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Welcome back to Buckeye Talk.

I'm Stephen Means, and I'm joined by our columnist Jimmy Watkins.

I'm giving Stefan and Andrew a break

for the rest of the week, partially because Stefan is traveling home and Andrew and I weren't there.

We actually came home a day early from Las Vegas. So we were not at Michigan, UCLA Day, the last day of

Big Ten Media Days, but it's fine. I want to start, we're going to talk mostly Michigan here.

We're not going to talk a lot about Nico E. Michigan, UCLA Day. I love that. Just Lincoln Riley getting brushed to the side. You're just, this man is an artist at dissing Lincoln Riley. He's an artist. What do you want me to say? Like, they're not good. Maybe they'll be good this year. Maybe they won't, but they don't have a, they didn't get

Nico. I think if they would have gotten Nico, USC would actually be pretty interesting this year.

But Nico and UCLA, NICO is showing up at UCLA at a time where UCLA is maybe two years away

from being able to maximize having a quarterback of Nico's recruiting pedigree. So it's just kind of this thing of like, Nico left Tennessee. Why did you leave Tennessee? Nico gives answer. That's probably not the complete answer, but it's the answer he's going to give versus the answer that the media is going to give. It was not primarily money motivated, Stephen. Yeah. That's what this man said. It was family. I just held out of Tennessee practice for family reasons. Yeah, yeah, it's just family reasons. Which he can only pull all because he's back in LA. The big takeaway from him, though, was apparently Ohio State cracked two of his helmets. I didn't know that. I thought, we knew about the one helmet they cracked. He revealed that they actually cracked two of them. Though he did say some of that might have just been because it was that cold, but also them boys was hitting out there. So it can be two different things. And he kind of went into depth about why things got out of control and was essentially like, it got so out of control in the first half that we didn't necessarily bounce back from that in the second half and make the necessary adjustments. And he'll come back with UCLA later this season. Okay, that's Nico I. Malava. Let's talk about Michigan. Did your own more name Bryce Underwood, the starting quarterback? No, he did not. It's an open competition. Even though Mikey Keene has not thrown a pass in Michigan practice yet, even though Michigan added another

quarterback through the portal, I mean, an ECU transfer former four-star recruit, Jake Garcia,

I don't think it's nothing, but Trone went out of his way to say that that was not because of,

you know, anyone not being ready for camp or anything like that. Even though Bryce don't know what

is making many millions of dollars

and is a five-star recruit.

And every sign seems to point that he's going to be the starting quarterback.

We are still waiting with bated breath to see if Price Hunter.

I actually think it's open conversation.

It just seems like all of the momentum.

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