Welcome to The Audible presented by Trader Joe's.

I'm Stuart Mandel, joined, as always, by Bruce Feldman.

No Ralph this week, but we found, frankly, we found somebody better to fill in for him.

And that is our former colleague now NBC Sports. Nicole

Hourback, Nicole, welcome back to the Audible. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Fun to be reuniting and

always fun to be, you know, taking shots at Ralph. That's one of the great joys in college sports.

We are going to talk about all kinds of stuff with Nicole today, including she covered the Olympics

recently for NBC, which was a really big deal, some college football NBC stuff.

But first, we do need to talk about the White House roundtable on Friday about saving college sports.

I watched that thing in its entirety on C-SPAN.

I know, Nicole, you followed along. I don't know.

What did you feel coming out of it in terms of like expectations going in and then what actually

happened? Well, I don't think that they saved college sports in one two-hour meeting. I think we

can all agree on that. I don't think any of us expected them to

make a ton of progress. I mean, you look at the list of people that we're going to be there. A lot of

people that have no real insights or touchstones to college sports right now, no student

athletes and like not coaches or GMs or people who are like really involved in the NIL space right now

and how it works. So yeah, to me it was always going to be mostly a photo op, I guess C-SPAN

wallpaper for a lot of people. But just like the idea that you were going to have people

kind of making the same points that they always make and asking for federal help.

I mean, it's 2026. We're going on like, what, six years of people begging for federal help and still not finding like a narrow or like a way to do this from a bipartisan way.

So until something changes, I just kind of always expect it to be mostly about posturing.

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