Good morning.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

We are now 94 days away from Vanderbilt football’s season opener against Charleston Southern. 94 for the Commodores is defensive lineman Bradley Mann. The 6’6”, 288-pound redshirt junior from Jacksonville has played parts of the last three seasons, but had his season end early in 2022 and 2024 due to injuries. Before his 2024 season ended, he played in nine games and registered nine total tackles.

Not really a whole lot going on Vanderbilt-wise today, but whatever meeting all the SEC people are at this week is producing a lot of “have we really lost the plot this much” quotes (oddly, none from anyone associated with Vanderbilt… or maybe that’s not such a coincidence) so… I don’t know, time for another long lamentation on the state of big-time college athletics.

The town you grew up in probably had some Italian restaurant, maybe it was a Mexican restaurant, or whatever, that’s not important. The owners were old immigrants who probably could have made more money than they did, but what they really cared about was making good food and enjoying the company of the 30 or so regulars who ate there multiple times a week because the food was great and they adored the owners, and whatever other people came in every now and then, if they didn’t become regulars themselves, they always enjoyed the experience.

The owners died and if you were lucky, at least one of their children wanted nothing more than to take over the family restaurant. The restaurant probably effectively died with the old owners, though, because their kids decided that splitting the proceeds from selling it off to some out-of-town restaurant management group that knew a few things about squeezing the most profits out of a restaurant and next to nothing about good Italian food would give them a short-term cash infusion to put their kids through college. Or, hell, buy a boat.

The people currently running college football are constantly trying to find new ways to pay for the coming revenue sharing. So they say. Doesn’t revenue sharing imply that there’s revenue to be shared?

The old restaurant still exists in name, but this is the kind of thing that happens when the old ownership dies and the kids sell the shop.

Greg Sankey said coaches did, indeed, discuss several CFP format models today, including the 5+11 referenced yesterday. Sankey described their feeling on that model as, “Why wouldn’t that be fine?” https://t.co/5yao43N7GN

— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) May 27, 2025

According to SEC ADs, the answer to why a 5+11 would not be “fine” is that:
1) SEC would’t move to 9 conference games
2) SEC couldn’t hold the long-discussed play-in games
3) reliance on the selection committee

— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) May 27, 2025

The coaches here are the old regulars. They miss the old owner pouring everybody a shot of grappa at closing time but somewhat understand why that’s never coming back. They’ll never understand why the waitress leaves the check on the table ten minutes after they’ve cleaned their plates (along with a casual but awkward “no rush”) but still have half a bottle of wine left on the table (which they can no longer BYOB, because new ownership got a liquor license and what’s the point of letting customers drink if you can’t charge them $8 for a glass of Sutter Home?)

The ADs are the new management, who see the old regulars as minor annoyances who they can take for granted even as they show up less and less than they used to, but ultimately want them to stop showing up in order to clear space for a steady stream of youth baseball travel teams who will each experience a mediocre plate of chicken parm at the restaurant at least once in their lives, and whose parents consider an $8 glass of Sutter Home the highlight of their week.

(Am I being too mean? I feel like I’m being too mean.)

College sports, at least at the top level, is run by people who know as much about sports as the Olive Garden knows about Italian food. They know how to squeeze the most profit out of it, but as far as what makes the average Anchor of Gold reader reliably show up in the comments section during a midweek baseball game against Indiana State… well, that’s a complete mystery to the people running college sports, and it’s why we’re where we’re at.

(Side note: The people running college sports are the same type of people who think replacing Andrew, Patrick, and myself with generative AI to save a few bucks is a good idea. They already replaced Christian D’Andrea and VandyTigerPhD with a chatbot named “Cole” to see if you’d notice. Side note to the side note: I am writing this mostly to see if Cole notices that I just called him a chatbot.)

Anyway, the disconnect is how you get crap like the proposed automatic qualifier model. It’s also how you get “please, I beg you, for the love of God read the room” quotes like this:

SEC’s Greg Sankey said in current College Football Playoff format, “it’s clear that not losing” is more important than playing quality opponents

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) May 26, 2025

Of fucking COURSE not losing is important. What the hell do these guys think the point of sports is?

(And lest you think it’s just the SEC that’s guilty: the cartoon villain running the Big Ten is pushing much harder for automatic qualifiers behind the scenes, but has the good sense to shut the hell up in front of cameras. The ACC and Big 12 are currently pondering doing dumb shit like bringing in private equity, presented by credulous journalists as “seeking a cash infusion” while never mentioning the strings that would be attached, and suggesting that the two leagues should merge. Also, as much as those leagues publicly hate the idea of guaranteeing the Big Two four auto bids each, it seems like they would probably like to guarantee themselves two apiece?)

Maybe the simplest possible way to explain what’s happened to college sports is to look at the progression of athletic directors at the University of Alabama.

1957-83: Bear Bryant
1983-87: Ray Perkins
1987-89: Steve Sloan
1989-95: Hootie Ingram
1996-99: Bob Bockrath
1999-2013: Mal Moore
2013-17: Bill Battle
2017-present: Greg Byrne

The first two were literally the school’s football coach. Sloan, Ingram, Moore, and Battle were former Alabama football players and longtime coaches. (Bockrath, hired away from Texas Tech, doesn’t fit this bill; he was also run off after pissing off pretty much everyone in the athletic department.)

Byrne has spent his entire career in athletics administration. He graduated from Arizona State and if he played a sport there, his Wikipedia page doesn’t mention it. In all likelihood, he, in the words of Three-Year Letterman, never lettered in shit.

That’s the new version of college athletic director. Of the 16 current athletic directors in the SEC, only Ray Tanner at South Carolina and John Cohen at Auburn have a background in coaching. Only Candice Storey Lee and Keith Carter at Ole Miss played at the school they’re currently working at. The rest? Career athletics administrators. People who understand the bottom line of the athletic department far more than they understand why the fans care.

Understanding the bottom line more than why the fans care is how you get stupid crap like every big non-conference game and most of the bowl games being played at a neutral-site NFL stadium, where the best-case scenario is Lambeau Field once in a while, but most of the time it’s one of the generic interchangeable massive enclosed or semi-enclosed stadiums (AT&T Stadium, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Hard Rock Stadium, SoFi Stadium, Allegiant Stadium… they all kind of run together, really. How the people running college football haven’t managed to move the Rose Bowl to SoFi Stadium is unclear.)

But eventually, this type of management hits an Endless Shrimp moment. Endless Shrimp bankrupted Red Lobster, because the person who thought up “Endless Shrimp” simply did not understand how much shrimp the kind of person who is drawn to Red Lobster by an “Endless Shrimp” promotion can eat. Maybe it’s not Endless Shrimp, but maybe it was removing a menu item that was the only reason a good portion of your customers were coming back. The old regulars might understand why the new owner doesn’t close the restaurant by pouring shots of grappa for the remaining customers, but they’ll never understand why the new management burned the old owner’s homemade lasagna recipe and tried to pass frozen lasagna off as the genuine article. They might even stop coming back. Sometimes, the restaurant group tries to start a restaurant concept out of thin air and it ends up being LIV Golf, a sad product that was literally promoting an upcoming tournament by flying an airplane banner over the PGA Tour event in Fort Worth I went to on Saturday. There were more people following Scottie Scheffler from hole to hole in 95-degree heat than there are at the average LIV tournament, period.

I don’t know. Maybe big-time college football isn’t at that point, but it definitely feels like they’re trying to paper things over by offering us unlimited breadsticks. The point is that it’s not the same and you don’t have to agree with the guys on Twitter whose interest in the sport appears to be mostly related to gambling that different means improved. You don’t have to disbelieve your eyes and ears. This isn’t what college sports is supposed to be.

Sports on TV

All times Central.

12:00 PM: MLB: Dodgers at Guardians or Red Sox at Brewers (MLB Network)
5:30 PM: MLB: Braves at Phillies or Cardinals at Orioles (MLB Network)
6:40 PM: MLB: Reds at Royals (MLB.tv free game)
7:00 PM: NHL: Panthers at Hurricanes, Game 5 (TNT)
7:30 PM: NBA: Timberwolves at Thunder, Game 5 (ESPN)
9:30 PM: MLB: Yankees at Angels or Nationals at Mariners (MLB Network)

Scoreboard

MLB: Dodgers 9, Guardians 5 … Cardinals 7, Orioles 4 … Tigers 3, Giants 1 … Phillies 2, Braves 0 … Twins 4, Rays 2 … Mets 6, White Sox 4 … Brewers 5, Red Sox 1 … Astros 11, A’s 1 … Reds 7, Royals 2 … Cubs 4, Rockies 3 … Rangers 2, Blue Jays 0 … Yankees 3, Angels 2 … Padres 8, Marlins 6 … Pirates 9, Diamondbacks 6 … Mariners 9, Nationals 1.

NBA: Pacers 130, Knicks 121 (Pacers lead, 3-1.)

NHL: Oilers 4, Stars 1 (Oilers lead, 3-1.)