College football season came into to an end last night in Atlanta. Ohio State is your national champ Our next guest was on the ground. I believe I saw him send out a picture on social media. He's been one of our favorites college football all year long. The writer and creator of one of my favorite college football newsletters called Extra Points. My buddy Matt Brown on a Tuesday. Matt, Happy Tuesday. Man, you were on the ground in Atlanta last time?
Yeah, I was.
I just got back to Chicago about twenty minutes ago. It was a little bit of a zoo getting out of town, but.
I was there and it was a truly excellent experience. I think.
Tell me about that environment.
What was the percentage of Ohio State fans versus Notred Notre Dame fans, and what was it like to kind of be on the ground there.
Yeah, I think it was probably her around sixty percent Ohio State, maybe fifty five percent Ohio State. Normally, I think in these kind of circumstances, the Ohio State fans wild and only take over a building, but Notre Dame is probably right up there in terms of as large and as national of a fan base and one that can afford to show the ridiculous amount of money for a ticket.
I mean to get in the building leading up to the game.
The tickets were over three thousand dollars to go just get at the at the at the very top row. Think easily the most expensive championship game ticket in the
last last decade or so. And when that kind of thing happens, especially when you're playing in a really big NFL stadium where you have a really high roof and the sound kind of moves around differently, I think there's a there's always a legitimate fear that it becomes more of a sterile, corporate environment rather than the more passionate, collegiate focused event that you would expect. But I really found this to be a pretty high energy, high energy game,
high energy crowd. Things kind of began to low a little bit in the middle of the third quarter when it looked like Ohio State had already won the game, but Notre Dame came back pretty quickly, and it.
Was it was loud, it was it was, it was intense, and the level of relief I would say from Ohio States coaches, their players.
Their staffers was very significant. Once you get on the ground here because this is not the typical championship journey, the typical championship expectations or pressures.
It's I think it's a complicated ending for this team, and.
We'll get there in a moment.
I have not seen a final number as far as the TV ratings go, but as you reference, if it's three grand just to get in the building, I would imagine that the powers that be in college football, and I would imagine when we see the number, the powers that be in television are probably going to celebrate this twelve team format.
Right.
It feels like it's probably checking all the boxes for the people that make the decisions about this stuff.
Oh, I think unquestionably for anybody on the financial or business side of college athletics or this industry, the first year of this, called team Playoffs, was a massive, massive success.
You were able to prove that you could.
Host a campus site game on short notice and some notoriously difficult to UH to reach, UH and and handle environments. Right, Like, I don't know if any of you guys listening have ever been to State College, Pennsylvania where Penn State is, but there's basically two hotels that it's in the middle of nowhere.
It's a giant camping trip.
They sent one hundred thousand people on on the ten days notice to.
Pulled off a game. There's not a lot of hotels in South Bend, you know, on recruiting visits.
People typically have to stay in Chicago or Michigan. They hosted a playoff game, you had, you had strong attendance, strong ratings uh and and improved ratings and and buy into the end of the regular season. So there's certainly things I.
Think could be tweaked or improved, and.
Those are things that the administrators are going to be talking about over the next.
Couple of weeks.
But I think it would be hard to draw up a better bracket, better result, better better finale for any of the Bean Counters.
Don't we had this year?
All right?
Moving over to this wild ride that it's been for Ryan Day And look, yeah, you know, I don't know that I have an accurate frame of reference for how intensely passionate, maybe at times crazy Ohio State fans are. And I get losing to Michigan four times in a row is a really bad look. And I don't know how they lost to Michigan this year with how good they are, how deep and I get it, I really do. But Ryan Day is a coach that has a better winning percentage than Jim Tressel. He has a better SMP
index than Urban Meyer. He's now one of three current coaches that have won a national championship. And it feels like if they moved on from him at the age of forty five, he could pick his next job. How real was the heat around him and what did this run say to people that think he should not be in charge there?
The heat was meaningful.
It was not a situation where I think he was in danger of Ohio State actively terminating the contract, and a large part of that is just because his buyout would be would be absolutely prohibitive.
But the stresses on.
Him and his family there were I saw some reports leaving the game that there was like extra security around his house. After the Michigan game, it gets to that point when you realize like it's not worth it, especially because Ryan Day spent a lot of time in the
NFL and and had interest in the NFL positions. Have has indicated that they've had interest in him before, and so that the kind of mood and thought in a lot of the corners of the industry, was if Ohio State lost early in this playoff, after the amount of money that was allocated for this roster, how senior laden and experienced this team was, and those kind of expectations, if it blew up in their face, then rather for the termination, there would be a kind of you know, mutual,
amicable parting of waves, and you know, maybe he goes to make the cult's job or something right.
But that's that isn't what happened, And it wasn't just that Ohio State had lost to Michigan four times in a row.
Like yeah, I think I think Day's like seventy and ten. He has one of the highest winning percentages legitimately in like college football history. But it's like every t all ten of those losses were especially brutal.
For Ohio State fans.
Right, you lose to Michigan four times in a row, You lose two games in a row to Oregon, you had the one versus two matchup earlier in the year in Eugene, and then you had Oregon the year before as your premier not out of conference game when they really weren't.
That good, and you had c. J. Stroud and you lose.
You had the very winnable playoff game against Georgia when they won the national championship by roughly eight hundred points, and things kind of fell apart in the fourth quarter and you missed the fifty yard.
Field goal and that's the end of it, right.
There's something I think acutely frustrating about being a team that wins almost every single game, often in a way that fuels psychologically frustrating to the fan base.
And then the.
Last three or four years they've lost most of their big games unless they're playing ten State, who has the same problem, whose fan base is facing a similar kind of neurosis.
So then to go from all of.
That and all of the negative energy to not just beating four really good teams in a row, but mostly beating the absolute snot out of them in a way that they really didn't do it to any competent team during the regular season changes everything. And if anything, I think this actually might be an interesting case study for how you have to handle load management in the twelfth team playoff era. You're gonna have to play an NFL schedule to win a national championship. You're gonna have to
play sixteen games. You can't empty the.
Chamber in early October.
And that might mean not that you're hot dogging it or anything, but that might mean that you're willing to trade some less exciting finishes or some closer margins of victory than you might expect to keep your team fresh and ready to go in Lake December and January. And that's what Ohio State did this year.
Do you think there's any chance and maybe this is just me getting older, because I'm thinking what it would be like to win. He's finished in the top ten every year he's been the Ohio State head coach.
As you reference, he's seventy and ten.
That's third all time winning percentage in college football, one of three coaches to win a national championships as I reference. Do you think there's any part of him that's like, I'm over this and maybe he decides that he would like to go do what he does at a top
the very highest of levels somewhere else. If I don't think he'd leave for a college job, but you think, you know, all of the pressure regardless of what he seems to do, is that something that maybe he says, I'm not interested in doing this for you people anymore.
I mean, it's entirely possible if that conversation is going to happen, I'm not just going to you know, it'll be happening after the championship parade and after something else. I think the next month in Columbus.
Is going to be fascinating.
Just I wan to see how fans and I include myself in this, honestly, how they reconcile their previous sentiments with this guy and compartmentalized the frustration over the last few years with the final result. I understand that many people listening to this and think, how on earth could you go seventy and ten and be unhappy like that? Sounds insane people Utah and DOAU fans walk across broken glass to have some kind of a run of success
like that. But I think you also have to remember that Urban Meyer, when he was the coach at Ohio State, had Ohio State in the top ten every single year, made the playoffs several times, won a national championship. Had there been a twelve team playoff era, I think Ohio State would have almost certainly won at least another championship during that era, and then Jim Tresso before Urban Meyer had Ohio State in the top ten almost every single
year and won a title. Like you really have to go back to the World War Two to find multiple years in a row where Ohio State has sucked. It's probably the most recession proof program in college football. And that isn't me just saying that as a guy that was born in Columbus, Like look up sports reference man like the that's that they have the highest floor of anybody in the sport. So you come in and you're just a pretty good coach, You're gonna win nine games there.
Now you have to really really screw up to bottom out. And I think that that, juxtaposed to the results on the field, is why you saw this saw some frustration.
I need if a.
Day decided in two weeks, I did what I said I was gonna do. I'm gonna go coach the Colts. I'm wanna go work with grown men.
Forget this.
I couldn't blame him, but I don't know enough to know if that's if there's an opening right now that would be of interest to him. Given you now now that now there's a title defense.
Captain Morona, I wouldn't go seventy and ten in college football, Matt, if we're being honest, I mean you said b yu fans, you know, walking off, and you're one of the few media members I could actually make that reference to. But seventy and ten I.
Think would struggle to recruit in this environment. I remember, if it's been a minute, but.
I remember he rubbed a couple of people the wrong way. Yeah, very very passionate guy, but not everybody was always thrilled with his approach. You have to be a little bit more of a team player in this era.
But we're talking about the chief captain of the need fights. He'd ad just you know that?
Sure?
Well, yeah, definitely definitely team schematic mind.
Okay, ok, moving on before we start getting emails. I just knew you were the one that I could ask that question too, for obvious reasons. All Right, we had a lot of good college football guests on yesterday. We also had the game on our station at five thirty, and I asked them all the same question, Matt, because I just felt like, in my opinion on paper, that was a mismatch last night, and so I said, can Notre Dame make this a fair fight.
Do you think they did.
Oh, unquestionably. I mean the first ten minutes of the game.
I think laid out exactly the script that Notre Dame needed, which was running a lot of qv power and hold the ball for eight minutes and just paper cut Ohio State to death and limit the number of possessions. There times that Ohio State could score buck guys scored touchdown their first four drives, but because Notre Dame was soh at the beginning of the game, the margin never really got out of hands. I think that the only real mismatch on that game Washio the Notre Dame's ability to
throw the ball downfield versus Ohio State's secondary. If Nelson has to throw in the ball thirty two times in a game, Notre Dame's gonna lose. That's not a team that's really built to come back.
And they almost did.
There was a there was a pathway for them to win. It would have looked a lot like the Michigan game, where you just dragged the drag o'house stayed into the mud and make them fight in.
A phone booth.
They just weren't able to do it for four quarters. They're really only able to do it for about fourteen minutes.
So equal time here for coaches, because I've been wildly impressed with Marcus Freeman. Didn't start out well with that home loss to Marshall, and obviously Week two wasn't Northern Illinois this year, But what would it be like at the age of thirty five, your first head coaching job is you're the head coach of Notre Dame, you know,
like that's that's a wild thing. And as I've listened to him more throughout this run and studied him more throughout the Notre Dames you know, march to the National championship game, I've been wildly impressed with his communication, wildly impressed with the way his players respond to him. He kind of just feels like this rising star in the ranks to college football. So what stands out most to you about this kind of wonderkins rise we've seen from from Notre Dames head coach Marcus Freeman.
Sure, and maybe this market doesn't know about this or I don't know if it was, you know, mentioned on the broadcast four hundred times, but Marcus Freeman of course played at Ohio State. He's from Ohio, and as Ohio State fans went to the message boards over the last two years contemplating ejecting Ryan Day in the space. One of the two people that everybody said we should go bring, we should go bring home would be Marcus Freeman. I
think you're exactly right. The most impressive thing that I think he's managed to do this season was take what is normally the most unlikable brand in college football and make them likable and make them fun. It was fun to root for Notre Dame this year. They're They're running an inspired triple option kind of offense. They're one of the only major teams where or the quarterback run game is an integral part of what they're doing. They had
two really exciting offensive skill position players. And this team, you know, they had like five starters in missing multiple NFL guys due to injury, and they were counted out nationally after that. Northern Illinois lost, you know, by like week four, You right, part of that's just because they got a little bit unlucky with with the schedule this year. We in our lifetime, we have had so many Notre
Dame coaches who are so deeply, deeply unlikable. I don't know if there are blood relatives that enjoyed watching and rooting for Charlie White's and Brian Kelly is not somebody that's going to be on the Mister Congeniality Award list for anybody that works in the college sports industry. That's not what Freeman is, and he's not the stereotype of what a domer or.
Has typically been.
I don't know if he's going to end up staying there for thirty years. Nobody really does in this industry other than winningham. But if I was an Notre Dame fan, which I'm not, but if I was, I would be very heartened by this year and feel very good about where your coaching staff is today and moving forward.
Heard a lot of college football media members complain about the length of time, the fact that it's January twentieth in this Monday night game. I get it, but you can't go head to head against the NFL. You're a smart guy. What do you think the solution is here?
I don't really know if there is one.
I understand the frustration too. I think in a perfect world, maybe this is a game that's played in the Central time zone and you go a little bit earlier and try to.
Alleviate some of those things.
You already kind of got beat up on some of these early early playoff games by going against the NFL. The only thing I could possibly think of is potentially starting the season.
A week earlier.
But then you're looking at a lot of lost revenue from having maybe multiple games four class actually starts. It's one of the issues that the college baseball schedule has with the postseason goes well past graduation for many teams.
The Final Four has the.
Same issue too. The championship games is usually on a Monday, It's usually in the Eastern time zone.
It usually goes way past everyone else's bedtime.
It thinks when I'm president, the day will the day after the championship game will be a day off, just like the Super Bowl. But that's we're not there yet.
I love it.
What do you make of I think Joel Klat's the one that's been pushing this narrative of college football, making the Rose Bowl their answer to the Super Bowl.
I understand it from the perspective of tradition, and you know, look, even if you're a completely cynical person, when the sunsets over the mountains around the third quarter, it does look beautiful.
The most cynical reporters.
I know, I haven't covered a game there yet, but you know, tell me, like, no, when you touch the grass, you.
Recognize that it's perfect.
The very selfish state response for me, and this is not something that other people are going to.
Care about, but you and I might care a little bit, is that the.
Roadbush is hard to get to, and when you host gigantic events in Los Angeles, because traffic is so bad and everything is so sprawled out, it's difficult to get hotels, it's difficult to do media availability.
You just you're just stuck there.
And there's there's really three cities where you can have a great stadium experience and fans and everybody involved in the event can can be relatively close by and you can have all the programming within walking distance. I think that's Atlanta, It's New Orleans, and it's Indianapolis. I know everybody makes fun of Indianapolis that you've covered a major event there.
You get it.
You're not there to go move or to go you know, look check out the art scene. You're you're there for for this this major football game. It'd be cool for television, but having covered events in other places. I think if I had to go to the Rose Bowl every year, I would complain a little bit about being stuck in my car.
And there it is. There, it is, yes, the final the final point there.
Hey. You know.
The the narrative matter, as you know, is that Ohio State bought a championship, paid a grip of money for a group you know, twenty to twenty five mil. I don't know what the number is, but you know what's interesting, the majority of that revenue went to like returning players, you know, in a way Ryan Day built this thing over a long game type play, and I think the narrative is like they just went and bought a bunch
of dudes in the transfer port. They brought in some And we've been debating here because Utah football is bringing in forty one new players. It's a fifty three percent roster turnover, and you get it because they really struggled
a year ago. But coach witz Mo has always been recruit, developed, retain, win, and the best Utah teams have always been teams that have had third four fifth year guys, so four eight you know, Rose Bowl Pac twelve champs as well, and is that a model for success in college football.
So how would you articulate the.
Way Ryan Day and the Ohio State administration went about building this roster and allocating their funds.
Yeah, this is this is something I'm going to be writing about some more this week because I've seen that narrative too, and I do think it's missing the point a little bit. So, Yes, the total for Ohio States football roster was about twenty million dollars down on the field. Talk to the athletic director roster or. He confirmed that Ryan Day alluded to it in the in the final press conference. Both people also said, and I'm inclined to believe this, that that wasn't the highest payroll in college
football this year. And it's hard to get hard and fast data about this depending on who you talk to. Oregon, Texas, Miami. We're all in that conversation as well. That they didn't make it to where Ohio State did.
What I believe you're.
Seeing at this point now we have a couple of years of data. It's enough evidence to suggest that you can and should plug particular holes in your roster via the transfer portal. And there's some position groups where it's easier to do this than others, but that it's very difficult to build the bulk of your roster that way.
Simply because you need continuity.
So one thing I think i'd point to you here is that every single starter in that championship game on Ohio States offensive and defensive lines was a Heights will commit.
To Ohio State.
Seth Blacklin, the center, you know, came from Alabama. You might have remembered that he had a truly horrific game in the College Football Playoff, had a couple of fumbles.
That's why he was off. He was injured. I did not play through the through the playoff run. But most of those guys.
Were seniors or or redyerd juniors, or people that turned down going to the NFL for the third or fourth round, uh, delaying their their their second contract to come back and win a title. I think there's enough evidence to suggest you can definitely get a quarterback and the and the transfer portal. And in fact, I think that's going to be pretty common because no one's gonna sit on the bench for more than one year, so there's gonna be
a lot of good guys. You know, Will Will Howard as a as a mid three star who got you know, bench for Adrian Martinez. It wasn't exactly like picking up KYLEB. Williams in the portal, but like those guys exist, Ohio State had picked up maybe the best safety in the country. Uh, it was only available because Nick Stapan retires and picked up a really good running back.
That the side. It was okay taking a substantially lesser.
Role to split carries with a five star high school Ohio State commit The place where I think you run into the most trouble is trying to build the line of scriptage that way. And it's just because there generally are not enough good offensive linemen that hit the portal, and you really generally need a lot of experience and time and reps to build chemistry specifically within that unit. We're going to see a couple of teams win championships in different ways, right. I don't think everyone has to
do things exactly like Ohio State. You don't have to spend exactly that much money, And to be fair, a non trivial amount of that money was not donor money. Well, I was actual, honest to goodness, legitimate corporate marketing deals, and Ohio State will probably.
You know, then in Texas will.
Probably always have the most legitimate corporate marketing deals, maybe Michigan in some years. But I think it's going to be easier to build the team where the majority of your players are people that signed with you as high schoolers or if they were transfers, stay with your program for multiple years, and then you go when you try to fill three or four holes in your roster each year.
So the Big Ten now has back to back national champs. They have Oregon with Uncle Phil's money. They have Ohio State and Michigan. They have LA Chicago, New York. If you can't Rutgers, I suppose, and there are a lot of Penn State fans in Philly. They have some of the biggest markets in the country. They have some of the best teams in the country. Is it time to say the Big Ten is not just a pre emitive conference in college football?
But it might not be close, don't I don't know if I'm willing to say that it's overwhelmingly the best conference in college football. I think I think pound for pound is probably still the SEC, but that gap as as small as it's ever been, and there's a reason to believe that that friend could change. And it's interesting because this is also true when you look.
At the history of college football.
The main entities that were opposed to giving athletic scholarships were Big ten teams. Because those Big ten schools were in more industrialized and large, larger metropolitan areas, it was much easier to give those athletes.
Make work jobs.
And schools in the South, which were often in smaller areas and less wealthy states and had less wealthy fan bases, wanted to give scholarships so they could be an equal footing because they knew that Michigan and Ohio State and Minnesota and Wisconsin kind of outbid death. And then you went to the athletic scholarship model, there was some more parody. He had the under the table Bagman era where the
I think the Southeast really had a major advantage. And there's an argument to be made as a move into revenue sharing and move into a world where money above the cap that has to be tied to marketing deals and it's going to be more strictly like monitored via the court system, is going to give another big advantage to schools in law, not just larger markets but that have richer fans and are tied to larger industries.
And you can say what you will, but there's a lot of great schools in the SEC.
But the higher end institutions in the Big ten has fifty thousand students, you know, student student bodies, alumni networks of two hundred, three hundred and four hundred thousand people, and law schools and medical schools and a deeper tradition of professional education and.
Richer alumni than most schools in the SEC. So it's entirely possible that the.
Pendulum was flewing back. You know, Auburn has pressurized lumber money, Georgia has alcohol money. Texas and Texas A and m have oil money, which is a different level of rich and mean the Michigans of the world have fast money, tech money.
Larry Ellison's girlfriend.
You know, besides she's in Michigan sand So Larry Ellison touts a three million dollar check for Bryce Hunderwood. There's things at Ohio State and Michigan and to some extent, you know, Wisconsin and Nebraska can do that. A lot of schools in the SEC, and that's going to be I think an uncomfortable cultural reevaluation compared to how people in the South look at their football programs over the last fifteen years.
Final thing mad will set you loose.
And you know, when I saw that you're on the rundown, I wanted to ask you about this because you'll be good with it. The US Department of Education, we've been waiting for a little Title nine guidance. We got it, so future revenue distributions from a school to an athlete or his or her NL rights are now what's called financial assistance, which must be made proportionally available to male and female athletes.
I was not aware of this, but my news alerts tell me we have a.
New president that has been installed, so potentially this could change things. But what's your take on where we're at now after the Department what the Department of Education released and moving forward with a new president in the White House and a new administration, what effect could that have on this ruling?
And where do you ultimately do you think we land?
It's a great question, And what I can tell you, guys is I've been tracking this for over a year and talking to a lot of experienced litigators and attorneys that work in the Title nine space. And what I heard pretty consistently over the last nine ten months was that based on the letter of the law and based on court precedent and administrative precedent, and not just from like the Biden and Obama administrations, but you're going further back,
you're based on on on the law. The Doees guidance here makes a lot of sense.
There was, there was.
That's part of the reason why you saw a lot of universities try to really hedge their bets with how with with with revenue sharing a needle with some of their work with NIL because they're very worried about that potential liability. So that's true on one component. So I'm not I'm not shocked that the advice came at all. I am shocked that it came, you know, three days before the Biden administration's out the door.
The other kind of challenging thing though about Title nine.
Is that there's no Title nine cops.
Right.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education will go after you.
When somebody sues you, when there's a complaint, and that process takes forever. Right.
We have we have a case still pending right now with Oregon, and we're one of the components are are women athletes suing over disproportionate publicity and and side benefits and and administrative support around nil, to say nothing of revenue sharing. And we're not close to that case being finished. So what a lot of a lot of universities in this market, in my market, across the country have decided to do is say, look, we're all speeding. They can't arrest all of us, and and we don't see enough
state troopers out here. So I'm not going to adjust my speed. I'm just going to hope that I'm not the red lambeau that you know that draws the Fed detentions. First, like, if the Feds can't stiffing in almost everybody in Division one is out of compliance, and in Title nine and in some capacity it's just not it's just not regular, it's not enforced very often. So so this is the major question, is what this administration decides to do with this particular component of Title nine.
And honest to god, I think.
That's that's not an easy political question to answer, right because you've had a lot of conservative activists points to Title nine as part of the justification for fighting back really hard against trans.
Participation in athletics.
You're going to have a lot of other conservative activists who are not willing to go to the mattresses to fight over equal distribution of financial payments for women's basketball players. To take money from football players and give it to women's basketball or women's volleyball. You're going to have some conservative activists you don't think we should have Title nine at all. And I think there may be a real bipartisan conversation about revisiting.
That law because it wasn't written for sports, and it.
Wasn't really written for a world where collegiate athletics becomes more explicitly professionalized. And that's a conversation worth having. So all of this is to say, I'm I actually, I'm really frustrated that the Biden administration is tided to do this because I think that just injects more chaos and uncertainty without a meaningful solution.
And uh, there's not a good time to go be have a dot evu.
Email address of working in this stuff here, because you're gonna get you're probably gonna get sued either way.
Where can people go get all your work?
Matt You can find my stuff at extra points mb dot com or Matt Brown EP on Twitter and Blue Sky.
Thank you, my friend. Have you a great week and we'll chat too.
Oh it's always my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
I the great Matt Brown.
I'm telling you it's one of the best college football newsletters around. A lot of it is the business of college football things off the field, just called extra points. Find it on extra points mb dot com or his Twitter pages at Matt brown EP. All right, got to tell you about my friends at Prize Picks before we catch a break. Prize Picks is the best place to get real money sports action with over ten million members. Now we've got conference championship weeks coming up, and they're
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