Hey, hey, where you been, but got talk is about to begin, hey, hey, hey, come on in, welcome back to the big Wednesday

Stay back. I talked from leaveland.com. It's Doug Lamarese. It's Nathan Beard. It's Stephen Means and we are a draft in we are drafting

16 team college football athletic conferences from the power five. We are looking at the 65 power conference teams and we are making our own conferences. We attempted to get a fourth person on the podcast, but we don't have any friends.

At least I don't. And we just kind of jammed it. My schedule this week is forcing us to record a little bit early, so we didn't have time to invite a texture. We'll get textures on again.

What we're going to do is we're going to draft our three conferences, 16 teams each, and then we'll have that leftover conference of 17 teams. The goal here is to think about where big 10 teams fit in the hierarchy of the most attractive teams, football teams,

slash athletic departments in college football. We're not really necessarily going to like have a big competition at the end of who got the better conference because, you know, it's kind of jacked up, but we want to feel like, okay, now, which someone's got to pick between like where does Indiana fit, where does Penn State fit, where does Michigan fit, where does Ohio State fit. It's more about where those big 10 teams fit and Nathan, we were just discussing this ahead of time, this is primarily football driven.

We are we didn't do a ton of research on money on alumni base. We're not worried about academics at all, but how what are our basic guidelines for how we are considering the importance of things as we draft these programs.

I guess the best way to describe this was I went back to the list that I put together last year when we did the tiers of college football, which was also based just around the power five programs.

And I adjusted off of that based off of maybe looking a little bit farther back into their full football history, but then also taking into account things like is it a state school with the name of the state as opposed to a state school that doesn't have the name of the state and things like that, like branding and things like TV contacts, but then also in some ways greater athletic department success or greater athletic department offerings.

So I used use think of it as like football is the tier of this, like, you know, it's it's the what we said, 75 80% of this is based on football and then you make adjustments off of that.

So TV ratings size public versus private geography, geography, basketball, other sports, maybe academics, like in some slight way, like only as it burnishes the reputation of the athletic department, right.

Like just like just I think like the kind of thing and it's one of those things, Stephen that it's like we're really doing it at a surface level, but frankly, like I think a lot, I mean, it's not like the decisions that have been made in realignment and college football has been done on a whole lot deeper level than surface level, right.

I mean, like, you know, so the fact that the big 10 added Rutgers, even though Rutgers stinks at sports and they clearly was in a New York City money grab that kind of thing will factor that kind of stuff in here.

But nobody's interested in whether you're in this some certain academic consortium, but that's all crap anyway. So like I do think this is a decent facsimile of how this might actually work if we were starting over and making conferences.

It's value whether that value issue when football games and when championships and bring or and bring eyes that way, or it's because you're in a part of the world where people watch anyway. And so there's a new market you can tap into, you know, with all due respect to what academics are, that's not what we're thinking about an athletic program.

You're thinking about, okay, how can we make money and we either do that because we're winning and so people are interested or we live in New York and people are just interested.

Yeah, no, I think value is a very good word to throw in there. So I think that smart. And listen, in the real world, USC and Penn State wouldn't be in the same conference.

They might be in this exercise. That's not really what it's about either, but also West Virginia is in a conference with school like four Texas schools. So like it's already jacked up and Boston College is in the same conference as Miami.

So again, we're not getting that far off of reality here. We are going to make this a snake draft. So that means the people on the end will draft to an arrow constantly.

Nathan has the first pick. Stephen has the last pick. I'm picking in the middle. Let's go with our college football realignment. Oh, by the way, the name of my conference. I had decided is the big dug.

So good luck to the 16 teams, trying to become part of the big dug. I'll make t-shirts and we'll roll from there. But Nathan, you have the first pick.

I didn't know we had to name our conferences. I'm going to have to think about that a little bit.

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