118: Michigan Will Move on From Manuel, And the ACC Revamps Its Tiebreaker

118: Michigan Will Move on From Manuel, And the ACC Revamps Its Tiebreaker

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508218/fan_mail/new] Fortunately we did not record to early and were able to get the news out of Michigan before we began recording. The down side of course, is we were not able to fully digest whatever findings the internal investigation uncovered or the big picture of losing an AD that has a tenure of 10 years and a championship track record on the field. We do our best to connect the dots of how we got to an initially defiant administrator that eventually was forced to step down and what was the worst of what we heard about the culture in the department. We take a quick look back at the ACC media days, first by giving a so-so seal of approval to the job Commissioner Jim Phillips has done in his tenure, while he has a number of those praising his work, there are others that are harsher critics. One thing you have to say, he still has the job. The ACC also revamped their football title game tiebreaker [https://theacc.com/documents/2026/7/15//ACC_Football_Tiebreaker_Policy_Jully_2026.pdf] to avoid the mess like the one they found themselves in last year. If you were hoping for sheer simplicity, you forgot the conference has an odd number of teams, playing uneven schedules, with some teams playing only 8 conference games.

Show-Cause Conversations: Coach Marty Richter

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508218/fan_mail/new] Extremely honored to have Marty Richter join the show. He is the Head Men's Basketball Coach at USC Upstate, and about to enter his third year on the job. Marty and I go way back to our days working together at Florida Gulf Coast. While I toiled away in the Compliance Office, he was helping lead the team on the historic Dunk City run. We chat about the magical 2013 Sweet Sixteen experience, and also his other stops along the way that took him from D3 to Junior College, Drake and now with the Spartans. We also discuss the current state of men's college basketball and how it feels to try to build a winner at a mid-major in the current times.  As we note in the episode, Marty is the second Richter to join the show, as his wife Brynn joined us last year [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/show-cause-conversations-athletic-academics-and-the/id1818640191?i=1000742024130]to discuss her time as an Academic Advisor in college athletics and her role in bringing me to FGCU.  Very appreciative of Marty's time and his insight!

117: Can a Video Game Revolt Teach College Sports a Lesson? Plus, Cincinnati Gets a Letter From the NCAA

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508218/fan_mail/new] We are back on a Monday in mid-July, and that means we are talking EA's College Football '27 issue and World Cup VAR problems, but fear not, we relate them back to College Sports, as always. Cincinnati gets a letter of inquiry from the NCAA regarding Sorsby, and Kansas inks a jersey patch deal that makes the Monster Energy Big 12 football season announcement seem like a smaller can to swallow.

116: A Monster Deal for the Big 12?

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508218/fan_mail/new] On today's show, we go straight in on how the Big 12 kicked off their football media days [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJPZbrvtvz4].  We wonder if this is the start of a big push by the Big 12 to be the most relevant conference in terms of coporate deals or if this is jsut a carnaval show that will fall flat as time goes on.  We also examine how the bending of the rules in the World Cup may have affected the US team's dismal performance in the round of 16, and the perception of the rules of the tournament in other games as well. Finally, a discussion of fandom with an orthopedist triggered me to discuss the perception of who spends the most and who has the money in college sports. Does it make sense that a namebrand SEC team thinks an ACC team has more money to spend?

115: Conference Realignment Takes Effect (Again), and A Look at a Power 4 School's Self-Reported Violations

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508218/fan_mail/new] July 1 occurred last week and with it, a new wave of conference realignment. The Pac-12 is back, albeit in an altered form. We have schools moving back to previous conferences, moving because their conference fell apart, and even some schools dropping out of Division I. We will do our best to cover all the new landing spots. We again check in with the World Cup because again, the parallels to college sports just keep coming. Also significant is while drawing comparisons to targeting for the US red card problem, the news hit that it was overturned, FiFA strikes again. We conclude with a look at Alabama's self-reported Level III violations for the 25-26 Academic Year. The violations are minor in of themselves but reporting them and athletic staff learning from them have definite impact.