This is an IHeart podcast.

Yeah, there's a lot of fear mongering.

Is it really as bad, like all the time, as bad as people think?

I'm not necessarily sure it is. Lake Cake, high atop a bustling Ames, Iowa. We are Thursday. We were March 21st, the year of our Lord, 2004. Jampack show, as always, we're going to have Matt Campbell on the back half of this show, sat down with him. A lot to get into on a lot of topics around college football, not just Iowa state, so I don't care if you're a Portland State grad. You'll probably be interested in what he has to say. I'm going to talk, albeit very briefly, about this whole deal with ESPN in the college football playoff. I know a lot of you are interested in it. I'm just, forget about things on the periphery. I'm going to try and cut through on it. Got something on Ryan Day. There are a lot of new teams and new conferences this year. Are any of you planning on actually winning those conferences? Or any of you out there looking to bet new teams and new conferences? We'll talk about all that and more. They're watching us in Des Moines, Iowa, where I spent a night last night. They're watching us Atlanta, Georgia, Amarillo, Texas. a lot of good behind the scenes stuff, guys. We've been on the road. As I said, we were in Missouri two days ago, Manhattan, Kansas yesterday, Ames today. We're going to be all over the country at Lake Kick Josh. If you want a good peek behind the scenes of what it's like at these programs, specifically over on Instagram, I've had a lot of good stuff for you. Okay, let's dive into the show tonight. Uh, forget one of you. A whole bunch of you asked what my thoughts were on

ESPN acquiring or extending their acquiring of the exclusive rights to the college football

playoff contract through, I think it's like 2031. And there's this kind of boogeyman syndrome in the room where everyone wants to hate on and bash everything that is establishment college football, whether it's the NCAA, or whether it's ESPN because they've said something once upon a time you don't like.

Or there's an on-air talent there that you think is biased against your program,

or you just think holistically, maybe they're participating in practices behind the scenes that

are detrimental to the sport. And look, I'm not saying there's not validity to some of that.

But I don't think that we have angels running any kind of angelic media company out there.

So at some point, you have to bite your own personal bullet for, you know, the greater good.

Okay, so that sounds like a bunch of boilerplate stuff.

I know.

So what I think about it is, I wish personally that we had a college football playoff contract

that number one didn't include 12 teams but beside the point at this

point so i wish we had a world with the existing and future college football playoff structure

where every network had a piece of it now this is my perfect world i'm going to get to why that

wasn't possible in a second but i would love for it to kind of mirror what the nfl does and i'm as usual

not on i'm not a big proponent of our sport adopting a lot of what the NFL does. But listen, when it comes to presentation and distribution, there's a lot of the NFL gets right. Okay. So I think a lot of you agree with that. Judging by my inbox, a lot of you agree with that. So, okay, well, Josh, why can't we have that? Well, don't ask ESPN.

Like, here's what I'm not going to do.

I'm not going to look at the one media company that was willing to bid big, big money on the future of college football and its playoff contract and hate on them.

When you get behind the scenes and you realize how really uncompetitive that bidding process was.

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