This is an IHeart podcast.

Okay, look, we've got to have a conversation about, I mean, what's a villain in college football?

What's a villain?

The real bad guys.

Not the ones you don't like. Of course, if someone beats you, you don't like them. But the ones you truly feel are detrimental to the sport, to the way that we like it to be, the way you grew up with it. We may not be on the same wavelength as this. I'll tell you what I'm talking about. Lake Kick, we're live and we're from jam-packed

Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm not high atop. We're on the field here at Lucas Oil Stadium, Tuesday, July 23rd, the year of our lower, 2004. It's Big Ten Media Day, so I'm going to talk to you about the balance of power in this conference because everyone's talking about Ohio State. And if they're not talking about Ohio State, they're talking about Oregon. And I'm like, well, someone other than those two just won the national title.

Do we forget about Michigan?

We'll discuss that. I got big questions. I got bold predictions. I want to ask you who the villains are in this sport. It could be a person. It could be a conference. It could be a brand. It could be whatever you want it to be. I asked you guys today, you did not disappoint in what you sent me.

We're going to have Ryan Day on the show tonight.

You know, there's been a lot of chatter out there in the Twitter sphere, the X-Sphere, if you will, about Caleb Downs and what they're going to do with him. So I didn't want to tweet about it. I just asked him to his face. He had a pretty interesting answer. Notice the grin on his face tonight when he answers that question. They're watching us in Avon, Indiana, Augusta, Georgia, Plano, Texas, and, you know, why not? Indianapolis as well. Thank you guys so much. At Lake Kick, Josh. Make sure you're following Twitter and Instagram especially. We got a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. We got all kinds of folks here that you may see a different side of. Who knows if you're following on the social.

So let's dive into the show tonight.

Again, if you just tuned in, Ryan Day on the back end of the show.

The balance of power in the Big Ten, who runs this thing?

How many teams are in Tier 1?

Is there even a tier two?

You know, if you watch this show or listen to this show, that sort of my, my focal point with the Big Ten for a while. Like, yeah, everyone knows who the big boys are. They've been the big boys for a

while. Then you go to Tier 2 and it's like maybe Penn State and then that's it in Tier 2. And it's

made the TV product very top heavy. It's made the overall conference product very top heavy.

So Michigan just won this thing. And Michigan just won a national title. And because Jim Harbaugh left and because a lot of their roster got overturned, a lot of folks are looking at them. You see the win totals here. Colin's showing them to you if you're watching on YouTube at eight and a half. And people are saying, okay, well, that means they're kind of in the background. We're talking balance of power, though.

Not for me. They're not. This is still Michigan's conference until otherwise noted. This is not some predictions segment. So if we're talking about who's run things, well, if you've won the thing three consecutive years, if you just capped it off with a nice cherry on top, that's a national title, how do you put anyone other than them up there?

Now, if you ask me who I'm going to pick to win this thing, I'm not picking Michigan to win this conference this year, but that's irrelevant because I didn't pick them last year. And I was wrong. So who really cares who anyone's picking? We're going off what's happened. If we're going off like paper pop tangible on this piece of paper results, it's Michigan's conference. And then we start talking about the rest. So then we can go start talking about Ohio State. Because if not for Michigan being in the way, again, all caps. If not from Michigan being in the way, then boom, Ohio State. They're winning the Big Ten last couple of years maybe and they're in the playoff and who knows what they're doing. Ryan Day's probably got a championship trophy on his mantle, conference, and otherwise, that he doesn't have right now because they've been in the way. That doesn't mean we have to go 10 or trash mentality. That doesn't mean Ohio State sucks. They don't. There's quite literally one hurdle that they haven't been able to clear. It's Michigan and then Georgia once they got into the playoffs a couple of years ago. And, I mean, that's trajectory of a ball off a foot. That's the difference in them winning that thing versus losing that thing. So this program's right there with the best of the best. When we're talking about balance of power, you can make the argument that the conference runs through Columbus. but the thing about it is the team from Ann Arbor has gone through them three straight years.

So I'm not mad. You can make the argument that the conference runs through Columbus, but the thing about it is the team from Ann Arbor has gone through them three straight years.

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