Creighton HC Greg McDermott, CBB With Mark Titus, Everyone Attacking Take Culture And Hank’s 5th Best Patriot

Speaker 1 Hey, pardon my take, listeners. You can find every episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

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Speaker 1 On today's part of my take, we've got a twofer for the people. We're finishing up our week-long

Speaker 1 previews. We did NBA Monday.
We did an NHL Wednesday. Today we have college basketball with Mark Titus and Creighton head coach coach Greg McDermott, which is a great interview.
Great dude.

Speaker 1 A lot of fun talking to him. We're going to talk about whatever else is going on.
Maybe J.J. Reddick versus the world.

Speaker 1 Hank has his number five

Speaker 1 Patriot of all time, according to Hank.

Speaker 1 We're going to do Fire Fest of the week.

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Speaker 6 It's part of my take.

Speaker 1 Isn't it about Marshall Sports?

Speaker 1 Welcome to part of my take.

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Speaker 1 Today is Friday, February 23rd, and this has been just the JJ Reddick week. He's pissed off the entire world.

Speaker 7 It's his world. We're just living in it.
He pissed off Pat Bev, pissed off Doc Rivers.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 He pissed off not ball knowers online. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So fans.

Speaker 7 So when JJ says, like, I only get 50,000 people watching an X's nose thing. I'm one of those because I know ball.

Speaker 1 Humble brag?

Speaker 7 That's what I want.

Speaker 1 Now, we like J.J. Reddick.
He's a friend of ours. He's a friend of the show.

Speaker 1 But I feel like this is just JJ Reddick doing his full return to Duke form.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think he's kind of doing a little bit of a, there's a couple things that he said that I was like, I disagree with that.

Speaker 1 But when he goes on first take, I think he's just playing up the fact that like everyone used to hate him and they see that face and they see him being like, I'm smarter than you.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 that was Duke J.J.

Speaker 7 Reddick.

Speaker 1 I don't like him.

Speaker 7 I think it's more the Duke J.J. Reddick in the mindset of like, I'm the only one that appreciates like true knowledge.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You guys don't understand true knowledge. Jay Billis does that from time to time, too.
Yes. When he gets deep in his bag on that lawyer shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And sometimes we just want to watch people scream about the Cowboys at each other.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it was an interesting

Speaker 1 week for him because he basically started the week. He bashed Doc Rivers and said,

Speaker 1 you know, he always has an excuse, which I agreed with. Doc Rivers does have a lot of excuses.
We played that on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 And then on, I think it was maybe Wednesday or Thursday, he went on first take and was like, why is everyone care about what I said about my former coach? Which,

Speaker 1 yeah, of course, if a player calls out his former coach, like we just did an entire Robert Griffin III versus Jay Gruden story arc. Well, this is.

Speaker 1 That's like everyone will always tune in if a player's like, my former coach, Johnny Manzel just bashed Brian Hoyer and people are talking about that.

Speaker 1 That is always going to be what people want to listen to.

Speaker 7 This is also the next iteration of saying something inflammatory, getting invited back on shows to defend your inflammatory thing, where now he's going back on shows and he's fighting back, and he's like, this shouldn't be inflammatory.

Speaker 7 Then the discussion becomes like, why aren't we as a society smarter about what we choose to watch in terms of basketball knowledge?

Speaker 1 Right. And

Speaker 1 it's funny because in 2024, I would make the argument that fans are more knowledgeable than they've ever been in any part of sports history.

Speaker 1 There is countless things that you can watch if you want to learn more about the game that you love. Like, just it's the internet.
There's podcasts. There's clips.

Speaker 1 There's everything is at your fingertips when it comes to becoming a more knowledgeable fan. Unfortunately, what JJ misses is we are fans, and fans are a lot of times dumb.
I'm counting myself.

Speaker 1 And we like drama. We like to make knee-jerk reactions.
We like to have stupid debates with our friends. It's not hard to figure out that, like, we want to be entertained.

Speaker 1 We're dumb creatures who want to be entertained. Sports should be entertainment.
Being like, why isn't anyone watching my Zion Williamson primary ball handler clip? Yeah, I guess I'd watch it.

Speaker 1 It'd probably be interesting. But yeah, I also want to debate, like, you know, will LeBron go back to Cleveland?

Speaker 7 Yeah, also, the people that end up paying JJ's salary are mostly the ones that just want to talk about LeBron, the Dallas Cowboys, the Yankees, and the Dodgers all the time.

Speaker 1 It's like one of those things, you can't fight it. That's why this show exists.

Speaker 1 We're dumb sports fans that were lucky enough to be sitting in these seats talking into a microphone.

Speaker 1 And we also understand that most sports fans want to be entertained and have sports sports be an escape from everyday bullshit.

Speaker 7 We can do both sides of the coin too because right now we're debating whether or not we want people to be smarter about sports, whether or not they should want to be smarter.

Speaker 7 And it got distilled down to Duke sucks. Yeah, Duke does suck.
So

Speaker 7 that's the main takeaway that you can get.

Speaker 1 I do think he is doing a little bit of a bit when he goes on first take. It's the heel in him.

Speaker 7 He's being the

Speaker 1 professional wrestler. And

Speaker 7 you guys don't deserve me on TV. Right.
I kind of like that. Yeah.
I like, like, maybe you're a little bit of a masochist when you watch TV sometimes.

Speaker 7 I like it when experts on TV are like, you piece of shit walk me right now. I am so much smarter than you when it comes to all this stuff.
I'm like, God damn, he's owning me.

Speaker 1 MJF is one of the most popular wrestlers in the world. He calls his fans poor constantly.
Yeah. Like, we're all subs.
We just want to be dumbs.

Speaker 7 When Andy Kaufman went to Memphis and called everybody hicks and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, we want to be insulted and then we want to get mad at you and be like, no, our conference is the best conference.
Fuck you, dude.

Speaker 7 Choke me out, JJ. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What do you mean to go on? Step Step on me with some heels. Pat Bev, I think, is going to be on, uh, gonna be in the office next Friday.
He's gonna come on PMT. Although, I like what Pat Bev did.

Speaker 7 I don't have a problem with Pat Bev having Doc Rivers back because, like, one thing they know about Pat Bev, if he's in your foxhole, he's in there deep. Yeah.
Real deep.

Speaker 7 And so he signs with the Bucs, and immediately he's like, I'm riding or dining with Doc Rivers. Yeah.
That's as simple as it is.

Speaker 8 Well, he's been Doc's guy for a long time. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Also, a bit wild to claim that JJ's career was saved by Doc Rivers.

Speaker 1 I liked it, though. Because guess what?

Speaker 7 Okay, JJ's been pretty good at shooting three-pointers for his entire life.

Speaker 1 But if you get to a take first, it's just like, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 7 Doc made you.

Speaker 1 I didn't look up any stats behind it because then JJ got caught in a,

Speaker 1 basically, he got caught in his own trap because Pat Bev said something inflammatory, and then JJ tried to back it up with stats that it wasn't true.

Speaker 1 And I saw the tweet, and it was just too many numbers. So I just passed right over it.
And I was like, no, I... Pat Bev was right.

Speaker 8 Yeah, there's stats that normal people don't know how to read.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.
Right, right.

Speaker 8 He put a bunch of stats. I was like, I don't know if this is proving his point or not.
I'm assuming it is because he posted them, but I don't know any of the shit like that.

Speaker 1 We are dumb. And I mean that in like a loving way.
Like I consider myself not that smartest person when it comes to the sports I watch, but I love watching sports. I love the drama of it.

Speaker 1 I love the sports. You put on a game, you don't know what's going to happen.
That's the beauty of sports.

Speaker 8 Pape's point was you blew a 3-1 lead to us, and that's a fact.

Speaker 1 That is a fact.

Speaker 1 That's basically checkmate.

Speaker 7 That's easily digestible. That's a meme.
Yeah. Yeah.
He wrapped him up in a meme and said, no, here's why you're wrong. And I think JJ responded to him by saying

Speaker 1 Doc didn't save my career I got offered that same year like a multi-million dollar deal for another team that I turned down so it's like somebody else won me at that point you're like well actually I'm not poor here's a screenshot of my bank account yeah and then Pat Bev wins that round too yeah yeah so I and at the end of the day it's like this debate has happened many many times over I think like 10 years ago it was a a more it had more weight behind it because there weren't as many options for fans to find what they wanted in terms of content.

Speaker 1 Now, in this day and age, it's like there's everything. And guess what? A lot of times the most popular thing is the one that takes sports as entertainment and an escape from everyone else.

Speaker 7 There's plenty to go around.

Speaker 1 Plenty to go around.

Speaker 7 We should actually, we could get this even dumber with our analysis. Is JJ Reddick overrated as an announcer?

Speaker 10 I was going to say, do you guys think he's feeling himself off his promotion from last week to the A-team?

Speaker 1 No, I actually.

Speaker 7 No, JJ's awesome. Like, I really.

Speaker 1 I do think he's doing a character on first take. I swear to God.
Like, and that might be just me growing up on, you know, the attitude error where I can just work myself into a shoot constantly.

Speaker 1 But if you watch it under the idea that JJ is being like the Duke's smart ass, I know more ball than you, it's great TV.

Speaker 7 He should show up next time wearing an ascot.

Speaker 1 Like, really TV.

Speaker 7 Ascot, fake prescription glasses that he doesn't need.

Speaker 1 He should just wait till Stephen A like says something stupid and just shove a bunch of $100 bills in his mouth.

Speaker 1 Or he should be like, Stephen A makes a good point and then JJ says, do you know who my father is yeah that would rock yeah my dad's a lawyer yeah he'll sue you right now i i'm i'm all in for it it's entertainment and yeah i like i like i like learning i actually saw dan or lofsky who chimed in dan orlofsky's a perfect example where dan or lofski when he started his career i thought he was a little bit boring because he was trying to teach everything and he started having more fun and i think he's great he's great at what he does he's a little bit weird but in a in a good way where it is good what he plays yeah he's showing it like his personality and he's like i i will stop when i see a a clip of him teaching a play or something.

Speaker 1 I'll watch it because I know it's not going to just be droning on like, this is what you should know as a football fan. There's a little personality into it.
Yeah, you got I so I like both.

Speaker 7 I like it when Dan teaches me something, and I also like it when Mark Slairth pulls up a clip. He's like, you have to play man football.
Yeah, sometimes just about being a man. We are that kid.

Speaker 1 Why not both?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why not both? That's why we have guests on this show who can tell us smart things, and then it helps us even out the dumb things that we say.

Speaker 7 Where do you you stand on this, Hank? Are you standing behind your Duke brethren? Are you on Pat Bev?

Speaker 1 The Brotherhood.

Speaker 8 I mean, Pat Bev's my Barcelona brother. I kind of got awry with him.
Yeah. But I love J.J.
Reddick.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I never thought it was like a, like, you got to pick a side. It was more just, it was funny because J.J.
did a good job of basically dominating an entire week just based off his own takes.

Speaker 7 Jay, can you put a reminder in the calendar? Next year, the week after the Super Bowl, say something really, really inflammatory and just absolutely take over the news cycle.

Speaker 1 No, no, not the week after the after the super bowl well the week after the super bowl is filled with post super bowl talk right so this is the perfect week because there was no nba games for three days yeah before yeah right during the all-star break and maybe we can do this during baseball season too at that like that midsummer swoon after martial madness yeah yeah let's say something really really stupid and just get people angry yeah and then just have and then we'll come back on the next show and be like well what we said was not exactly what you think and then say something even dumber and we got them in a trap.

Speaker 1 Perfect. Yeah.
I don't like when shows do these type of like tricks to try to string everyone along and get everyone like, oh, here's a cliffhanger. You got to tune in next week.

Speaker 1 Hank, do you have your fifth Patriot?

Speaker 7 I do. The number five Patriot of all time?

Speaker 8 My number five patriot of all time. You know what?

Speaker 1 Let's save it. We'll save it for a little bit later in the show.

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Speaker 1 We have another thing we have to talk about.

Speaker 1 Big Dom.

Speaker 7 What's going on with Big Dom?

Speaker 1 You see the report?

Speaker 7 What report about Big Dom?

Speaker 1 So there was a report out of Philadelphia that I 100% believe. I do not care if this was made up.

Speaker 1 I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 This is one of those things that, like, it passes the feel test for me the report is essentially that big dom was a lot more than just a security guard he was essentially nick siriani's emotional support animal and when he got suspended from the sideline nick siriani spiraled out of control was fighting with players and big dom is the reason why their season fell apart and i 100 believe it i mean we said this in real time it was happening it's like big dom yeah the whole vibe that he he brings.

Speaker 7 I would not be shocked if Big Dom was like, have you ever seen that movie Flight with Denzel?

Speaker 7 He flies the airplane upside down. He's the drunk pilot.
That one.

Speaker 1 Sully Solenberger?

Speaker 7 No, anyways. I've seen it.
You saw that one? So John Goodman in that movie was...

Speaker 1 Wait, the plane was upside down?

Speaker 7 Yeah, he flew it upside down, then landed. It saved half the plane.
You did a barrel roll? The barrel roll 747.

Speaker 1 What was that game, N64? Barrel roll. Do a barrel roll.
Do a barrel roll.

Speaker 1 Star Fox. Yes, such a good game.
Yeah. Such a good game.

Speaker 7 So John Goodman is the banana boat guy that just shows up to calm Denzel down. He's got a briefcase filled with whatever he needs.
Maybe Big Dom had like a pocket full of Xanax.

Speaker 7 It was like, hey, dude, just chill out on the sideline.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 you need another Italian to calm down the first Italian. Yeah.
Like, you can't have an Italian alone just on the sideline roaming around without an emotional support Italian.

Speaker 7 Maybe his mother? Yes. He should have brought his mom down on the sideline.

Speaker 4 Sunday gravy.

Speaker 7 So Big Dom, it would not shock me if he was a reason for Nick Siriani flying off the handle.

Speaker 7 Do you think Big Dom enjoys this type of press conference or press coverage where it's like Big Dom is the reason for this?

Speaker 7 Not even a tiny little bit.

Speaker 1 He's probably calling up Putin, being like, how do you get these guys killed?

Speaker 1 So what are your thoughts on

Speaker 1 the Big Dom story, man?

Speaker 4 I mean, it makes sense. I agree with everything that you said.
He's a leader in that. You talk about a leader of men.
Big Dom is a leader of men. He's been around the program for a really long time.

Speaker 4 He's seen the ups and downs. He's probably the most well-respected guy on that sideline.
And when Big Dom tries to

Speaker 4 de-escalate, I don't think that's a word.

Speaker 1 No situation. No,

Speaker 7 it was a word.

Speaker 1 It was a Philly pronunciation. He didn't say it right, but it was a word.

Speaker 1 Yeah. De-escalate?

Speaker 7 De-escalate is what they say in South Philly, for sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, but I think people are like, all right, Big Dom said to knock it off. Like, we got to knock it off.
And without, it's like there was no dad.

Speaker 4 It was like there was no dad to stop the fighting.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the question now, Max, is, I think.

Speaker 4 Except I also agree with A.J. Brown.

Speaker 1 What did A.J. Brown say?

Speaker 4 AJ Brown. So A.J.
Brown has a burner that is his burner. It's like his handle with an underscore.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 And he said.

Speaker 1 Wait, A.J. Brown has a burner? So it wasn't A.J.
Brown?

Speaker 4 So it's a burner, but it's... So people were like, oh,

Speaker 4 that's a fake tweet. But then people are like, no, that's his burner.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's actually a genius idea.

Speaker 7 To do like a fake account of yourself. Correct.
No, you missed it. That's just an imposter, but it's actually you.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 7 I gained a lot of respect for A.J. Brown right now.

Speaker 4 So I tweeted about it last night, and then I got people being like, oh, you're fake. And then people being like, no, that's actually real.

Speaker 1 Okay, so what do you see?

Speaker 4 He said, Philly media is so lame. It's literally something every day.
Then the fans

Speaker 4 believe this BS.

Speaker 4 They really should start raising the prices of microphones and cameras because you people will say anything for views. I see why nobody likes us because we don't even like us.
Hashtag reality.

Speaker 1 So A.J. Brown's basically trying to be screlly for podcasters.
He's like, if we raise the price of these microphones, no one can podcast.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's what it sounds like to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Uh-oh, I don't know if I agree with this, Max. We're talking to microphones for a living.

Speaker 4 No, but

Speaker 4 I don't think he's talking about us.

Speaker 7 Especially, that's great for us because we already have the microphones, so we can flip them.

Speaker 1 What if they break?

Speaker 4 I've only said positive things about A.J. Brown.

Speaker 1 All right, so Max, here's the big dilemma that you have now, though. So Big Dom is the most important person in the Philadelphia Eagles organization.
I think we can all agree on that. We all agree?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need a Big Dom for Big Dom.

Speaker 7 I got the guy. The dude that's always the guy in the stands, the fan that has all the Philly masks tattooed with the button.

Speaker 7 The fanatic, yeah, belly button as his nose. That should be Big Dom.
No, no.

Speaker 4 See, the thing about Big Dom is that he doesn't need the spotlight.

Speaker 1 Like, those guys all need the spotlight. Max, you just found out what happens when Big Dom gets suspended.
So, next time a Dre Greenlaw situation happens you need a big dom to

Speaker 1 anti-Italian discrimination for the NFL so you need so maybe you don't get an Italian to be big dom's big dom so that way that if they go to Italians you know he the this guy he's German he can walk in and be like hey stop maybe not he's not good at de-escalating he's uh swiss no but if you're German you could keep an Italian in your pocket true no I think I want like a Greek guy like close to Greek yeah like close to Italian but not quite Italian then he's gonna start taking payments under the table.

Speaker 1 Every dom, that's fine.

Speaker 7 Every dom needs a sub, so you just get like a hoagie that he walks around with.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you realize that you need a big dom protector because he's the most important piece.

Speaker 4 I'm willing to be the big dom protector.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 You are.

Speaker 7 You would get him more fired up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was going to say,

Speaker 1 you definitely are someone who doesn't get angry easily.

Speaker 7 You would actually, he would have to become your dad, too. No.

Speaker 1 No, we don't need an Italian, Max. That's the problem.
We have too many Italians on the Eagles sideline. It's a combustible situation.

Speaker 7 I think maybe they need some wine.

Speaker 1 Just calm down.

Speaker 7 Just have a nice glass of red.

Speaker 4 Maybe a cigar, get some cigars on the sideline.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 4 Big Dom's an important piece of this program. And I believe that he is sorry for his actions last year, even though it was bullshit and he should have never been punished.

Speaker 4 And I think that he knows that he is important and can't be taken off the sidelines again. Yeah.
So

Speaker 4 I don't, I think it's more of an accountability thing, and Big Dom knows that he is now accountable.

Speaker 7 Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing that your head coach is so emotionally fragile that he needs a security guard next to him to keep him calm at all times?

Speaker 1 But then the fact that it's Big Dom, I kind of understand. Because if we had a Big Dom, we'd need a Big Dom for this podcast.
If we had a Big Dom, fuck us on Big Dom.

Speaker 1 Fuck. Yeah, no, it's...

Speaker 1 It really is one of those things that we said it was a joke, but we were 100% serious at the same time, and we were right. Big Dom was the most important piece of this Eagles.

Speaker 7 He's holding that whole project together.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 He gets shot in the stomach next to the bottom. You think the whole Esplanade falls out of the bottom?

Speaker 4 I mean, PFT said he's coming on the show.

Speaker 7 He agreed to come on the show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we both did. Do you think Big Dom's going to get maybe a little

Speaker 1 extra sauce, extra gravy? A little box of Z out of this? He deserves it all. I agree.
He should renegotiate his contract.

Speaker 7 It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the Eagles and Big Dom moved in other directions from each other, just as a Commanders fan. That's how much I fear Big Dom.

Speaker 1 Do you think Big Dom, if a team wanted to get Big Dom, how many draft picks would they have to give up?

Speaker 1 Ooh.

Speaker 7 Fifth rounder? No,

Speaker 7 I'd say six

Speaker 7 additional. Sixth, swap a seventh.

Speaker 4 You talk about the Caleb Williams. I wouldn't take the Caleb Williams.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't take Caleb Williams to Big Dom? Nah.

Speaker 7 On a rookie deal?

Speaker 1 Nah. Nah.
Oh, the money, though. Actually, he's not crazy.
Because I want Big Dom, and I would maybe give up the first.

Speaker 7 Yeah, dude, you build around Big Dom.

Speaker 7 We got our franchise security guard.

Speaker 1 Build around Big Dom. It's a great t-shirt.
It actually is.

Speaker 1 Build the whole wall out of Big Dom. Build around Big Dom.
Yeah, build the whole airplane out of Big Dom.

Speaker 7 You give me 53 Big Doms, I give you a Lomarty. It's that easy.
Easy. And Big Dom, to his credit, he did save your franchise quarterback from having a stadium fall on him.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Is he the franchise quarterback?

Speaker 7 That's a good question. He didn't look like himself this year.

Speaker 1 He was hurt.

Speaker 7 There's something else going on in the sports world that I think we should should talk about. What? We're on uniform watch in baseball.
Oh, yeah. Big time.

Speaker 7 People are big mad about the new baseball uniforms.

Speaker 1 Fnatics got cheap.

Speaker 7 So it's Nike uniforms, and I read an article about it. I think I understand kind of how it works.
Nike gets to design the uniforms, then they send them to Fanatics to produce the uniforms.

Speaker 7 So Fnatics makes them. They put the Nike swoosh.
They do all the uniform specs. And they look cheap now.
Like, people are mad. Players are mad.
Fans are mad.

Speaker 7 I just saw today that players are a little bit worried about their balls showing

Speaker 6 in the new pants.

Speaker 7 And I saw one picture. It was some dude on the Giants.

Speaker 1 This is a way to grow the game.

Speaker 7 It might be a way to grow the game for sure.

Speaker 1 The only thing, well, you look it up.

Speaker 1 The only thing I know about this whole story is people were blaming Fnatics, and then Darren Revelle tweeted right away, being like, it's not Fnatic's fault, which just made me think it was 100% Fnatic.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You don't want Darren Revelle defending you. You're guilty as fault.
It's like if you have a lawyer wearing a cowboy hat. Yeah.
You're like, that guy's guilty.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was just instant. I was like, yep, Fnatic's fault.

Speaker 7 Okay, here we go. Here's Casey Schmidt for the Giants, big cat.
Look at this.

Speaker 1 Just balls. Oh, those are just two big balls.
Just two big balls in these pants. He looks like Frank Gore.

Speaker 7 That's the on Dick circle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can see. That's

Speaker 1 okay, so they got to figure this out. But this is actually a good.

Speaker 1 Now, if I'm going full wrestling brain, this was smart by the MLB because we're talking about him.

Speaker 7 That's true. Way to stay relevant, baby.

Speaker 1 Way to stay relevant. Just make some shitty uniforms and have everyone's balls showing.

Speaker 7 Vogelback's going to look like Chris Christie at the NYPD softball game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that's going to be a problem.

Speaker 1 That's going to be a big problem.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but we. We actually can't.

Speaker 7 So people are complaining.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't mind seeing.

Speaker 1 Schwarber probably has really big paws. Oh, he's got

Speaker 1 a lot of sounds.

Speaker 7 He's got a sack on him for sure.

Speaker 1 Respectfully, all due respect. I'd knock it out of the park.

Speaker 1 Jeff Van Gundy.

Speaker 3 Don't they wear cups?

Speaker 1 Hank's not listening. No.

Speaker 1 Jeff Van Gundy? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Baseball players wear cups, though, right?

Speaker 1 I don't.

Speaker 7 Depends on the position. I would definitely wear a cup.

Speaker 1 I don't think, like, outfielders don't.

Speaker 7 I would definitely wear a cup. Max?

Speaker 4 Nah, you don't wear cups.

Speaker 1 Unless you're a cup of catcher. Yeah, you're a catcher.
You don't wear a cup. Yeah, you don't wear a cup.

Speaker 1 I've gotten hitting the balls a couple times playing baseball. I think that's a little league thing.

Speaker 1 You got the

Speaker 1 BMGs? Big media,

Speaker 4 big media clackers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because cup is restrictive in running.

Speaker 7 It kind of is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think they wear cups.

Speaker 7 But also, yeah, in little league, you play on fields that have a lot of bad hops.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 you know, you're just not good enough to stop the ball that's going to hit your balls.

Speaker 1 A third baseman is not going to let a ball hit his balls.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but have you guys seen the actual uniforms? Like the tops? Yeah, they're terrible. The letters that are too small.
And the letters are too small.

Speaker 7 Everybody has seen uniforms that they buy from China and they arrive and you're like, well, that doesn't look like the real thing.

Speaker 7 That's kind of what these are.

Speaker 8 Well, it's like, yeah, there's the $150 versions, or you could get the $25 versions that aren't stitched.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not. I saw the Mariner's patch on their arm and it wasn't embroidered.
And really? Yeah. It was just like, it was, it was ironed on.

Speaker 7 So it's become such a story now that what's going to happen is people are going to find every single small part that's wrong with the uniform and it'll become another story.

Speaker 7 And then it's just going to snowball and snowball.

Speaker 1 And all we want to do is just fucking see how Zion Williamson is the primary ball handler. That's it.

Speaker 7 That's it. And now we're actually

Speaker 1 talking about baseball.

Speaker 7 I want to know about the spin rate on Mike Clevenger's two-seamer.

Speaker 1 That's a good story, though. We also had Johnny Menzel with an all-time quote.
Do you guys see this when he

Speaker 7 lost 40 pounds in three months? Yeah, and

Speaker 1 Shannon Sharp being like, how'd you do that? And Johnny Menzel,

Speaker 1 he was just as honest as possible. Cleveland.
I was 170 pounds sitting in Vegas that August, that September, October, whatever it was later in that year.

Speaker 1 How do you lose 40 pounds? You're on a strict diet of blow.

Speaker 1 That's so great.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Fucking Trick died a blow, dude. What do you want me to say? It's a fact.

Speaker 7 I hope he's not using it anymore because that is a big problem if you lose 40 pounds. 40 pounds.
And you're only like 210 pounds to begin with.

Speaker 1 It's like when David Bowie had a whole entire year where he was actually, he had to be fed like a baby. All he drank was milk and hot peppers and cocaine.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 David Bowie also got so bored with having sex with women that he started banging men.

Speaker 1 Hey, listen.

Speaker 7 Sex positive. Just went through every single hole.

Speaker 1 Or sex positive.

Speaker 1 All right. Before we do...
Hank, are you ready for your

Speaker 1 number five?

Speaker 7 Wait, can we hold on to that for one second? Because, Big Cat, I wanted to bring up, there's two more things. Oh, okay.
Just real quick, the other big storyline.

Speaker 7 Justin Fields, he went on the Steve Browns podcast. Yes.
They asked him about unfollowing the Bears on social media. I was right.
He said that he didn't want to see NFL highlights.

Speaker 1 Correct. He was bored of the Bears.
Like, he just doesn't want to see Bears' highlights when he's going on vacation.

Speaker 7 And he said, sometimes the girl that you like the most is the one that you're not following. Yeah.
Is that true? Yeah. I didn't really understand that part of it.

Speaker 1 I don't follow Sidney Sweeney.

Speaker 7 That's cat. Why? How many Sidney Sweeney fan accounts do you follow?

Speaker 7 Wait, so you sought that picture out on your own?

Speaker 1 I was on a fan account. Yeah.

Speaker 7 The fan accounts are the horniest. Always the horny.

Speaker 1 Correction, I do follow Sidney Sweeney.

Speaker 7 Sometimes this girl. You know what?

Speaker 1 I'm going to unfollow her. Okay, there you go.
Yeah. We'll play a little cat and mouse with her.
How do you like that?

Speaker 7 That'll get her attention.

Speaker 7 Maybe it was a ploy to get the bears' attention because I bet Sidney Sweeney's going to see this and be like, wait, why did Big Cat unfollow?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Maybe I should reach out to see if there's a problem.

Speaker 1 We also, after everyone freaked out about Justin Fields unfollowing the Bears,

Speaker 1 Matt Eberflues

Speaker 1 debuted a new beard, so got a new coach. He looks totally different.
That's good. He looks like a winning football coach now.
Like, it's, he basically is like, you know what?

Speaker 1 I know this marriage isn't going well. Let me change something up.
Look at him. Tell me that's not a fucking football coach now.

Speaker 7 When did you hire Brad Pitt be?

Speaker 1 I know. The guy is hot.
He's going to win some games. So things are looking up.
Sure.

Speaker 1 What would you rather have? Big Dom or a new beard on your coach? New beard on your coach. Easy.
Easy. Big Dom's so bad.

Speaker 7 How many draft picks would you have?

Speaker 1 Big Dom's so bad.

Speaker 7 The other thing was that Charlie Woods, he's trying to qualify for a PGA tournament today.

Speaker 1 He actually didn't shoot that. Don't say the score.

Speaker 7 He didn't shoot that bad.

Speaker 1 We're pro Charlie Woods.

Speaker 7 We are Charlie Woods. He got a two-deleted.
But he got a 12 on the 7th. Without 12.

Speaker 10 He rebounded with six straight parts.

Speaker 1 That's mental stuff.

Speaker 7 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Like, people are talking about the 12.

Speaker 7 When was the last time you got an octopal bogey?

Speaker 7 And then hit six pars in a row. I bet you Tiger's never done that in his entire life.

Speaker 1 Keep brought up, Charlie. Facts.

Speaker 7 Also,

Speaker 7 if you get a 12 on a hold, that just means you're not good at cheating. Yeah.

Speaker 7 You get better at cheating.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that was... Listen, everyone's trying to bash him.
No, he's the next up.

Speaker 7 You marked that in nine, and then you keep it moving. Wasn't he qualified?

Speaker 1 He was trying to qualify for a PGA event. Yeah.
Yeah, the event I'm calling next week. Oh, okay.
So there you go. That would would have been great if Charlie Woods had been in it.

Speaker 7 He should get an exemption. Jake, can you give him a Jake exemption?

Speaker 10 Charlie Woods, you are playing in next week's event.

Speaker 1 No, what you should do is you should just randomly just start calling Charlie Woods highlights without anything on the screen.

Speaker 1 And here's Charlie Woods.

Speaker 9 I'll try to work that in. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right, before we do Hank's number five Patriot of all time. Ball's here.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Hank. Actually, I have one more thing before we do your Patriot.
I saw a list today that I would like people to take a guess at, which may be an insult list for some of us here.

Speaker 1 Worst win percentages in the past 10 years in all four major sports.

Speaker 8 Minnesota is worst. So

Speaker 1 it's all combined.

Speaker 8 Isn't Minnesota the worst?

Speaker 1 Minnesota is not the worst. No, no, no, sorry.
It's each franchise separate. So like if it were, do you understand what I'm saying? Like the Mets would be, it wouldn't be all New York sports.

Speaker 1 It'd be the Mets.

Speaker 1 Oh, got it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyone take a guess for number one?

Speaker 8 It was just one franchise.

Speaker 1 One franchise, but it goes across all four major sports. It's ranked.
I have a guess. The worst 25.
It's not, no, this is not an insult. The first.

Speaker 7 The New York Giants.

Speaker 1 No, it was the Jacksonville Jaguars, which kind of shocked me.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, Chaps always brings out these weird stats about the Jaguars every time they win a game, and it's like, oh, this is the first time since 1999 that they've won eight games in back-to-back seasons.

Speaker 1 You're like, what the fuck? Yeah. So it's.

Speaker 8 Show me the Pirates.

Speaker 1 Pirates are not on there. They were, you know, they won like 97 games in 2016 or 15

Speaker 1 or 98 games. And that was a Schwarber home run.
Jets are number two. Pistons three.
Giants, four.

Speaker 1 Browns, five. PFD, unfortunately, we're brothers again.
Bears are nine. Commanders are ten.

Speaker 7 It's been tough.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Knicks are 11.
The one that was,

Speaker 1 what was the shocking one? Oh, the Blackhawks being 25 was pretty shocking because I guess it has been a while.

Speaker 7 Stanley Cups.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's been a while since that happened and it's been really bad since. The Lakers are 13.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 6 They were really bad in between Kobe and LeBron.

Speaker 7 A few bad seasons, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But I just saw this and I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Timberwolves were 14, Hank. That was your first Minnesota team.

Speaker 1 And then everyone else, I think, was clear except the Wizards. The Wizards are not on there.

Speaker 7 We had some good seasons with Paul Pierce and with John Wall.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the basketball teams are the Pistons at 3, the Magic at 6, the Lakers at 13, the Timberwolves at 14, Hornets at 20. That's all the basketball.
So you're clear.

Speaker 7 Surprised the Hornets aren't higher.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I was a little shocked at this list because the top five made sense, and it really does show like the Giants and Jets two and four is pretty pretty bad.

Speaker 7 And if you if you zoom out a little bit on the Giants, obviously the two Super Bowls, awesome. Maybe two of the best Super Bowl wins that you can ever have.

Speaker 7 So you've had some good times in there, but besides those, if the Giants aren't winning the Super Bowl, they're not doing shit that year.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is funny looking at this and being like, oh, if you've won a title in the last 20 years, that doesn't mean, you know, like you'd still trade, you'd still take it like the Royals were 24th.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You'd still take it.
Absolutely. 100% would take it.
The Lakers, well, that didn't count. It was a bubble title.
And the Bears almost won the Super Bowl in 2018.

Speaker 1 They were just like three games away. All right, Hank.

Speaker 7 Number five, Patriot of all time.

Speaker 8 As reported by Hank School.

Speaker 1 First recap, number six.

Speaker 8 Number six was defense. Defense was championships.
He made two crucial plays against the Seahawks, one against the Seahawks, one against the Falcons.

Speaker 1 Falcon Butler.

Speaker 1 It's Dante Hytows. Oh.

Speaker 8 Number five, also defense.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Early era.

Speaker 8 First dynasty one.

Speaker 1 Teddy Bruski.

Speaker 1 Swaggiest, probably the swaggiest patriot, maybe on this whole list.

Speaker 6 Santa.

Speaker 1 Oh, we already, we already, we already, we already, it's, it's Tyler. Soul Tom Brady is house.

Speaker 6 Laura Malloy, Tyla.

Speaker 1 Tylaw. Tyler.
Tyla. All right.
Okay. So that's number five.

Speaker 7 That's number five. You think he's the swaggiest patriot?

Speaker 8 On this list, I think he might be.

Speaker 1 Wow. Can we do a top 10 swaggiest? Yeah.

Speaker 8 Well, I mean, the Patriots aren't the swaggest team. That's kind of the whole Patriot way.

Speaker 1 Is four going to offense?

Speaker 1 Four is going to offense. Whoa, can't wait for Monday.

Speaker 7 Devlin.

Speaker 8 I was trying to put Kevin Falk on this list, but my friends weren't having any of that.

Speaker 1 Wait, I thought this was your list. It is.
No, I'm saying. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
For what he meant to do. Do we have to start over?

Speaker 8 This whole list started with me being like, I've been fighting with my friends, or not fighting, but like, you know, debating for the last day.

Speaker 1 But if you wanted to put him on, it's your list.

Speaker 8 But they, they, you know, they show.

Speaker 8 I wish I could put him on this, his list, but I'm not. We might have to start over.

Speaker 1 This feels like Hank's friends' list, not Hank's list. It's my list.

Speaker 8 He's an honorable mention.

Speaker 8 We'll do one member, one honorable mention per show.

Speaker 1 Kevin Falk is 10. Honorable mention.

Speaker 7 What number is he in the honorable mentions?

Speaker 1 Two.

Speaker 1 Okay. So ahead of the Lighthouse.

Speaker 1 Because one was

Speaker 1 who was one? Bethel Johnson. Right.

Speaker 7 Okay, so Bethel Johnson, number one. Now we're going in reverse in terms of ranking the honorable mention guys.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah, I'd rather you go 10 to 1 on the honorable mentions.

Speaker 8 All right, I don't know if I have 10, but I can add some more.

Speaker 1 So on Monday, we're going to get the number four Patriot of all time and the number 10 honorable mention. Yep.

Speaker 7 It was also just cool when they had a guy named Ty Law and then Lawyer Malloy also in the same backfield.

Speaker 1 That's cool. Yeah.
Very cool. All right, Hank.
You feel good about that? Yeah, I feel good. You think people are going to come at you?

Speaker 1 Well, they don't know what the rest of the list is. Yeah.

Speaker 8 I thought

Speaker 8 he only played in two Super Bowls. Well, he played in three, but one was 97.

Speaker 8 But he only played in two.

Speaker 1 He only won two Super Bowls.

Speaker 8 Yeah, he was hurt in 2003.

Speaker 7 So number four, I'm going to guess Jules.

Speaker 1 No, I think we said Jules was three.

Speaker 7 No, because I think he's going to go defense three. I think he's going to go like...
Gronk two?

Speaker 7 Yeah, Gronk's going to be two. It's going to be like either.

Speaker 1 Wait, you think Gronk's going to be ahead of Jules?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I can't wait for Monday.

Speaker 1 I wish someone could knock me over the head right now, and I just wake up and it's Sunday night and we're recording the pod.

Speaker 7 It's going to be either Brewski,

Speaker 7 Will Fork,

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 7 Willie McGinnis at number three.

Speaker 10 When are we going to start going back to seven through ten?

Speaker 1 That's when you get to one, then you go to ten. Okay.

Speaker 1 But I want him to go, I want him to go evens first. So 10, 8, and then 9, 7.

Speaker 7 JJ wouldn't understand this level of broadcast.

Speaker 1 What a teaser.

Speaker 1 Who's it going to be? Can you tell us?

Speaker 1 Does it go offense, defense, offense, offense?

Speaker 8 Starting at 1?

Speaker 1 No, starting at 4.

Speaker 8 Starting at 4, it goes offense, defense, offense, offense.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so I think I'm right on the line anyway.

Speaker 1 No, I think Jules is going to be...

Speaker 7 No, he said defense number three.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. I think Jules might be two.

Speaker 7 No chance. No chance.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 7 Hank is playing this from not from a level of friendship, but from

Speaker 1 hatred. Remember when you didn't put Jules on the

Speaker 1 Mount Rushmore of Guess?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I do remember that.

Speaker 1 But in this

Speaker 8 if he would be, no matter what, he's on the Mount Rushmore.

Speaker 7 So what you're doing right now is you're bullying Hank into changing Jules

Speaker 7 being the number two.

Speaker 1 No, Jake has the master list.

Speaker 8 And this is also four through one is Mount Rushmore.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 buzz off. But it's still, there's a difference between two and four.

Speaker 1 Big difference. I don't think so.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 Is Chris Long on the list?

Speaker 1 Two gets the BCS. Four doesn't.
Chris Long is not on the list.

Speaker 7 Honorable Mitchin.

Speaker 8 I didn't like that he went to the Eagles after, so I don't know. No.
That really, like, I like the bad.

Speaker 1 And he likes Philadelphia way more.

Speaker 1 Way more.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like he was kind of playing into him and Lane Johnson being like, they have no fun over there. Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 he does kind of hate the Patriots.

Speaker 8 He's the only person that won a Super Bowl with the Patriots, then beat the Patriots the next year in a Super Bowl.

Speaker 1 Who else? LeGarret Blunt.

Speaker 8 He's an honorable mention, though.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 don't ruin it.

Speaker 1 By the way, ranking these one through four, we forgot to mention.

Speaker 1 I know we said it on Wednesday, the college football playoff, but it's very funny watching Notre Dame fans realize that they're fucked.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it is. It's great.

Speaker 1 It's just been a super bad thing.

Speaker 10 And then some were coming after me saying they actually wanted this. Why?

Speaker 1 Guaranteed a home game.

Speaker 7 Oh, that's a hell of a spin zone.

Speaker 9 As the 5'12.

Speaker 1 Crazy spin zone. So if they're the number one team in the country, they're going to want to play a first-round game.
No chance.

Speaker 7 That does kind of rock that you get to go to a home game, though.

Speaker 1 But still, no chance. If they're the number one team in the country and they have to now play an extra game.

Speaker 7 Right. If you were asked, like, would you rather get an extra home game or be ranked in the top four and get a buy, you would take the buy.

Speaker 7 But I think a home playoff game is a pretty good consolation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, people have been getting their shots in it, Notre Dame. Not relevant, they're saying.

Speaker 7 Sad to see.

Speaker 1 Real sad to see. Should have joined a conference.
Why don't you just pony up and join a conference? Big Ten will maybe take you.

Speaker 1 Big Ten will take him in a fucking heartbeat. Okay, let's get to our interviews.
We have great interviews. Doug McDermott and then Mark Titus are doing college basketball preview.

Speaker 1 Get you ready for March, which is, what, a week away?

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's pretty much March.

Speaker 1 Ooh, a week away.

Speaker 10 Can't wait. We have to wait an extra day because of the leap year.

Speaker 1 Motherfucker.

Speaker 9 But it's the third birthday part of my take.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah, good point. That's true.

Speaker 1 We are three.

Speaker 1 Okay, before we do, Greg McDermott, PFD, you had a quick word for one of our sponsors.

Speaker 7 Yeah, before we get to Greg McDermott, he's brought to you by Rocket Money. Do you ever feel like money is just flying out of your account and you have no idea where it's going? Well, I know.

Speaker 7 Time out.

Speaker 1 Time out. We're going to have to restart the ad.
Hank's brain just broke. Wait, I was wrong.
It's the second birthday. Yeah, what the fuck? Oh, 12 years old.
We're not 12 years old.

Speaker 1 I was like so confused for a second. It would be a second.

Speaker 6 Yeah, because it's the third.

Speaker 1 Wait, the podcast. No, the podcast started on the 16th.

Speaker 7 The podcast started in February 29th of 2016. Right.
That would mean that our first birthday was February 20th.

Speaker 1 Good job, Hank. Time back in.

Speaker 9 Second birthday. Game on.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 1 Give it up for Chicago.

Speaker 13 Sebastian Maniscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, is coming to Hulu on November 21st.

Speaker 1 30 years ago, Jeff Bezos, complete nerd. Bezos now ripped to shreds on his super yacht and the boxes keep coming.

Speaker 13 Sebastian Maniscalco, It Ain't Right, premieres November 21st, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

Speaker 7 And now, here's Greg McDermott.

Speaker 1 Okay, we now welcome on a very special guest. It is head coach of the Creighton Blue Jays.
It is Greg McDermott off of a huge, huge win.

Speaker 1 Coach, first of all, thanks for joining us. I wanted to go back quickly to Tuesday night.
You beat number one UConn. Incredible game by your guys.
It was also your 600th victory.

Speaker 1 So congratulations on that. And you said that it was one of the biggest wins in kind of school history and one of those big, like, not tide-changing wins, but one that people will remember.

Speaker 1 We've had a couple, we've had 48 hours. Are we sticking with that?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, it was, I think it was.

Speaker 14 important

Speaker 14 simply because we've we've had six shots at the number one team in our history and we weren't weren't able to get a win. And to do it against the UConn team that was playing so well,

Speaker 14 And to your point, really important this time of the year as we move closer to the NCAA tournament and the Big East tournament.

Speaker 14 So it just kind of solidifies your resume and hopefully sets you up for seeding. But, you know, from start to finish, our crowd was absolutely phenomenal.
They were into it from the jump.

Speaker 14 And, you know, it was one of the better environments I've ever been part of. Yeah.

Speaker 1 By the way, I did a bad job of asking that question because it made it seem like I was expecting you to be like, no, I've looked back and it was, it's not that important.

Speaker 1 I'm a big believer as a sports fan, as a die-hard sports fan. You have to embrace the, the, the ride and those big wins.
Like, okay, maybe it doesn't end up in a national champions this year.

Speaker 1 Hopefully it does for you. But fan bases have to enjoy those big moments because those are special nights that you can't just brush off and be like, oh, it was another Tuesday night in February.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And it's, I mean, college basketball is hard.
And,

Speaker 14 you know, trying to beat a team like UConn is very difficult. They're elite in so many different ways, offensively, defensively, on the glass.

Speaker 14 Obviously, they take on Danny's personality with the way they play and the toughness that they play with. So you have to play a hell of a game.
So when you

Speaker 14 find a way to beat them, and we've been fortunate,

Speaker 14 we've had some success against them,

Speaker 14 but you don't take it for granted because it's hard to win, especially in this league.

Speaker 7 So you go down early. They kind of punched you in the mouth right off the bat.
And I feel like most teams kind of crumble because it's UConn.

Speaker 7 They get intimidated, whether it's Coach Hurley or their reputation, what they've done in the past, what they've accomplished. But you guys bounce back after it.

Speaker 7 Can you give yourself some credit for like, hey, that's a pretty good job coaching that I did?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I don't know about that.

Speaker 14 It was a bad job coaching the first four minutes of the game because we were behind 11 to 3. But, you know, I think a lot of it was, you know, Trey Alexander and Ryan Kalkbrenner.

Speaker 14 Kalk's been here four years, Trey three years. We've had success against UConn.
So a lot of teams haven't. And I think because of the fact that we've had some success in the past and

Speaker 14 while we got absolutely spanked at their place,

Speaker 14 we did some really good things defensively. We held them to 62 points.
Their field goal percentage, their fact the field goal percentage was not good.

Speaker 14 We just were atrocious offensively and most of it had to do with them. So I don't think our guys were concerned because we've had success with them in the past against them in the past.
And

Speaker 14 once we got the crowd in the game,

Speaker 14 all bets were off.

Speaker 14 It was a difficult place to play the rest of the night for UConn.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one last question about UConn, and this is a Dan Hurley question.

Speaker 1 We're friends with Dan, so we, you know, full bias out there, and we have a theory, and I want to know from the opposing coaches box, when he drinks that mushroom tea at the beginning of the game, and it looks like he's drinking piss, that's a little intimidating, right?

Speaker 14 I've always wondered what was in that. It's piss.

Speaker 1 It's piss. It's piss.

Speaker 14 It's a fun game, and

Speaker 14 we've had some great battles with UConn. But at Creighton, you know, our, our fans don't come to watch the opposing team play.
They come to watch us play.

Speaker 14 And that's, uh, you know, that's different than most places. But, you know, Dan, Danny does a great job.
And, you know, he's, he's so intense. And, you know, and I'm friends with Danny, too.

Speaker 14 And, you know, off the floor,

Speaker 14 he's an awesome guy. And the game starts and he's a little bit psychotic, but that's who he is.
And that's how he coaches.

Speaker 14 And he gets every last bit of energy out of every one of his guys and deserves a lot of credit for the success they've had.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and like coaches in college basketball, especially because the rosters change year to year, like I love guys who stay a while. Like you've been at Creighton for a long time.

Speaker 1 That's what fans start to kind of, you know, they take the teams take on the image of their coach, and you get, you know, Greg McDermott going against Danny Hurley every year. Like, that's fun.

Speaker 1 That, that's what I, that's what I like to tune into.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's fun to develop those rivalries. And, uh, you know, it, and

Speaker 14 you're not getting anything easy.

Speaker 14 You know, we're not getting

Speaker 14 our pet plays against UConn. And, you know, they're probably not getting theirs against us.
Just because we've coached against each other, we know each other. We know tendencies.

Speaker 14 And then at the end of the day, it comes down to players. And that's really what it's all about anyway.

Speaker 14 If you don't have good players, you're not beating UConn.

Speaker 14 If you don't have pretty good players, you're probably not beating Creighton.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 it's fun to have some guys that have been in the league a long time. And

Speaker 14 you know, those rivalries, you know, we certainly, even though we're a long ways apart, I think we've developed a pretty healthy rivalry with UConn.

Speaker 7 Yeah, especially in the Big East. It's always been about having coaches with big personalities and

Speaker 7 the ongoing rivalries that they have and the battles that they go through with each other. So

Speaker 7 in terms of the league, the Big East especially, who is your favorite coach to go up against?

Speaker 7 Whether it's somebody that brings something different out of you or someone where you just enjoy the competition with that person?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, UConn is certainly won team that I really enjoy competing against because you find out if you're doing your job well.

Speaker 14 But there's so many great coaches in this league.

Speaker 14 Ed Cooley's a great friend of mine. That's been well documented.
And so, you know, I was. you know, he bought me dinner in Omaha this year.

Speaker 14 So it's good when he comes to town because I can send him the check because of that fat contract he's got over there.

Speaker 14 But, you know, across the board from, you know, Sean Miller to Shaka to Thad Mata

Speaker 14 and, you know,

Speaker 14 Shaheen's done a great job at Seton Hall this year. And right on down the line, it's really a league of really good coaches and a lot of good guys.
And for the most part,

Speaker 14 we get along pretty well. You know, we're a basketball-centric league, and we're only going to survive if our men's basketball programs are doing well.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 a lot of guys have done a lot for this conference.

Speaker 1 Yeah, on that point,

Speaker 1 I know it's been a while. I think it was 2013 you guys

Speaker 1 joined the Big East, but it's something that is now happening in college sports basically every year where teams are going up, teams are going down, there's all this transition.

Speaker 1 What was the biggest hurdle when you went from

Speaker 1 Missouri Valley to Big East and you took that step up in class? Because we're going to see it many, many, many more times with teams going up and down, left and right.

Speaker 14 Yeah, fortunately for us, Big Cat,

Speaker 14 when we made that move, that was Doug's senior year. So, you know, Grant Gibbs, Doug, Johannes Madnegut, Ethan Rogge, those guys were seniors.

Speaker 14 You could have taken that group into any conference in the country and they were going to have a chance to be successful.

Speaker 14 And I think it's so important that you have success, you know, early and you show that you belong. And I think that group really blazed the trail for what's followed.

Speaker 14 And, you know, we had a little blip in the radar the next year

Speaker 14 because the guys that were playing, you know, behind that group were recruited to play in the Missouri Valley.

Speaker 14 And, you know, while we didn't have a great record that year, we got better and some of the the younger guys in our program grew.

Speaker 14 But, you know,

Speaker 14 thank God we made the move. You know, in this day and age, with what's happening with mid-majors and with the transfer portal and NIH.

Speaker 14 It's difficult. So I think you have to be a

Speaker 14 seat at the right table. And, you know, I'd like to think, you know, certainly the Big East has done a lot for our institution and our athletic program.

Speaker 14 And I'd like to think that we've added some value there as well.

Speaker 14 But the fact that we were able to get off to a good start, finish second in the league the first year, get to the, we got beat by Providence in the Big East title game,

Speaker 14 I think had a lot to do with what the trajectory that we've had since.

Speaker 1 Yeah, how did you recruit Doug McDermott?

Speaker 14 You know, he went to Northern Iowa to start when I was coaching at Iowa State. He actually signed with Northern Iowa.

Speaker 14 And then when I came over here, we were in the same conference and he wasn't excited about playing against me twice a year.

Speaker 14 But, you know, I sleep with his mom, so that gives me an

Speaker 14 It gives me an outside chance.

Speaker 1 I was setting you up for that because I knew that. I knew where you were going.
I knew you were going. It's a a great line.
I got him because I slept with his mom.

Speaker 7 Well, it's also, I'm going back and looking at it, and there's a rumor out there. Maybe you can dispel it that he got tens of thousands of free meals before he came to play for it.

Speaker 14 He got a lot of that. And

Speaker 14 actually, his senior year,

Speaker 14 back in the days without any NIL, Grant Gibbs got a six-year of eligibility, and we didn't have a scholarship. So we put Gibbs on scholarship and Doug became a walk-on his senior year.

Speaker 14 So he actually still owes me for that. Oh, yeah.
I paid his tuition his senior year. You think that would come around yeah

Speaker 14 at some point but he still hasn't paid that check interesting so i i want to go back to maybe maybe a sore memory from last year you guys made a little run and the tournament unfortunately didn't end the way that you wanted uh against san diego state right and uh i'm curious from your perspective do you go back do you watch that game film do you try to erase it from your memory because the way that it ended and then moving forward did you watch the final four or were you just in a place where it's like i i'm so so devastated by this i don't want to watch college basketball i i finally watched the game on the last recruiting trip in july on the way home uh you know so recruiting was over for the summer i was going to go play some golf for a few weeks and i'm like all right let's let's exercise this demon and watch that game uh you know and it was it was a hell of a game it could have it could have went either way and it came down to the very end you know i watched the final four just you know i like hoops uh brian dutcher is a good friend of mine obviously uconn being in the tournament um you know i wanted to follow that But, you know,

Speaker 14 it's hard to get on that doorstep and be knocking on that door. A lot of things have to fall right from a matchup perspective, and your team has to play at a high level.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I hope we'll get back there. I hope we'll have another chance at it at some point during my career.

Speaker 14 But, you know, I also didn't want it to define what was a. a very good season by that group of guys last year.

Speaker 14 So, you know,

Speaker 14 if I don't want the guys to feel like that defined the season, then, you know, I can't act that way either.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 How often do you practice free throws with your team? Because

Speaker 1 that's a big thing when I'm watching college hoops. Like, you got to make your free throws.
And I don't know if you saw, but we did a free throw challenge. Yeah.
I mean, that was impressive.

Speaker 14 Thankfully, we shoot them better than you guys.

Speaker 1 Wait, well, hold on. We made 41 in a row with the mulligan.

Speaker 14 What did it take? How many hours?

Speaker 1 16 hours.

Speaker 1 16. That's a lot of free throws, Coach.
41. I think I mean

Speaker 14 was Frank involved in that or was he not part of it?

Speaker 1 No, No,

Speaker 14 Frank wasn't very nice to me after that Seton Hall game in Jersey.

Speaker 1 That's listen. Somebody sent me that.

Speaker 14 The dude killed me.

Speaker 1 That's when you know you've made it, though. When Frank the Tank has

Speaker 1 shown his ire at you if you're in sports, it's like, yeah, I finally got on his radar. But yeah,

Speaker 1 listen, we have 41 free throws in a row.

Speaker 1 Do you practice them every single day? Because I hope so. We do.

Speaker 1 We do.

Speaker 14 Our guys have to make a certain amount of free throws in a row before they leave practice every day.

Speaker 1 How many?

Speaker 14 Sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 12, sometimes it's 14. Just kind of depends what,

Speaker 14 you know, where the clock's at at that particular time. But fortunately, we've knocked on wood.
I hate to say it, but we've been a pretty good free throw shooting team.

Speaker 1 So if PFT and I were on your team, we would actually be your best players because we'd never leave practice. We'd just always be at practice.
First in, last out.

Speaker 14 How long would it take you guys individually to make 12 in a row?

Speaker 1 12 in a row. Well, Big Cat can get hot.
Yeah, I could make 12 in a row.

Speaker 7 I'm not what you call a basketball player. So it would probably, if you asked me to make eight in a row, it'd probably take me five, six hours to be able to accomplish that.

Speaker 1 But it'd get done. Yeah, it could get done.

Speaker 14 That's a guy that's, yeah, a guy that's in the gym, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it could get done.

Speaker 7 Well, one other thing that I've seen you do, coach, and I'm not sure if you can still do it, but I saw a video of you dunking at practice.

Speaker 7 Can you still dunk?

Speaker 14 I haven't tried for my goal was to do it when I was 50, and I did do it when I was 50.

Speaker 14 May or may not have slipped a women's basketball onto the rack sometime during practice with the manager of the year,

Speaker 14 but I was able to get it done.

Speaker 14 But, you know, now

Speaker 14 I don't want to blow an Achilles or a hamstring trying to do something stupid at 59. So

Speaker 14 I've shelved that one.

Speaker 1 Well, what about if you win the championship?

Speaker 7 If you win the natty, will you try to dunk again to celebrate? I will.

Speaker 14 I will do that.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 14 If we win it.

Speaker 1 I like that.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You can come to our, you can come, we'll host you and we'll have a big, you know, done. Greg McDermott dunk off.
Yeah. All right.

Speaker 14 So now we might be rooting for you where we're going to need an elite physical therapist to do some stretching before and after.

Speaker 1 We can get you. We can get you there.
We can get it there. We can get it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 How many times have you had McDonald's with Warren Buffett?

Speaker 14 Never.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 you see Warren in a restaurant in Omaha once in a while.

Speaker 14 He doesn't come around a lot to games, but he was at Doug's senior night. He was very upset with the official that called that foul against us on San Diego State last year.

Speaker 14 And he made it well known. But obviously,

Speaker 14 he's done a lot for this community. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It would be great if you went out to eat with him and you picked up the check. That would be such a power move, wouldn't it?

Speaker 14 Yeah, that'd be a big-time power move.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, sure.

Speaker 7 If I saw him eating in a restaurant, I'd just point across the table. I'd be like, hey, I want to cover that guy's bill today.

Speaker 1 I got you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So going back to Doug, real quick, we see it obviously all the time in college basketball. A lot of times

Speaker 1 the coach will have their son on the team, but very few times it's, you know, you guys have the

Speaker 1 success that you guys had together. Was it hard coaching your son and kind of balancing that where it's like

Speaker 1 he's one of the guys, but he's also your son, and you have to, maybe there's moments where you're sitting there watching the game and you're just proud of your son, but you're like, wait, I'm coaching a Big East basketball team.

Speaker 1 I got to snap out of it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Yeah, you know, there were some things the first year

Speaker 14 that were challenging. I think more so for Doug than probably for me.

Speaker 14 It was very important to him that he was treated like one of the guys.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I remember a specific time one of his teammates telling me that after a really hard practice, you know, he walks in the locker room and all of a sudden everything goes silent.

Speaker 14 And Doug's like, now, wait a second. You know, I think he's an asshole too for what went on to me.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 14 I'm with you guys.

Speaker 14 But, you know, when Doug asked me and said, you know,

Speaker 14 dad, I want to, I want to be treated like everybody else, I said, I can do that.

Speaker 14 But when I tell you to block out, you can't look at me like I told you to take the garbage out and you don't want to do it.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 14 if this is going to be coach and player, then it has to be that from your perspective too. And it was a challenge for Doug because for the first 18 years of his life, my voice was his father's voice.

Speaker 14 And then all of a sudden it's his coach's voice. And, you know, because in college coaching, you don't have an opportunity to coach your kid in junior high and AU, you know, you're doing your job.

Speaker 14 So I didn't really coach Doug much outside of driveway stuff until he got to college. But once we got to that point,

Speaker 14 it was great. And NBA scouts that came in and watched us play,

Speaker 14 watched us practice when he was a junior and senior, they'd, you know, they'd said many times, if we didn't know it, there's no way we'd know your father and son by the, by watching you interact in practice.

Speaker 14 That's the way he wanted it. That's the way I wanted it.
And it's, you know, obviously obviously it was a really special time.

Speaker 14 You probably, I probably didn't embrace it and enjoy it as much when it was going on because you're in the grind. But looking back on it for both of us, it was a pretty special time.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 When he got the nickname Dougie McBuckets, were you like, that's a cool nickname? Or were you like, chill out with the nickname, son? You haven't

Speaker 1 done that.

Speaker 14 That's a pretty good, that's a pretty cool nickname.

Speaker 14 And, you know, and I get call from high school, more high school coaches, but some college coaches have called me as well that were contemplating coaching their kid.

Speaker 14 And obviously it's different in high school because,

Speaker 14 he goes home with you every night and you're at the dinner table every night.

Speaker 14 But, you know, it's easy if he's your best player or a guy that doesn't play very much. You know, people got pissed off if I took him out of the game at Creighton.

Speaker 14 So that was never, never really a problem.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I have an X's and O's question for you. This kind of goes back to UConn, but when you have a team that can shoot well from the outside,

Speaker 7 how do you make them worse at shooting? Because it seems like it's something very difficult to do that a lot of coaches try to do, but very few can accomplish.

Speaker 14 You know, we're trying to limit the amount of three-point shots teams get. You know, everybody has a defensive philosophy, and, you know, UConn's going to pressure you.

Speaker 14 They're going to try to force you into turnovers.

Speaker 14 And obviously, it works really well for them.

Speaker 14 We try to send everything to Ryan Kalkbrenner at the rim and try to, you know, make sure their best shooters aren't getting a lot of looks from the three-point line.

Speaker 14 And I think their, you know, Caravan and Spencer, their two best shooters the other night, only had five three-point attempts. So that's what we're trying to do.

Speaker 14 And obviously, we spend a lot of time in practice running guys off the line and making sure you're not getting hit by screens to try to accomplish that.

Speaker 14 And, you know, some days it works, some games it works better than others. But, you know, fortunately for us, the other night, it worked really well.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I like the word philosophy, too. It's kind of like culture, but every coach has their different philosophy on how to build a team and how to play.

Speaker 7 What would your philosophy be if you were to distill it down to like one thing about basketball?

Speaker 14 Well, it's, I mean, offensively, it's freedom, you know,

Speaker 1 and pace.

Speaker 14 You know, we're our, you know, we'll, we'll do, we'll, we'll do a lot of different gimmicky stuff defensively, how we guard a ball screen, what we're going to do.

Speaker 14 We'll go over a screen on one guy, under a screen on another, but offensively, our guys have the freedom to play and the freedom to shoot.

Speaker 14 You know, we, we take some crazy shots from six feet behind the line at times,

Speaker 14 but we also practice those shots. So,

Speaker 14 you know, and, you know, everybody recruits to how they're trying to play.

Speaker 14 We want guys that can really shoot the basketball, that can handle it, that can pass it, and that, you know, have a good basketball IQ. And that's what we've been successful with.
And

Speaker 14 that's what we'll continue to try to do moving forward. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So speaking of freedom, how many shots in a row does a guy have to make to allow him a really terrible heat check shot?

Speaker 14 It depends who it is. Yeah, that makes sense.
You know, Stephen Asperth had a great start to the game the other night, you know, the transfer from Utah State.

Speaker 14 He's played awesome here the last, you know, 10 or 12 games.

Speaker 14 But I had him do a a drill and practice that I talked about in the post-game the other night that I used to have Doug do, where you couldn't, you have to make five in a row or five shots from five spots.

Speaker 14 And if you missed two in a row, you have to go back to the beginning and start again. And he made 33 in a row.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 14 And so he said, what should I do now? Am I done? And I'm like, no, if you're going to shoot those crazy shots eight feet behind the line in games, let's back up and practice some of those.

Speaker 14 And he hit a couple bombs the other night. So,

Speaker 14 but our guys have a lot of freedom. They know it.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I think it does something to the opposing defense when they know that a guy can pull from 28 feet anytime they want.

Speaker 14 I mean, that puts a little bit more pressure on our opponent's defense.

Speaker 7 Okay. So, counterpoint to that question: if you have a guy that has, how many shots in a row does a guy have to miss before you're like, hey, you know, there's limits to our freedom here.

Speaker 7 We need to, we need to reel in some of this freedom.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14 I mean, there's the old coaching saying that the last thing you want to do is tell a bad shooter to shoot.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 14 if our guys, if they can shoot it,

Speaker 14 you know, and a lot of times you have to talk guys off the ledge and remind them that the best shooters in the world

Speaker 14 miss over half their shots.

Speaker 14 You know, my son is one of, you know, top 10 or 15

Speaker 14 three-point percentage shooter in NBA history, and that's at like 41%. So he's missing six out of 10.
So

Speaker 14 that doesn't mean you make, you know, two out of every five. You're going to go six of seven, and then you're going to go one of seven.
It just happens.

Speaker 14 But you trust your work, you trust your preparation.

Speaker 14 The other side of me is, is if a guy like Baylor Scheiderman has missed five in a row, I like his chances on the sixth one that he's going to knock the next one down. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's the fastest you've ever pulled a guy out of a game? Because I love old school college basketball coaches.

Speaker 14 Yeah, there's, it's been, it's been seconds before. Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 14 I mean, it's been a a while uh but you know something stupid happens on the first play that you've you've gone through a hundred times and a guy screws it up it's you know let's get him out of there that's what one of my favorite i i'm i'm a badger fan and bo ryan used to do that all the time where he would just like you'd be 20 seconds into a game and someone would get yanked and you're like all right

Speaker 14 yeah bow didn't mess around i i knew bow and i have known each other since his division three days so uh yeah he he didn't mess around yeah i like that move what do you tell the guy when he when he gets pulled he's a starter and he gets pulled like 10 seconds seconds into the game.

Speaker 1 You just sit him down. You're like, hey, we've been over this.

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 14 If that happens, you don't have to say a word. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Message received. Yeah.

Speaker 14 He knows exactly why he's coming out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 So I guess it's a tough question to ask. And

Speaker 7 I'm curious to know if you're going to actually answer. What is the expectation for you in this postseason this year?

Speaker 14 Well, I mean,

Speaker 14 the first thing is you got to get there.

Speaker 14 And, you know, there's teams that

Speaker 14 have high expectations going into season and

Speaker 14 it doesn't work out and they don't make the tournament. So

Speaker 14 we're always gearing ourselves to play our best at the end of the year and build towards February and March.

Speaker 14 Make sure your body's healthy, their mind's in a good spot.

Speaker 14 You know, in the NCW tournament, it's so much about matchups.

Speaker 14 And, you know, everybody talks about seeding. Seeding to me doesn't

Speaker 14 mean much unless you get to play, you know, close to your backyard. But it's about matchups.

Speaker 14 So, you know, I know that the guys that decided to come back, you know, Baylor Scheiderman came back for his fifth year.

Speaker 14 Alexander and Kalk Brenner tested the NBA waters last year and decided to come back.

Speaker 14 You know, they want to get back to that game.

Speaker 14 They want to get back to that moment and have a chance to try to knock the door down and get to the final four in the first time, first time in Creighton history.

Speaker 14 So I know that's what they're thinking. I'm thinking about the next game and the next play.

Speaker 14 I think as a coach, if you think any other, any other way, you're asking for trouble.

Speaker 1 So do you guys pay attention to Ken Palm at all? Any guys in your office?

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 my staff's looking at that all the time. And,

Speaker 14 you know, because it measures a lot of the things that at the end of the day, analytically, we're trying to measure anyway.

Speaker 14 You know, how are we performing in comparison to our peers?

Speaker 14 And, you know, there's, it also gives us some information on, you know, what percentage of our shots are three-point shots. Is it what we want it to be?

Speaker 14 And on the other side, are we making sure our opponents aren't shooting a high percentage there?

Speaker 14 You know, we don't force turnovers. We don't shoot a lot of free throws, but we don't foul, so our opponents don't either.
So those are things that we're constantly looking at.

Speaker 1 Well, I got some good Ken Palm stats for you. And you can

Speaker 14 be good.

Speaker 1 You can tell to the guys. So I saw this the other day.
It's as of Tuesday.

Speaker 1 According to Ken Palm, the last 20 national champions have all been top 25 in adjusted efficiency margin, top 37 in adjusted offensive efficiency, top 38 in adjusted defensive efficiency, top 45 in strength of schedule rating.

Speaker 1 This is as of Tuesday. The teams that follow under those categories are Purdue, Arizona, Tennessee, North Carolina, Marquette, Michigan State, and Creighton.
So you're in there.

Speaker 1 And as of right now, you have the balance of the team, you know, both offense and defense, and played a very good schedule. I don't know.

Speaker 1 You could tell your guys that. Maybe you don't want to, you know, maybe you want to do what you just did, saying, hopefully, we get into the tournament.

Speaker 1 I'm going to break some news to you. You're going to be in the tournament.
But that's kind of cool.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it sounds like if they get any coaching, they're going to be in good shape. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now it's up to you.
You have the

Speaker 1 guys. No pressure.

Speaker 14 Try not to screw it up. Try not to screw it up.
Stay out of their way.

Speaker 7 Yeah. So here's an easy question for you.
Which city would you like to retire in more?

Speaker 1 Omaha or Columbus, Ohio?

Speaker 1 What do you think is a better retirement test? do this?

Speaker 14 That is

Speaker 14 a cagey question.

Speaker 14 You know, I live on a golf course here in Omaha, so

Speaker 14 and I like the golf course, so you know, it'd probably be Omaha.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, good answer.

Speaker 6 That's a good answer. Good answer.

Speaker 1 I have one last question for you, Coach.

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Speaker 1 I think I know the answer to this, but maybe you can explain it.

Speaker 1 I love college hoops. I actually love, I love the first two days of March Madness, but Conference Championship Week is my favorite.

Speaker 1 How much more difficult is Conference Championship Week than the actual tournament?

Speaker 1 Because it feels like every year, that's when it's like, this is all these teams know each other, back-to-back games. It's the toughest as tough could get.

Speaker 1 Like, what is the preparation when you're going into the Big East tournament versus March Madness?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, to your point, it's so difficult because,

Speaker 14 you know, there are no secrets, you know, and

Speaker 14 hopefully you don't play in that first night. It's three games in three days

Speaker 14 without a chance to breathe in between and against teams that really know you. And in our league, and I turn on some of the other conference tournaments when you're sitting around, like the garden is.

Speaker 14 jammed.

Speaker 14 It is packed. It is an incredible environment, especially if we're playing playing somebody from the East Coast.

Speaker 14 It's a hard environment. You're essentially playing a road game.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 it's really, really challenging, but it's also really special. And

Speaker 14 you really sense it

Speaker 14 how important the Big East tournament is to the schools in the Big East.

Speaker 14 to actually try to win that tournament. I think some conference tournaments, why they're important,

Speaker 14 they're kind of looking ahead to the NCAA tournament. But in the Big East,

Speaker 14 it's huge to have an an opportunity to win that. And

Speaker 14 we played in it nine years because one year got wiped out by COVID.

Speaker 14 At least we played a half in that year.

Speaker 14 And we've been in the championship four times and just haven't won it. So for us,

Speaker 14 we'd like to knock that door down.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we've talked to a couple Big East coaches about that tournament. And I'm always curious to know,

Speaker 7 do you hold anything back at all? Or is it just like, let's go full send during the tournament and then we'll regroup and figure out what we want to do for the round of 68?

Speaker 14 No,

Speaker 14 all you got to do is watch a game. It's so high level.
And

Speaker 14 everybody's trying to win. I don't think there's anybody holding

Speaker 14 anything back. And even Villanova, I think they're national championship teams.
I think they won the Big East tournament both of those years.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 UConn got beat, I believe, in the semis last year. But

Speaker 14 it's hard basketball, but it's also an incredible, incredible experience for the young guys to get an opportunity to play in it, especially in the garden and the Big East tournament.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love it. I love it.
There's no better time than March. Coach, thank you so much.
Listen, if my team can't win, maybe I'm rooting for you to come to our office and dunk one last dunk.

Speaker 1 I think you can dunk.

Speaker 7 I think you can do it. I've seen you running up and down the sidelines.
I think that you've still got some bounce of those legs. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, if I'm chasing a referee, maybe I have a little more adrenaline at that point.

Speaker 14 Guys, if we get there, I'll be there. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Okay, we can get a ref for you that you can chase around. We'll get someone in a ref, you know, and just like yell at you, and then you can chase them and dunk.
But thanks so much, coach.

Speaker 1 Best of luck the rest of the season.

Speaker 14 I appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

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Speaker 7 And now here's Mark Titus. And now for something completely different.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 it's time for some college basketball talk. We have our colleague,

Speaker 1 which is not weird to say anymore, but it is probably maybe a little weird for AWS because we haven't had you on since I think, I think it's been a year.

Speaker 1 I think it's been around a year because you've been at Barstool for almost a year. Yeah, I think I came on like right when I signed on.
Yeah, yeah. So it is Mark Titus.

Speaker 7 We have him on more frequently than that, given his outbursts in the past. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All the comments. Cannon.

Speaker 7 Comments, the things that we've had to bleep out after the fact.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's easier to book him now to just be like, hey, you want to come on? And it's been almost a year.

Speaker 1 So we basically hired you because we're like, at some point, we're going to have to do a free throw challenge.

Speaker 1 We've done that. So

Speaker 1 unfortunately, I'm going to hear to tell you that your contract is going to expire and you're not going to be renewed.

Speaker 7 Bring it back like Mantis for a day next time we need you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We learned that we don't actually need you as badly as we thought. We have Mantis now.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 You walk in, we'll be like, that boy's straight.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 that was, you've had a lot of welcome to barstools.

Speaker 1 Your first week here was the first week of March Madness.

Speaker 1 And I remember so vividly walking into you in your studio in the old New York office, and you had, it looked like you had just come back from Vietnam. You had a

Speaker 1 million mile stare. And I was just like, you're all right, dude.
And he's like, that was just a lot. And I was like, you should go home to LA for a couple of days.

Speaker 1 But now that you're comfortable, it's not a bad place, right? I love it.

Speaker 1 I absolutely absolutely love it. It's been awesome.
The free throw stream was so fun.

Speaker 1 I did, I mean, you said this too, that like I went home, I was exhausted, I went to bed immediately, slept forever. I woke up, and the first thought I had was, I want to get back on the line.

Speaker 1 Yeah, with the boys. With the boys.

Speaker 1 No, this place is incredible. It's like every day is a circus in a good way.

Speaker 1 But yeah, there was an adjustment period and getting thrown into the gambling cave out of the start was

Speaker 1 very difficult because

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 my memory was like day one, Dave asked me for a pick.

Speaker 1 I kind of, I didn't even,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't watch basketball in that way. So like I was just kind of like, I don't fucking know.
Kentucky, I guess. I think Kentucky played Kansas State and they won.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then I went home, I went back to the hotel and I was like, thank fucking God, that's over. And then the very next morning, I was in line at Starbucks and Dave was behind me and he's like, Titus.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, what's up, Dave? And I was waiting for like the pat on the back and he just goes, give me another pick. I was like, fuck.

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, fuck again. He's like, yeah, dude, it's day two.
Yeah. Another one.
Then you're his guy.

Speaker 7 And that's a dangerous place to be because you can get the axe immediately. Right.

Speaker 1 You're on the radar.

Speaker 1 I'll be better prepared this year.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so we were watching day one of March Madness last year, and there was a lot going on. There were a lot of games.

Speaker 7 You went through some ups and downs right off the bat. I don't think you'd been in a gambling environment like that before.
What adjustments are you going to make for this year's March Madness?

Speaker 1 I'm going to be more aware of spreads uh that was something that i it's already hard enough trying to decide who's going to win these games yeah but uh uh i i'm going to be more in tune with that um

Speaker 1 i i also learned that like nobody actually

Speaker 1 yeah i don't know it was it was difficult because nobody gave a fuck about the basketball everybody was just like like uh watch it like uh big ev and i got into a little uh dust up one i i i have a memory of that because he he was just screaming like how do you call that fucking foul and then i just like in retrospect, I shouldn't have, but I was like, I mean,

Speaker 1 he hit him right on the arm as he was shooting. He was like, I know that, but I don't give a fuck.
How do you call your foul? There's no rationale.

Speaker 1 I realized, like, ah, okay, so we're kind of approaching this a little differently.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm just going to gamble heavily.
Yeah. Maybe that's really good.
I got to get into the trenches with the boys.

Speaker 7 It's like, if you can't beat them, join them.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know, so just, yeah, you'll become one of those people eventually. You'll become everything.

Speaker 1 You'll do it. Yeah.
So let's talk some college basketball. This has been a very fun season.
It feels like very wide open, kind of similar to last year.

Speaker 1 UConn is the best team, you would say, right now, but they just lost to Creighton by a billion.

Speaker 1 What are your big picture thoughts going into the conference championship week and

Speaker 1 the tournament? For someone who maybe doesn't watch college basketball is trying to catch up? I think...

Speaker 1 I want to kind of say everyone sucks, but that's not a good way to get people into the sport. No, not everyone sucks.
Yeah. I think everyone sucks on the road.
Everyone sucks on the road.

Speaker 1 That's the thing. And it's hard because

Speaker 1 you want to get excited about teams, but then even Kentucky's a good example. Kentucky goes to Auburn, a very hard place to win.
They looked awesome. And you're like, oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I've gotten to the point where I only almost look at road performances because

Speaker 1 the home court will lie to you. So Kentucky looks awesome at Auburn.
I talked myself into them, and then last night they look like dog shit against LSU.

Speaker 1 So yeah, not everybody sucks. It's just everybody has very obvious weaknesses.
And

Speaker 1 a week ago, it it was Purdue and UConn and everybody else. And now, I mean, Purdue loses at a bad Ohio State against a bad Ohio State team.
UConn got blown out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was due. I felt like

Speaker 1 due. And they needed that.
I think UConn. I think when UConn beat the hell out of Marquette, the conversations about like, is this team better than last year? Way too premature.
Yeah. And I think

Speaker 1 that was rat poison. Is it saving this? Yeah,

Speaker 1 that was rat poison. Yeah, but you're right.

Speaker 1 I mean, the road games are tough. Kentucky is a good example.
I mean, that was an incredible ending where

Speaker 1 Kentucky finally hit a big shot at the end of a game, and then they just stopped playing defense, which they never really started playing defense this year. No.

Speaker 1 I don't think they've ever been like, let's start playing defense.

Speaker 1 They just started the season, and they're like, oh, yeah, there's the other half of this game, whatever. Is Cal on the hot seat for real this time? Oh, dude, it's so.
I mean, it actually, like,

Speaker 1 it feels like it might be for real. At some point, the meme becomes the reality.
Yeah. And

Speaker 1 they're not going to fire him. He has a lifetime contract, so I think they have to kill him.
I think

Speaker 1 they have to actually execute him. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But, yeah, I mean, like, it does feel like there might be a conversation where they're like, Cal, are you sure you want to do this still?

Speaker 7 Hey, Cal, how much longer do you want to live? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 There might be a friendly nudge. They might try, but I think the AD loves him.
I don't know. The Kentucky fans are absolutely ready for a change, though.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 It also hurts that this is a very talented Kentucky team.

Speaker 1 And then they have Reed Shepard, their point guard, who's from Kentucky, who's like every Kentucky fan's wet dream, where he's really good. And they're like, this should be everything.

Speaker 1 And they just don't play the team. This feels like it should be a vintage Cal team because the last couple years, they haven't even been that bad the last few years, to be honest.

Speaker 1 They lose to St. Peters,

Speaker 1 which was very, very bad. But they were a two-seed.

Speaker 1 And I think when you look back on the last few years of Kentucky, it feels like they were like 500 the last few years, you know, and they haven't been that.

Speaker 1 They've been good, they just haven't been Kentucky good, and then they fuck it up in the tournament. Um,

Speaker 1 but Cow went away from like what made his teams good, which is like the one and done stuff, and like, well, I'm just going to overwhelm you with talent.

Speaker 1 And he started going to the transfer portal, and he's getting Oscar Sheboy and Shavir Wheeler, and guys like that. That didn't really work out for him.

Speaker 1 He hit a hard reset, and this team is all guard-oriented. They're all young dudes that are going to be like NBA players.
He has like five future NBA players on this team, probably. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If not more than that, probably more than that.

Speaker 1 Everything about it feels like a vintage John Caliperry team. So if he fucks this up, like, I mean, you're kind of out of like,

Speaker 1 I don't know if excuses, though, you're out of like paths for him to get it back. Like,

Speaker 1 if he fucks this up, he's completely lost the magic team. And it's, and it will be, I mean, it's already been a decade, but it's like we're on 12, 13 years.
Yes. They won a title.

Speaker 7 What is a fuck-up for him this year? Like, he has to, the Sweet 16, Final Four?

Speaker 1 I mean, I would have thought

Speaker 1 they should be competing in the SEC.

Speaker 1 I mean, the SEC is good, so I don't want to say there's no excuse for them not to win the league, but the fact that they're not even going to come close to winning the league is crazy.

Speaker 1 They have to make at least the Sweet 16. Yeah.
At least.

Speaker 1 And they're not. I mean, they're not.
I don't think they're going to.

Speaker 7 And if they get spanked in the Sweet 16, then it's like he fucked us up.

Speaker 1 Right, right. And I guess that's the hard part when evaluating this stuff is you always move the goalpost.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, he loses to the national championship by five, and you're like, fucked it up. Fucked it up.

Speaker 7 We're supposed to be Kentucky.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 7 What about Purdue? Talk to me about Purdue.

Speaker 7 I think there's nothing in sports that you enjoy more than Purdue losing.

Speaker 1 Purdue losing at the right time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Purdue's a sick joke. It's a sick joke.
It's the greatest this year because they're the only team that can win it all from the Big Ten. Right.

Speaker 1 They've been talking about the Big Ten forever, needing a national title.

Speaker 6 It's going to hurt us.

Speaker 7 So can they win it all or are they going to fuck it up?

Speaker 1 They can win it all. I think this Purdue team is better than last year.

Speaker 1 The guard play

Speaker 1 has, first of all, their guards are older.

Speaker 1 The two white kids that were freshmen last year,

Speaker 1 they are older and they're way better. Like Brayden Smith last year was like a game manager more, and now he's actually a stud.

Speaker 1 And then Lance Jones, the kid they got in the transfer portal, is fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 So I do think that Purdue is going to make a Final Four. I think they're better.

Speaker 1 But what worries me about Purdue is like they just can't resist being Purdue. And I don't mean that as like a LOL Purdue meme.
Like I like watching them against Ohio State,

Speaker 1 they're one of the best three-point shooting teams in the country. Now, last year they couldn't shoot for shit.
Now they can. They're hitting threes.

Speaker 1 They shot nine threes against Ohio State because they just cannot resist just trying to dump it into Edie over and over and over. Edie's awesome, but

Speaker 1 I don't know what their plan B.

Speaker 1 They don't give you confidence that they have a great plan B. And that's what worries me about Purdue.

Speaker 1 Purdue's good, though, this year. They're better than they have been in these horrific exits.

Speaker 1 And I know the reason why I know this is because it's shifted now to, you know, last year was like, well, their guards are so young. Like, are they going to be able to stand up?

Speaker 1 And they obviously didn't.

Speaker 1 It's basically like, wait till Zach Eady gets officiated different in madness.

Speaker 1 That is a sign that it's like, oh, they actually are pretty good. They are good.
They are good. No, they are good.
They are clinging to that. They can definitely win a national champion.

Speaker 1 I just, yeah, like, it's,

Speaker 1 you know, how I'll say things one game, and,

Speaker 1 you know, you don't want to put too much stock in one game, and they have been awesome all year. But, yeah, I do worry that that's just like

Speaker 1 they just become so ED dominant that the rest of the guys are just staying around watching. But they are good.
They are legitimately,

Speaker 1 they address their problems in the offseason.

Speaker 1 I just,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 when push comes to shove and assholes start getting tight in the N-SAA tournament game, they're just going to revert back to what they know, which is dumping it into the post, which is great, but you know, it's a guard-oriented game in March, and teams will like that's what Fairleigh Dickinson did.

Speaker 1 That's it. We were laughing at Dave, yeah, and the family cave, but Dave just kept yelling, they're too small.
That's exactly what happened, and

Speaker 1 I don't, I still think the recipe to beat Purdue is the exact same, even though they've gotten a little better. Um,

Speaker 1 and everybody knows that. Like, that's the other thing that worries me about that.
It's like every single team knows how to beat Purdue. There's going to be no

Speaker 1 you don't, you don't need like the quick turnaround of Scout of like, oh, fuck, we're playing Purdue. Like, what do they do? What are their tendencies?

Speaker 1 Like, I feel like every team in the country knows how to beat them. But the good thing for Purdue fans is executing that is going to be difficult.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Best league in the country, Big 12?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Big 12 is the best, but I don't find it the most interesting. I think the Big East and the Edge.
Well, it's because Houston is at the top.

Speaker 1 Houston's great.

Speaker 7 It feels like they're not yet Big 12.

Speaker 1 And they're great, but they're hard to watch. Did you watch the Iowa State team? Yes, Yeah, they're hard to watch.
Both those teams are really good.

Speaker 7 I kind of love that game, though, because they were just beating the fuck out of each other.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they were. Yeah.
But I think that is why the Big 12, like, it is the best conference, but when it's Houston instead of Kansas up top, it just feels different.

Speaker 1 And that's, I know Houston fans get mad about that, but it's just the facts. Yeah, I'm still trying to make sense of Houston because

Speaker 1 their defense is unbelievable. They're so good.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 Jamal Shedd is awesome, and Cryer is great. Like, I do like their guards.
Their guards are, it's going to be interesting because I wonder how much offense they can generate.

Speaker 1 I wonder if Shedd and Cryer are guys that

Speaker 1 can just pull something out of their ass

Speaker 1 offensively when they need to in March. And I don't know if they are,

Speaker 1 but I could see them being that.

Speaker 1 It's really,

Speaker 1 I don't know. They're like right at the line for me of how talented did you need your guards to be offensively.
Defensively, they're fucking incredible.

Speaker 1 But like this Houston flame out in the tournament feels like they lost a game like 53 to 49. Right.
They couldn't score, but they played great defense. Right.

Speaker 7 I'll rebound them by like 20 rebounds. Yeah.
Still can't get their shot.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like it's just a disgusting game.
They go like 21% from three. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But they still take, they took like 20 of them because they're like, we're desperate. Right, right.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But no,

Speaker 1 I like Houston a lot, and I think the fact that they went to the Big 12

Speaker 1 is going to help them immensely, obviously, because they're in a tough conference and they're playing well.

Speaker 7 What I do love is there's so many fans that are fans of teams in the Big 12 that kept saying to Houston, like, just wait till you play a real conference.

Speaker 1 Just wait.

Speaker 7 Just wait till 2024. You're going to feel what real basketball is like.
And they come in, they're still really funny.

Speaker 1 We're going to win your league. Yeah, yeah.
I really like that.

Speaker 7 What about Texas?

Speaker 1 Did you get a chance?

Speaker 7 Also, why is his name pronounced Acemus?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I never understood that.

Speaker 7 He's really fucking good. Yeah, he is.
So he can tell you how to pronounce his name whatever way he wants, but A, B, how does that make the situation?

Speaker 1 I've never really understood that.

Speaker 1 I don't know. The problem with the Big 12 for me is there are a lot of teams that.

Speaker 1 But it's that way, kind of across all of college basketball. Because there are good teams, certainly, and Texas is one of them.
But no, I don't think Texas is going to a Final Four or winning.

Speaker 1 Like, they're not a serious national title contender.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're in the middle of the

Speaker 1 12. Yeah, and all those teams are kind of that way.
Like, I don't, I would say Houston's really the only team I think has a shot at winning. Like, Iowa State fans won't want to hear that.

Speaker 1 Kansas is supposed to be good, but, like, I think even Kansas fans kind of realize that this team's not it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the rest of the teams are good, and they're going to, the Big 12 is, like, more of like a

Speaker 1 numbers game where it's, like, we're not going to win the national championship, but we are going to have five teams in the elite eight. Yeah.
Like, you're going to have to respect us because

Speaker 1 we just overwhelm you with how many good teams we have. But then when you look up, like, none of those teams are actually winning the national championship.
houston could though yeah

Speaker 1 yeah i mean i i yeah the big 12 is and they they are tcu tcu is another team i like but like i don't think they're

Speaker 1 tcu uh i dixon really screwed us because we went and did a tcu uh

Speaker 1 college football show and we had him on and he was like we're gonna run like the the showtime lakers yeah and i was like oh fuck i'm gonna bet the over in every single one of their games and they they do run but they don't make shots like the showtime lakers so i've lost a lot lot of money there's a guy uh jordan sperber who does awesome uh breakdowns uh if you're like a basketball geek and want to see like x's and o's stuff he's he's like a film nut but he uh

Speaker 1 that only got 54 000 views yeah jj reddit zion williamson yeah what a what a great humble rat by jj reddick and like this this boring thing it only got 450 i i feel his pain because like i i'm like the smartest fucking guy in the world and like i kind of do i prove it on my show over and over and over again and uh i think the reason my show isn't the number one sports podcast is because i'm probably too smart

Speaker 1 for the fans don't want it yeah i gotta double down

Speaker 1 you can do x's and o's but or you can get cat williams to come on a show and call everyone in hollywood gay yeah and then you get 60 million views yeah uh wait so what were you saying uh say sperber always puts together he takes the uh the intro press conferences when coaches get hired in the offseason literally every single coach is says we're going to push pace yeah we're going to we're going to run and gun we're going to yeah and then and then he he oftentimes will do like an update and be like, here's their pace, actually.

Speaker 1 Here's what

Speaker 1 their offense is actually doing. But every single intro press conference, the coach is like, one of the tenets of our program, we're going to push it.

Speaker 4 We're going to get good shots.

Speaker 1 We're going to put points on the board.

Speaker 1 And then reality hits. Yeah.
That's a fact. All right.
So let's talk about the Big East real quick because

Speaker 1 Max over there, Villanova,

Speaker 1 they are. We're running this tomorrow.

Speaker 1 You can't have a worse setup than Villanova being like starting to play some good basketball. Max had talked himself into the UConn game.
Now it's game day is in stores.

Speaker 1 They're coming off with 20-point loss where Danny Hurley was like, I coached bad, the players played bad. And now Villanova has to go play there.
And Danny Hurley's releasing Game of Thrones gifts,

Speaker 1 videos.

Speaker 7 This feels like an ass kicking. It's going to be

Speaker 1 a fucking biblical ass kicking for Max and Villanova. Are you in on Arnova, Max? I can't.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 I go with whatever way the last game goes.

Speaker 1 I'm all in

Speaker 4 after every single game. And the last

Speaker 1 three games, double-digit wins, or three wins by double-digit points.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now you've got to go play UConn. So is there a team in the Big East besides UConn and we'll say Creighton as well? Yeah.
We have Greg McDermott on this show

Speaker 1 who can make a deep run. Marquette, obviously.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I think Marquette's.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Maybe that's just because of the Badgers.
Because the Badgers. And I don't think the Badgers are that good.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Seton Hall's

Speaker 1 been great.

Speaker 1 It won't happen, though, because they're Frank.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And Frank's not allowed to have happiness.

Speaker 1 Seton Hall is like an auto-bed at home type of team. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm drinking the Butler Kool-Aid. They're on the bubble.
Oh, why? Who's their coach?

Speaker 6 Who is their coach? Yeah, look it up.

Speaker 1 Oh, who is their coach?

Speaker 1 Do you know their coach?

Speaker 1 You don't know their coach? No, do they? Do you know their coach?

Speaker 7 nova's the fourth best oh it's thad motto

Speaker 1 oh oh did he where'd he coach oh well good for him i didn't realize that

Speaker 1 i i i was drinking the butter koole but now i'm really drinking

Speaker 1 yeah um

Speaker 1 they're so fun to watch they they they won at creighton and at marquette yeah we're talking about like you want to see teams that can win on the road they won they they have two impressive road wins villanova could could

Speaker 1 do something they're the fourth best team in the big east

Speaker 1 yeah you're probably probably right.

Speaker 1 When they're at their best. Yeah, there's a following.
To be proud of. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 4 they've looked like the third worst team in the Big East for a lot of the year. But talent-wise, they're at least the fourth-best team of the Big East.

Speaker 1 Talent-wise. Talent-wise.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the Big East is the most fun league to me, I think. Well, it's all basketball.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just pure basketball. The fans are obsessed.

Speaker 1 It's all they care about.

Speaker 1 The coaches are incredible characters

Speaker 1 through and through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I do think a lot of these teams can

Speaker 1 go.

Speaker 1 Bias aside, I do think Butler,

Speaker 1 I do think that

Speaker 1 they're not going to go to Final Four, but

Speaker 1 that was bias included.

Speaker 1 I don't know what you mean by a deep run, but yeah, like Butler can make the Sweet 16. Butler, bias aside, may not make the tournament.
No, I know that, but like that would be the bias aside.

Speaker 1 They're going to make the tournament. Are they? Yeah, they'll make the tournament.
But there's a team every year that plays in the play-in that

Speaker 1 makes a little run. Yeah, no, you're right.
Every year there's a team that's on the bubble that makes a run. I'm saying Butler could be that team.
Their last four in right now, according to Lenardi.

Speaker 1 They'll make it in.

Speaker 7 Okay. Can I say something about the play-in? I just, I've decided I hate the play-in.

Speaker 7 I don't like it because it's an afterthought, even though it comes before.

Speaker 6 I don't like the play-in at all.

Speaker 7 I think I want my tournament to to start on Thursday. I like it being clean Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Speaker 7 The teams don't get the shine if they play in the play-in. Nobody remembers if you play in the play-in and lose.

Speaker 7 I understand why they want more teams in there. They want to be able to throw some 16 seeds in and get them out of the way.

Speaker 7 Some teams that won their conference.

Speaker 1 How would you feel

Speaker 7 that they don't want to give shine to on a Thursday?

Speaker 1 If they called it the play-in and you didn't actually get an NCA tournament, you didn't get to put on a banner in your arena that NCA tournament appearances, you didn't get to put that on there unless you won the play-in.

Speaker 1 I'm fine with that. If it was truly like, this is not the NCA tournament.
Yes.

Speaker 1 This is purely a play-in. The tournament starts on Thursday, but we're still going to keep the exact same format.
We're just going to rebrand it. Yeah, the games can stay.

Speaker 7 I'm not in favor of, I like more sports on TV. Yeah, for sure.
But if you just do, if you have four at-large teams that play on that Wednesday, you don't call it the tournament. Yeah.

Speaker 7 But if you win, you get in the tournament. I'm fine with that.
I just, 68 isn't as cool. 64 is a way better number when it comes to a bracket.

Speaker 1 I like the play-in because it's an appetizer. Right.
It gets you warmed up. And I also think that UCLA kind of like legitimized the play-in when they went to the final four from the play-in.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like that, that was it. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm happy they got in. You know, like, we need the play-in.
So I just, I like the appetizer. It gets me warmed up.
I do think that this idea that we're going to have like whatever the number is 132.

Speaker 1 I hate that. That sucks.

Speaker 7 64 is the perfect number. And I agree, like with UCLA, they could have played in that as an at-large.
And yeah, you get into the tournament that way. And we've been fine.

Speaker 7 I just, I don't like the number 68. I feel like 64 is way better.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1 I guess you could just not watch until Thursday morning. Not an option.
Yeah. That's true, too.
That's why I like it because I'll always watch it. You put it on TV, I'm going to watch it.

Speaker 1 And it also feels like, ooh, nice. This team could get...
Who else did? I don't know why I said that because it isn't an option. Yeah, I say the same shit sometimes.

Speaker 1 Like, people will say the same shit to me about, like, I'm like, I hate watching, like, I don't feel this way about Houston, but if you find Houston basketball disgusting and you're just like, I fucking, I can't watch this kind of basketball, people will say, well, just don't watch.

Speaker 1 And it's like, I mean, I have to watch. Yeah.
You also have to realize that. You're not going to watch one of the best teams in the country.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The play-in is objectively hilarious, too, for the teams that do lose, like Brandon Walker's Mississippi State last year. Yes.
He didn't make the tournament. Yes.
TJ the Rutgers lost a few years ago.

Speaker 1 Right. They didn't make the tournament.
You get to do that with your friends. Right.
They're like, you weren't really in the tournament. Right, right.
So I love the the play-in. Right.

Speaker 1 I do like the play-in. I do think that it should be official, though.
I do think that Mississippi State last year should have officially not made this. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm fine with that, but I just like the idea. They should keep it.
You can basically play like, the play-in is basically a choose-your-own-adventure, where it's like the losing teams.

Speaker 1 You can be like, yeah, they didn't make it.

Speaker 1 There's always somebody that argues that we should not make the 16s play, but I think the 16s want to play. Yeah.
That's another thing. They get a chance to win a tournament game.
Right. That's cool.

Speaker 1 Like, they don't otherwise, and I get it. They want to play against a one-seed.
That's cool. But, like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I like the playing.

Speaker 1 I'm a big fan of the playing.

Speaker 1 All right. Pac-12, real quick.
Arizona. Swan song.
Arizona's for real. Arizona is for real.
They play Washington State tonight. Yeah, it should be a great game.

Speaker 1 Washington State's second-best team in the Pac-12.

Speaker 1 Is there a chance, though, that Tommy Lloyd spent a little too much time with Mark Phew and he's always going to be just close enough? I know. He's got a little too much Mark Phew.
Well, Arizona,

Speaker 1 Purdue losing last year is the greatest thing that happened to Tommy Lloyd. Nobody remembers that Arizona lost to 15 seeds.
Yeah, no, you're right.

Speaker 1 They're the two seeds. Right.
Yeah, he's been.

Speaker 1 He is starting to get into that range of like, I think that's why he lost some of these games this year because Arizona is, they are very good, and their national title is good.

Speaker 1 And the Final Four is in Phoenix, which is an interesting wrinkle.

Speaker 1 And the Pac-12 having its last year, like, there's a lot of stars aligning for the Arizona redemption.

Speaker 1 But I think they're not having quite as good of a year as they probably should be.

Speaker 1 And I think that might be on purpose because Tommy Lloyd was getting way too many of those graphics that are like, this is the hottest start anybody's ever had to college basketball coaching career.

Speaker 1 And you don't want that when you've had the last two tournament exits they've had. Like Houston was way better than them the year that they lost.
That was a Sweet 16 at least.

Speaker 1 But Houston just like manhandled them when Arizona is probably the best team in the country a couple years ago. And then you lose to a 15 seed last year.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's,

Speaker 1 I don't want to say Tommy Lloyd, like, he just signed an extension, and I think most people realize he is an incredible. He's still two or three years away from getting the narrative.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there's been a couple, like, they lost at Oregon State, I want to say, and then that game at home where they struggled with UCLA for the entire game. Right.

Speaker 1 They let Stanford score 100 on him. But I think that's smart.
I think he's got to show more cracks in the regular season.

Speaker 1 If you're dominant through the regular season and then you fuck it up in March, that's true. That's what Konzagi

Speaker 1 looks embarrassing. But if you have like seven or eight losses entering the tournament and you lose in the Sweet 16, it's not a bad year.
Yeah. It's not a bad year.

Speaker 7 It's like Izzo, right?

Speaker 7 He limps in the tournament sometimes. You don't expect it.
You're like, what a great coach.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like if Michigan State makes the Sweet 16 this year, that's going to feel like a great accomplishment. Incredible accomplishment.
Yeah, they were. You picked him in the national ship.

Speaker 7 Well, they're a great team.

Speaker 7 They're a fantastic team. Very hard to beat at home, especially early on in the season.
You're a national title competitor. If you go in

Speaker 7 and you defeat Michigan State when they're, what, ranked number four at the the time, you'd have to be a great team to do that.

Speaker 1 You should get an auto-bed to the N-SA tournament, right? Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 7 Let's talk Sunbelt, Mark.

Speaker 1 No, we won't talk Sunbelt.

Speaker 7 ACC.

Speaker 7 So I miss, I'm going to say it, I miss Coach K. Big time.
I miss having him around.

Speaker 7 I miss the rivalries. I miss him lecturing people.
I miss getting to talk about Coach K.

Speaker 7 And it feels like it's not just Duke, but like

Speaker 7 a little bit of the shine is off the ACC now without Coach K.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 1 Duke is sneaky putting it together a little bit right now.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it's not the same.

Speaker 1 Carolinas,

Speaker 1 I think it's Beyond Coach K, like

Speaker 1 the ACC lost a lot of characters. They lost Roy, they lost Boheim.
They lost Mike Bray, who nobody talks about. Dude, how about Boeheim calling games? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's per, like, I turned on a random ACC game the other day, and I was like, is this Boheim? And he was just so curmudging me. I was like, it is Boeheim.
I don't like him calling games.

Speaker 1 He should be the halftime and the

Speaker 1 yeah, it was so weird. He should be in the studio.
He's just kind of in his whiny voice and I was just like what is going on right now yeah but yeah we lost a lot of ACC guys yeah

Speaker 1 and and Virginia is still like technically one of the better teams in the conference and now Virginia is is as bad as like when Virginia had those good teams and everyone was like this team cannot score the basketball they were wrong they actually could they just like played slow but they were like their offense was incredible they had NBA players and and they got good shots and they made them um this is actually what Virginia basketball was to all the people back in the day.

Speaker 1 This specific Virginia team is disgusting, just disgusting basketball. They play great defense.
They cannot score to save their lives.

Speaker 1 And the problem the ACC has is that they are still one of the better teams in the ACC.

Speaker 1 And they are just like, they are very, very offensive.

Speaker 7 Yeah, when they're good, when they win games, you can be like, this is, if you're a real basketball head, you love Virginia basketball because they suffocate you, they smother you, they're careful, they're deliberate.

Speaker 7 But then when they can't score, it's just like this is bad basketball. It's bad basketball.

Speaker 7 Yeah, what is what is Tony Bennett's philosophy on just like how he plays? Like, what is the driving force behind why he chooses to play such a weird brand of basketball?

Speaker 1 Uh, his dad, I think. Yeah, I think it was just like his dad, yeah, his dad did it, and he did it that way.

Speaker 1 Um, it's just it literally is just like you, if you're from Wisconsin, you got to play boring basketball.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know, like, it makes sense in like an antiquated way where it's like we want to work for a good shot, work the ball, wait till you get like like if don't don't shoot bad shots that checks out like the value of each possession yeah i i think like there was a lot of like the pack line defense is like make them shoot further from the basket which like was smart strategy in the 80s yeah and then now it's like that's where everybody wants to shoot yeah i also think it's like a lot of these teams virginia obviously you said when they won the national title they had nba dudes but it's smart when you have a team that maybe doesn't have like that one or two guys that can can beat everyone off the dribble it's like all right we're gonna work as a team to get these good shots right right.

Speaker 1 And now, yeah, the introduction of the ball screen has just completely changed.

Speaker 1 Somewhere along the line, and Steph Curry, it was the ball screen plus Steph Curry that have just revolutionized this game.

Speaker 7 If only Steph Curry would have been recruited by any team that was around him when he was growing up. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, damn. Yeah.
You know what?

Speaker 1 In all the Steph Curry, Virginia Tech angles I've thought of, it never did cross my mind that like,

Speaker 1 Virginia plays the pack line and they give up threes and they're fine giving up threes and Steph Curry could have gone to Virginia Tech. Yeah.
Just fucking

Speaker 1 rain threes on Virginia.

Speaker 7 Really, Virginia should have recruited Steph Curry.

Speaker 7 Everyone should recognize it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, true.

Speaker 7 But especially Virginia, because if they knew that Tech wasn't recruiting him, at least you get the opportunity to be like, we got this guy, and it's a big fuck you to Virginia Tech, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 7 That's a big miss.

Speaker 1 I wonder if that should be recruiting strategies, like recruit the guys,

Speaker 1 recruit the sons that

Speaker 1 the dad's dad's alma mater doesn't want.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and then you can be like the whole time, like, they didn't want you. Yeah.
And fire you up that way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
All right, we got to mention the Mountain West so Mountain West fans don't get mad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're starting to piss me off, Mountain West fans. I don't know.
Why? Why? I think because there was the narrative that they couldn't do it in the tournament than San Diego State.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's just one guy. Last night I was watching that awesome, awesome New Mexico, Colorado State game, and someone's like, oh, just finding out about the Mountain West.
Like, fuck you, dude.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I fucking watched the Mountain West. Yeah.
I fucking lost. I'm pretty sure that UNOV threw a game against Air Force like a month ago that I bet on, and I watched every possession of them.

Speaker 1 They lost by like 30.

Speaker 7 I watched the Mountain West.

Speaker 1 So they got like hockey fan energy? Yeah, they're a little bit like, oh, now you're

Speaker 1 paying attention to the Mountain West.

Speaker 7 To be clear, this is one fan.

Speaker 1 No, but

Speaker 1 it's one guy. No, Mountain West fans.
No, Mountain West fans do have a little chip on their shoulder. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because they, I mean, it's an earned chip because they did have all those years where it was great basketball to watch, and then they get to the tournament and they'd be out in like, remember the year they were out in 10 hours?

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, so, like, they have a chip.
I do remember that. But I liked the Mountain West.
It's fun, fun basketball. It's been great this year.

Speaker 1 It's so fun. They might get six bids.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The UNLV should not make it for that one game I'm talking about. But

Speaker 1 they have the same problem PFT said. It's like whoever's at home.
Yeah. Well, no, they lost at home

Speaker 1 by 30 to the Air Force. I'm pretty sure they.
Oh, UNLV. Did you talk about UNLV? I'm sure that was a point-shaving game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't make sense of who the best team in the Mountain West is. I I have no idea.
It depends on basically what I just saw. I think New Mexico probably has the highest ceiling.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They feel like the team that

Speaker 1 they make the most sense to me. I like their guards.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 Utah State is probably the answer. They're probably going to win the league, right?

Speaker 1 The one thing that worries me about Utah State, they haven't played a single power conference team all year.

Speaker 1 When I realized that,

Speaker 1 that definitely worried me.

Speaker 1 San Diego State is like when the bracket comes out, I'm going to make San Diego State go the furthest of any Mountain West team, though. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it's just, it's last year bias, but it's also like they do have the pedigree.

Speaker 1 And they were the one team that, like, they've never had, obviously, a final four run, but, like, they were the one team that would have some semblance of success out of the Mountain West. Right.

Speaker 1 Like, they at least would go to a Sweet 16 every so often. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I think San Diego State will probably end up still being the team. But yeah, fun league.

Speaker 1 It has become the league that's like,

Speaker 1 if you don't know what game to watch, just throw on a random ass Mountain West game. It might be the hipsters basketball.
Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is.
Yeah, it definitely is.

Speaker 1 It does have that energy because it is like every night you can watch

Speaker 1 the A10 used to be that way. Yeah, you're right.
And the Mountain West has kind of become that. Yeah, you're right.
Where it used to be like, oh, yeah, no one's talking about VCU, Dayton, all this.

Speaker 1 You're absolutely right. The Mountain West is the new A-10.
This Richmond...

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Watch out for Bonnie's. St.
Bonaventure game. Yeah.
Popping off. Yeah.
Yeah. The Mr.
Beer guy, he actually,

Speaker 1 I think his name was Dom. Awesome dude.
Remember the St. Bonnie's fan who used to wear the beer hat and they'd show him at every game.

Speaker 1 Captain Beer. Captain Beer.
He did an awesome move. He passed down the hat.
That's good.

Speaker 1 That's good. So there's a new Captain Beer.

Speaker 1 That's a fucking great move. That's a great move.

Speaker 6 For college basketball.

Speaker 7 Like, if you're a fan and you're in the student section, can you imagine continuing to go back to that fan section, maybe wearing the same

Speaker 7 sunglasses that you've worn worn every single year. That'd be weird.

Speaker 1 He came to the office and he brought us some merch, some Captain Beer merch.

Speaker 7 Guy rocks. Speaking of TJ,

Speaker 7 how awesome is it getting to host a daily show, which I love, by the way, mostly sports. You have a

Speaker 1 cast of characters. Yeah, both of them.

Speaker 7 I mean, I love TJ.

Speaker 1 I love Ebo, love Connor.

Speaker 7 You got everybody.

Speaker 7 Cody.

Speaker 1 Cody,

Speaker 7 it's got to be a great time hosting that show. Fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's fun hosting, especially when you guys are hosting it with me. Yeah.
That's what I enjoy it the most, is when I look across the desk and I see Face I Respect, like one of you two.

Speaker 1 Like one of us.

Speaker 1 I should thank you, though,

Speaker 1 because you doing mostly sports with, what's his name? Brendan? Brennan Walker? Brennan. Brendan.
Brendan Walker.

Speaker 1 You doing mostly sports with Brennan Walker has definitely cleared my schedule a little bit with his anxiety phone calls. I'm assuming they're going to you because I know they're not fixed.

Speaker 1 I assume they're just going to you.

Speaker 1 He helps my anxiety because I have a ton of anxiety as well. But then I see Brandon and I'm like, do I look like that? Yeah, it like forces you into a

Speaker 1 leadership role with him. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 7 You have to calm him down. Somebody has to.

Speaker 7 It forces you into perspective about yourself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really does.

Speaker 1 But no, we love the show. It's been great.
We love that

Speaker 1 you guys help out with the show

Speaker 1 when asked. Called upon.
Yeah, when called upon. It's been a fun show.

Speaker 7 Now, is it going to be a disappointment for you if you don't get ranked as the number one college basketball personality?

Speaker 1 No, because I

Speaker 1 don't know. I don't know what's funnier.
If I do or if.

Speaker 7 The funniest outcome would be if you were ranked number like two or three, and then Brennan Walker got you a giant banner to hang up that said like

Speaker 7 college basketball personality.

Speaker 1 That's probably true.

Speaker 1 Are you guys still in the honeymoon?

Speaker 1 Have you had the time, because this happens to every show that's ever been created on the internet, where like, I don't know, a year in, everyone's like, this show sucks now.

Speaker 1 We're not there yet, but I feel that

Speaker 1 Brandon pointed out that we have like a Reddit now. Oh, that's the first story.
And then it's over. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Brandon made the mistake where he's like, we apparently have a Reddit and everybody's super nice. And I was like, yeah, for now,

Speaker 1 that's the problem. Yeah, that's the problem.

Speaker 7 Some light advice, take it or leave it. Just don't read the Reddit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, never go on it. And then you don't have to worry about it.
We do have this problem, and I don't know if you guys can relate. Connor, who's like kind of a side character, but

Speaker 1 we let him him talk every so often. He's a big Philly guy, and his opinions about Philly sports just fucking stink.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so we get a lot of shit where it's like, shut this Philly asshole up, please. I don't want to hear from this Philly piece of shit.

Speaker 1 And I don't know why I'm asking.

Speaker 1 It's just something that we're trying to deal with.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I can fuck you out with that one. We don't have that problem.
We're trying to deal with that.

Speaker 1 Because we enjoy it, but also the fans just hate his fucking guts.

Speaker 1 And that's a little weird. Well, he's not Italian, though.

Speaker 1 So you're good.

Speaker 1 I think Max's personality is more Italian than Philly sometimes.

Speaker 7 It's a lethal combination.

Speaker 1 Where he'll start a sentence and finish it with his hands. We're like, dude, I don't know sign language.
We weren't talking about me.

Speaker 7 No, we were talking about Connor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We were talking about Connor.

Speaker 1 Well, you just said my name. Well, no, because I was saying, like, as long as Connor's not Italian or becomes Italian, you should be okay.

Speaker 7 What is he, Irish? German-Irish? He looks like a fan.

Speaker 1 You're fine. You're fine.
He's Irish, right? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Connor's an Irish name.

Speaker 1 Connor Griffin. He has great teeth.

Speaker 1 He's Irish. Probably.
Redhead.

Speaker 7 Yeah, people get pissed off when you have that one guy that his name starts with E and he always talks about JMU. Yeah.
That's a bad person to have on a podcast.

Speaker 1 All right, national title. And we're going to have you back on, obviously, for the brackets when they are announced.
But give it to us. Maybe give us the final four.
Okay, final four.

Speaker 1 It's impossible to do without a bracket.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's also impossible because I did have this realization the other day that I don't think I can think of four teams that I trust to win four NCA tournament games in a row right now, which is a problem because four teams will.

Speaker 1 By definition, four teams. I trust UConn.

Speaker 1 UConn and Purdue feel obvious.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, that's what I'm going to just. Okay.
All right. I have to think this through.

Speaker 1 Because everybody wants you to pick

Speaker 1 a wild card, but the reason they are a wild card is because they've kind of sucked this year. Right.
So, like, why would I pick them?

Speaker 1 I think Purdue is going to make the final Four. I said that at the start of the year.

Speaker 1 I think Purdue is going to get their redemption in the sense that they're going to make the Final Four and not win a national championship.

Speaker 1 I do feel like Houston's defense is Houston is

Speaker 1 the jump up to the Big 12 is going to help them immensely, and I have to trust Houston.

Speaker 1 I don't think UConn's going to do it. Oh,

Speaker 1 I think UConn is good. I think UConn is very, very good.
I just think

Speaker 1 back-to-back championships is hard. Back-to-back Final Fours is very hard.
hard and uh

Speaker 1 yeah i i like you con like even villanova that like they villanova was the year in between the national title like they villanova had an awesome team and they got tripped up and like you get who then who beat him i can't remember who cares i can't remember

Speaker 1 oh you didn't even get out of the second round you were the one seed

Speaker 4 i'll take a a second round exit sandwich with but who did beat him who did beat him

Speaker 1 i who cares who i'm just asking i'm nervous uh like we're it seems like you know the answer

Speaker 1 like you know the answer. Jake, do you know the answer?

Speaker 10 Yeah, it was the Wisconsin Bats. Oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 It was Wisconsin. Yeah, that's a coincidence like Bad Mad's Motor.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think UConn's in a position right now where the foreseeable future, they will be national title contenders. But I'm going to pick them to get tripped up like in the Sweet 16 this year.

Speaker 1 So I got Purdue. I'll take Houston.
Give me Arizona because I like that.

Speaker 1 That's a sexy idea of Arizona being in Phoenix in the Final Four last year, the Pac-12. And then I got a ride with Tennessee, who I said, big cat, when you came on my show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they were one of my picks. And we talked about national title picks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we threw out Michigan State and Tennessee. Yeah, so you picked three number ones and a number two.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 What's the let me pull up bracket matrix? What do you want me to pick? What's low enough?

Speaker 1 Well, I was going to pick Indiana State, but right now in Lenardi. I can't quit Kentucky.

Speaker 1 Kentucky's probably going to be like a six-seed. They're five-seed, maybe.

Speaker 1 I'll go with. Well, I'm going to go with.

Speaker 1 I did pick

Speaker 1 Nebraska.

Speaker 1 I'll pick Olemis. Okay.

Speaker 1 Nice. Vermont.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Give me

Speaker 1 Nevada. Yep.

Speaker 1 And South Florida. Actually, South Florida is.
Yeah, they are. South Florida is very fun.
South Florida is fun, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They won a big-time trap spot last week. Dude, fuck it.
I'll pick Butler in the final four then.

Speaker 1 Take out

Speaker 1 Butler doesn't know. Take out Houston and put in Butler.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Give me your NIT Final Four.

Speaker 1 Buckeyes. Buckeyes are back.
We're in Purdue, so we're back in the NIT picture.

Speaker 1 Buckeyes JMU. There we go.
Buckeyes JMU. I would love that.
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 Did we have to go?

Speaker 7 Yeah, we should. That was a women's.

Speaker 7 Was that a women's round of 16 game last year? Because I think me and you bet on that, right?

Speaker 1 You know what? Now that I think about it, that was my.

Speaker 1 yeah, we did, and I think I owe you something. It was a mustache bet.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 There were so many bets going on. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was such a whirlwind because that was my welcome to barstool moment in terms of the gambling was

Speaker 1 we bet on the Ohio State JMU women. Ohio State won by like 23 or something.
And PFT was cackling in my face like, ha ha, gotcha. Lose, gotcha.
Gotcha. And I was like, what is going on?

Speaker 1 Got your ass. Loser.
Yeah, I don't like looking at bracketology right now because I just pulled it up in Wisconsin's playing Indiana State in the first round, and that's a loss.

Speaker 1 Jake, I have a question for you with bracketology. How do you feel about Joe Lennardy becoming the lightning rod for anytime a coach has a problem with

Speaker 1 where he's at in the bracketing,

Speaker 1 they go after Lennardi.

Speaker 1 He gets so much shit, and I don't necessarily think Lenardi's the best bracketologist, but I just find it fascinating that Joe Lennardy has created this industry where he's just like, here's what I think the selection committee is going to do.

Speaker 1 And then every time around this year, like a team that's on the bubble, their coach will do a press conference. We're like, oh, one more thing before I go, fuck you, Joe Lenardi.

Speaker 1 Joe Lenardi's like, what did I do?

Speaker 10 Well, Mark, as someone who tried going down the path of being a brachatologist for one season, I can tell you that role is absolute hell.

Speaker 1 There is no way to make anyone happy.

Speaker 10 I left Wisconsin out of my preseason bracket two years ago.

Speaker 4 And Catholics did not shut up about it.

Speaker 1 Well, you shouldn't have done that. because you just copied whatever they said.
I wanted a true, real bracketology.

Speaker 9 They were projected not to do well that year. Projected?

Speaker 1 Who projects?

Speaker 10 It's an impossible job.

Speaker 9 It is impossible. There is no way to make anybody happy.

Speaker 1 It is impossible. I agree with that.
But then the funny part about it is it's actually like super easy because

Speaker 1 when you're forecasting the field in the NCAA tournament, you're basically looking at like a pool of like eight teams and you're picking five of those eight to make the tournament. Correct.

Speaker 1 That's really all it comes down to. Correct.

Speaker 1 And somehow, I don't know, but just like the idea that Lenardi is the only one that, like, would you take that as a point of pride, though, Jake? You're the guy that everybody wants to attack.

Speaker 1 Are you like, this is fucking insane? Why is everybody in the middle of the table?

Speaker 10 I think the fact that ESPN has the rights to like 85% of college basketball games, he's the easiest target.

Speaker 1 Well, he was the first. It is true.
He was the first

Speaker 7 a field of study. The fact that he put ology at the end of it makes it seem like

Speaker 7 more of a sign.

Speaker 10 There's a part-time class you could take with him.

Speaker 1 He still exists. It's not really his opinions, though.
That's what I find hilarious about it. It's like, Joe Lenardi, in his mind, he's like, this is science, dude.
Like, I'm not.

Speaker 1 He's just doing what they think they will do.

Speaker 10 You don't see people coming for Jerry Palm.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
It's all Lenardi. It's always Lenardi.
And he's just like, every time he's on TV, he's just like the biggest teddy bear-looking dude.

Speaker 1 And the idea that these coaches are behind closed doors is like, fuck it. We got to fucking kill this guy.

Speaker 7 It's just one guy that's like locked in his basement. The bunker.

Speaker 1 Also, Jerry Palm, you can't go out him because his hair. Like, what are you going to say? Like,

Speaker 1 you just look at him and you're like, your hair, dude.

Speaker 1 Like, he kind of just put a speed bump in front of all haters. Like, we're going to make fun of that.
Look at his hair. That's what's it.
You're out of the bracketology game?

Speaker 10 I did it for one season, and it was a huge mistake.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I've been trying to find a field for Blake to get into because Leroy's thing was breaking news, and he was really good at it. Blake might become a bracketologist.

Speaker 1 I should become a bracket. You should become a CBI bracketologist.

Speaker 7 He could be a bracketologist. Maybe he could also be like an NFL news aggregator, like a Dove Kleinman.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 football.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but yeah, maybe bracketology, Blakeatology.

Speaker 1 That works. But yeah, it can't be the NCAA or the NIT.
It should be the CBI or whatever the other thing. CIT.
I don't even know if that exists anymore. CIT.

Speaker 1 That would rock. It was a CBI.

Speaker 1 Or it would be even better if he was like brachatologist for like the Maui tournament. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We already know who's going to play next year. Just make the bracket.

Speaker 10 Or just do champ week where it's predetermined. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 7 Conference Championship Week, bracketology.

Speaker 1 Bracketology.

Speaker 4 I like that a lot.

Speaker 7 You talked about Tennessee. I want to circle back to them real quick because there are two teams I bet on preseason.
One is Houston. The other is Tennessee.

Speaker 7 And I feel like I'm getting big T poisoning in my ears all the time. But they're a very fun team to watch.
I actually think they would have been good last year if Ziegler didn't tear it towards ACL.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, and he didn't play in the tournament. Yeah, last year felt like, I don't know,

Speaker 7 I just like the the guy because he's like 5'8, but he's fun to watch.

Speaker 7 Dalton Connect might be the most electric scorer in college basketball. He is, yeah.

Speaker 1 He's so fun. He's just like,

Speaker 1 he is, it's just the problem with guys like him is when he's not on and it's not all there,

Speaker 1 he'll drive you insane because

Speaker 1 he does get a little, he like spaces out

Speaker 1 when he's playing. Like he doesn't play defense and he doesn't really, like sometimes offensively, he's like, kind of doesn't understand what the rest of the team is doing.

Speaker 1 But like when he's rolling, he's the most electric scorer in college basketball, absolutely, which is the reason I've talked myself into Tennessee all season, even as they lose.

Speaker 1 I trust that, like, like, because the Rick Barnes and March thing is very real, but it's also,

Speaker 1 he made the Sweet 16 last year, and like, it is, it is like a, and he's made a Final Four before in his life.

Speaker 1 Um, so I don't, I don't fully understand what, I, I, like, Dan, you'll say, you'll be like, Rick Barnes and March, and I'm like, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 What does that mean again? What does it mean?

Speaker 1 You just visualize it. He's not going to win a national championship.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 you just close your eyes and you're like, oh, yeah, there he goes. Right.
Down the tunnel.

Speaker 1 16 lost. I can't.

Speaker 7 But visualize him for a week leading up to the Final Four, like doing all the press conferences, talking about getting his team ready for Final Four. I just don't see Rick Barnes in that role.

Speaker 1 But he's done it. He's very good.
He's done it. He's made a Final Four.
Yeah, but he's very good, but he just, it's Rick Barnes in March. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I think this team is different than the Tennessee teams of the past because of Dalton Connect. And Zakai Ziegler is a great, great offensive player, too.

Speaker 1 And he's gotten a lot better throughout his career.

Speaker 1 They have a good offense.

Speaker 1 They have offensive weapons in a way they haven't since basically Grant Williams and Admiral Schofield, which is a team that, you know, ha ha Rick Barnes in March.

Speaker 1 But like that, if you remember that tournament, 2019, that was

Speaker 1 like Tony Bennett, Virginia fucked that all up for Purdue

Speaker 1 and Tennessee because like all three of those teams in that bracket were good enough to make a Final Four. All those games were close.
Like

Speaker 1 Purdue, Tennessee game was awesome.

Speaker 1 One team had to win. Whoever was going to lose that game was going to get point and laughed at and be like, you always fucked this up in March.

Speaker 1 And then the next round, the exact same thing happened with Purdue and Virginia, where Purdue had Virginia beat. Virginia wins on a or sends it to

Speaker 1 the last second shot.

Speaker 1 And that's how Purdue loses. And now all of a sudden it's like Purdue can't get it done in March.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 This shit drives me crazy because it makes no fucking sense, but then it kind of does make sense. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Martin Gonzaga is never going to make a fucking. But what I was saying, the point was, this team offensively, I trust more than any team since the 2019 Tennessee team.

Speaker 1 And yes, that team lost in the Sweet 16. But if you go back and see how they lost in the Sweet 16, Rick Barnes.

Speaker 6 See how you did that? Rick Barnes looked at his calendar parts.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit.

Speaker 6 Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 Walked right into that. All right, well, Titus.

Speaker 7 Rick Barnes, Rick Barnes, Rick Barnes, Rick Barnes, Rick Barnes, March.

Speaker 1 Who do we trust that's going to win a national championship this year? Dan Hurley, because I saw it last year. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 That's literally it.

Speaker 6 These other guys haven't proven they can win.

Speaker 1 Bill Self. Are we going to trust Houston? Like, Houston's made one.
Kelvin Samson made one Final Four as a Mickey Mouse run to the Final Four. No, it's Bill Self and Tommy Lloyd chokes in March.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Matt Payner chokes. It's Bill Self and Danny Hurley.
Bill Barnes chokes. That's it.

Speaker 1 And if Jay Wright wants to come back, I'll trust him too. That's it.
But Jay Wright's another perfect example. Like, he, Villanova, was the

Speaker 1 Jay Wright. Like, they can't win the big one.
And it's like, all right. Then he just rows off some national titles.

Speaker 1 All right, Titus, thank you so much. Everyone can tune in to Mostly Sports Every Day and the Mark Titus show, where he talks in-depth college basketball.
We'll have you back on for the brackets.

Speaker 1 This is the best time of year. I'm excited, guys.
Thanks for having me. Look forward to get the bracket by hand.
Yeah, tell Brendan we said hi. All right.

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Speaker 1 All right, let's wrap up. Hank, Firefest of the week.

Speaker 1 Go ahead.

Speaker 1 I may have. Oh, no.

Speaker 1 It's been two days. It's been two days.

Speaker 8 All right, I lost my.

Speaker 8 No, no, go ahead.

Speaker 1 Say the first one. It's not a Firefest because it's been two days.
You can't have to be a Fire Fest two days. You have nine months.

Speaker 8 Is it nine months?

Speaker 1 You have 10 months.

Speaker 7 Basically, nine.

Speaker 8 No, I mean, I've got a lot of people reaching out. I've actually got a lot of positive reinforcements, which I appreciate.
A lot of good advice.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Have a different moment.

Speaker 8 No, I gotta. That's the thing.
I'm athletic. I just haven't been athletic.

Speaker 8 My baseline is so low.

Speaker 8 I've chosen not to do athletic things for the last couple of years, give or take, 10.

Speaker 8 But it exists inside me.

Speaker 7 I like the belief in yourself, but also you don't have that belief in yourself because you're thinking about not doing it.

Speaker 1 He's already practicing his three-point shot. No, I'm not.
I'm going hard to dunk. When are you going to transition to threes?

Speaker 8 Summer?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 7 It's going to interfere with your golfing, which is a real problem.

Speaker 8 I don't think so because I think it's like good. I need to...
What I've learned, which was surprising, was that obviously you have to train legs, obviously.

Speaker 8 You also have to train your hips and your shoulders, which I'm always on the search for boulders for shoulders.

Speaker 8 You've got to train your shoulders heavy so that you have good, like that's a big part of dunking. I've learned a lot about dunking in the past couple of days.

Speaker 7 What would you say the percentage of positive feedback to negative feedback has been?

Speaker 8 That I've read.

Speaker 1 I've read 100% negative.

Speaker 8 Well, I only read the one, like, I just kind of block out the negative ones.

Speaker 1 So, you're in the information game?

Speaker 8 That I've noticed,

Speaker 1 overwhelming. You're in the information gathering portion of this journey.

Speaker 8 Knees over legs.

Speaker 1 Knees over shoes.

Speaker 1 Knees over feet.

Speaker 8 There's an Instagram account

Speaker 8 following him. And I downloaded a program.
There's a lot, obviously, a lot of this is probably a conversation.

Speaker 7 These are all things that you've done on your phone.

Speaker 1 Is it information gathering?

Speaker 6 No, I downloaded, I got a laptop.

Speaker 1 I have a whole workout program. Oh, you found it?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I found my laptop.

Speaker 8 I'm excited. I'm excited for the challenge.
I think it's going to help everything. I'm going to be athletic.
I'm going to be a better golfer, healthier.

Speaker 1 What point do you think you're going to get injured?

Speaker 1 We'll see about that. Okay, because it wouldn't be the worst if you're injured, then

Speaker 1 once I get injured, it's all break your legs, ACS, make sure it's on camera.

Speaker 8 I also also was thinking, I should get something if I do both.

Speaker 1 What? Like, what if I think you can do both?

Speaker 8 And hit 23s.

Speaker 1 Well, then you've got to put something else up.

Speaker 1 You already over-leveraged.

Speaker 7 Do you want to double down?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 7 $20,000?

Speaker 8 No, because I can't. The bet is if I couldn't do either.
So obviously.

Speaker 1 All right,

Speaker 1 if you do both, then

Speaker 7 careful.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, if you do both, we'll both get cats. And if you can't, you have to get a cat.
No. Okay.

Speaker 7 How about if you do both, you get to go on a month-long golf vacation?

Speaker 1 No. Okay.
No.

Speaker 1 No, no. Wait, wait.
No, no. Wait, but if you

Speaker 7 can't do it, then you have to pay us 10% of your salary for the next five years. Every paycheck.

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 I'll double the price. So I'll give you 20 grand.
If you can't do both, then you have to get the soul patch. It doesn't matter.
Soul patch. patch yeah

Speaker 1 it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen soul patch happened soul patch hank you have an extra day to prepare soul patch 29th good point jay true

Speaker 8 soul patch all right we're good oh

Speaker 1 that's weird by the way tune in on monday we have derrick white and peyton pritchard here and hank makes a crazy soul patch back absolutely not sounded like he did no um

Speaker 8 In my car.

Speaker 1 You're not going to get either of these. Good.

Speaker 8 Keep it coming.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 You're not going to get either of these.

Speaker 8 I just have to basically change my entire lifestyle, way of thinking, and every, you know, every time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have to become a new person. Yeah.
You're not going to get either of these.

Speaker 8 Once I do that, then it's going to happen.

Speaker 6 New DNA.

Speaker 8 No, my DNA is there. It's just been

Speaker 8 bogged down by all the trash I consume.

Speaker 1 It is going to be tough to learn how to dunk when you're golfing all summer. No, I don't think so.
Oh, okay. I mean,

Speaker 1 we have a basketball court in our, I will, I will walk in the course.

Speaker 8 PFT, we brought up the rollerblading thing, and I was like, absolutely not. And then I was like, you know what? My legs.
As a person who's training his legs, I am so down to do rollerblade from L.A.

Speaker 8 to San Diego.

Speaker 7 So getting a country club membership that you're probably want to, you're going to want to use that quite a bit this summer, am I right?

Speaker 8 We work in a gym. I just have to come to work, which I guess I will do now.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you have to change everything about yourself. Yeah.
And then you'll be able to dunk.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 8 And then

Speaker 8 both of my car key batteries are dead.

Speaker 6 Dude, you can give me your car keys.

Speaker 8 Do you have a thing?

Speaker 1 It's...

Speaker 1 You can change it.

Speaker 8 Do you have the battery?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's probably one that you can buy easily, or they probably have it in the control room. That'd be clutch.

Speaker 8 I also don't know how to open the thing.

Speaker 7 So how have you been getting into your car?

Speaker 1 Key?

Speaker 8 The key, but it's a process. Yeah, it's like a annoying.

Speaker 7 You can hook it up to a potato, too, I think.

Speaker 1 Oh, damn. You drive a Rolls-Royce?

Speaker 6 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Let's see.

Speaker 7 I like the pussy wagon keychain you got on there.

Speaker 1 It's this thing, Hank. You just got to get this open.

Speaker 1 You know that it's like right, it's sitting right here. So you get that open,

Speaker 1 and then you can...

Speaker 1 What if I hit the panic button? Don't do that.

Speaker 1 If you get that open,

Speaker 1 it's like a watch battery.

Speaker 1 Easy. All right.
Firefest solved. Yeah.
Just go.

Speaker 8 So no fire fest for me this week.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Okay.
Nice. I didn't know you were driven rural stories.

Speaker 1 Fucking stunting on us. Cheese steak.

Speaker 1 PFT.

Speaker 7 I got a couple fire fests. The first one is the Rick Petino stalker's back.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 So we talked about Coach. And apparently he lit a fire under his player's ass.
Yeah. So Rick Petino's, I think he's a great coach, and I think he didn't say anything wrong.
We should all chill out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he texted me twice.

Speaker 1 And he also gave me a date.

Speaker 7 We need to respect Rick Petino, as we always do. I like Rick Petino.

Speaker 1 I want him on the podcast. St.
John's, if you're listening, please have Rick Petino come on the podcast. We'd love to have him come on the podcast.
Yeah, come on. Okay.
See, you're doing it again.

Speaker 6 Come right.

Speaker 1 Another text. I'm going to get another text.

Speaker 7 Come right on this podcast. This guy's been texting me for like 10 years.

Speaker 1 I hope he does.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, he's texting me, not you. We might get killed.

Speaker 7 We might get killed.

Speaker 1 I should just give him your number.

Speaker 7 Yeah. No, don't do that.

Speaker 1 I tracked him down in Final Four. Yeah, that's right.
Tell that story. Yeah, he no-showed.
Yeah, he didn't know-showed.

Speaker 1 But then he was like, you sent your goons. I don't know.
So maybe he did show.

Speaker 7 Max does give goon vibes. Yeah, he is our goon.
Wearing a tracksuit. By the way, I like Rick Petino.

Speaker 1 Listen, we make jokes about everyone on this podcast, including ourselves. So Rick Petino, please come on the pod.

Speaker 7 It's actually my lifelong dream to last 13 seconds.

Speaker 1 That's stolen valor of

Speaker 1 Firefest because he's texting me. Well,

Speaker 7 he was texting you about something that I said on the podcast.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but he then followed up and texted me more pointedly.

Speaker 7 And then my other Firefest is

Speaker 7 we've got March Madness coming up, Final Four, which also means it's time for the...

Speaker 1 By the way, the soccer list is

Speaker 1 great AWL. Yes.
It's every show. So I just want to at least give him some credit for that.
Yeah, he loves

Speaker 1 the program.

Speaker 1 Yes, thank you. Because it's almost instant when we say something.
So I want to say, like, I really, I know you want us dead, I think, but do appreciate you subscribing and listening to every episode.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 7 My other Firefest is March Madness coming up, Final Four is coming up, which also means the Hong Kong Sevens tournament's coming up, the rugby tournament in Hong Kong that I went to a few years ago.

Speaker 7 Donnie's been texting me pretty constantly, being like, hey, are you going to come? And then now recently pivoted to, well, who from Barstool should come with me if I'm going to go over there?

Speaker 7 It's the last year that they're going to have the the South Stand set up, the last year where it's going to be, it's probably going to continue to be a zoo.

Speaker 1 What they did,

Speaker 7 the exact weekend of the Final Four.

Speaker 1 We'll do one Zoom on Sunday.

Speaker 7 And it was, listen, it was a lot of fun last time. And the first thing I said when I came back is it was so much fun.
In fact, it was so much fun that I'm never going to do it again in my life.

Speaker 7 I've been starting to think about doing it. Why don't you just go?

Speaker 1 Because last time you went,

Speaker 1 when did you leave?

Speaker 7 I left, I think it was like early on the Thursday before the Final Four. Okay.
Because when you fly there, it takes like 18 hours. Right.

Speaker 7 And then when you're there, it's an exact 12-hour time difference. So when you guys are taping the show at night, it'll probably be 11 midnight.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's tough.

Speaker 7 And then that would be 11 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 1 And we might get...

Speaker 1 And also, now that I'm putting these two stories together, that'd be interesting that you somehow are out of the country when we're in a very public spot at the Final Four where Rick Petino Stocker could come get us.

Speaker 1 Huh.

Speaker 7 It would be interesting. Howard.

Speaker 1 These are

Speaker 7 unrelated instances. Howard.
But also, you could do another segment with an athlete who tries to take my job in case I die on the trip. George Kittle did that last time.
Yeah, we did. We could.

Speaker 7 I'll just say, George, you're a great guy. Stick to football.
I don't think you can fill these shoes. But I'm thinking about it.

Speaker 7 I will make a decision by the end of the week whether or not I'm going to go. Max is shaking his head, being like, don't go.

Speaker 7 You have no idea how fun it was, Max.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 7 we just got oblos.

Speaker 1 I just, we got oblos. What oblos?

Speaker 7 We just got oblos.

Speaker 7 Sounds like you're a hater.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 7 Sounds like you don't want to see me live my best life.

Speaker 1 No, no. We got oblos.

Speaker 7 I'll make my final decision by tomorrow whether or not I'm going. If I don't go, I feel like Minti would be a great person to go over there with Donnie.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. I don't know if he might be like Elvis.
He might not be able to go out of the country.

Speaker 7 That's true. Minty in Hong Kong would be special, though.
Yeah, it would.

Speaker 1 That is a good replacement.

Speaker 1 Very good replacement.

Speaker 7 Maybe I'll have him wear a wig and sunglasses.

Speaker 7 I mean, he does Pat Mahomes. Maybe he can be PFT.

Speaker 1 He could easily do it.

Speaker 7 So, yeah. But I do want to go.

Speaker 7 I've been feeling the itch recently, and it's like, that's such a fun weekend.

Speaker 1 A lot of rugby.

Speaker 7 It's just a blast. It's the itch?

Speaker 7 If I go, I'm not going to take MDMA again.

Speaker 7 I said that's the first and only time I do that. That's a lot.

Speaker 1 That's not saying Hank's going to dunk.

Speaker 7 I'm not a drug guy, even though when I did go to Qatar with Donnie, I I ended up doing acid.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 I don't want to do drugs. The reason that I want to go over there has nothing to do with drugs.

Speaker 7 It's just such a fun time.

Speaker 1 Okay, my Fire Fest is the Rick Petino Stalker's back texting me.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 I've actually started a real diet. Chef Donnie's cooking for me.
I'm a little grumpy, but I'll be okay. Yeah, you are.
No, I'm not.

Speaker 1 I was a test. You're the grumpy one because you're sick.
You've been sick all week, right in our face. You got the Scottsdale flu.
No, my real Fire Fest is

Speaker 1 no, actually, I'm not going to say it because then Hank will use it against me.

Speaker 7 See what you've done to this podcast, Hank? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I enjoyed vacation. Okay.

Speaker 8 This always happens.

Speaker 1 I did get a little, I got the itch, though, at the end. And also,

Speaker 1 I'm a big believer. I remember even when I was like a kid and I would go on vacation and I would be like, now I can watch like all the MTV I want.
Yeah. And my mom would be like, it's vacation.

Speaker 1 Go outside. It's like, it's my vacation.
Yeah. I should get to do what I want.
So like when people are like, stop tweeting about Mincy, you know,

Speaker 1 doing the, the, what was he on? He was on the

Speaker 1 crowd surfing or Sidney Sweeney's boobs. It's my vacation.
I can tweet about whatever I want. If it's Sidney Sweeney's boobs, that's okay.

Speaker 7 You should have tweeted more about the Mountain West on vacation if you really cared about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. But I, I'm a big believer in if you're vacation.
Like, if I could do my real vacation, it would just be sitting in a room with a bunch of TVs and gambling on every game.

Speaker 1 That's my real vacation.

Speaker 7 That's your job, though.

Speaker 1 But it would be nice if I could do it just unfettered. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, vacation's really nice. It's really nice.

Speaker 1 I'm not addicted, though, so don't get some thoughts, Hank. I ain't addicted.

Speaker 1 It was fine.

Speaker 1 Jake.

Speaker 10 Remember when I interviewed with you guys, I sent you my website?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 10 I haven't touched it in years, and I just got a $325 bill for an auto renewal.

Speaker 1 Oh, so then renew it. What is it? Oh, it was an auto renewal.
It was an auto renewal. So jakewmarsh.com.

Speaker 10 Jake W. Marsh.
It was just a shit was, I made it when I was graduating college just as like a real slash resume, one-stop

Speaker 1 shop.

Speaker 9 But I haven't touched it in a long time.

Speaker 10 And I, and I just spent another $325

Speaker 9 unknowingly.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you got to update this website. I know, it's so old.

Speaker 1 You got to make it flashy. You were on it.
Yeah,

Speaker 8 you added this part.

Speaker 10 Yeah, but I haven't touched it since like COVID. I think the last time I had it

Speaker 9 was

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 10 2020, 2021.

Speaker 1 I know that we do some advertising with some of these companies, but like this, we should just be like, hey,

Speaker 1 do you want to last longer in bed? Just go read Jake Marsh's website.

Speaker 1 Like, you'll have no problem. Like, 90% of the stallion.

Speaker 10 90% of the work on there is my college work.

Speaker 1 Just I'm either going to DIY. If you want to fuck like a porn starve, go to jakewmarsh.com.

Speaker 7 Jake is a die-hard New York Yankees fan and loves rooting for his hometown teams in Miami as well. Some of Jake's hobbies include playing golf, tennis, and relaxing with his family.

Speaker 7 You like chilling with a fam? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Prior to that, Jake spent two seasons as a play-by-play broadcaster of the University of Vermont men's basketball team. His other interests are petting dogs and eating pussy.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Word for word. Huh.
But yeah.

Speaker 7 You should should have a positions tab on here.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like just

Speaker 7 have one tab on the website be the Kama Sutra.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it should be an auto generator where you can hit like hit for a new position. Yeah.
And it just pops up a new position. I forgot one Firefest.
I have one other Firefest.

Speaker 1 My last Firefest is I have a really good friend, and he's a crazy, crazy sports fan. And

Speaker 1 he's in for just an absolute ass kicking on Saturday, and I'm worried about him.

Speaker 7 Who's his team playing?

Speaker 1 I think they're playing.

Speaker 1 Is it Yuku?

Speaker 7 Is it going to be Nationally Televised? Yeah, I think they're playing Yuko.

Speaker 4 This is a no-lose situation.

Speaker 1 What do you mean? It sounds like you guys could lose by a lot. Yes.
And if you guys lose by a lot,

Speaker 1 it's a no-win situation. No, there's a win.
There's a situation. So how is it a no-lose?

Speaker 4 It's a non-los because exactly what you're saying. Everyone's expecting Villanova to lose by 30.
If they lose by 30, it's just what it is.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, that would be funny.

Speaker 7 No, if you get your ass kicked and it's such a prominent game.

Speaker 4 But that's what everyone's expecting.

Speaker 7 You understand that this is the weekend where the nation turns its eyes to college basketball.

Speaker 8 15 favorites.

Speaker 1 That could be 15-point favorites. It'll be 13.

Speaker 1 Let's take a look real quick. Let's take a look real quick.

Speaker 1 Time pawn max 10.

Speaker 9 10.

Speaker 9 I think 82.72.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's going to be a bad. I actually kind of want to see him.

Speaker 7 Max, is it?

Speaker 1 You want to live stream it? 72.60.

Speaker 1 What time is it at?

Speaker 4 7 o'clock Saturday night.

Speaker 1 Oh, perfect live streaming hours. I'll come in and live stream with you.

Speaker 4 It's going to be an absolute blowout.

Speaker 1 Is it going to be a must-win?

Speaker 1 What? Must-win?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 This does absolutely nothing to the committee. It's only positive for the committee.

Speaker 1 All right. I'm going to just...

Speaker 1 Are you going to go out Saturday night and watch it somewhere? Yes. Okay.
Perfect. Okay.

Speaker 4 This is like the Phillies all over again. What?

Speaker 1 I'm just going to pay everyone that you are friends with to make sure they send me all the clips.

Speaker 7 I actually might try to track Max down.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Just stay across the bar incognito.

Speaker 4 But like,

Speaker 4 I'm going in expecting them to lose by a lot. But in the off-chance that, like,

Speaker 4 how much of the public money do you think is going to be on UConn on Sunday?

Speaker 1 A lot. You're right.
You're right. But there is a lose.

Speaker 4 And also.

Speaker 1 If you lose. Yes, correct.
But

Speaker 4 imagine if Hurley loses

Speaker 1 after posting that meme.

Speaker 1 Oh, you give him the business.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 7 that would be an all-time bad tweet.

Speaker 10 I'm also excited for the college game day signs that you guys told.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Max Two Sodas. We need a lot of Max Two Sodas.

Speaker 7 None of them. Max had two sodas.
Nobody bring that to

Speaker 1 College Game Day.

Speaker 7 Max, Max, I got your back. If anybody brings a Max Had Two Sodas sign to College Game Day,

Speaker 7 I'm going to have to retweet it so that nobody else does it and be like, this person's the only one that can do it. Anyone else that does it is not crazy.

Speaker 1 I'll go one up, PFT, because I don't want these Max HasTwo Sodas signs anywhere. If anyone does a Max HasTwo Sodas sign,

Speaker 1 at least be a man about it and put your Venmo on it

Speaker 1 so that I could send you some money. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I want some accountability.

Speaker 1 I want to know.

Speaker 1 And you know what?

Speaker 1 Heaven forbid.

Speaker 7 Heaven forbid somebody dresses up like Max and then shows up. It's also bullshit.

Speaker 1 And then shows up

Speaker 7 and then shows up with a foam dome with two sodas on either side of it.

Speaker 1 Here's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 1 I don't want to see any of these Max Has Two Soda signs, but I will pick,

Speaker 1 and obviously, you know, because it's the two sodas, I'll pick two of my favorite Max Has Two Soda signs, and those people will win a prize on Venmo.

Speaker 1 I can't wait for that. I can't wait for that.
Max has two sodas. Maybe pictures of Sad Max included in it.
So it's best sign wins. Max has two sodas.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 numbers

Speaker 1 eight

Speaker 1 twenty three

Speaker 1 eighteen

Speaker 7 what am i gonna pick said forty hank

Speaker 1 said forty

Speaker 8 divert

Speaker 1 77

Speaker 1 77

Speaker 1 pug

Speaker 1 99 pug 99 pug what was pug talk the other day that ruled people just talking about pugs It's Pug's new podcast. Pug, what was Pug Talk? Did you get in on it? 99 Pug.
They're asking about Pug Talk.

Speaker 1 Shane, what do you got?

Speaker 7 It was trending on Twitter, so I had to get in on it.

Speaker 6 Pug. Who said that?

Speaker 6 Who said that?

Speaker 7 Who said it? You didn't sign off.

Speaker 7 Say, Pug.

Speaker 1 Pug.

Speaker 1 I really need headphones. Pug, you're our new big dom.

Speaker 1 Tell him that. Yeah, I said that.
You're a new big dom.

Speaker 4 We were looking for a big dom on the show, and I said, and we were trying to figure it out, and I said, it's got to be you.

Speaker 1 You're our big dom.

Speaker 1 That's fine with me, Pug.

Speaker 1 Perfect. You know what?

Speaker 7 My only issue with Pug is like, if you look at Pugs in the wild, like that live in a family,

Speaker 7 no house that has one pug only has one Pug. Right.
You know, they always have,

Speaker 1 yeah, they're like cats. They're the cats of dogs.

Speaker 7 You have to have multiple pugs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Shane, what's your number?

Speaker 1 21. All right.
Everyone say their numbers again, real quick. 28.
40. 18.
77.

Speaker 7 99, pug.

Speaker 1 3.

Speaker 1 I just want to hear it again.

Speaker 1 80.

Speaker 1 80.

Speaker 1 All right, see everyone on Monday. Love you guys.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 today's a night

Speaker 1 to find you shy away.

Speaker 1 I'll be coming for your love, okay.

Speaker 1 Take

Speaker 1 on

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 gon'

Speaker 1 have changeless to say

Speaker 1 I'm sinners, but I feel

Speaker 1 it away.

Speaker 1 Tell them if I'm just okay.

Speaker 1 Say after me.

Speaker 1 It's no better to be safe than somebody.

Speaker 1 Take

Speaker 1 on

Speaker 1 me.

Speaker 1 Take

Speaker 1 me

Speaker 1 up.

Speaker 1 I'll be

Speaker 1 gone

Speaker 1 if I do have

Speaker 1 of the

Speaker 1 city

Speaker 1 of the city

Speaker 1 of the city of the

Speaker 1 city