Welcome to the Barnyard with Steve Robertson. As always, I am your good friend and host Steve

Robertson here on the Maroon Friday. Get edition of the yard. Hope you are well today. Hope it's a payday for you. How cool would that be, right? For you bi-weekly wage owners and weekly guys, maybe this is it. Maybe you get a chance to put a little corn in your pocket and get out and go do some cool things this weekend a lot of

basketball on this weekend and this is kind of like for me it's just kind of like the lull between the

two seasons you know when football winds down you know we have a few weeks there before college

baseball begins and and so it's good to have this you know it's good to have SEC basketball

unfortunately on the women's side of things, we've been really good.

So you look forward to those Sundays.

And in recent years, last couple of years, we've been able to kind of invest some time on

Saturdays watching college basketball.

I mean, it's a fun thing.

That's one good thing about the SEC network is, you know, if you're a big fan of college basketball, you can get up, have, you know, sleep late and have a late breakfast and kind of plug in and watch SEC hoops all day long. That is an amazing thing. I remember when we used to struggle that we had to go sit outside on top of a hill and use the rabbit ears and try to get the game on the radio.

And then sometimes you'd lose track of what was going on.

And so I appreciate this day and time.

I wish we were a little bit better at men's basketball.

But the last two years have been better.

You know, this year has been a little bit of a disappointment.

But to be fair, to Ben Howling and staff, we knew this is going to be a rebuilding year. And it's in forethought, when you begin to kind of break that down, you think, yeah, you know, it's going to be a tough year. But then when you're in the middle of it, you know, when you're in the middle of having to get up and go to the water cooler and you don't have anything to kind of feel good about, you know what I'm saying?

You know, it's like you can't go out there and beat your chest and say, hey, we're going to,

we're going to kill you guys this weekend. You can't talk any trash. You know, it's not any fun. Then you get through it, then you can look back objectively and say, you know what, we knew it was going to kind of be a tough year, but maybe we've kind of laid the foundation here.

So we're going to talk a little bit of basketball a little bit later in the show. But, yeah, big weekend for sure for college hoops around the country and within our league. And as we saw last weekend, and earlier this week, anything can happen. Absolutely anything can happen with the SEC. There just seems to be so much parity within the league this year.

I don't know that we have a great team. I think Tennessee is really, really good. I think Alabama is proven to be the class of the SEC right now.

And I don't know if anybody really expected them to be as good as they are. I think everybody expected them to be improved. I think they've taken some great strides here in the last 12 months,

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