right it's not as much about hiring the best baseball coach as it is now navigating some really complicated business and legal realities.
And that's exactly where I wanted to go next, because this is a job that is a different ask than it was twenty years ago. And yeah, you know, you could go over a litany the guy who I think they I don't know if Brian Rolapp answers the phone because he's the CEO of the National Football League. He essentially is Goodell's number two. I think if Rolapp stays with the NFL, he's going to be the next commissioner, And therefore I don't know that he even interviews for it.
But he is a BYU grad, He's a Harvard MBA. I've met him a number of times. You've had him on the show. He is a dynamic pro and he's a really smart dude. He is kind of credited by you know for essentially leading the NFL to where they're at right now with their myriad of revenue streams based
off their broadcast deals. But this is a long and complicated way of me asking you a simple question, which is, how has the changing dynamic and landscape of collegiate athletics, namely college football, changed the ask for what this job is now.
Well, and I would say that the I think the ask for being the ad at BYU is different than being the AD at Utah, although both of those jobs have changed very significantly over the last five or six years, in part because of some of the changing finances. Right, you know, DYU is I understand it is not a place where you're going to be able to, you know,
permitted to habitually deficit spend. You're going to have to bring in revenues that match what do you want to be able to to spend, and that means you're going to need somebody who is dynamic about finding new money in a way that aligns with church principles that that you know, you're not going to be able to make come up with an extra fifty million dollars through selling data rights to gambling companies, which is something that a few other major conferences have kicked the tires on or
or deeper. You know, MMR deals with with with with with beer or something. So whether that's getting even even more creative about earned revenue from sponsorships, whether that's potentially.
Playing more games or other games outside of of the United States, and trying to engage globally, whether that's that's doing different things at by U TV, all that kind of stuff's on the table.
But there's also almost a government affairs and legal component to all of this.
Right, everybody who's an AD now has the responsibility to comply with Title nine, and that is much more complicated now than it was two weeks ago, and certainly and two years before.
You know, before then, you have various reporting responsibilities with the Department of Education, which may or may not continue to exist. Your athletes may or may not be employees in three or four years. You're being sued six ways from Sunday as part of the NCAA. If you're a Big twelve athletic director or university president, you have to be worried that the big tenant SEC aren't going to try to muscle you out of big time college sports.
So this is a job that's not just about hiring and training and running successful athletic programs, and it's not just a sales job. I think it's a little bit of a lobbying job, it's a little bit of a lawyer job. It's certainly some backchannel political diplomacy kind of job. And then at BYU you're also a very public ambassador
for the church. This is not a place where you can get photographed on a fundraising visit in a bar, even if you're not drinking, even if you're not doing anything wrong, because there's going to be pressures here that are just not a thing that you have to deal with at Utah or with the Philadelphia Eagles at the Phoenix Suns. And that's not necessarily a criticism, that's that's just the reality of the gig.
So I had I had breakfast with a gentleman about three months ago who is a pretty heavy hitter in our market, and we discussed the dynamic of, you know, where the schools are at locally with their collectives, and he told me that his understanding is bringing me on right now has nine seven figure donors, while the University of Utaon only has two. Now that was about three or four months ago. I don't know what's changed, but do you have a grasp or an accurate understanding on
just how that collective down in Provo is doing. It seems like it's very healthy. They signed the number one player in college basketball next year. According to what I've been told, both Yegor Demon and Cannon Catchings are seven figure kids. I don't know how much of the support Kalani gets on the football side that Kevin gets on the basketball side, but the football team was really good
this year. Do you have an accurate understanding of just exactly where they're at down there with their finances?
Yeah, And it's hard because so many of these things get you know, cut through telephone, and it's the private institutions and you don't have to You don't get the same stuff you do from the irs as you might for other places. The folks that I trust has said, Hey, you know, there's this kind of meme around the internet that b what you use basketball budget is just from the youth, It's just just from Ryan Smith. And that
isn't true. Whether it's nine seven big donors or four big donors or six big donors, I don't know the exact number, but I know it's multiple people and my understanding and I think we've said this on the year before here too, and that hasn't changed. Is the amount of money and the kind of major financial commitments coming to be what you basketball are not the same that are coming into be WHATU football. And part of that
I think is just a business decision. You can drop seven figures on one basketball player and that can be the difference between playing in Dayton and playing in the Sweet sixteen. You could put seven figures in the one football player and you've changed nothing. You really can't overspend on four or five guys. You need fifty five guys
to be a really, really effective team. And I think the rules for roster management in football, especially at a place like BYU, are always going to be very different. So it probably does make more financial sense to make a bigger splash for basketball. I hope that you can win sixty five percent of your games in conference. I can't speak to where the elite heavy hitter donor activity
is happening in Utah. I think that that was a school that did a really good job of engaging their corporate community, did a really good job of engaging some of their donors who are maybe not dropping seven figures,
but are comfortable dropping high five figures. And you need a lot of those two I think maybe if there are some either a basketball head coaching change or a reason for more of the basketball folks to get a little bit more engaged, or some other kind of big news on the football side, I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that money coming back out. It's very hard for almost anybody, if you're not Ohio State, to get the same twelve people to write you big checks
every single year. There's gonna be years when you're just going to financially go for it, and there's probably gonna be years when you don't. And that's going to be true for most P four programs.
All right, So moving off of BYU, but staying in the space, and thank you for doing this. If I could quote Kendrick Lamar, not like us, because there's no way I would dig through dozens and dozens of twenty twenty three nil collective nine nineties.
But Matt, you did that. So what did you learn through this exercise?
You know you can go whatever direction you want, just kind of a big picture question. You wrote on this just a few days ago, and you know you learned about how these collectives grew or shrank to your point, and how they're paying athletes. It is a topic that all college athletic fans are interested in. What did you learn as you kind of undertook this exercise.
Yeah, and so for those for folks that are listening here right. An NIL collective can be set up as a nonprofit or a for profit or not for profit. And if you're a nonprofit, if you're a five o' one C three, you have to file at nine to ninety, which is a form that any any reporter or any JOQ public person can examine where you have to declare how much money you brought in and where you spent a lot of it and who you're paying. One of Utah's main collective for fiscal year twenty twenty three, the
Crimson Collective, was one of those nonprofits. They told the i r S that they brought in a little over five and a half million dollars, which was on the higher end of the collectives that we examined over the course of the year. I think that the largest one from fiscal year twenty three was Notre Dames that that
was well into the eight figures. That doesn't necessarily mean that five and a half million dollars was all of Utah's budget, right, there's going to be commercial deals and activities or other collective activities, our individual athlete deals that have nothing that don't show up there. But I think this was an interesting snapshot because for a while it seemed like that was the future. Everyone's going to have
a five to one seats free collective. People could donate to it and and and write that off their taxes, and that was going to be the most efficient way. The i R s on multiple times has has has questioned that distinction. More and more of these groups are dissolving. Some of them are dissolving just because the collectives in general are going to be less powerful in the post house settlement era. So I don't I don't think this
is the future anymore. But you know, from what we were able to see, you could see, Hey, this this Utah was able to raise more money than than many other similar programs, Like it was a bigger fund than Washington's main collective. It was. It was a bigger fund than what Purdue was reporting. It was. It was bigger than what some of the other schools in the Big twelve are reporting, which which speaks to some of that donor activity.
All Right, excuse me.
Moving over to a story you and I talked about when the Biden administration they handed down the Title nine guidance, which at the time indicated nil payments would follow under the Title nine guidelines. And you were kind of the first guest we had on the show to talk about the potential roll back once the Trump administration took over. And it's not just that, is it. It's the rescinding the National Lation National Labor Relations Memorandum viewing college athletes
as employees. And then there's the Title nine stuff as well that's been rolled back. So walk us through this. What does it mean? What do we need to know about this map?
Yeah, let's try to translate this into like non policy dorc language here. Right right before the Biden administration left the White House, their Department of Education put out a memo that said, hey, you know, based on this case law, based on how Title nine has traditionally been interpreted, we believe that the House Settlement revenue sharing needs to be
split the same way that scholarship money is distributed. You have to comply with Title nine for this particular thing, which is very significant because almost every school, and I'm sure including the schools in this market, we're planning on distributing you know, eighty five plus percent of their you know, direct direct payments to football, men's basketball, maybe women's basketball, but certainly not anything resembling a fifty to fifty or
fifty three to forty seven split. You know, the industry perception and expectation was, I think the Trump White House is going to roll this back, which is exactly what happens. But I think not to get like partisan here, it just still creates a sense of uncertainty and challenge if you're an athletic administrator right now. One of the reasons is that historically the federal government arm that investigates Title nine is out of the Department of Education, with the
Office of Civil Rights within there. And the Trump administration wants to get rid of the Department of Education, and if not completely, then then to gut it so much that I can't handle most of its responsibilities. And that this isn't me as like a crazy live saying this like that's that's what they said they wanted to do
as part of their government restructuring. So I mean, it isn't really clear whether that responsibility goes to the Department of Justice if it goes away entirely, if it goes to somebody else, and and that that's true for other similar Title nine reporting. So part of the challenge right now if you're a school isn't just how do I protect myself from being sued or losing a lawsuit when I set up this house settlement money, but how do
I set myself up for long term compliance? And also how do I set myself up for long term compliance in case, you know, Democrats come back in the White House in four years and bring a bunch of this stuff back. Do I want to be able to go into a lawsuit and then realize that I haven't been keeping receipts for a while?
Like there's there's there's a lot of concern because the speed and the somewhat randomness of the federal government cutbacks and reorganizations.
Is faster than what people understand. How to comply with any of those rules are so long answer to say, people are confused, and they're probably going to be confused for a few more weeks.
So moving over into this space, while kind of staying in the same general area, you were one of the first that I heard say that you are now skeptical that college football will eventually land on this pro model that we've all pontificated on for a number of years, and very smart college football media members like yourself right
about all the time. And you know that was prior to the new administration taking over, and you articulated why you were a little bit skeptical that we were going to fall into this model even though a lot of people believe it is an eventuality. Let's revisit it now that the Trump administration is in the White House. Are you still in that space where you're not sure that this pro model is the eventual place where this plane will land or have you kind of change your stance there?
No, I think where I am right now is very uncertain. I completely understand the it's inevitable argument, and a lot of that centers on not the White House and not Congress necessarily, but the courts system, where a world where you are directly distributing revenued athletes and what they are
doing and practice resembles an employment relationship. More and more that that that courts would eventually rule that big time football players and big time basketball players are employees and have to be treated as such, and and in a divide to Congress, there isn't really the ability to pass the law to prevent that. But where we are right now is one a world where so much of the kind of administrative law and precedent around labor relations it's
being thrown out the window. We've gone here and in four months from the National Labor Relations Board ruling in favor of athlete unionization too, they're legitimately not potentially not being a National Labor Relations board at all. Uh, there's there's a there's a real chance this Supreme Court might decide it's unconstitutional. Uh, they've already fired all the people that that that said that that were ruling in favor
of the college athletes to begin with. We're also moving towards the world here where Republicans have unified control of of of the legislature. And the guy that's most invested in college sports right now, and and who's going to lead a committee is Ted Cruz. And Ted Cruz is already signaled, hey, I am I'm broadly sympathetic to to college sports concerns right now, I'm not exactly a friend of organized labor. Whether he grants the NC double a
and outright anti trust exemption or or something different. The idea that Congress can just step up and say, I don't care what the court say new law, college athletes aren't employees is a legitimate possibility right now. And you might go, ah, but I won't do that because that's not very free market of them, Like come on, have you met Tommy Tuberville like that? That's that's not the point.
This isn't about ideology anymore, right Like, this is about whether guys that don't follow college sports very close they are reading the tea leaves and think that there's going to be enough you know, fan resentment on the nil era to try to slam the door on some of this stuff. So I don't want to say that that's
that's absolutely going to happen. But I think any attorney, any athlete, labor rights advocate, any athletic director that's not willing to grapple with the actual political reality right now, it has their head in his hand. It's such a different world than it was six months ago. And you just simply cannot rely on on on task, precedent and previous institutions to rule a particular way anymore.
Dovetails are to the final question for today for the second time in form, the power brokers from the SEC and the Big Ten are getting together to discuss what they want this entire thing to look like moving forward. They'll discuss the house for NCAA settlement, future governance, and then of course the CFP format, scheduling, partners ships and such.
We're in the Big twelve footprints.
What do you make of this continued momentum moving in the direction of those two conferences essentially calling all the shots.
Yeah, I think if I was a fan of a Big twelve institution, I'd be deeply concerned about this because I don't know if there's a really effective way that the Big twelve and ACC can can fight some of these changes. The idea that, hey, the last college football playoff format was built around a conference alignment world that doesn't exist anymore, I think that has some merit, and I don't think the Big Ten and the SEC demanding
multiple automatic bids has any merit. I think that that's terrible and honestly anti American, But they have the leverage to potential push for some of those things, so and I think that would be absolutely terrible for for for this conference. The more spots that are locked up by these bigger these bigger brands, it's not going to free
up more space for you guys. It's gonna it's going to create a path to help them get seven and nobody in this league for football recruits and anywhere close to the championship caliber level to compete with the Ohio States or Organs on a year and year out basis. So this is I would consider this a borderline existential threat. I don't I can't sit here on the radio and tell you I know exactly how this is going to go or whether they're going to be successful in twenty
sixteen or successful a little bit later on. But this is a concern that I think really needs to animate, not just Big twelve and ACC athletic directors, but university presidents and their attorneys. All.
Right, man, Where can people go find all that work that ultimately allows you to talk for twenty minutes about things and none of us fully understand.
You can find the Extra Points newsletter at extra points mb dot com. I have a story coming out tomorrow about changes in the video game group licensing space, which I understand are of interest too. Many fans. I've also got some original reporting coming on in a day or two about the US Soccer Federation potentially trying to take over college soccer, and more about what's happening here in New Orleans. To find it at Extra Points MD dot com. You can find me on the internet at Matt BROWNEP.
You're the man, Matt. Thanks for the time, buddy. We'll chat soon.
Okay, always my pleasure. Be well friends.
All Right, Matt Brown, I'm telling you it is the best college football newsletter if you're trying to understand the landscape and the business of what's happening. I read it every time you post one. At Matt BROWNEP is where you find them.