Welcome to the Audible.

I'm Stuart Mandel, joined as always by Bruce Feldman.

Bruce, over the weekend at Elite 11, you broke a story that, from what you told me,

you were under the assumption had already been broken.

Yeah.

So the background on this is Malik Zaire, the former Notre Dame starting quarterback, obviously.

Graduate transfer had been on the market for a while.

And last week and a half ago or so, I had reported that Zaire was expected to transfer to UF if the SEC had amended its graduate transfer policy.

Well, on Friday, three days ago as we're taping, they did that.

And in the wake of it, Malik Zaire had tweeted maybe an hour after the news got out, let's go with exclamation point. So that was kind of cryptic, but I think, you know, I assumed it meant, as a lot of people did, that he's heading to Gainesville. So when I'm out at the Elite 11 on Saturday night, it was the second day of camp. And there's other media there, but it was the second day of the camp, and I saw Malik and I know him a little bit. I've, you know, covered him and been around him, you know, basically for the past few years. We started talking, and at one point he told me, yeah, I'm heading to Gainesville on Wednesday. It's actually going to be the first time he's ever visited UF, but he's excited to play it at Florida. And he thinks it's, you know, he loves the challenge of it being in the SEC, which he kind of compared it to the major leagues. And he's going to embrace that. So, and then we talked a little more. He told me he was going to be, you know, I said, what are you going to study there? He said journalism. He thinks that

he wants to maybe even write as part of his graduate degree. Did you try to talk him out of that? You know what? I'd said, you know, there's been a lot of layoffs in the business, Malik. You know, you want to stay and look on the on-air side because he's a pretty dynamic kid. He's a good, He's a good speaker and very, very outgoing and em,

and bullion is the way I would describe him. air side because he's a pretty dynamic kid he's a good he's a good speaker and very

very outgoing and and a bullion is the way I would describe him so maybe the TV side's a

little more makes more sense given our given the state of our industry last time

if there has been this I don't can't recall that a college football, like a notable college football player after finishing college, maybe after finishing the NFL, became a sports writer.

I got one because he was a friend of mine who I work with at ESPN magazine, Alan Grant.

Oh, yeah, that's a good one.

Alan Grant once led the nation in punt returns for Stanford and played in the NFL for four or five years.

And he did, uh, he worked at ESPN magazine as an NFL writer and actually liked to write other stuff more,

rather than NFL.

But, uh, he definitely helped our, uh, helped our rec league basketball team.

Because even at like 35, you have an NFL cornerback and a kick returner.

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