Welcome to the Audible presented by Trader Joe. I'm Stuart Mandel, joined as always by Bruce

Feldman and Bruce and I are joined today by the Athletics Nicole Hourback. We've got several

topics in the news from the past week that we would like to get to with you Nicole and let's

start with the Friday news dump that Mike Bone, USC's athletic director, has resigned effective

immediately and you've got to love the PR attempts they did here where his initial statement was

about how he, you know, it was a very time to walk away, health concerns. USC puts out a statement

thanking him for his time and but all three of us are like, yeah, this is suspicious. You don't

resign effective immediately on a Friday afternoon if there isn't something more there and sure

enough, it turns out that they had hired an external law firm to conduct an investigation into

the workplace culture there in the athletic department. This is a firm that specializes in

sexual harassment and misconduct allegations and several staffers express concerns about Bone

and how he, you know, unwanted physical touching with women and just generally making people feel

uncomfortable. Just even the timing of this, you have no interim amounts for anything as you said

Friday afternoon, I think for anybody thinking rationally, you'd be like, okay, something really

shady is going on behind the scenes. This is not like, oh, this is a health reason and everything is

just smooth. I think everybody saw through that right away. Nicole, your reaction when this

kind of dropped? Yeah, exactly the same as what you just said, Bruce. I think it was pretty apparent

that something had gone down, something had happened. Very quickly, I started hearing from folks that

were at the Big Ten's meetings this past week in Rosemont and they were like, you know, Bone wasn't

there. I thought that was odd in the moment and obviously looking back on it, they're like,

well, something was happening. And, you know, we didn't know for a few hours exactly what had

had led up to this, but you don't end a career or say, you know, it's time to hand off to someone

...