Welcome back to the latest edition of the Audible presented by Trader Joe's. I'm Bruce Feldman.

Join us always by Stuart Mandel, my colleague from the athletic.

Stu, we're in the middle of the summer. Summer vacations are about to start for both of us.

But we're also around that time. We're at the two-year anniversary

of NIL becoming a real thing. This is a good, probably topic to jump into about how it's worked

out. It's in the news constantly. We hear a lot from coaches who are pulling their hair out about not

just NIL, but how it ties into the transfer portal, especially.

With all the, and we're going to get into a bunch of other stuff on the podcast.

We'll get into the mailbag.

We're going to talk about air raid defensive coordinators.

We're going to talk about the tragic passing of Ryan Mallett, the former Arkansas and Michigan quarterback.

But I do want to start with this. So we're at the two year, two year mark of NIL. It's in the news.

What is the biggest reality thing that you're like, okay, this is a problem and this is something that they,

being the people who run college athletics, are maybe missing the boat on. Yeah, you know,

we were talking about this a little bit before the podcast, but it's interesting to me how so much, like anytime you see NIL mentioned in the news, it is in the course of discussion about like what a crisis we're in, right?

Everybody in college athletics, the commissioners, the president of the NCAA, the coaches.

It's like they talk as if it's just fact that there's this huge problem that needs to be

addressed.

And as I sit here and look back at the two year mark, and by the way, it was years before

that of fearmongering about how I was going to ruin

college sports and it'll be the death of college sports and whatnot. And it's like, you know,

this just happens that the day before this recording, an ESPN press release hit my inbox,

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