Welcome to the Cover 3 Podcast with your host, Chip Patterson and Barton Simmons.

It's your call for the best college football coverage.

From National Signing Day to the National Championship and everything in between, CBS Sports Presents, the Cover 3 Podcast.

Back your only Cover 3 Podcast here on CBS Sports.

That's Barton Simmons. I'm Chip Patterson and man, oh man, we are starting with bowl season.

It is something that I think Barton College football junkies have never said that there were too many bowls.

I would count myself among those and I think that as we enter, you know, we're going to start to preview these games.

Yes, there are going to be a couple of matchups where the cell is going to have to be pretty hard.

But we got some good ones. We're going to get you through the first couple of days of the bowl season here today with our locks.

How are you doing Barton?

I'm good. I'm playing injured. Again, I feel like I'm always playing injured. You're never playing injured.

And I'm always playing injured. I'm like the guy at the, you know, in the training room that knows all the trainers, families and has ice pack or heat pack or stretch or massage at all hours of the day.

I'm just, so I've had a rough, rough go of it this morning and last night. I'm down in Montgomery, Alabama for the Alabama Mississippi All-Star game.

But I'm plugging through it before I got on the injured reserve list. I did all my research and have some conviction.

So I feel, I actually feel, you know, I don't feel good from the health standpoint, but I feel pretty good from a pick standpoint.

Yeah, we are all, we are also missing Tom Frennelly for this first edition of the lockspot. But don't worry, I do have his locks and a sealed envelope.

And we will be getting him back shortly. It is not expected to be an absence that will be in any, any extreme length of time.

So we look forward to getting Tom back. We will still have his locks for you. So the, the one thing that we wanted to get into before we actually unhatched these locks, put them on the, on the card for the competition is, is just the idea of motivation.

Like Barton, I find it interesting that we, we can put together and we did put together an entire bull bedding guide at CBS Sports. We're talking six numbers to know all of the yards per play, all of the turnover margin, third down conversion percentage.

And you can crunch every number we can go to S&P plus. But at the end of the day, when we're picking these bowl games, a lot of it's going to come down to motivation.

And I think that when we look at the coaching carousel, I think that when we look at some of the comments from the coaches and the players, we take NFL draft into consideration.

It is, it is far more of an art than a science once we get into the postseason.

...