College football season preview, from Manning family lore to Bill Belichick’s coaching debut at UNC, with Jessica Smetana
The Sports Gossip Show
The Athletic
4.8 • 738 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Madeline and Charlotte are thrilled to welcome a guest that they’ve been wanting to have on the show for a LONG time — Jessica Smetana! Jess is a sports commentator and analyst. She currently hosts The Echos podcast with Mike Golic Jr., and you may have seen her on Vice TV’s Sports Gone Wrong or on a Meadowlark Media property.
Jess and Charlotte have also been friends and colleagues for almost 10 years, and used to host The Most Valuable Podcast together (RIP).
The gals covered a lot of ground together for this college football preview. How well will Belichick and UNC actually perform this year, and will his personal life be a distraction? Why is college football historically the messiest sport?
They also discussed the lore of the Manning family (and why Archie Manning is the Kris Jenner of college football), NFL nepo babies in college football, the story of Houston Nutt, Hugh Freeze, and an escort service (yes, those are names of real people), and much more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Please welcome to the show. |
| 0:10.9 | A guest that many of you have been asking for for a long time. |
| 0:14.6 | We've been waiting for a long time. |
| 0:16.8 | We wanted it to be the perfect moment. |
| 0:19.4 | My dear friend, our dear friend now. |
| 0:21.9 | Jessica Smatanna, welcome to the show, but don't say anything yet because I'm about to do an intro. |
| 0:27.5 | Jessica's Mattina. |
| 0:28.6 | I'm going to do it like Jason Kelsey on Newhife. |
| 0:30.7 | Jessica's Mattana, long time analyst, commentator, sports genius, college football |
| 0:36.8 | aficionado, currently the host of the |
| 0:39.5 | Echoes podcast with Mike Golick Jr you may have seen her on Vice TV sports got |
| 0:44.0 | wrong gone wrong damn it and Metal Arc media our dear friend Jessica |
| 0:48.9 | Smetano welcome to the show thank you Charlotte that was wonderful And you also forgot to mention the most valuable podcast. A podcast that we, yeah, I know you should have, you should have said that one. A podcast that we host a long time ago that a lot of people, a lot of people know us from. Oh, yeah. I was going to say, most importantly, former host of the sports of the most valuable podcast. It was called |
| 1:13.4 | the most valuable podcast. Yeah, it was an amazing show gone too soon. RIP. RIP. We hosted |
| 1:18.8 | together. It was a beautiful moment in time. Wow. It was. And then our boss was like, hey, no one |
| 1:24.4 | likes personality driven podcast. So we're going to cancel yours. |
| 1:28.1 | And we were like, but we think people do like those. |
| 1:30.9 | Did you see that like Barstool just made like a $500 million deal with like, I don't even |
| 1:36.8 | know at the time. |
| 1:37.4 | This was like six years ago. |
| 1:39.5 | And he's like, like, like seven or eight. |
| 1:41.5 | This was like 2018. |
... |
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