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All right. Welcome in. Lake Hake is live. It is Thursday night, March 11th,

the Year of Our Lord, 2021 jam packed. As always, we've got a big

week here. Actually, it's ongoing. Some of it's already happened. Some of it's in the process of happening. Some you can see. Some you can't see. All of it I'll tell you about, before we go off the air tonight. We're talking about, to be honest with you, something I never thought I'd talk about at the inception of the college football playoff, and that is which era has been, was, and then will be

healthier for college football? The old BCS, you know, the much maligned BCS, or what a lot of people are pitching as the future of college football, an 18 playoff, an expanded playoff. Again, stuff that maybe I thought I'd never hear myself say, I'll probably say on the show tonight, but I'm going to give you my reasons. Some of you're going to agree, disagree. I'll give you my reasons. The Sunshine State Scorecard came out this week. Now, that's a special that Bud Elliott does for several states a few times a year. But I look at it, especially the Florida and California versions and double especially the Florida version as the real key to

unlocking parity in college football. Don't have a lot of it right now. I think there are tangible

ways that don't involve expanding a playoff that we could go about getting it. That's one of them.

We'll talk about that tonight. Also, it is the continuation of the series that we're doing where

we're asking these questions for different conferences out there.

We're going to hit the ACC from several different, like half a dozen angles tonight.

All that plus the Notre Dame mood tracker.

And before we start, a great big thank you to everyone who participated in our first,

but certainly not last, late kick show owners association meeting. It was great. I sat right over there, and we just, we got about, what, somewhere between 20 and 25 of you in a room on Zoom, and we just talked for like an hour and a half, somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours. Here's the important part. It's not the last time we're going to do it. Next one, I think when we get over 14,000 on Twitter at Lake Kick Josh, that'll be the next one. We learned a lot, though. The process taught us a lot about how we should structure it and format it next time. So we're happy. We got a nice B, B plus product that we are rapidly going to turn into an A plus product the next time around. So we're really happy with that. And thank you so much because it was really, really fun.

Also, one of those other irons in the fire that you guys always ask me about

is merchandising and whatnot. And I'm certainly not an expert on that by any means, but some people are.

Just stay tuned. Not too much longer. Stay tuned on that. We got a lot to talk about. Let's dive in.

The BCS and the college football playoff, two distinct eras when we were in one. Most of us claimed that we wanted the other. And now the more and more we've gotten into the other, I'll be darned if a couple of us, maybe even three, maybe five, maybe even, I don't know, 30 percent are looking back saying, you know, things weren't so bad during the BCS. Now, there are certainly merit to the college football playoffs. So let's dive into this because I think in a lot of ways we're at an inflection point in college football. Now, there are a lot of different conversations going on simultaneous. So we don't even have time just on this show or a collection of these shows to address every single one of them. But I think a lot of us can agree on a few things, even if we disagree on the answers. The inflection point that is here, and I think it's been here for a little while now in college football, is this confluence of a whole bunch of things that we don't like. I don't think any of us look at the deterioration of bowl season and it mattering less and less and say,

oh, that's a good thing.

We're happy about that.

I don't think any of us, as pure college football fans, are looking at a bunch of guys opting out of bowl games and saying, oh, man, I love that.

I don't think any of us are looking at the increasing regionality of college football and saying,

oh, I love that. Man, I love when 70% of the country doesn't matter. No one likes that.

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