Welcome to The Audible.

I'm Stuart Mandel, joined by Bruce Feldman.

We are recording this on Thursday morning.

We spent the early part of this week at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago, and we want to share

some of our experiences there with you.

But first, Bruce, right before we came on the podcast, some news broke about a topic that

you and I first really delved into here with Bill Hancock way back on a few days after the semis last year and that is that

they have agreed to change the semifinal dates move them off new year's eve for most of the

rest of the contract yeah and for people who don't know bill Hancock is the executive director

of the playoff he's really the face of the playoff. You may see, you know,

before you saw Jeff Long, this year you'll see Kirby Hokut, the Texas Tech AD as kind of the person

defending their rankings. But Hancock is the one who most of us interact with on this. I mean,

my takeaway is common sense and ESPN, which is paying a fortune for the playoff, one out,

which is a good thing. I think that's a win-win for the fans. Yeah, you know, they tried to

for whatever reason they thought they could reinvent New Year's Eve and it didn't work.

Which sounds so stupid when you say it like that.

It didn't.

It didn't work.

And I think where you have to give them credit is if this were the BCS, and the BCS days, they were just so stubborn that I wouldn't have been surprised if they just kept on keeping on the way it was.

And at first it sounded like they might, but I just think, you know, when we had

Bill Hancock on our podcast the Monday morning after and he just kept saying one year doesn't

make a trend and the games were lopsided. He was in spin modes, too. He was in spin mode, especially

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