Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

You do wear robes, though. I presume you wear robes. There are torches.

We get no robes. They don't even buy us robes.

That's f***ed up. Right after this ad.

You're listening to Giraffe King's Network.

So John Urschel, I summon you here finally after months of chasing you.

Getting you past the statute of limitations, as opposed for your testimony as to what it was like to be on the college football playoff committee.

Who this past week came down with what feels like tablets from the mount top declaring that in fact, yes, number one Georgia is followed by number two Michigan, followed by number three Washington, followed by number four Florida state, all undefeated and then Oregon OSU Ohio State, Texas, Alabama, all 11 and one after them.

And so I want to get into how it is maybe that these decisions were reached, but first I need to explain who the f*** you are.

And why it is that behind you happens to be this chalkboard that you just wiped clear of suspiciously secretive equations.

Right. Who am I? So I'm John Urschel. I'm a former NFL offensive lineman.

My day job now is I'm a I'm a professor at MIT. I'm a mathematician. And I assume I'm here because I'm a former college football playoff committee member.

Okay, so I just got to be clear about this. Nobody has a resume like John Urschel.

The guy played on the offensive light of Penn State got drafted by the Baltimore Ravens and while in the NFL playing, you know, the highest level of football in the world, he simultaneously started taking Ph.D. classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you know, arguably the highest level of mathematics in the world, which meant that John was studying J.J. what and also this.

The only solutions to the differential equation, D, Y, DX equals K times Y are exponential functions given by Y of X equals Y of zero times E to the power KX.

Yeah, I didn't understand a word of that for the record. But the reason I called up John is not because he just became a full time professor of mathematics at MIT last month at age 32.

It's because for three years from 2021 to 2023, he was a member of an even more incomprehensible institution, the college football playoff committee.

And so now that his tenure is over officially, I wanted to find out what it's actually like to be a part of this thing, maybe the most controversial and enigmatic voting body in all sports.

That's probably true.

I feel like college football for many who are not initiated into the cult of it, so to speak, is underappreciated as a matter of its hugeness.

Like this is the second most popular sport in America, John, and the college football playoff now, the culminating event of this whole enterprise, we're talking about a half billion dollars a year as constituted presently in a TV rights deal with the SPN.

And we're talking about, yeah, a math problem, therefore, in terms of how do a portion, not just the money, but the slots available in a semi-final with Ford teams, a different sort of math problem that I'm curious how you got asked to help solve.

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