Hello, Trojan, friend. No, no, we're not going to do all that. Welcome into an episode, a pop-up episode of the Peristyle podcast. I'm your host Shotgun Spriling alongside R.J. Abadia in studio. I'm in town because I came in town for a wedding. I've got to stay out on the West Coast for another week because I'm going out to the desert for four conference baseball tournaments. So I figured, you know what, why not? Let's just throw some football in the mix. Let's go record a pop-up podcast. And RJ was considered enough to come into the studio and join me. So we're going to be recording here. We're going to break down the USC kind of where we see the depth chart at right now after the spring and, you know, looking forward to what's going to happen in the fall.

And then we'll take some mailback questions if we can get some of those and maybe we'll break down a couple other things.

RJ, how are we doing today?

We're doing great.

I mean, I think it is important to find some time to talk a little football.

We're stepping into that long desert crawl on the calendar where if you love football, this is the toughest spot,

right? We're creeping up on Memorial Day. You've got to get through Fourth of July. End of July is

when it'll really start ramping up, right? Like all our media responsibilities start

to happen and then they'll be in fall camp. But I think this is a good time of year to kind

of check in and check in with the depth chart and see how everything's going. And also, I would

congratulate you on managing to cover four different conference tournaments, but have none of them

be the one USC is in. So that's, that's That's an impressive, that's an impressive move. Like Ron Burgundy, I'm not even upset. I'm more impressed than anything else. I will also be keeping tabs on the Big Ten tournament. Did also record a data download podcast a little bit earlier, trying to get an interview for that one, so that one will come, be published on Tuesday. Also did my D1 baseball podcast earlier. So I was talking with the Yale baseball coach. If anybody is interested in that, you'll learn about Ivy League baseball. And they've already punched their ticket. So as everyone else starts getting into conference tournament action this week, Yale's already sitting at home, being like, all right, we're ready to go. We're ready to find out where we're going to because the Ivy League goes a week early. The Patriot League normally goes a week early. They're actually starting on today on Monday, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday for a series. And then there's one other conference, the Southland Conference, where they start a week early, but they do three-game series,

so they will actually finish at the same time as other conferences. So it's kind of a unique

setup that they have. The Patriot League is similar. They have two three-game series

weekends to determine their top team, which is weird to me because the Patriot League,

they play each team like five or six times, some teams like seven times, there's only six teams in the conference, and then they're like, you know what, we should play each other some more at the end. So they're just been like, they were the best team all year, we're just keeping that. But enough of the baseball talk. I will be keeping tabs on the Big Ten tournament for sure. USC does not play until Friday. We can touch on that a little bit here. They got a buy to the single elimination portion of the tournament, which is a really unique setup the Big Ten has this season, but they won't play until Friday. But I'll be keeping tabs on all of them. I may actually come back out for the Big West tournament too for the championship game of that. So to get a fifth one in, I mean, I'm slacking this year because last year I got to six different conference tournaments. That one was a wild. I got the Patriot League and Ivy League before I left the East Coast and then went from Arizona to L.A. to Vegas back to L.A. in a four-day span. So bounced around all over the place.

This one, I'm thinking I'm going to stick in the desert for the most part because there are now

four tournaments all in the same area because you know why you do that? Because it doesn't rain in

the desert like it does in Hoover, Alabama, where the SEC tournament will inevitably have a rain delay at some point this week,

and we'll be playing a game at starting at like 11 p.m.

So everyone wants to play in the desert where they know that they're going to get sunshine and, you know, warm temperatures,

though the ball will be traveling ridiculously.

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