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 stew, where in the middle of the

summer, some of the vacations are about to start for both of us, but we're also around that time

where 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.

And we're going to get into a bunch of other stuff on the podcast. We'll get into the mail bag.

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 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 NTA, 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 fear mongering about

how I was going to ruin college sports and lead a death of college sports and whatnot. It's like,

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

that the college world series that just wrapped up was the most watched college world series in

NCA history, or in ESPN's history. And I have seen so many press releases like that this year

about the Women's Gymnastics Championship, the softball college world series,

...