If Texas and Oklahoma To SEC, Who’s Expanding Next? College Wires Podcast

Texas and Oklahoma made the formal request to join the SEC. What’s next? What about the ACC? The Big Ten? Notre Dame? College Wires Podcast

Texas and Oklahoma made the formal request to join the SEC. What’s next? What about the ACC? The Big Ten? Notre Dame? Pete Fiutak and Nick Shepkowski discuss it all on the College Wires Podcast.


College Wires Podcast: Texas and Oklahoma make formal request to the SEC. Who could expand next?

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

Now that Texas and Oklahoma look more like they’re locks to be off to the SEC, what’s next? What are the next expansion possibilities?

Where’s Notre Dame going to go, if anywhere? What’s going to happen in the Big Ten? Where does the Big 12 go from here? What’s the ACC going to do?

Pete Fiutak and FightingIrishWire.com‘s Nick Shepkowski get into it all in the College Wires Podcast.

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Predictions for every Big 12 game

Will Texas and Oklahoma REALLY Leave For The SEC? College Wires Podcast

Could Texas and Oklahoma really go to the SEC? So now what? Pete Fiutak and Nick Shepkowski discuss it all on the College Wires Podcast.

It’s all anyone in the college sports world wants to talk about – Texas and Oklahoma and the SEC. Pete Fiutak and Nick Shepkowski discuss the massive possibilities on the College Wires Podcast.


College Wires Podcast: Will Texas and Oklahoma REALLY Leave For The SEC?

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

Really? No … REALLY?! Texas and Oklahoma leaving for the SEC?

How awesome would that be – at least for everyone but the Big 12? Could it really happen? Will it really happen?

The story is changing by the minute, and at the very least it’s going to lead to a whole lot of rumors and speculation as conferences freak out about all the possible business deals that could be done.

Pete Fiutak and FightingIrishWire.com‘s Nick Shepkowski get into it all in the College Wires Podcast.

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Predictions for every Big 12 game

College Football Cavalcade Podcast: Angry Big Ten Parents, SEC Schedule, Spring Football

The Big Ten parents aren’t happy, the SEC schedule has two key issues, and spring football, in the College Football Cavalcade podcast.

The Big Ten is getting it from the parents and players, the SEC schedule has two key issues, and the viability of spring football, all in the College Football Cavalcade podcast.


College Football Cavalcade Podcast

Three segments: 1. Big Ten parents and players, and the problem the B1G has on its hands.

2. The two issues with the SEC schedule that was just released.

3. Can there really be a spring football season?

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

Click to listen to the College Football Cavalcade Podcast …

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Is There Going To Be A College Football Season? HOW?

For all the talk about the college football season possibly coming together in 2020 … how? Is there even a real plan to get this going?

For all the talk about the college football season possibly coming together in 2020 … how? Is there even a real plan to get this going? Pete Fiutak goes on a rant in the CFN Podcast.


Is There Going To Be A College Football Season?… HOW?

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

Okay, college football people, conference commissioners, athletic directors, networks and business types who are all semi-publicly and privately saying there’s going to be a 2020 college football season …


CFN Podcast: Will There Be A Season? HOW?
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That’s absolutely fantastic. All of the words being written and all the podcasts being done with various highly-placed sources sound hopeful, but one little question, though …

HOW?

Seriously, tell us all the exact plan of attack, because so far no one seems to have one.

A few days ago my watch got pinged for a Breaking News type of alert from some major web site highlighting a long-form, in-depth piece with inside interviews with high-end big-wigs giving all of these fantastic talking points.

There wasn’t one word about testing.

You can play the games, but if one player who was on the field tests positive, that’s it. Game over.

It’s all shut down, we’re all worried about the other players, and we’re all freaking the freak out about that 64-year-old offensive line coach who social distanced himself from vegetables for the last 40 years.

But before my ranting whine-fest continues, three ground rules.

1. No politics here. I don’t care about whatever side of the bread you actively choose to butter. When it comes to whether or not there’s going to be a college football season, the political world doesn’t matter …

Sort of.

From a perception and normalcy standpoint, it’ll be a really, really big deal to the campaigns on both sides if there is or isn’t football in September and October leading up to the November election.

Also, the politics of specific regions might play a massive role. It’ll be tough to have a Pac-12 season with California likely to put the kibosh on any sporting event unless it’s deemed 100% safe.

Schools in the Big 12 and SEC states might have an easier time depending on the political leanings of the respective governing bodies.

2. Professionally and personally, no one – I repeat, NO ONE – wants and needs college football more than I do. If I’m sounding grouchy here, it’s because I’m mad that the in-charge types are blowing off what’s possible in an attempt to be perfect.

3. I actually am positive about all of this. I’ve said from the start that I honestly believe it’s possible to have a college football season played safely in some way. We all might like the game aspect of college football, but this is financial life or death for many athletic departments – necessity might just make this happen.

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This can be done, but that means we have to deal with reality. It starts with one basic premise that athletic directors and conference commissioners have to get drilled into their respective heads immediately.

Nothing has changed since sports were shut down in mid-March, and nothing in the next year or so will be all that different, either.

We’re not going to have a vaccine before the end of 2020. This is it. The virus hasn’t left over the last six weeks, and we’re all going to have to live with it – or not – in some way for a long, long while.

You might believe things should open back up again immediately – everyone has to die of something – but from a liability and practical standpoint, college athletics can’t just go back to normal with a Hope For The Best plan.

You might believe that everyone should stay locked down and not come within 100 feet of another person, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to figure out how to safely and effectively do certain things.

However, just putting some timeline on when college football will be back before there’s a cure or vaccine is ridiculous.

You can say that there’s a plan to do a college football season of some sort by the end of 2020, or you can say that you’re thinking of creating a season that starts in February of 2021, or you could say you want a gazillion bajillion dollars delivered to your front door by Kim Kardashian dressed in whipped cream.

It’s all fantasyland hoo-ha.

College football teams can’t even have a team meeting right now, much less hold a practice, much less have a game.

Commissioners and ADs, you have to start living in the land of the real and possible. That means you have to come to grips with something that the rest of us can’t.

This ALL really, really, really sucks.

Don’t plan on regular students going back to college campuses in 2020.

It might be possible to figure out how to conduct socially-distant classes and make other aspects of college life safe, but one house party later … uh-oh. Thanks for playing.

But you don’t need college kids on campus, anyway. Even if the students return like normal, to have a football season, the players can’t mingle with the rest of the population and will need to take their classes remotely.

For this to work, the same ideas from several weeks ago still apply. Here’s what everyone has to have an answer for.

Testing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, testing for this thing in this country has been the all-time textbook definition of an epic fail, but there are no sports – college or pro – unless everyone who’s on that field is tested and determined to be virus-free. And then …

– Quarantine and isolate in a jock dorm. Make one athletic dorm available for just the football team – we’ll deal with the other sports and the logistics of Title IX another time – but the players and coaches all have to live in one dorm on campus, and that’s it. They can go there, to the practice facility, and to the games. But …

A rule needs to be in place that a player can opt-out and not lose his scholarship. If a guy doesn’t want to do this for whatever reason, it’s fine. He can’t be threatened if for whatever reason he doesn’t want to be locked down for three months or more.

– Travel. Right now, look in the sky. Keep looking. Keep looking. You see all those planes whizzing by? No? This one is easy – airlines have nothing to do. They can sanitize their unused planes and make them safe for team travel.

Every airline would bend over backwards right now for the business.

- Hotels and away games. I have a friend high-up in the business for one of the major chains. They’re right now in the process of coming up with new and efficient ways to assure that every room is totally sanitized and virus-free once everything opens back up. Hosting a football team full of players, coaches and trainers who have tested negative in an empty hotel shouldn’t be a problem.

Every hotel would bend over backwards right now for the business.

And then there’s the part that everyone has to let go of right now, and not a second longer.

There’s no way there can be fans in stands for sporting events.

Temperature check? Seriously, everyone, learn what the word asymptomatic means.

Six feet of distance between people wearing masks? Yeah, three words – Blue Angels, Thunderbirds.

As soon as those things started flying around major cities honoring the health care workers, what did people do? They crowded around each other to look up and see the fly-by.

I live across the street from a golf course and a hospital. As I’m writing this, three guys on the 5th hole green at the country club are all but hugging each other they’re so close, all while there’s a giant Heroes Work Here sign up across the fence.

Schools and athletic departments can’t handle a swarm of tens of thousands of people coming to their stadiums no matter how much everyone might try to be safe.

Worst of all, almost all college-town hospitals aren’t even remotely equipped to handle a surge of sick patients. Again, this goes back to why colleges probably won’t open back up for the regular student population this fall, and why the idea of 50,000+ local people in one spot might be a virus spreading problem on steroids.

Again, it ALL really, really, really sucks.

Schools and athletic departments, I know everyone needs the ticket revenue, but take the TV money, get what you can get, and literally buy some time to figure out 2021.

Oh yeah, but players and coaches, you need to be ready.

It’s been suggested it would take two months to get a college football team going for a season. Yeah, coaches … be prepared that if there appears to be a window that might work, you might have a few weeks.

Everyone else, be prepared for there to be a season that looks absolutely nothing like anything we’ve ever seen before, and also be prepared for the possibility that it just might not happen.

However, we’ll have college football again. Even if it’s not in 2020, the sport will still survive, and we’ll love it all more than ever.

This country survived World War II, a civil war, a Spanish flu, a polio nightmare, the Dust Bowl, The Great Depression, and the Up With People halftime shows. We can make this happen.

Now it’s up to you, college commissioners and athletic directors. Don’t hope for a season, figure it out.

For any ideas on what you’d like to hear on future podcasts, hit me up @PeteFiutak.

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2020 NFL Draft: 4 Reasons Why Cincinnati Should Not Take Joe Burrow 1st Overall

Why do teams need to avoid taking a quarterback early, much less No. 1 overall? NFL draft history isn’t kind.

Why do teams need to avoid taking a quarterback early, much less No. 1 overall? NFL draft history isn’t on the side of teams picking in the top ten.


2020 NFL Draft: Why Cincinnati Should Not Take Joe Burrow No. 1

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

CFN 2020 NFL Draft Prospect Rankings
from the college perspective …
QB | RB | WR | TE | OT | OG & C
DE | DT | LB | CB | Safeties

It’s not about Joe Burrow … sort of.

He’s a great guy, a great story, and he should be a terrific pro who makes a whole lot of money and has a whole lot of success at the next level. But if the Bengals want to win a Super Bowl, going with Burrow – or any quarterback – is asking to buck a historically brutal trend.

To be fair to Cincinnati – and especially to Burrow – it’s not just about the top pick. Taking any quarterback in the top ten is thumbing your nose at the NFL Draft gods, at least if you want to win a Super Bowl.

So what’s wrong with taking Burrow with the No. 1 overall selection?

Okay, it is about him … sort of.

Here are four reasons – from valid to off-the-rails – why Cincinnati shouldn’t take a quarterback No. 1, starting with …


CFN in 60: Why You Don’t Take A QB Early

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Tools

Burrow’s 2019 numbers at LSU were staggering.

76% for 5,671 yards, 60 touchdowns, six interceptions, one SEC Championship, one Heisman, one national title, and the greatest single season overall by any quarterback in the history of college football.

There’s no faking that, and there was nothing fluky about his leadership, his swagger, and the way he turned into the pitch-perfect spokesman for a team, a school, and for his region in Ohio.

Forget that he went from being just okay in 2018 to off-the-charts a year later. Sometimes college quarterbacks figure it out, and sometimes they mature as a player. Their body types kick in, the game slows down to a crawl, and it all comes together at once.

But that was college football.


CFN Podcast: The problem taking a QB early
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Was it the scheme? All of a sudden, LSU’s offense went bonkers thanks to the right coaching – Joe Brady parlayed his job as the passing game coordinator to the Carolina Panther offensive coordinator gig – the NFL talent at receiver, and Burrow being the right guy to run it all. However …

There’s one glaring difference between Burrow and almost every quarterback selected No. 1 overall since Terry Baker was picked by the Rams in 1963.

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The arm. It’s okay, but it’s a limiting factor to his next-level game, and it’s nowhere near No. 1 overall pick-worthy.

Alex Smith didn’t have a howitzer, but he was a bit of an outlier thanks to his spread offense mobility that Burrow doesn’t have. The guy in that 2005 draft who did bring the heat – Aaron Rodgers – fell to the 24th overall pick, and the 49ers and Jim Harbaugh later replaced Smith with Colin Kaepernick, who fired a major league fastball.

That’s not to say Burrow can’t throw, but this is the No. 1 overall pick we’re talking about.

In the NFL, arm matters.

And then there’s this issue …

NEXT: NFL Draft History, Part 1

CFN Podcast: Will There Be A 2020 College Football Season? How Can This Happen?

Will there be a 2020 college football season? In this global pandemic, is it even possible, and what are the main barriers?

Will there be a 2020 college football season? In this global pandemic, is it even possible, and what are the barriers to putting some sort of a product on the field?


CFN Podcast: Will There Be A 2020 College Football Season?

Contact/Follow @ColFootballNews & @PeteFiutak

With the hopefully obvious caveat that there are FAR more important issues and concerns to figure out than whether or not a sport can be played …

Will there be a 2020 college football season?

It’s the only question in college athletics right now, because the life of athletic departments depends on whether or not there are football games and if there are fans in the stands.

How can this possibly happen? What are the big barriers unique to college football compared to other sports?

Before diving into the fun and silly stuff around a college football season in future podcasts, check out the latest CFN Podcast as I dive into the basic questions and issues about the one big thing that matters in the college football world.

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For any ideas on what you’d like to hear on future podcasts, hit me up @PeteFiutak.

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CFN Podcast: Interview With Chris Fallica, CFP Rankings Reaction, Is The SEC Overrated?

CFN Podcast: College Football Playoff rankings reaction, our interview with ESPN’s Chris Fallica, and is the SEC really that good?

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CFN Podcast: Reaction right after the College Football Playoff rankings were announced, our interview with ESPN’s Chris Fallica, and is the SEC really that good?


Pete Fiutak and Nick Shepkowski talk about the latest College Football Playoff rankings, discuss whether or not the SEC is overrated this year, and we interview The Bear, Chris Fallica from ESPN’s CollegeGameDay.

Check it all out …

Week 13 CFN Podcast Full Episode

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Our interview with ESPN’s Chris Fallica

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Subscribe to the CFN Podcast on iTunes

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CFN Podcast: College Football Playoff Possibilities. Who’s No. 4?

CFN Podcast: After a big week with LSU beating Alabama and Minnesota stunning Penn State, now what for the College Football Playoff?

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CFN Podcast: After a big week with LSU beating Alabama and Minnesota stunning Penn State, now what for the College Football Playoff?


Pete Fiutak and Nick Shepkowski talk about the big midseason awards along with possible coaching changes.

Check it all out …

Week 9 CFN Podcast Full Episode

We dive deep into all the College Football Playoff possibilities, the Alabama-LSU fallout, the Penn State-Minnesota stunner, and get into it about who that No. 4 team will be – and should be …

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Subscribe to the CFN Podcast on iTunes

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