Darian Mensah's Contract Drama + Championship X-Factors
The Audible with Stew, Bruce & Ralph: A show about college football
The Athletic
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bruce and Ralph are in Miami for the championship. Speaking of trips to Miami: Duke QB Darian Mensah announces he's leaving in spite of his two-year contract, with Miami reportedly the destination. Can he do that? Can Miami? What exactly are these contracts for? And will this distract from Monday's national championship game? Plus, Ralph flips his championship pick back to Miami, invoking the 1984 Nebraska upset, and they choose their X-factor players for the title game.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Audible, presented by Trader Joe's. |
| 0:09.9 | I'm Ralph Russo from The Athletic, joined in person. |
| 0:13.6 | We're in the same place. |
| 0:15.1 | It's very rare that this happens. |
| 0:17.4 | Joined by Bruce Feldman, my colleague from the Athletic. |
| 0:20.0 | Noah Stewart Mandel. |
| 0:21.7 | He is... |
| 0:22.6 | Apparently, this lavish ocean front room that you got, |
| 0:28.1 | Stu thought it was beneath them. |
| 0:29.2 | Wasn't enough? |
| 0:29.8 | Yeah, it wasn't enough. |
| 0:30.7 | Yeah. |
| 0:30.8 | I could give you guys a little view of the water here. |
| 0:35.9 | We have a very nice setup here. |
| 0:38.1 | We are at the national championship game to be played Monday night between Indiana and Miami. So we are in Miami. |
| 0:47.3 | Bruce was at Media Day earlier today. I got in a little late. I had some of the things to do |
| 0:53.1 | this week. So I got in a little late. We will touch other things to do this week, so I got in a little late. |
| 0:54.6 | We will touch on Media Day. |
| 0:56.5 | We will re-approach the national championship game a little bit. |
| 1:02.2 | I didn't get a chance to give my thoughts on it, though I gave a prediction that I might be backing off on. |
| 1:07.6 | But first, we want to start with really the big news of the last 24 hours or so. |
| 1:14.0 | And that is Duke quarterback Darien Mensa jumping into the portal, or at least announcing he was going to jump in the portal. |
... |
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