Alabama AD Greg Byrne on Buyouts, NIL Chaos & the Real Cost of College Football
The Audible with Stew, Bruce & Ralph: A show about college football
The Athletic
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As we get deeper into the buyout season, Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne joins Bruce, Stew, and Ralph to pull back the curtain on college football's economics. Byrne addresses whether schools, as Stew wrote in a recent column, are “wildly irresponsible spenders,” or facing genuine financial constraints. He also explains what it's like sitting across the table from powerful agents.
In mailbag, the crew debates whether Arch Manning deserves the criticism after a rough start to his Texas career, and Bruce and Stew disagree on what makes a coach "great" versus just "good." Plus, breakout players to watch this weekend.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the latest edition of the Audible, presented by Trader Joe's. |
| 0:12.9 | I'm Bruce Feldman, joined, as always, by my college from the Athletic Stewart Mandel and Ralph Russo. |
| 0:18.4 | Ralph is with us now. He's going to go away in a little bit. |
| 0:22.0 | Not because he has anything better to do, |
| 0:24.3 | but he actually does have to do something. |
| 0:26.4 | So we'll see Ralph in a little bit, |
| 0:29.9 | but we have a big show today. |
| 0:31.3 | We got your mailbag questions. |
| 0:33.5 | We got our breakout players in the games to watch. |
| 0:36.8 | And because the big story this weekend was Penn State buying out James Franklin, |
| 0:42.4 | we thought it would be a good idea to have on a real-life athletic director at a big program. |
| 0:48.2 | Greg Byrne from Alabama is going to join us where we can throw all sorts of questions at him |
| 0:53.1 | about what's real and what's not |
| 0:55.2 | when it comes to all the economics that go on with college football. |
| 1:01.5 | All right, Stu, we're pleased to be joined by our guests. |
| 1:04.5 | He is Greg Byrne, the Alabama Athletic Director. |
| 1:08.0 | I've been an AD at the Power 4 level for almost 20 years. |
| 1:13.7 | First at, yeah, first at Mississippi State in the SEC, then Arizona and now obviously in Tuscaloosa. |
| 1:19.6 | Greg, thanks for joining us today. You bet you. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all. |
| 1:23.8 | You too. Okay. So over the weekend, obviously the huge story in college football was Penn State Fire James Franklin. And to do that, they will owe him close to $50 million in terms of the buyout. And that prompted Stu to write a column Sunday on it and had a paragraph that he wrote this quote these schools aren't broke they're |
| 1:47.6 | just wildly irresponsible spenders end quote you've been an ad for a long time worked in college |
| 1:55.3 | athletics for even longer what are the fans and us in the media missing here? Well, that it's complicated, right? |
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