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Music Good morning, Bucknarders. Welcome to the Bucknuts Morning 5 here on Wednesday, October 15th,

2025. I am Dave Biddle. I am very happy to be joined by author Bill Conley from ESPN. I'm a big fan of

your work, Bill, and it's an honor to have you on the show. Welcome into the show, my friend. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right, let's start with the book. We're going to get to you. You're also the inventor of SP Plus, you know, the advanced metric for football, which I absolutely love. I love analytics and sports. And you're one of the, I guess, founding fathers of analytics and football. So we're going to get to that later. But what gave you the idea that book is called for the fans out there? We're going to let you know how to buy it in a minute. But the new book is Forward Progress, the definitive future of college football. Bill, what gave you the idea to write the book? Yeah, I mean, I think just the change. This one's pretty easy to explain,

I figure, you know, the amount of things in a sport that changed far too slowly for a very

long period of time, suddenly basically everything we've been arguing about for years,

all kind of changed within about a two or three year period. And so I started to realize,

you know, I like having kind of a vision for where I think three year period. And so I started to realize, you know,

I like having kind of a vision for where I think the sport should go. And I sort of to realize that for a long time, I was just reacting. You know, this change happens and you react to it. And then

there's another court case or whatever, you react to that. And so, you know, that's the best part

about the book writing process is forcing yourself to step back and look at how things have developed over a longer period of time.

And so, you know, there's a chapter in there about conference relignment, chapter in there about television's relationship with the sport and about arguing about playoffs and so on and so forth.

And kind of helped me to get my own perspective

...