Welcome to the audible presented by Trader Joe's. I'm Stuart Mandel joined as always by Bruce Feldman and as always

The off season never quiet. There's always something to talk about. Since we last recorded last

Wednesday, believe it or not it's been a week, Jim Harbaw leaving for the

chargers. Sharon Moore, his replacement, we'll talk about that in a second, but we had some developments

on the NIL, NCA collective fronts on Tuesday, Bruce.

It emerged that Tennessee has been under investigation

for the activities of its collective, Spire, dating back to that period in early 2022 when we here at the athletic reported a lot about

spire, this was kind of the early, early NIL collective days and people didn't know much about them.

And David up and wrote a story talking to the guys at Tennessee's collective Spire that was kind of jaw-dropping at the time.

It was the first, I mean these guys were openly

acknowledging that they were participating in recruiting and spending a lot of money in recruiting.

And then of course then came the Nico deal, which is, you know know spire publicly acknowledged for the first time

yesterday I reported on that one in March of 2022 and you know what was a seen as a

staggering 8 million dollar NIL contract.

Well, I don't know why it took two years, but the NCA is now

interested in these things that seemed pretty obviously at the time to be against pay for play rules.

But Tennessee is not going to just sit there and take it.

Their Chancellor wrote a pretty fiery email to NCA President Charlie Baker calling the guidance around these

issues that they put out back then on clear insisting that everybody operated within the rules

that were established at that time. A lot of insinuations that basically, hey, you never said that, you know, back then you never said that these groups couldn't

emerge and participate in recruiting and they were just operating under the guidance you had at the time.

And sure enough, 24 hours later,

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