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00:00Always good to have Mike DiCorsi with us every Tuesday on Coast to Coast from the Sporting News.
00:09Mike, great to see you. Happy Thanksgiving to you and the family as we've hit the holiday week here.
00:14Of course, you're seeing me, Mike. It's holiday week. No Scottie.
00:17It's good for me to talk to you again here.
00:21Your column today. Now, Mike always puts out great columns. Let's just say that.
00:25Every Mike DiCorsi column is outstanding.
00:27But the one today about the college football playoff, I personally love because this is something, Mike,
00:32that I have been screaming about for really a year since we knew this was going to happen.
00:36And they were going to go to 12 teams.
00:38My Nike radio partner, Joe Lisi, who, of course, you see with me sometimes here,
00:42me and him have been arguing about this for a year.
00:45He's a traditionalist for a team. He's going to water down the game, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:50Mike, you had there's 17 games this weekend that have some kind of a connection to this college football playoff
00:58and teams getting in and and he's staying alive and all sorts of stuff.
01:02Whereas I would bet that in other years.
01:07Probably 13 to 14 of those 17 games would mean absolutely nothing,
01:13except who's going to play in the cheese it bowl or the who cares dot com bowl.
01:19Mike, that's exactly right. Mike, Saturday night, I found myself watching Texas A&M at Auburn.
01:29And in that circumstance with Auburn at four and six and A&M at seven and two, I believe.
01:35Why would I have watched it for eight and two?
01:38I wouldn't I would have no reason whatsoever to watch that game in any other year up until now.
01:43I'm not an Aggie. I'm not a Tiger. I have I would have had no interest in that game.
01:48I now I was riveted four over times.
01:52Everybody in that building understood what the consequence was for A&M and what it would mean to the to their possibilities of making the playoffs.
02:01I'm on Twitter and everybody that I that I see is talking about this game.
02:05And I know it's a completely different thing than it would have been a year ago.
02:09Mike, I've been waiting for this for 60 years, literally 60 years.
02:14I watched my first college football game in 1968 when my folks took me over to my grandfather's house to watch Notre Dame play Purdue.
02:22We were an Irish Catholic family. So they they were huge Notre Dame fans.
02:26So that's what we did. And ever since then, I've been waiting for college football to get with the times.
02:33And finally, we have and you see what the results are on Saturday from literally noon until midnight, noon with Indiana,
02:41Ohio State and then the Florida Ole Miss game at the same time.
02:46And then later on in the evening, you had Alabama losing at Oklahoma.
02:51And then the game I just described, all these games had tremendous consequence.
02:55And along the way, Kansas is hurting Colorado's chances.
03:00It was so great for college football. And I still see people, a good friend and a respected columnist, Dennis Dodd,
03:07today just talking about how it's all mediocre and and it's not worth watching or not.
03:12Maybe I'm putting words in his mouth, but not what it should be, I guess, is definitely what he said.
03:17And I just I couldn't disagree more. I think this is exactly what sports are supposed to be.
03:21We're not sitting there complaining that the Seahawks are going to get in the playoffs or as it as it is now.
03:27We're not complaining about that, because that's their division.
03:31And if they win it, they'll make it.
03:33And that's the way it should be in college football, just as it is in every other sport.
03:38I'll tell you when else they're not going to complain, Mike.
03:40On the weekend of December, I believe it's the 21st, is the Saturday, the Friday night, the 20th, Saturday, the 21st.
03:47They're not going to be complaining when they have four huge college football playoff games with big teams that are going to be playing in them
03:55and not just the Potato Bowl and the Bahamas Bowl with Miami of Ohio.
04:00Nothing against those bowls of those teams.
04:02But, Mike, people are going to be locked in on college football Saturday, December the 21st.
04:07And let me tell you, usually they're not that day. That's another way they're going to love it.
04:11I offended some people today who are traditionalists when I said that that what we're seeing now is games that are of great consequence instead of brutal exercise.
04:22And it is a brutal exercise to play college football on the way to meaningless ballgames.
04:26But I covered those those ballgames back in the day when I was covering Penn State.
04:31They were a nice trip and then a game that kind of didn't really matter whether you won or lost.
04:36And that's been college football through much of its history.
04:39And it's been it's been spotlighted over the last four or five years when significant players have begun saying, hey, this game doesn't mean anything.
04:48My knee does and I don't want to blow it on the way to the NFL draft.
04:52So we saw Kenny Pickett, yes, play in the ACC championship game because a trophy for Pitt mattered.
04:58But against Michigan State in the Peach Bowl, he was in the press box helping to call plays.
05:03That's the difference between what we'll see in a few weeks in the college football playoff.
05:09You will not see players sit out those games.
05:11I have read some people speculating that eventually we'll see them sit out those games.
05:16Hey, guys want to win championships that those games matter.
05:20The league championship matters.
05:22The playoff championship matters.
05:24The bowl game for the benefit of of the local community's tourism business.
05:30That really doesn't matter to the players.
05:32They make the trip and they enjoy it and they get the swag and all that.
05:35But the game itself, it's just exercise.
05:39One thing has not changed, though, Mike, whether it be four teams are now going to 12.
05:44We're going to have a lot of conversations over the next two weeks about whether Alabama is going to get it or not,
05:51because this has happened a lot with four and they're the three, you know, them and Ole Miss are the three loss SEC teams.
05:57Now, I tell you right now, Mike, you know, tonight they're going to put Alabama as one of those first two teams out of the 12 and leave that door jarred open,
06:08just like they used to do when they were five or six and there was four teams.
06:13And we're going to have a lot of discussion if they're going to be the three loss SEC team that gets in.
06:17Yeah, you know, I think a couple of things.
06:19First of all, one of my colleagues at work has come up with a reason, and I'm not going to blow it for him.
06:25He's going to write a column about it if the tide takes down the Tigers in the Iron Bowl.
06:32So I won't blow that.
06:34So he's got a good reason.
06:35I'm going to say it's a legit reason, but they also have some significant losses that could keep them out.
06:41For me, if there's a more than two loss SEC team that will be long, it will be A&M if they defeat Texas and get into the SEC championship game.
06:52I will say this right now, Mike, if they do that, they will belong even at four losses.
06:57I think that's a reasonable thing, even at four losses, because I wouldn't punish them for then losing in the championship game to Georgia.
07:05They play an extra game more than a lot of other teams that are in contention for this.
07:09I think earning your way into that game by taking out Texas, I think they'd belong even at four.
07:15But Alabama has something that they have on their side.
07:19Now, they have to win the Iron Bowl against Auburn, and there's no guarantee they do that after what happened against Oklahoma.
07:27I don't think we can guarantee anything with Alabama football.
07:31But if they do get that, I think there's a justification for them to make it, depending on everything else that happens, of course.
07:39First really big week of college basketball here, Mike, and I've only got, unfortunately, 90 seconds.
07:45We've got the Maui. We've got all these games in Vegas today.
07:48What did you think of Hurley yesterday, and who do you like in this Auburn-North Carolina game tonight?
07:53Because that's a great game.
07:54Well, first of all, I will say that I think that he was right about the call.
07:58It was a questionable call.
08:00I thought it was the blockout player.
08:03I can't remember which Memphis player it was that was trying to block out Liam McNeely, and I just don't think he got there.
08:08McNeely went over his shoulder.
08:11I thought that if you're going to call an over-the-back, you need to have the blockout in place.
08:16So I thought it was a bad call, but I don't think it justified getting tacked there.
08:22And I think Dan Hurley is one of the best people in college basketball.
08:26Really cares about his guys, is the most cooperative person he could possibly be.
08:31I really like him.
08:32I just wish he would cool it.
08:34He doesn't need to do that.
08:36There are ways to do that part of things without really making yourself as obvious as he does.
08:44And, look, he did it all the way through the last season's tournament.
08:49I sat opposite him at the Final Four, and I thought it was over-the-top, unnecessary,
08:54especially in games that the Huskies were dominating.
08:57They never had a game that wasn't double digits.
09:00So we'll see on that.
09:02Carolina, Auburn.
09:04I like Auburn at this point.
09:06Auburn has to go into Duke next week.
09:08That's going to be hard, but I think they'll be able to take care of this thing tonight.