Chris Huston (00:01.564)
All right, we are here with Baba Khayeri of RCFB, the Reddit subreddit, the subreddit that is really just what they call the internet's tailgate. Welcome, Bob, back to the show.

Bobak Ha’Eri (00:14.317)
Thanks for having me, how are you?

Chris Huston (00:16.2)
Doing great, doing great. 4.4 million fans, the top 1 % of subreddits. What is it about this website, if you want to call it a website, that just attracts so many college football maniacs?

Bobak Ha’Eri (00:33.561)
You know, that's a great question. So RCFB has been around for about a little over 15 years and organically it grows. It's just an opportunity for fans of all teams to kind of have as civil as you can get in college football discussion, but just an opportunity to get together there. It's fun. You know, every time there's a big game, there's always a game thread. People can kind of gather fans of teams, neutrals. The one thing that's nice about college football.

Chris Huston (00:49.17)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (01:00.334)
is there's so many fan bases and granted you could say like yeah there's the p two in all of that stuff but there's so many fan bases that once you get a lot of people together and we're the biggest forum right now on the internet as it turned out with the biggest community of culture ball fans you get a kind of itself police is itself i say that knowing that you know there's a team of us about thirty of us that help kind of moderate the discussion i'm keeping from getting out of hand but it just i think because it's

Chris Huston (01:05.564)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (01:15.494)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (01:27.744)
a place for people to have fun it celebrates will makes college football enjoyable and i think that's what keeps people coming back

Chris Huston (01:35.078)
Yeah, and you are the editor of the subreddit, are one of the editors. What is your responsibility and how did you get into that role?

Bobak Ha’Eri (01:43.884)
Yeah, my goodness. I would say we're kind of a group of equals in that sense. There's a group of moderators, roughly a little bit under 30 of us. I've been there. probably the second longest tenure person there. And the editor role comes from the fact that about 10 years ago, we started also doing our own original reporting with editorial oversight. And that's where I stepped in.

Chris Huston (02:06.396)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (02:07.47)
We have about 30 people in any given year who report around. It's so funny in college football, this is a modest number if you know college football, about 100 games. So that's a very modest number, but usually the last seven national championships and all of that stuff. But all of that said, as a group, there's so many aspects to the site. We do things like we have our own fan poll, we have a lot of creative ideas that go into it. And then frankly, a lot of people that do the tech work on the back end of it.

We're a community and we kind of put that together and each person, we're active. know, sometimes I always use the analogy, if you've ever done nonprofit work, sometimes you get on a board and it's a do nothing board. We're not a do nothing group. Like, and I got into it. I remember I was my first, I can remember when I first started using the website because my oldest child was born and my wife and I, slept in shifts. This is a while ago. He's now, he's now, well, he's going to turn 14 soon enough. And you know,

Chris Huston (02:47.26)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (03:05.965)
every night I would stay up the first kind of shift up until like two in the morning because I'm a night owl and you know be sleeping on your shoulder all of that stuff and like what am I gonna watch and this is in November so I'm like all right midweek maxxion you know whatever game Sunbelt you know fun belt you know and I would just find a place like where can I vent when I'm sitting here with a baby on one shoulder that I can like type something out and then that's when I found the subreddit and I ended up being active enough and I I well helped with web forums before right

This is just, it seemed like a fun opportunity. I liked the vibe. People were very nice and, you know, humor was always appreciated. And I think of myself as somewhat humorous person. And yeah, just from there, it ended up like we did a fundraiser. I helped out. I mean, I'm a lawyer by background. I'm like, I can, I can make sure that the money gets where it needs to go. And then somebody said, you're responsible. You want to be part of the team? I'm like, we don't do it that way anymore. Now it's way more formal. I mean, that was when there were like 30,000 people.

Chris Huston (04:01.115)
Yeah, sure.

Bobak Ha’Eri (04:03.283)
on the subreddit now there's, as you said, 4.4 million, which is wild to think of. Yeah.

Chris Huston (04:07.259)
Yeah. Really wild. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I look at forums for college football across the internet and they all have their different flavors and their different styles. And some are a little bit like ghost towns depending on the school. And some of them are wild, rollicking places. A couple of things that interest me about your involvement. One, I feel like there's a lot of lawyers.

on message boards and college football message boards and people with law degrees. I feel like it's potentially an extra outlet for, for arguing, that, that maybe you don't have the ability to do it in another venue. You can go on, these, on these forums and do so, but also it seems like the CFB subreddit, it feels like the big leagues of message boards. Like you go do your time on your, your team board.

But if you come over to that site, you got to bring your A game, right?

Bobak Ha’Eri (05:07.702)
You you have to know how to talk to people in Summer Ground. think you've hit on something. I mean, I'm of a vintage where I didn't grow up with the internet. Like I got it in college and then, I mean, I knew of it, but I didn't really have it in any kind of personal way. So when I found forums, you you find your voice, you know that there's certain ways you can't really, shouldn't talk to people. And some places encourage that, some places, I mean, I've been on plenty of team boards. I'm my undergraduate, I'm a USC Trojan, so I've been to plenty of USC boards.

Chris Huston (05:36.624)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (05:36.905)
And I mean, back in the day, I remember some were more, you know, enjoyable than others. but it can be tough when you get a very insular group of people, because then you get, you know, people who are super like the team can do me no wrong. People are doomsayers. So when you do, when you visit a forum like RCFB, you get a group of people. you can't, some of the things that might be tolerated on a, on a sub, I should say on a

Chris Huston (05:52.774)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (06:05.558)
forum more team based, you get called out for it. And I mean, our nature is, and I'd say the culture there is I kind of hinted at, it's like, if you can poke fun at yourself, if you can have joy, if you can feel like good for other people, and I mean, don't get me wrong, if you can still like, if you know how to, okay, I went to Catholic high school, right? I used to write plays. There was a line you didn't cross. You always knew if you wrote a play, there's a line you never crossed, and I was always good at that.

Chris Huston (06:33.735)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (06:33.74)
So if you know, like, okay, there's a line where, okay, you can't take it too far, then it works well if you go into a website like RCFP. So I think that's kind of been the vibe that we have in terms of trying to get a character of the site and kind of how it's developed organically over time. And that's the thing, like, I'm not gonna say we have created that. It's just kind of, that's the way the culture developed. mean, that's what attracted me to it and that's what's continued on.

Chris Huston (06:46.855)
Yeah. whole development of it is fascinating to me because back when I worked at USC in the athletic department worked in sports information department in the, Pete Paul Hackett, Pete Carroll era, about an eight year period. And back then

traditional media was still the way things were going and people on message boards were looked at as like unwashed masses. The people who were just nutty fans who didn't have perspective on things and didn't know how things were going. was a little bit of a, you know, there's a haughtiness as to how things were approached. But now you can't argue with 4.4 million fans because I mean, you're not going to find a single media outlet that is

covering college football that is going to have those kinds of numbers. So now I feel like the inmates have taken over the asylum, so to speak. But what's great about your subreddit is that it's not like what they were worried about, which is that if the inmates take over the asylum, it's going to be just a bunch of nonsense and idiocy. obviously have, there's always going to be some nonsense and idiocy because it's college football, but there's serious discussion.

Bobak Ha’Eri (08:11.082)
Gross.

Chris Huston (08:12.877)
On these sites and you're going to get excellent analysis. And from these sites that are, you're going to find more like objective analysis on your site. Then you're going to find on a fan site or, I think even on a traditional media site, because in some cases, certain media people have to be, they have to sort of couch what they're saying. And because they want access to who they're talking to that kind of thing. so it seems to me that, that the subreddit.

just brings in the very best of the best and you get as close as you can to some objective analysis in college football.

Bobak Ha’Eri (08:51.861)
Well, Chris, you touched on some really, I think, big macro level things that we always deal with because you're absolutely right. mean, I remember there was a time where you just didn't want to say like, yeah, I use the Internet to imagine like there was a time and it's so weird to even think loud. You talk to the younger people because I teach an undergraduate class and I teach in law school and you talk to younger people and you know the idea of meeting somebody through an app or online doesn't seem weird to them. I remember when that would have been still pretty strange, you know.

Chris Huston (09:20.721)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (09:21.544)
Like there were whole movies, rom-coms about how weird these two people met online, you know? So kind of, especially people who grew up in the 80s and 90s and before that, they do, they see, and we've dealt with that, because I mentioned, you know, we've had our own media kind of team, and you're always dealing with that, like, we sending a fan into the press box? And I get that concern. But some of the younger programs, I think, and some of the smaller programs absolutely do embrace the fact that, okay, yeah, RCFB,

Chris Huston (09:26.245)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (09:50.1)
They have their wild edges, we think they're going to be serious enough to take this seriously. And some will engage us not only, not talking just the press stuff, but like we've been engaged by a couple of teams to do, you know, social media takeovers because we have a set, you know, a fairly successful ex account of a little over 300 and I think 370,000 right now. you know, the blue sky, the Instagram, all of that stuff, right? So we've, we've engaged with some of them. We love the bowl games. mean, before there was,

Chris Huston (09:58.184)
Thank you.

Chris Huston (10:07.239)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (10:16.926)
The Pop-Tart Bowl loved those people. The people who market that are fantastic. But the Belk Bowl walked so they could run. And now they're the Duke's Mayo Bowl. But I love Miller, Yoho over there and that crew. And they were the ones that realized, like, you know, there's a billion bowls right now. How do we separate themselves? So they would engage with the subreddit, do like an ask me anything, an AMA, and kind of pretend to be like a bowl game entity, you know, and something like that.

Chris Huston (10:23.134)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (10:42.423)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (10:44.042)
So I think some of the wiser programs have embraced it because you hit the nail on the head. I love traditional media. I mean, I am still in your time subscriber iced. I got rid of the physical paper only because they wouldn't deliver it to where I lived at some point. You know, I used to read the LA Times. used to read, know, gosh, I grew up in the armpit of California, Bakersfield, but the Bakersfield Californian. And I mean, I used to read these things, right? So, and now it's like,

Chris Huston (11:00.039)
You

Chris Huston (11:06.139)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (11:12.379)
I know that, especially for some of the smaller entities, smaller papers, that the subscriber count isn't that. And then I always feel odd because we're competing with 4.4 million subscribers. And during the season, our traffic is way beyond that because you don't have to subscribe to be part of the, or even, you know, reply. And I'm just kind of like, how do they not, they choose to ignore where people are getting their news from. People are getting their news from, you know,

Chris Huston (11:25.891)
Sure. Sure.

Bobak Ha’Eri (11:39.049)
ESPN, Fox, all the major sports networks, absolutely. Maybe more their websites and apps and even terrestrial television anymore. But I've noticed people will just say, oh, wow, I had no idea this was a story because they see it aggregate on our CFP. And some of our own people will report things. But most of the time, it's just people creating a post. And also, as you said, like analysis, like, hey, you know, I've been noticing that this team, I was actually just reading a post on Eastern Michigan, like.

who on earth is gonna go out and do a report on the Eastern Michigan Eagles, other than someone who's really passionate about the team and made some incredible points about the two questions he thought the team had moving forward. So that's again what we are and I get it. It's sort of strange I think for some of the more, especially the more legacy sports information departments to get their mind around it. And I mean, it's funny too because they're gonna eventually have to understand.

Chris Huston (12:09.841)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (12:35.035)
I do get the concern. I'm almost scared to think like, we going to get to the point where they have to invite influencers in to cover games? Like, I don't want to see that point. No one wants to see that point, you know? But at the same time, you know, there is that kind of, you know, there's going to be sites like ours that are neither fish nor fowl. And what do you do with them? Because what's left? What's left? mean, so I feel bad. Like, for example, Pacific Northwest, they have such exciting college football, right?

Chris Huston (12:45.132)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (12:56.283)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (13:02.953)
and they've had for a long time, let's be clear. But it's it's eroding up there, the college football coverage that they get for the local fans. And people have to be able to step up and help fill that role to get people information. And frankly, I'm not stupid. We could never match what a proper beat reporter could do, what someone who is doing professional journalism at a full-time career could do. But it's like at the same time, there's gotta be people that can fill in the stop gaps and...

Chris Huston (13:04.87)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (13:31.31)
and the news that gets aggregated on our cfp the the analysis that users create and even the reports they create are are part of this this shift which has been kind of starting to reach a critical mass as we see the the erosion i think of the traditional media

Chris Huston (13:43.77)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (13:47.431)
Yeah. A couple of things that you brought up in that last rant. Yeah. I was trying to think what is a better phrase. No, because there's all kinds of things I was taking note of. just one of the things I wanted to ask about is you mentioned the Pacific Northwest. And in a sense, it looks to me that college football is, I don't want to use the term weathering on the West coast or on the East coast.

Bobak Ha’Eri (13:53.787)
Rant. Rumble.

Chris Huston (14:16.996)
compared to the Midwest and the South, you know, basically college football is becoming an sec big 10 community, exercise. And I'm sure you see it in your traffic, right? I'm sure you look at the traffic and you see that, that, you know, there's a bunch of people from over here in the country and there's a bunch of people from over here in the country. And there's a little bit of people on the sides, right? Is that what you see or, and how do you, how do you start to get people interested?

Bobak Ha’Eri (14:25.223)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (14:47.011)
on the coasts in this sport.

Bobak Ha’Eri (14:51.144)
I think that's one of the remarkable things. tend not to see, I mean, the schools that have the biggest fan bases aren't surprising. Like, I mean, for the longest time, number one and number two were, even when they weren't particularly great, Michigan and Ohio State. Just because they have huge fan bases, maybe they're more tech savvy. mean, that is the original flaw of a community like RCFB. Most of our users will tend to be slightly younger and more tech savvy, but the problem is each year that goes by,

Chris Huston (14:59.431)
Hmm.

Chris Huston (15:07.047)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (15:18.545)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (15:21.029)
The other end of that scale is fading away. So it's becoming more, not only the middle, it's becoming the bulk. But all that said, I've noticed that Oregon fans, healthy amount of Oregon fans on our CFB, USC fans, I know USC fans, they show up when the team's doing well. It's like Miami fans. It's like, hey, now they're all over the website. If the team doesn't do so good, they evaporate, but that's the nature of Los Angeles or Miami or some of the major cities. So I would say despite...

Chris Huston (15:24.476)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (15:37.773)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

Bobak Ha’Eri (15:49.243)
this erosion in coverage, the fans we see match the fans that are doing well. that makes sense, know, they will step up when they're doing well. You saw a lot more Boise State fans at the beginning of this season than already two weeks in, but they still show up because they were the not only the hardcore is always I don't want to use that term because it sometimes sounds a little bit derogatory. I mean, but the serious fans do still show up because they know like Boise State's Gooses and Cook, there's still a future for the team.

Chris Huston (15:56.049)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (16:17.819)
They can still even get into the playoff under some certain circumstances. So we see that. Again, more SEC, more Big Ten fans, certainly, but that's just the nature of how many there are. I we still see fans. I'm always excited when I see fans of schools of Division III, Division II, and AIA when they show up. then, granted, the conversation tends to mostly pool around the biggest stories, but always a nice thing of a website like...

Chris Huston (16:43.462)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (16:46.947)
RCFB is because there isn't and I mean I don't in any way cast dispersions on this but when we're not chasing clicks We can just say okay What do you guys want to talk about and when what sometimes stories pop percolate up that have no coverage outside of maybe a Local TV paper or somebody just noticed something and then that becomes a bigger conversation but in terms of I'd say I it's you made me really think about this because as I was talking about the erosion of the Pacific Northwest news

Chris Huston (16:59.088)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (17:09.018)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (17:16.76)
It's not like Oregon fans have dried up or Oregon State fans or wazoo or Washington or any of the fans in that region have just dried up. It's just it's unrelated. If anything, it's more of the larger kind of macro level of like newspapers in general as news gathering sites and the sports department is kind of usually one of the few things that people are even reading the paper for are getting brought down with that. And I think that would that would be how I characterize it, perhaps.

Chris Huston (17:40.687)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (17:43.895)
a bit more than there aren't the fans. The fans are certainly there.

Chris Huston (17:46.084)
Yeah, yeah. The other thing was that

It's, I think it would be very easy for you guys. You have a lot of memes on your site. You have a lot of, you know, it's sort of a big part of college football is like this inherent snarkiness and the irony and the satire, but you're also very serious stewards of the sport, which is like, which is just great to see, you know, you're talking about all the teams equally. You're not, you're not, you don't have any, there's no obvious, like, you know, you're like, you're not doing the clickbait thing, right. As much, some things just naturally happen.

How do you balance the whole, we've got, we're, you we don't want to meme-ify things too much, but memes are good because if we boil things down to memes, then we start getting into the, we start getting into the non, it's all emotion, right? It's all about, you know, stirring emotions.

Bobak Ha’Eri (18:39.205)
Yeah, it becomes almost like a nonsense symbolic language. I completely agree with you. There's actually a couple of ways to look at this. Early on, we tried to structure it so that a weekly post, the posts are what comprise all the different items on RCFP at a given time. The post will have a weekly post to of corral everything like meme Monday or trash talk Thursday where...

Chris Huston (18:44.42)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (19:07.171)
We've even said it so it automatically turns everybody's words into all caps because all caps is cruise control for cool, right? But no, mean, it's, so by corralling it to those spots, you kind of allow, actually it's kind of nice because then you get a concentrated version of it you get a little bit more development of it. And then we created sort of what we call like sister subreddits, like rcfb memes. Hey, you can go there all the time. And they actually slightly get their own culture.

Chris Huston (19:10.95)
That is awesome.

Chris Huston (19:31.013)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (19:35.641)
But they're delightful and they kind of self-policed. But you're right, in terms of the main subreddit, we don't have to do too much once we kind of created this like, that goes in the weekly post. And then luckily, other users become part of the, police force is the wrong word, but they get it, they help enforce it. They say like, this is the wrong place. They usually hit report on it, so we find out about it immediately. And then polite like, move over here. It's never like,

Chris Huston (19:55.122)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (20:04.056)
You don't want make it like punitive, know, but you want to make it so that people kind of get the gist of how it goes. And to some extent, you know, in conversations in any message board, especially once we got to be the size of a million, two million, three million, four million, there is a certain bit of, of conversation that does tend to reward the top. Because the way, for those who are not familiar with Reddit, I should kind of explain this. The way it works is people can up or downvote an item.

and then that kind of creates how prominent it appears on the page. And within each post, there is a very, very active comment section. And that's what people usually come for, oddly enough. I would say people come more for the comment section than they do the posts themselves because they want to talk about a topic. We always joke like, come on, at least read the article. know, mean, please. But our game posts, live game posts and post game discussions are by far the biggest. mean,

Chris Huston (20:49.316)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (20:53.514)
Right.

Bobak Ha’Eri (21:01.334)
Sometimes over a game it'll be 40,000 comments and we start to actually crack reddit a little bit in their ability to host. yeah, we have to split the national championship into quarters because it just won't work otherwise. All that said, the up vote down vote does tend to reward a little bit of the meme culture so to speak. So sometimes the first two or three on a very popular topic might be either a really funny joke, I mean honestly some of them.

Chris Huston (21:06.278)
That's wild.

Chris Huston (21:11.014)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (21:20.262)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (21:27.788)
I wish I had the aggregate humor that the website has sometimes. But then there is usually an equal chance for something quite insightful. And if it is number one, it might be number two number three. But you get that nice balance. And honestly, unless it becomes an abusive meme, and there's been a handful over the years, I'm not going to single any of them out, then there's ways you can kind of corral those.

Chris Huston (21:31.814)
You

Bobak Ha’Eri (21:52.928)
in other ways using kind of a website to sort of mark those words when they show up for review. But we've luckily never had to do that. There's been one or two like basement level things that honestly aren't even memes, they're just sayings. I mean, there's a few teams that have slogans that other teams like to use on them. But that's the nature of the beast and you do what you can to do it. As long as you can accept the fact that there will be errors,

Chris Huston (22:12.864)
Right.

Bobak Ha’Eri (22:21.249)
and you can just move past them, that's a wonderful thing about running a website like this.

Chris Huston (22:25.361)
Sure, sure. Now, can you share a moment where something that started on RCFB, whether a meme or a campaign or a fan narrative, ended up breaking out into the wider college football world?

Bobak Ha’Eri (22:35.779)
You know, there was, there've been a few of those and, and I want to say, I think this one may have started oddly enough on, I think they're now the shut cat, the shutdown full cast group. One of their writers came up with the idea of the surrender Cobra. Um, the idea of, know, when, when the game is going lost, you get the person back of their head, hands on the back of their head. Um, and that became super popular in RCFB to the point where

And we've known this, we have good relations, I want to say, with college football game day. At one point, they started to pick up on it too. So sometimes we've joked like, there's now this segment they do on the college football game day. I'm like, did they take that from our Twitter? Did they take that from our forum? We've kind of like joked about like, where is this? Where have these things been sourced from? But that one is one. But yeah, just occasionally, like some of these jokes pop their way into the wild. And like,

Chris Huston (23:19.803)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (23:29.282)
Sometimes people will do things for RCFB and then they'll we've found that some of the other websites will hire them Because we have had a budget I'm a ball everyone who work everyone who does anything for us is a volunteer and I mean Anytime that happens. We're just like, know Awesome, that's great Like how can you get mad at someone doing something on RCFB or place where they're doing it for a passion because I remember back in the day Even on a USC forum. I think there was somebody I remember who's writing incredible insightful analysis

And then one of the websites straight up hired him. You love to see that kind of thing, you know?

Chris Huston (24:01.414)
Sure. Yeah, I imagine that happens all over college football from time to time where in this internet age the cream rises to the top. You can get involved in commentary in ways that you couldn't before. Okay, so now as media rights keep consolidating and fans face more barriers to those acts, people don't want to pay.

unfortunately for media, And so especially like I find myself, if I want to read a single story about something on the Houston Chronicle, I just don't want to, you know, I don't want to pay for a subscription just to read the one story. So do you see Reddit and other fan communities filling in the coverage gaps? Is that what makes them so popular? Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (24:47.555)
100%. Yeah, 100%. I think a lot of times, for example, people bring up a topic and some people who are, and I'm not saying like we have a 100 % intolerance of like copy pasting paywalled articles. That's just unethical. We don't believe in it. But sometimes people will come in and say like, yeah, you know, I was reading the discussion about this and they'll use what they read to add to the discussion on a certain topic. And certainly, you know, there's sometimes lighter versions of those stories that get

Chris Huston (25:02.032)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (25:17.634)
you know, the way the news aggregate, the way some of the other news sites do and they kind of, and I feel bad because I don't like how some of those sites, you know, and to an extent we are part of that problem, but I certainly don't like sites that are earning money off of regurgitating another long form story and taking a choice quote out of it. But certainly I would say, for example, X and to a lesser extent, Blue Sky have become one of the ways people kind of bring up a topic.

Chris Huston (25:30.246)
Mm.

Chris Huston (25:35.993)
Right.

Bobak Ha’Eri (25:46.774)
because sometimes a person will post the story on their ex or the author will. And then some people who can click through can click on it, others can't, but what at least it does is it gets that conversation started and then you get some of the people who might be more insightful on what's going on on that particular team chiming in. That's certainly part of the ecosystem that is quite prevalent now, I would say.

Chris Huston (26:09.018)
Right. Well, one of the things I've been trying to gauge in recent years, because it's been massive changes going on in college football, as we all know, I'm really curious what the rank and file, what the grassroots people think about a lot of these changes. In my personal life, anecdotally, the old timers were not big fans of it, but we just got to deal with it. And I have a theory that one reason you're seeing

An increase in, for example, television ratings for the playoffs or for even for the season. I have a pet theory that a lot of that is because of the, the, increase in prop betting and betting in general in college football. So people have more reason to watch games. Like there's more loosely connected fans than hardcore fans. they've, they've traded, they've dropped some hardcore fans and increased the sort of looser affiliated fans, sort of like in the NFL, where you have people who

only watch the NFL for their fantasy team kind of thing. And so that goes into the ratings and it helps the ratings, but are they, how much are they really fans of a team, right? As opposed to, you I want my player to do well. You know, you see all this stuff on a daily basis. You see what everybody has to say in your assessment is, are they taking all these changes in stride or what's popular as far as the changes, what's unpopular?

And has the composition of the fan base changed as far as you can tell?

Bobak Ha’Eri (27:42.561)
That's a great question because I think there is what people say versus what people do and there's what people will, know, soapbox for versus in their heart of hearts, how they really feel or how much does it really bother them? And I say that because, you know, across the board, college football is as healthy as ever in terms of the people watching and all of that stuff. you know, bets certainly are part of it. You could also argue the Dion effect, now the Belichick effect people.

Chris Huston (28:09.424)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (28:09.82)
Neutrals are also kind of being brought into it a little bit I still remember covering a game in here in the Twin Cities and and the person that was just showing me the way wanted to talk about Dion Sanders and like the second it was it was his first week there and I'm like, this is amazing. This person I can tell has zero interest in college football wants to talk Dion and you know, I think that's awesome for the record. And so with things like especially the portal initially was people were enamored by the portal at first. I think just the name portal.

Chris Huston (28:21.638)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (28:39.529)
especially to maybe your little Star Trek that there was some, there was a very popular game for a while called Portal. Like people thought that was neat. And then, and it was funny too, because before, you know, NIL people were always like, it's a shame they don't pay the players, da da da. And then now they're like, not like that. I'm like, you know, come on. Yeah, come on, man. You know, like there's people here in this sport who could get injured critically, you know, in ways that could just knock out their career or worse.

Chris Huston (28:40.396)
Little Star Trek action going on. Yeah.

Chris Huston (28:55.6)
Yeah.

they're paying them too much. What's going on? Yeah.

Chris Huston (29:09.222)
Alright, we're seeing.

Bobak Ha’Eri (29:09.608)
Like let them let them get the money while they can dear dear heavens, but all of that said, certainly i've seen whenever some of these posts come up, the most popular I say the most popular I should say the least liked topic that comes up but people love to talk about it Is anything that talks about kind of the consolidation of power? To the p2 and the fact that money is driving everything. You know, you know, it's like wu-tang cream, you know, like cash rolls everything around me, right? You know, it's

Chris Huston (29:30.438)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (29:36.43)
You're right. Yeah, private equity, yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (29:39.52)
Exactly. I think private equity, my goodness. So you'll always get the highly upvoted top comment will be decrying the state of college football. then, know, kind of the joke is some of them will then end it with, right, see you all next week. You know, and I think that that's the that's the issue here. Now, betting, too, is an issue. It's it's remarkable because we get both sides of that a lot. We get people who are clearly worried about how to an extent it can prey on those.

Chris Huston (29:53.188)
Hahaha!

Bobak Ha’Eri (30:07.901)
with an issue with gambling addiction. Full disclosure, not this season, but for three seasons we had a sponsorship with DraftKings, which we used to just pay for charity. mean, you hey. But at the same time, I mean, we knew that this is a serious thing. But even before gambling was legalized, everyone loved to know the spread. Everett, all the gambling terminology was still important because people wanted to be able to benchmark how their team was supposedly doing based on

Chris Huston (30:10.086)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (30:36.413)
what some folks in the desert think they should do.

Chris Huston (30:38.672)
But now you have like ESPN talking about spreads. It's a little bit more ingrained into the coverage now, right?

Bobak Ha’Eri (30:46.031)
I mean some of the schools now have whole big licenses with it, know, like Caesar's Gambler. I'm waiting for the permission one of them is going to get to like name their stadium that or something like that, know, Fan Duels Arena or something like that, you know.

Chris Huston (30:55.072)
Right. It's just a matter of time, right?

Chris Huston (31:00.804)
Yeah. I mean, I don't really have like a moral problem with it, but I'm just trying to gauge is, we selling like short, is it short-term ism, right? Like, because if you're looking long-term, you want to cultivate the fan base to enjoy the things that make college football unique. And if it's just this sort of like a money oriented focus.

Right? Or we're bringing people in for that. Like, how do you balance all that out? Right? Looking for...

Bobak Ha’Eri (31:37.246)
I mean, you think about it, do we want it explicit like it is now, where it is absolutely no veil on top of it, this is all about cash, versus the old days where it always felt disingenuous when administrators who were making incredible amounts of money themselves, and obviously it's well known that for the longest time, many of the highest paid public officials were college football or in some cases college basketball coaches.

Yet the players were, you know, oftentimes kind of. So you it's just this question of like, oh, wow, you built a hundred million dollars sports facility. And, you know, people were decrying that. And now people are it's just basically like, yeah, no, it is about money. We're trying to compete with the Joneses. Now we have revenue share. Now we have limits on NIL for however many lawsuit challenges it'll survive for. You know, I mean, it's just kind of I mean.

Chris Huston (32:21.647)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (32:29.704)
Kind of going to one of the things that certainly you hear some fans complain about and understandably some fan base is more than others is the one-two punch of the transfer portal in NIL inducing players to get paid more. I get that, I get it's upsetting but at the same time when I think of what I rather these players get the benefit knowing that their careers could end at any time. So I think on RCFB we certainly get the full mix. not by in any sense I want to say like the

representing the majority there but there is more of a fractional it isn't i'd like the fact that there is multiplicity of of views on the topic and you don't necessarily get completely bogged down in this is evil college football is over you know that what you were kind of in talking about the very beginning but certainly i'm sure there's some people that it there's always a person like all i really stopped carrying a part of us are like why are you on a subreddit

Chris Huston (33:20.046)
Right.

Bobak Ha’Eri (33:28.094)
commenting about college football if you don't care about it anymore. I I get it hurts and I get it. Like I have been through, I'm sure everybody, every fan has had that crisis that's put a bit of a question of why am I even watching this anymore? But you know, see you next week.

Chris Huston (33:40.25)
Sure.

Chris Huston (33:43.994)
Well, it's funny. Exactly. But it's funny too, back before the internet, I used to go to the local drug store in July or August, and I would open up the street and Smith's magazine to see who was on the team. Right? So it's a little bit of a, goes back to that a bit, cause you don't really know who's going to be on the team. lot of these, these, lighter fans, the ones who are not diehards who are Notre Dame fans or Alabama fans. And they're like,

We want to see that Jones kid. I can't, I saw him last year looking forward to seeing him this year. he's playing for a different team this year. And there's somebody in his position who, you know, we don't know who he is. So I think there's a little bit of that loss of connection. but the good thing is, is that, like I said, maybe it does go back to having that bit of mystery, involved in who's going to be good because you can look at these preseason.

you know, these predictions this year and they haven't been very good, have they?

Bobak Ha’Eri (34:44.156)
No, and it's funny too, by the way, just kind of, you made me think of something too. I remember this is always percolated on the outside. We've always had, I mean, you and I both remember the Maurice Claret saga and it dragged in Mike Williams, the USC wide receiver with it, arguably. There've always been players looking to get something out of it and move on. Used to be the NFL was the way. They used to, thought, be unnecessarily punitive on players who wanted to transfer because you had to, unless you went down to division.

Chris Huston (34:57.924)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (35:06.447)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (35:13.157)
Yeah, to sit out a year. And I thought, is, that's, that's why I always thought like, get it, but that, that to me seemed a little too extreme. So, I mean, I'm looking at the state of college football now. And I mean, I get that, that people sort of, apologize, I totally forgot the question because my phone dropped right there and we're not live. I'm used to doing a live, like I'm used to going live nonstop for an hour. like, this is, yeah.

Chris Huston (35:30.681)
That's okay. we, yeah, we can, yeah, don't worry. Don't worry. Let's, what was I saying? I might've forgot what I was, what I asked. was so long ago.

Bobak Ha’Eri (35:41.787)
Yeah, I was like going into vamp mode. I'm like, you know, we're actually we can stop and restart. So I'm going to I'm going to take advantage of that right at this moment.

Chris Huston (35:45.902)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. what was I saying? I was talking about, just the connection that fans have with the players and their team and how maybe it's more like the old days, ironically, because people didn't really know. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (36:00.263)
Yeah, okay, yeah, I remember. I can hop on that, No, I think I get exactly what you're saying, because I was at Era 2, like you'd read the newspaper to find out who the good players were. Maybe you'd get that one program when you go to a game if you bought a program, because even back then it always seemed like really expensive. Yeah. But I mean, and I get that. Nowadays, when I hear about some of the fans, and I get some of the hardcore fans, I don't know if they care so much about the players, they just want to be able to win.

Chris Huston (36:15.715)
No programs anymore. Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (36:28.816)
But like, mean, honestly, mean, do you really know that? tell me about your quarterback's life. You know, like, well, you know, I just thought we had a good quarterback and now now they're at Miami or something.

Chris Huston (36:29.903)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (36:35.045)
I don't know though. The thing is about that though, if it was just about winning, then it would just be like, I feel like there is an illusion that college sports, there's an illusion that college sports offers the college sports fan. It's a fantasy, right? And I think this is the original attraction that people have to college sports, which is that the illusion is that these are kind of amateurs, right? These are kind of normal people.

Bobak Ha’Eri (37:01.808)
Right. They walked the same halls I did, you know?

Chris Huston (37:04.345)
They walked the same halls you did. They're in your local college town. You might see them over at Chick-fil-A, drive through, depending on where you're at, right? And it's just, it's an illusion. But it was something that appealed to a lot of people, this idea that this isn't the slick, homogenized, money-driven world of the NFL, for example, or a lot of other pro leagues, which is not to say that there was

I think people understood that there was money involved because all the TV contract, everything was still big even before all this, as far as the money goes. But I think there was this people bought into the illusion of that. it's, think what separated the really hardcore college football fan from these NFL fans, it still kind of does. It's sort of like, you feel like you're belonging to a special club in a sense, right? Like this is like, get it.

You might like NFL, mister, but I college football because it's this and there's the bands and there's the community and all this kind of stuff. now for better or for worse, a lot of that connection is being severed. You know, the lack of rivalry, you know.

Bobak Ha’Eri (38:21.091)
It's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting you bring this up only because when we think about how college football was viewed a while ago, I'm talking a hundred years ago, there was this concern that the players weren't really students. You know, there were these brutes. I mean, before Teddy Roosevelt forced college football to change the rules up, there was this concern that they weren't actually really students even then. They probably were less so then than they are now in certain ways.

Chris Huston (38:37.029)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (38:45.207)
Mm-hmm. I'm sure, yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (38:49.125)
So I do wonder if we kind of, there's this sort of mystique, because you've talked about that. One of the great mystiques is that these students, athletes, are walking the same halls and doing the same things that I did back in the day when I went to the Ivy covered halls of my old alma mater. But at the same time, it's always been a little different. And I hesitate to paint a broad brush, because certainly there are many exceptions.

Chris Huston (39:05.379)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (39:09.849)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (39:15.739)
I think when I crunch the numbers one time at all divisions of college football, every year there's over 43,000 or something like that. So yeah, a lot of them are quite normal and quite student. And I mean, I've taught my own share of college athletes, although granted no culture ball players in my honors seminar, but I've had a, I'm not to say that they are qualified to do it. Let's be very clear there. I've interviewed my fair share of extremely smart college football players, cause those are the ones that like to trot out to media days if they can. Some coaches, some coaches, but

Chris Huston (39:22.169)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (39:41.583)
Right. Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (39:45.784)
All of that said, think, you know, that concern, not, I wonder how much of it is the younger students of the younger generation has already seen that that veil pierced. I wonder if they know that this is a money, this is about money. This is about in a way what it always kind of was, which is, you know, college minor leagues, it's football, the NFL's minor leagues, because no matter what they try, nothing really entirely ever catches on enough.

Chris Huston (39:58.597)
Mmm.

Chris Huston (40:08.698)
Right.

Bobak Ha’Eri (40:15.704)
and how else are they going to train these players? mean, because basketball always felt, yeah, basketball was always even more cynical. Like, especially when, you know, they forced the one and done rule, like they obligated someone to go and do a year. I think that really, think basketball's always been past that point, particularly back when we remember, you know, Kevin Garnett, Kobe, people who just bypassed college entirely when the NBA allowed it to go into into the league. So,

Chris Huston (40:17.997)
Yeah, a more cynical, a little more cynical, a little more realist. Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (40:41.188)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (40:45.059)
I do wonder if college football fans have always, a chunk of them have always maybe, the chunk that held on to the Mystique may have been smaller than we realized. Because clearly with all of these changes that have just brought to fore, I mean, I love when people have talked about that. Like remember when it was the money that was being done under the table was in the thousands and people were like, that's outrageous. But then when suddenly market rates started to come out.

Chris Huston (40:55.621)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (41:12.357)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (41:12.91)
I mean, some people have pointed that out, like in some of the Southern teams that were masters of potentially, you know, the bag men. so I think I was, was listening to Godfrey, think, who was the person who wrote that Meet the Bag Man article. That was quite a great piece a long time ago. He was even talking about like those folks when the money actually started coming out, found the rich boosters that thought they were rich. There's actually people at Michigan who are married to the second richest person in the world. And suddenly, you know, they really do want, you know, Underwood as their quarterback.

Chris Huston (41:33.378)
Boom.

Chris Huston (41:41.946)
Right. I mean, it's, funny. Like to me, it was definitely imperfect then. And now it's, it's almost like a little bit of a analog to society writ large where like, the, once you realize the norms are just optional that you're just kind of, you could just kind of ditch them. And now it's just straight up. There's no, there's no more pussy fitting around on the topic. It's I would say 80 % of media coverage I see is about NIL transfer.

Bobak Ha’Eri (41:42.34)
You know?

Chris Huston (42:11.811)
meteorites, conference changes, and playoff ideas and stuff. And the percentage of actual coverage of the teams seems to be getting squished. And part of that's because a lot of teams, think, because they're now these new money-making, overt money-making entities,

They are buttoning up things like the old days like talk about USC Pete Carroll used to have open practices USC used to have open practice. There are just, are like no open practices anymore. So not only are media not able to really watch the practice to see what's going on. you know, you, you basically just have everything just being unveiled at the games and, and, and you're just going to watch it and that's it. And it's just, it's just fascinating to me how that's how that change has happened with very little. I guess there's, there's some people protesting, but it seems to

to just be going and people are just shrugging their shoulders about

Bobak Ha’Eri (43:11.746)
Yeah, that's one of the great tragedies we've seen. It's a longer scale. I mean, the timeline is longer than just since COVID, but COVID really allowed an acceleration of that. And that's the reduction of access. mean, you know, obviously with public distancing and safety regulations that were installed, the access was reduced a great deal. But now I was talking to someone who, for example, just started covering some games for us and they had had a background in covering pro sports.

Chris Huston (43:20.473)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (43:38.124)
I'm like, look, can't go, you just can't go in the locker room. You can't go after the game. you're good luck, you know, like it's a very carefully curated. And that's where, again, we were talking about that. Like the concern is I hope they never decide like there has to be some level of media coverage that at least has some objective nature to it unless you're just inviting influencers. But at the rate they're going.

Chris Huston (43:41.603)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (43:46.117)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (43:57.466)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (44:01.561)
Maybe that's all they want. They want influencers who are just... It's like when the Marvel movies come out and they want the people that are just going to talk about how wonderful this latest Marvel movie is. Like, is that what you want out of college football? Yeah. Can I just say real quick, real quick, real quick. I was at Big Ten Media Day and I was... I'm not going to say which team it is, but I was listening to a reporter ask questions that were like... I think they stopped short of saying we, but you know, I'm just kind of...

Chris Huston (44:03.087)
Well, there.

Chris Huston (44:11.619)
It's fans, it's all, it's fan service, right? The schools are doing fan service and they're doing their own influencing.

Chris Huston (44:29.123)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (44:31.68)
like you're teeing up like this is this is like we're getting into what people don't like about certain political reporting like this has turned like I get it it's college sports and maybe there's been some some people could argue that maybe politics has turned too much into what sports is about but like on a sports level like look I know when it boils down to it sports are not the most important thing in the universe like we can all agree on that if you're rational human being you're not poisoning trees over sports or anything like that but

Chris Huston (44:37.54)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (44:54.373)
Mm.

Sure.

Bobak Ha’Eri (45:00.406)
I mean, at the same time, can we at least treat it a little bit more seriously in terms of access and watching it erode is something that has been just, I don't think fans entirely see it happening. And I mean, yeah, the money's big. The money part is what they get. It's easier to grasp. It's easier to understand like, then that's the biggest thing they'll derive. Like, I can't believe it's all about money at the expense of the Pac-12. It's all about money at the expense of this or the expense of that.

Chris Huston (45:12.633)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (45:30.38)
But really it's like, know, we're actually seeing something a little bit more nefarious. We're seeing a lot of, and I don't know, okay, I'm not going to necessarily say there's malfeasance involved here, but it's this, this everybody keeps thinking that they're doing the right thing by reducing access. And that's become a problem in terms of coverage, in terms of, and part of it, maybe it's a fear of the coach is now making so much money. I do not want to anger them. And some athletic departments kowtow to the coach. Some don't.

Chris Huston (45:45.477)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Huston (45:54.565)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (45:58.391)
but you know, it's hard to predict where it's going to go.

Chris Huston (46:01.935)
Yeah. But also they also, the, school now has their own content creation studio. So they don't want someone coming in and they want to do that story themselves. So they're fine with doing communicating with their fans themselves. And, and then on, on Saturday, you see the game and the idea, know, in theory, if you had two open practices or too much media coverage, then it's a distraction for the team. The team doesn't perform as well. That's the idea.

And so ideally fans should be like, this is good. My, my team isn't being distracted, but at other hand, where do they go? And I think that's why places like RC FB fills that gap we talked about. and then also one of the other things I wanted to ask you about was the rise, you know, the rise of LLMs, large language models in, replacing in a sense, Google search, Google search, basically

committing suicide over the last few years by just destroying their search function. And it's been revealed. And I think I also read that there's actually a deal between Reddit and ChatGPT. But when the LLMs go and train on, in this case, things like college football, they're relying on Reddit in many cases to provide the information that they're giving out to someone who's

creating a query. And so my question for you is, what's that like to know that you might be, you're not only servicing the current fans, but you're also potentially influencing what is the nature of perceived reality about something to do with college football?

Bobak Ha’Eri (47:46.304)
Well, one of the I have I have really a lot of on this, but I'll do my best to summarize them. It is a fascinating thing. And really, if you want the short backstory on that, there was actually a brief attempt at a lawsuit between Reddit and chat GPT when they announced that we were basically using Reddit for all of our information. And can you imagine Reddit was like, we this is an untapped market. So I get that. mean, I'm not I'm not an employee of Reddit. I get it as a lawyer why they did that. And that's where the license came from.

Chris Huston (48:07.929)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (48:14.558)
And I'm not shocked, because I mean, for example, with RCFB, to the benefit of the larger public, well, we were joking. We did some tests when I was getting ready to come here and talk to you. we're trying to see, is it going to talk like a meme? Is going to just use like, is chat GBT going to use slang that only comes from RCFB? I didn't see that, thankfully. But as you mentioned, RCFB is not only one of the largest subreddits, but more importantly,

during the season we become one of the top 10 most commented because even though there are some sections of Reddit where you default when you create a Reddit account to being one of the subscribers during the season RCFB more so than even you know RNFL or some of the what you think would be a bigger market more people talk because I think there's so many more games going on and people comment and I say that that's an important part because the way these LLMs work is they take

Chris Huston (48:48.804)
Mmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (49:12.639)
from the comments as much as anything. there's an insane amount of content that is being driven towards these devices that they're pulling their opinions out of. To a benefit I would say probably for the public because all in all the overall conversation will get you a pretty, if they're sampling from RCFP they're gonna get a fairly rational, probably opinion fan opinion. I'm not gonna say you're gonna get the best insight although I actually was curious, I asked chatGBT,

Chris Huston (49:14.194)
Sure

Chris Huston (49:17.656)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (49:42.417)
Why do you use a reddit RCFB? And it was like because you know you get the voice of the fan I get that that's certainly an angle of it because there's so many of them on there But you also get interesting insight you get memes you get you know I was actually kind of impressed. That's when I got scared by the answer. I'm like, wow. Okay, like yeah, you're right, you know robot but

Is Skynet gonna instead be a College football fan? I mean... But yeah, no, I mean, I'm not overly worried about it. I'm kind of... Of all the sources they could be drawing from, other than mainstream media, I'm kind of glad it's us. After them. Like, don't get me wrong, get it from like... Please get it from the athletic, know, Fox Sports, ESPN, any number of them, you know, any newspaper. But if you're looking for kind of...

Chris Huston (50:11.362)
Wow. Yeah, lot of responsibility on your shoulders, Babak.

Chris Huston (50:33.208)
Mm-hmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (50:37.109)
filling in gaps in creating that substantive nature of of of the fuller picture i mean i'm i'm happy they're looking to us

Chris Huston (50:43.596)
Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about the Heisman Trophy because this is the Heisman Trophy podcast. I, my interactions with fans regarding the Heisman is there's typically, I think it's split the same way. I think most things are where you have this core group of traditionalists who are really interested in it and the people who, if their team has a candidate, they get interested in it for a time. And then there's this group of like, permanent cynics and snarkies.

who are just like, it just goes to the best player of the best team and my favorite one is it doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore way back in like 1998 or something. They go back like very short period of time and how the Heisman has gotten worse since then. What's your opinion or what's your impression looking at your forum, what people's opinions are of the Heisman, what kind of discussions do they have and.

Is it seen as cringe? Is it seen as still a valuable award? What's the picture like?

Bobak Ha’Eri (51:47.349)
Well, I wouldn't say it's cringe at all that we it will definitely come through bright and clear if any, you know, any part of cultural ball goes that way. I think there is a concern that has it started to lessen a little bit in terms of its importance. I and part of this is I'm not sure how accurate that is only because I don't know if my own bias is coming in here. Maybe it's because.

Heisman was very good to my alma mater, also, oh, and then took one away and then gave it back. even then, the one criticism I think has always been sort of understandable. mean, last season, notwithstanding, it tends to always go to the best offensive player on perhaps the most successful team. But that has been something that goes beyond, other than that one Notre Dame player, that's been...

Chris Huston (52:14.66)
Sure.

Chris Huston (52:38.924)
Yeah. Paul Horning, Paul Horning in 56. Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (52:39.067)
I forgot his name. mean, you know, one who was on the actual. Yeah, Paul Hornig. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But beyond that, I think it's always been an important award. And I think people still do care because it is something people have pride if their school got it. People care. mean, obviously, John Matira had an incredible performance against Michigan right before the weekend before we recorded this. So his stock is certainly up in the eyes of a lot of fans. People were really excited.

last year to watch the Heisman race and who it came down to. have been some, I remember an RCFB, those two years Stanford came in second place. my goodness, we had to deal with a lot of people that were upset, you know, on those Heisman races, Toby Gerhardt especially. Yeah.

Chris Huston (53:09.336)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (53:16.42)
Yeah.

Sure. Which is an amazing thing because to get Stanford fans riled up to the point where they're posting on message boards, must be.

Bobak Ha’Eri (53:31.563)
they had the neutral fan in their corner. That's where it got fascinating. Now, I'm not going to say like uniformly in their corner, but like that's where it got interesting. Then you see what people who aren't necessarily part of a specific school think about. Like Travis Hunter was such an exciting story last season and people were really getting into it. But also, you know, there were some other great quarterback, there were some great quarterbacks and there were some great players across the board. mean, Cam Ward was certainly one of the better players in America. And I mean, I enjoy seeing that discussion.

Chris Huston (53:33.834)
got it.

Chris Huston (53:43.022)
Mmm.

Bobak Ha’Eri (54:00.116)
I'm really curious to see where it goes this season because this season, think more so than last season, really doesn't have, I mean, the preseason potential winners were a list that just sort of felt like, eh, these seem like say, Betts, but there isn't a returning player where everyone's like, oh, you know, there's a leader in the clubhouse.

Chris Huston (54:14.254)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (54:19.14)
The is that again, the betting odds tend to dominate who is considered the front runner when, as you might've remembered from my old website, HeismanPundit.com, there's actually sort of a variety of things that go into it that actually give someone a better chance to win. Someone like a John Mathieu, for example, is positioned in a way that gives him a better chance to win, I would say, than...

someone who plays in Rocco Beck for Iowa State, right? It's just one of those things. my sense of the Heisman in that maybe while college football changes, the Heisman can retain some of that traditional role. And maybe that's one of those things that the traditional driven fan can latch onto. Do you think that is something that the Heisman can kind of carve out for itself as we go forward?

Bobak Ha’Eri (55:10.663)
I love that because the Heisman truly is something that is an unchanging institution that all, no matter what fans say, everyone would love one of their players to win. Everyone would love one of their players to win. I don't care what university program, I don't care how many they have. If it's the first incredible, I still remember, my gosh, when Baylor got their Heisman, their fans were going absolutely bananas. And especially anyone who didn't follow Baylor.

Chris Huston (55:21.848)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (55:34.463)
So crazy, yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (55:39.279)
the previous decades near exactly how remarkable that was now they're actually solid team in this building got a quarterback in the race arguably now so i mean as i think it'll always be something you're right it's almost like a north star it's only a good set your watch to the heisman will be there the eyes will be the kremlin a crime no i mean there's plenty of great words out there don't get me wrong but i was minutes it and in i can imagine an arrow or the heisman isn't it i mean it

Chris Huston (55:42.275)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (55:46.818)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (56:03.342)
Yeah.

Bobak Ha’Eri (56:08.368)
I'm sure the University of Chicago is still proud that they have one even though they're now D3. Yeah.

Chris Huston (56:11.204)
Think it's still I think it's still sitting there and they're in their athletic department the original truth Yeah We should we bring them back in the Big Ten like they used to be I think we the Chicago economists or something but Well

Bobak Ha’Eri (56:15.25)
Bless their heart, I'm glad it is. I'm glad it is. It should be. It should be, darn it.

Hahaha

Bobak Ha’Eri (56:26.278)
Yeah, I always love the fact I mean one of my favorite pieces of trivia there is their old stadium was where they had the first sustained nuclear reaction So they they demol and they did it without telling anybody they didn't like a racquetball court But if you ever go to the campus, you know where the original stadium was because they built this statue And that's actually how you know where the Chicago the the original U Chicago football stadium was because they have a monument where they had done that reaction and that was part of the stadium

Chris Huston (56:34.884)
That's right.

Chris Huston (56:38.519)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Huston (56:53.476)
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the other good thing about the Heisman, I think that works in its case is when your team is not in the championship hunt, like say Colorado last year, Boise was in the playoff, but long shot to win it all. You can cheer for your team, for your player to make it to New York. You can cheer for your player to win the Heisman. It's a, it's a proxy for cheering for your team. Right. That's another thing that attracts people to it. Is that right?

Bobak Ha’Eri (57:17.682)
One last takeaway I want for you though. So we all know the model for the Heisman Trophy was an NYU player. Where did they play?

Chris Huston (57:27.692)
NYU, I think they played at, they play at the Polo grounds, I'm guessing.

Bobak Ha’Eri (57:31.973)
They had a small stadium on the Bronx campus. That was where the football team was. It's now Bronx Community College, because at one point NYU sold it, and it became a community college campus. But I always found that fascinating. I love these kinds of little trivia. Again, where did I learn that? RCFP. mean, that's the kind of little trivia that people love to of churn out there, and I find that stuff utterly fascinating.

Chris Huston (57:34.967)
Okay.

Chris Huston (57:44.397)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris Huston (57:54.371)
Yeah, now if I wanted, now I've not, I've read RCFB but I haven't posted on there. If I wanted to start posting on there, I can just start posting, is that how it works?

Bobak Ha’Eri (58:03.409)
Yeah, just make a free Reddit account and start posting. That's no other restriction. We're still a completely free website, completely open. You don't even have to subscribe to comment or make a post. It just makes it easier and part of your normal Reddit feed. you don't need the, I mean, some people use the app, some people use the website, some people do any number of ways to access it. We try to make it easy. You can also follow us on Twitter at

Reddit CFB and Blue Sky and Instagram and we have fun on all of those as well.

Chris Huston (58:34.456)
Now you also do a podcast, right, which is College Football Talk, where you have live streams.

Bobak Ha’Eri (58:41.103)
Yeah, yeah, I do that on the it's funny We actually started because reddit tried to copy at the time Twitter and do like reddit spaces that were like Twitter spaces And so we decided we'll try it we within two shows we thought This is cool reddit, but your system is broken and they got rid of it eventually So then we moved it over to Twitter. So yeah, no, it's a call-in show live every Tuesday night at 10 p.m Eastern on our reddit C of B on X

Chris Huston (58:51.662)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (58:58.596)
Bobak Ha’Eri (59:09.72)
That's been fun. I've been trying to do it everywhere I can. I have hosted a show live from Ireland, Scotland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Juarez, Uruguay. When I'm on a trip, it's just fun to talk college football. It be the off season. It's always good to just try to make it every time. think only when I'm in Europe, I have to actually make it a little bit earlier because it ends up being like 3 a.m. But my family isn't thrilled when I'm like, Dad needs to just talk to some people.

Chris Huston (59:24.056)
Sure, yeah.

Chris Huston (59:31.938)
Right. Yeah, it's always tough.

Chris Huston (59:38.839)
Yeah. Yeah. That's always a challenge being in Europe and having to, uh, to watch a game or get online and do something. Always a challenge. Baba Khayeri, sports editor for RCFB, the Reddit sub Reddit that is probably like they say, the, uh, the internet tailgate and the internet's tailgate, a great place for college football fans to talk shop, talk about, uh, the games, the players.

Bobak Ha’Eri (59:39.716)
Hahaha!

Bobak Ha’Eri (59:44.055)
yeah.

Chris Huston (01:00:07.472)
make predictions, complain about things like college football fans are known to do a really fun place. Thanks for coming on the show. And, yeah, looking forward to seeing more, from, our CFB in the future.

Bobak Ha’Eri (01:00:20.176)
pleasure joining you and we love the Heisman at r/cfb!

Chris Huston (00:01.292)
We are here with Mark Branstad, CEO and founder of trackingfootball.com. Mark, welcome to the Heisman Trophy podcast.

Mark Branstad (00:09.271)
Thanks Chris, yeah, really appreciate it. Great to be on with you.

Chris Huston (00:12.598)
We actually go back a long way back in the days of college football blogs and we shared an affinity with trap for track and field and applying those metrics to football to try to evaluate talent. This is something that I think older generations of scouts for a long time utilized. knew, I knew some scouts personally from the sixties and seventies who regularly relied on track and field and other sport metrics to help.

evaluate players. And this was something that you were on top of, uh, right. You know, during that whole period and now, you know, so, so for this episode, I went to go talk to the person at CFB stats and I discovered that you own CFB stats now, or are you the, it's all part of your company. So, uh, welcome to the show. And I just want to get, have you provide a little background on how you got started and, uh, how this whole process evolved to where you're now.

not only, you know, providing fans and media of this great service with CFP stats.com, but also you're now providing, programs, agents, all kinds of entities with, with proprietary analytics and stats regarding talent for players. So I'm curious to see how that all started.

Mark Branstad (01:30.381)
Yeah, absolutely. And again, really appreciate getting on here with you, Chris. And I think initially, if I recall, I think Bruce Feldman picked up just a real small snippet of some stuff that I was throwing out in a really old school WordPress blog, connecting some linemen to high school throws that were falling out and some receivers. And Bruce picked up on that and threw a little blurb.

you know, in an ESPN thing. think that's kind of how you and I then started to have discussions around, you know, football athleticism. But kind of, you know, by trade. So I graduated from Butler University here in Indianapolis and went to be a high school teacher and a coach. So I coached football in high school track for about 10 years. And was during that time that I started to kind of see that connection to just athleticism, right? And saw how kind of some of that

Chris Huston (02:22.136)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (02:25.411)
performance on the track and with the jumps and the throws by the linemen contributing. You just saw it a lot with these really good college and NFL players. And that was 20 years ago or so. So that was really before a time that the internet where all this data kind of proliferated. So I kind of anecdotally started to build this database to try to get more football, more of our football athletes out for track and vice versa, more track guys out for football. So that was just kind of fun. It was a real anecdotal thing.

But over time, I got connected to a mathematician who is still with the company today. He's actually our CFO. But his thing was like, look, you're going to have to take this from the anecdotes that Bruce picked up on that you and Chris talk about to, know, like holistic. It needs to be empirical. Like we need to run like all recruiting classes and all rosters for like Division I teams to kind of see if there's any interconnectivity here. So for about two years, myself and another individual that really helped me found track and football.

Chris Huston (03:16.268)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (03:21.763)
We started to run, you know, what was the background, know, multi-sport background, what was the track backgrounds of every player that gets, that's, you know, signing letters of intent for Division I. And, you know, it took us like, you know, literally two years to do that back in the day, but we built out this database of, you know, about 40 or 50,000 players. And then from there, we started to make more connections. And then ultimately we created a score called the PAI score, which is the Player Athletic Index, which is really the foundation of everything that we do with track and football because

we're able to kind of boil down the body type of a player, the position that he plays it to and then all of his athleticism and boil it down to one score. And the cool part about the cool part about track day. And I think what you and I coalesced around was, you know, track is historic and it's standardized. So, you you can look at what Bo Jackson did in like 1981, you know, you know, when he was in high school, you know, you can convert to a hundred yards, like a shot put the 12 pounds back then, 12 pounds today. You know, the long jump.

Chris Huston (04:07.041)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (04:17.731)
It's all standardized. You know, it's the same principle today as it was back in 1980. So the cool part was like the PAI score. If you roughly know what, what his body type was and what position he played those scores, you know, you can connect those anecdotes back 40 years in some cases. So that's where it really started to pick up some steam and subtraction. Um, you know, and then one of the things that like sports source and then, Marty Kuglian who developed CFP stats and Marty's been in business, you know, with the CFP stats thing for over 20 years.

They're all on the production side. And Marty got all these connections with the SIDs at all these colleges that send him sort of the box score. And he's kind of taken that into this, know, wizardry of this advanced box score, the thing he does with all the FPS teams. And it's kind of got this cult following. And we got NFL teams that kind of told us, hey, you know, we like to scrape CFP stats because it's so great. What happened to it? Well, when we started to work with Drew Borland SportsSource on a transfer portal solution,

Chris Huston (04:48.93)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (05:15.907)
we ultimately said, hey, we're doing this great joint product. We're gathering more and more college clients. We should just merge into one entity. And ultimately, last year, we did that. But really, it's been kind of a long journey in the sense, think, our first college client, we went to the AFCA Coaches Convention in 2016. And somehow, we ended up getting University of Minnesota as our first college client. And they kind of saw our first iteration of a website.

Chris Huston (05:42.112)
Awesome.

Mark Branstad (05:44.801)
that really again just kind of showcase lots of college players, what their athletic backgrounds were, those PAI scores. But again, I think some people are under the impression that that's kind of like all we do is just kind of show you what their track background was. And a lot of people just think that like that's the 100 or the 200, but as you and I discussed over the years, there's more to it than that. There's the jumps, there's the throws, which really kind of get into a different kind of athleticism that we see that translates to the football field.

You know, in some cases, we're able to put that score and give more insights about athleticism and football players than most people would believe. So like for example, today, even, you know, there are about a million high school football players every year. About 500,000 of those or more will do high school track. So I think a lot of people have an impression like it's just a few guys that really kind of have that in their background. But the reality is, and the reason why we're still in business and able to give all these insights is.

that it's about 55 % or so of all players, regardless of position, have a strike background. So that gets us started. And then we bring over to the top of what SportsSource does and what Marty does with safety stats and production. And we can give football evaluators kind of this 360 view of their athleticism and then their production.

Chris Huston (06:56.321)
Mm-hmm.

I just love how you guys fill this gap where I think there's a lack of general knowledge, even amongst a lot of football coaches, especially younger generation football coaches about tracking field and why these data points are important to assess athleticism. For example, you talked about shot put, know, this, if someone has a certain shot put, there's a certain level of power and torque and they're

explosiveness, right? And if you have a lineman who has a discus mark, a decent discus mark, and generally linemen are bigger than the average discus thrower. An average discus thrower might be, ideal discus thrower might be what, 230, 240? If you look at most of great ones, yeah.

Mark Branstad (07:26.979)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (07:43.075)
Yeah, really long though. Yeah, typically, you know, those Olympic caliber guys have super long levers, right? Because it's kind of the leverage event. They have super long arms. You know, one guy that comes to mind who's much bigger, but Margus Hunt, for example, I think he played for the Colts for a long time with the SMU originally as a track athlete. You know, he was probably overdrafted, kind you know, held his own in NFL. I he played for eight or nine years, you know, really got it figured out. But, you know, Margus was a really tall, he's 6'8", 6'9".

Chris Huston (07:48.044)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (07:51.478)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (07:58.893)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (08:04.375)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (08:09.507)
really long levers and then ended up being 300 pounds in an interior guy. But yeah, really successful disc disguise tend to be really long levers, right? Whereas the shot, you know, just really, really massive human beings.

Chris Huston (08:12.759)
Yeah. Yeah.

And also the

Yeah, but if you're 300 pounds and you can do that rotation, the spin, I mean, that shows your athleticism, your ability to have balance at that size. I mean, think if more football coaches understood that instead of just glossing over it, this is a way to, especially with linemen, it's really hard to evaluate.

Mark Branstad (08:29.152)
Absolutely.

Chris Huston (08:43.497)
athleticism and linemen aside from just the eyeball test and seeing them move around and bending their knees and that kind of thing. But if you show that flexibility, it's impossible to do a certain thing with the throws without also having this, right?

Mark Branstad (08:57.347)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that has changed over time. know, again, when I was, you know, coaching high school, you actually couldn't, you weren't allowed to record, you know, your track athletes and then show them that recording during the, during the meet. Now that's changed. And again, the reason I bring that up is that the important thing is that now like a lot of, you know, even these high school track events are, you know, they're online, right? You can see and watch exactly what you just described. You can actually watch.

You can be anywhere in the country and watch a football prospect and kind of see how he moves by spinning and throwing the shot if he's a spinner, even throwing for power. So yeah, a lot of this now is much more visual if you want it to be. You can certainly focus in on the data app, the performance aspect, which we do. If a guy throws 53, 54, that's pretty good. And hey, he's a four star athlete and he's six foot 300 pounds.

you know, statistically, you know, you're probably looking at something that we can get into all the analytics. But what I always find interesting too, is that, you know, especially in this era of NIL, which is, you know, relatively new, is that a lot of these star ranked kids, you know, these linemen, they don't necessarily have to go wrestle. They don't have to go throw, but they, lot of these guys continue to compete, you know, through their high school career. And I think that that shows, you know, even more of an intangible on the competitive side. Um, but to your point back to the technique, yeah, I mean,

All you have to do is go to some of these meets or watch them online and you'll see that these really big athletes can really move and are super powerful. And then you can kind of see and see how that translates, right? Because it's a, you know, it's, it's in a small space and everything else. there's, there's a lot of emphasis now on guys with speed, you know, even the big, big linemen with speed, but Hey, there's even, you know, there's, there's, there's the four by one, you know, the throwers really too. There's, know, and that's all kind of in fun, but there's opportunities for some of these big guys to get out there and show their limit.

Chris Huston (10:37.229)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (10:51.511)
Yeah. Can you tell me why there seems to be a resistance out there in media world or in, I guess, media world and maybe in the part of the organizations like the NFL that is outward facing in which they will do anything but quote attract time or track mark, which is weird because track marks, fully automated track marks run under similar conditions, run on similar services.

run with similar gear and they're throwing out miles per hours and you know 40 times that are hand timed. They will do anything but have this data narrowed down to a reliable measurable data point that is comparable across a whole range of players. Why is there this reluctance to for these organizations to just use the most reliable data?

Mark Branstad (11:47.587)
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's something that you and I used talk about a There's always there's kind of that track guy label, right? You know that, you know, they're really good at what they do, but they're not, you know, they're maybe not tough. And I think what that gets at is, you know, in track, you know, as a sport, if you're not, you know, almost 100%, right? You know, you're to go out there because it's so, you know, it's, you know, some of these races are so tight to, you know, the hundreds of a second, you know, if you're only 90%, you're going to go out there and be an embarrassment.

Chris Huston (11:53.549)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (12:17.411)
especially at like the Olympic level, professional level, right? If you're not 100 % in the 100 or some of these other really technical events, you're gonna be embarrassed. And so I think there's some of that where, hey, I have to be optimal if I'm gonna be a really, really proficient track athlete. Whereas in football, there's kind of this motto of, rub it in the dirt a little bit, man, and let's get it going. You don't have to be optimal to go out there and play.

Chris Huston (12:17.751)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Huston (12:40.765)
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Mark Branstad (12:44.515)
So I think there's a little bit of that stigma to it. Even with the throwers, and these guys are huge athletes and the toughest guys out there, especially in the weight room too, right? These Olympic throwers in the weight room, it's unbelievable what they're able to do in the athleticism. But I think there's always that stigma there. I also think there's a little bit of, and I think it's a bit of a misnomer, Chris, in that one of the reasons why we have been successful is a lot of track, or I'm sorry, excuse me, a lot of football evaluators do value track.

They just don't necessarily profess it like, know, in their war rooms, they're talking about a lot. We have a lot of NFL teams that tell us like, hey, our college director of scouting is always looking for track data points to help back up, you know, their assessments. So I do think that it's there. I just think that, you know, it's hard for, you know, media types and for the public maybe to wrap their head around some track a little bit because of one, that kind of stigma that...

Chris Huston (13:26.829)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mark Branstad (13:41.219)
you know, maybe it's more about being optimal and not being, you know, and just, you know, kind of suiting up and getting out there. I also think it's kind of a lack of knowledge too, right? Because, you know, they're familiar with like 40 times and everything in your point, you know, those were handheld until at least 2000. So how do you reconcile that with somebody, know, Jerry Rice, who did like the first combine in 85 or 86 or what it was, and supposedly ran four seven. You how do we correlate that to today to a guy that's running, you know, least, you know, hand to laser?

running 457, how do we do that? So I think there's never been this embrace of like you call it, fully automatic timing, which is the best and most adequate timing in the world. And it does allow you, like we said earlier, it allows you to go back and kind of, it's not quite apples to apples, but it's close to your point. If the surface is right, if the conditions are similar, if a guy runs at 10, 1100 meters, and then you've got a guy doing that in 1995 and he does it today, it's pretty analogous, right? But there's just sort of this hesitancy to, well, but.

Chris Huston (14:37.494)
Mm.

Mark Branstad (14:41.251)
you know, if it translates, say great, you know, is he a good football player? And I think the delineation that the really good football divers make is, I'm gonna use that to evaluate him as an athlete, not as a football player, right? And don't distinguish the two, right? As long as you don't confuse the two, you can be okay. I think it's where people confuse, hey, he's a 10, 11 guy, so he must be really good at being a receiver in football. And that's not always true, right?

Chris Huston (14:53.343)
It's weird. It's weird. Yeah.

Chris Huston (15:05.773)
Right. You're just able to quantify this aspect of their athleticism. And it's funny because you wouldn't say the same thing about height. wouldn't be like, well, it's pretty tall, but, but, but can he play football? You know, that kind of thing. You know, so it's, just a, it's just a data point. The other thing that I'm curious about in your evaluations, how, how deep your nuance gets, like, for example, you coached, high school, right. High school track. So I imagine that.

Mark Branstad (15:18.403)
Exactly.

Mark Branstad (15:30.659)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (15:33.134)
When football season was over and springtime was coming in, uh, you were probably going over to the, to the best athletes in the football team. Hey, you guys, you guys gotta come out and run track for me or the baseball coach might've, you know, found the best athletes. Hey, I need you to play center field, or maybe he comes out for two tracks. Maybe it comes out for the big dual meet against your, your rival. And so, so there are some, some athletes who play football who, who, if they had

taken the full-time track route, maybe they could run a 10.2, but they only came out twice and they ran 10.8s, 11.0s. In your evaluations, do you provide that nuance when you say, here's a guy who in minimal training time with basically moonlighting as a track person, ran a 10.8 and so therefore we project that his latent speed, untapped speed is much higher.

Mark Branstad (16:28.331)
Yeah, great question. So we get asked that sometimes. We try to stay out of the projection game on metrics, just because it's a little bit of a slippery slope. There certainly is. You bring up a good point. mean, we hear from some coaches and evaluators like, some parts of the country, there isn't necessarily the internal structure for coaching. And I'm going to.

Chris Huston (16:37.58)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (16:49.805)
And cold weather as well in certain sports.

Mark Branstad (16:52.835)
Yo, yeah, you know and I coach here in Indianapolis and you know indoor track was certainly a thing but yeah, mean, know certain certain years you couldn't you could barely do anything outside until until April, right? So and then you got these guys in Texas and California and that that have you know, they're literally going into their districts, you know in late March early April and we're really just getting started so There certainly is sort of this this handicap to it. And I think some people sort of you know, hey if he's

Chris Huston (17:02.647)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (17:19.555)
If he's from the north Midwest, you know, of the country, if he's from Michigan or Indiana or Wisconsin, he runs a 10 eight. He's probably more of a 10 six guy in Florida. We don't do that statistically because I don't like that. The beauty of track is, you know, is it standardized and it doesn't really care. You know, unlike star ratings, it doesn't care whether you're a star football player. You know, the numbers are the numbers and that's what's so beautiful about it. But at the same time, you're right. There are certainly, you know, coaching probably does matter. I mean, having been a long time coach.

For the most part, know, did I have anything to do with, know, and I had the pleasure of coaching a kid that won the long jump for in the of Indiana twice and played at Ohio State and he played for the Kansas City Chiefs for a while. But he was just a naturally great athlete. I didn't have a lot to do with that. So to me, I kind of think outside of the, you know, externals, like the facilities and the weather, can coaching help? It can. But I think at the high school level track is

Chris Huston (18:03.373)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (18:15.651)
It's not very it's in my opinion that statistics aren't all that linear, whereas football is more of a linear progression. The more somebody plays typically, you know the better that they're going to get. You'll see this linear progression with track. It's very salt tooth with high school kids. You know you'll have a kid will go out and he'll he'll run 100 year point in 11.5. You know first meeting it's 40 degrees and then you know if the weather gets nice and he's a high school kid, he might go out and run 11 one and wow where did that come from? And then I'll go back out and maybe broke with his girlfriend. He runs 11 three the next day. You know the next week.

Chris Huston (18:39.088)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Right.

Mark Branstad (18:44.483)
You know, so it's very sawtooth, but you know, so you don't see that nice linear progression with track performance. So, and that's another reason why we don't like to necessarily progress, to do, you know, the projections on progressions, because you might have a guy that goes out and jumps 18.9, their first long jump, figures it out, and then two weeks later goes 22. You know, so there's some really strange things that go on there, but by and large, you know, I think that high school track performance is mostly genetic, right?

Chris Huston (19:11.853)
Yeah, right.

Mark Branstad (19:12.419)
You know, coaching does matter, facilities matter, weather can play a factor, but you know, if a guy's a really good athlete and he's trying, you know, things, you know, the numbers are going to right? Yeah.

Chris Huston (19:23.223)
Yeah. What about the actual events? Do you educate your clients on what the performance in various events mean? For example, a great triple jump mark would probably would not be maybe as desirable as a great long jump mark because of the speed and foot turn over a turnover aspect to long jump versus maybe there's just more of a dexterity and precision kind of thing with triple jump.

Mark Branstad (19:51.811)
Absolutely, yeah. So another great question and we do get that not as much anymore because most of our clients we've kind of taken them through that wringer. yes, we do get that question and our service kind of allows for our evaluators to kind of decompose. So for example, you're, let's say you're at Texas Tech and you're a football evaluator there and that's an interesting one to bring up right now because they're probably the hottest team on the recruiting and transfer portal trail.

Chris Huston (20:20.172)
Sure.

Mark Branstad (20:20.675)
You know, in the heart of Texas, lots of kids there do track. What we're able to do is like for a triple jump. Let's say there's a kid who's six, three, 200 pounds, he projects to be a linebacker. And he triple jumps, you know, 45, seven. Most people are not going to one even know whether 45, seven is any good for a high school kid, let alone how do you translate that to football value? That's what we can do because we can show Texas Tech, well, hey, in the last 15 years, here are all the linebackers that you've signed that have played for you.

Chris Huston (20:36.748)
Right.

Mark Branstad (20:48.983)
And that have triple jumps and let's say it's 17 of them and then we can show them where they would fit everything else put a percentile grade on it and then give them a PAI score based on his body type and that's what what we would then talk about but like with long jump and triple jump into some degree of high jump you're exactly right is that those are kind of hidden gems because that's a different skill in and of itself than just being able to sprint those are running events but you then have to transfer right you have to transfer you know all of that vertical to horizontal

Chris Huston (20:51.168)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (21:11.116)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (21:17.303)
And that's a skill that a lot of athletes don't have. But you see that on the practice field and in games for defensive backs and wide receivers all the time. This ability to, exactly, to transfer.

Chris Huston (21:23.219)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (21:26.804)
Yep. to detail and workout. really need to be precise in your movements for a high jump or triple jump. It's not just pure athleticism.

Mark Branstad (21:37.249)
Yeah, exit. Yes. Right. High level coordination too. It's a different athletic skill set. And in football, you see that ability to transfer that vertical speed. know, they're backpedaling, they go into their transition and then they have to leave the ground at a really high rate of speed, right? That ability to transition. And there are some guys who are very linear, can run really fast, but they have no ability to transfer. Right. And you kind of see that. And that's another, you know, that's another data point, but I think a lot more football evaluators.

Chris Huston (21:52.428)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (22:06.083)
if they're becoming more aware of it to be on the lookout. But it can give you really good insights as to whether or not someone has that ability. And you see that with, there are tight ends that triple jump and linebacker types that triple jump. And it's sort of an unloved data point. And we're able to kind of put a football value on that data point for those athletes. So yeah, it's a little bit of a hidden way to get a better.

Chris Huston (22:23.018)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Chris Huston (22:27.916)
Sure. And you also provide data on other sports they play, whether baseball, basketball, wrestling, Yeah.

Mark Branstad (22:35.811)
Correct. And, you know, for us, I always tell people like the multi-sport and that's been a, you know, on X Twitter, whatever you want to call it. There's been some, you know, big discussions and sometimes it gets a little bit, you know, it gets a little ugly. There's always the multi-sport side and then sort of the specialization side, right? And I never, I don't like to get into the fray of that argument anymore, but we do track, you know, multi-sport participation on football.

Chris Huston (22:51.695)
huh.

Mark Branstad (23:02.945)
athletes and prospects. I 14 sports, I think we're up to that now. And, you know, even if they do like, you know, know, judo or karate or whatever, we even track that to a degree. What we don't do is we don't decompose it like track though, because, you know, with track, you don't really have to worry too much about the competition. like with wrestling, it's great to know that he wrestled. It's great to know that he was a state champion. But like, you know, do you parse out like wrestling statistics or basketball stats?

Chris Huston (23:06.273)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (23:13.599)
huh.

Mark Branstad (23:28.565)
The problem is we don't because you would have to know everything about the competition and it gets really complicated. So, and just because a guy scores 30 points in basketball, if you didn't watch, you can watch the video, they're like, man, look at that guy. He's a great athlete. Terrific. But just because he, just because he has, you know, 30 points doesn't necessarily mean he's a great athlete. Whereas with track data, you can really kind of assess, you know, how great of an athlete he is. But back to the multi-sport thing real quick is what we continue to see is like with quarterbacks.

Chris Huston (23:40.822)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (23:56.003)
know ESPN did a really cool study several years ago about, you know, I think they interviewed 120 plus former NFL quarterbacks and like 98 % of them were multi, multi-sport athletes, meaning they did these three sports in high school. And to me, it's not about putting a number on that. It's an intangible. It's like these guys, what does that say? They want to compete. They want to represent their school. They want to be the leader. They want to be around their friends. They want to be the leader of the other athletes, of the other players.

Chris Huston (24:12.854)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (24:23.565)
You know, that speaks volumes to me. And when you look down the laundry list of like the greatest quarterbacks, that's one thing that almost all of them have in common is they were three, four, you know, sport, you know, Peyton Manning, Brees, you name it. And it's like, but what, know, you think back to why did they do that? think the only thing that you arrive at is that they aren't competitive.

Chris Huston (24:42.822)
They love the sports. They love to compete. What are some underrated sports out there that might shed a little bit of light on a player's athleticism? A sport that maybe a lot of people don't talk about.

Mark Branstad (24:56.643)
Yeah, well, real quick, I'll throw out wrestling. People talk about that all the time. I think the unfortunate thing about wrestling is that not as many football players do it anymore because of the weight restrictions, I think, once they brought that in. Obviously, wrestling's great. Super tough sport. Some of the others that people don't talk about maybe as much, think lacrosse is becoming, they talk about it a little bit more. You see some guys, I know the Patriots are infamous for signing those UDFA lacrosse guys and they end up being pretty darn good players, special teams.

Chris Huston (25:05.153)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (25:14.635)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (25:24.803)
know, lacrosse is one of those, think, you coordination, you know, obviously toughness, there's the team aspect that not many people talk about. Let think of some others. You know, one that's kind of creeping up a little bit, although I don't think it's sanctioned everywhere, is men's volleyball. We're seeing that a little bit more on the West Coast, you know, out of some players. And it does make some sense, like, you know, for the taller guy, you the tight ends, you're seeing, you know.

Chris Huston (25:42.06)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (25:51.392)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (25:52.065)
That's becoming a little bit more of a popular one and by popular, mean, it's still in like the single digit percentiles, but we're seeing that a little bit more.

Chris Huston (25:57.069)
Sure. Danny Farmer, Danny Farmer, UCLA, uh, back in the late nineties was an excellent volleyball player and, and all American receivers. So you could really see his, uh, well on the jump balls, his, uh, his, uh, talents translating over, man, I'm looking at your, your data. You've got 291,000 player profiles. You had 14,000 players this last month. You have, you've analyzed 4.6 million plays, 2.208.3 million data points.

Mark Branstad (26:01.985)
Yeah.

Chris Huston (26:27.308)
covered 25,000 games since 2005. I mean, this is just such an impressive operation you have here. Go through real quick. When you present a profile for a player to a team, say they've taken your services, I see that you show athletic performance, on-field production, you do roster management and evaluation, advanced analytics and scores, and then team strategy.

Can you go through just real quick those key points and just talk about what you provide to your clients?

Mark Branstad (27:04.931)
Absolutely, yeah. So in this new world of the Transfer Portal and sort of they call Player Free Agency, what we realized three or four years ago is that we had to get really, really good at player accounting and roster accounting. So really sort of what we advertise and what our clients have come to expect out of us is that basically at any time when you get on, and we're a dual platform still, because once we acquired SportsSource, there's still the SportsSource platform, which is...

really been a production side website, but now it's very much gotten into personnel and then tracking football is primarily so just personnel with a lot of the athleticism flavor. So it's really a dual platform service, but we realized that what we have to do is we need to be able to give feedback on any player potentially that could get into the portal, which is power four all the way down to D3. And then there are NAIA players who...

Chris Huston (27:57.942)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (28:00.963)
you know, aren't necessarily portal eligible, but they're starting to gravitate up in some cases. You know, and then you've even got some other offshoot. So what we tasked ourselves about three years ago was to, we need to be able to account for every single player, which is about 100,000 total players in any cycle. And, you know, about 600 or 700 different teams and rosters. So that's kind of all those stats that you see there. And we are constantly adding players.

Chris Huston (28:20.876)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (28:26.765)
But it's not just building sort of blank profiles that you could get at any other side or service. Then what is their athletic background, right? To the point, did this guy, was he a basketball player? Was he a hockey player? If he did track, what were his specifics and can we put a P.A.I. score on him? Did he go to a combine? And we've got combine partners and we have clients that send us the on-campus data now so that we can score that. And then we've started to get into, there high school production stats that we can apply to this kid?

And then when he gets to college, you know, then we get into the, you know, all of the, the production and production analytics there. So, you know, it's really most, the vast majority of our time in our staff and we've got, I think, you know, we're up to five or six data analysts now that, you know, we spend a vast majority of our time now. So adjudicating rosters and players and in keeping track of what this all looks like to be sort of the system of record, you know, for college football. And we've got some NFL clients that appreciate.

Chris Huston (28:56.48)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (29:16.662)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (29:26.409)
know, that breadth and that depth where they can just get all that data in one spot, right?

Chris Huston (29:31.05)
Right. Wow. For the on-field production aspect, you obviously talk about the athletic performance. You have the on-field production. How hard is it to find reliable statistics in high school, one? And even with the track side, actually, I think you look at track times in Texas. Texas has of historically been notorious for

I don't know, maybe not very good wind gauges perhaps are.

Mark Branstad (30:02.402)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's some, raise your eyebrow. And on a legitimate point though, just as an aside, there are some crazy fast, young Texas track football athletes right now. It makes you, we have to look really, really hard. I think there are two kids that are underclassmen who have gone sub 10 and it's legitimate. mean, it's illegal and they've gone like 998. So we're seeing some things that just...

Chris Huston (30:16.512)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (30:32.458)
you are really spectacular. you know, on that level, yeah, you can't just go out and extract a bunch of track data or, you know, go scrape a bunch of track data off the internet without partners because the one thing about, you know, track data in the aggregate is it's not connected to football players. So you've got to then connect like, you know, okay, this guy went to this high school, he's a football player. And then you have to connect all that together, which is not...

Chris Huston (30:50.508)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (30:59.491)
which is not trivial, it's hard to do. And then on top of that, to your point, you have to know, is it wind dated? There are occasionally mistakes. Was it FAT? Does it need to be converted? And then sometimes, junior high data will get wrapped in to or lumped into a profile or you'll get sent data, because we take in data organically as well. They'll send you junior high data.

Chris Huston (31:09.558)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (31:26.627)
And that's not necessarily what you want to use because, you again, like, you know, junior high, you know, the shot put is 10 pounds or 8 pounds and that's not really what you want to use. So there are some pitfalls there. But we really have spent, you know, years and years and years kind of perfecting that. you know, it's a little bit easier and we've got some partners that also that actually help us out with that as well.

Chris Huston (31:26.838)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (31:33.61)
Yeah. Right.

Chris Huston (31:46.987)
Got it. it. Let's look at an example of how you might evaluate a current player. John Matier, who's a quarterback for Oklahoma, he was the first guest for our season in season three. Of course, he just had a big game against Michigan, came over from Washington State, came out of Texas, Little Elm, Texas. What did you say about John Matier coming out of high school? Or do you have that information on the ready?

Mark Branstad (32:14.837)
Yeah, so I don't know if I can share my my screen here with you, but.

Chris Huston (32:18.796)
Well, I'll just, I'll just get a screenshot later and put it up as you talk. Yeah.

Mark Branstad (32:21.955)
Okay, yeah, absolutely. know, kind of looking at him, you know, he's one of those guys who was a baseball player, you know, I think that's kind of in his background. And that's pretty typical, you know, for some of these, you know, quarterbacks. But what we would say about him is we also have what we call the PPI, which is similar to PAI, but it's a production score. And it's a college based production score. That's zero to five. So it's very similar to our athleticism score.

And last year, John was a 3.8 out of 5, which is really spectacular. That's right in line with most Division I All-Conference players. That's about the range that they would fall under. So he's very highly productive. But again, with him, and I think that we're unable to provide a score within the first four weeks, because we do something a little bit different than maybe some of the other services out there, like a PFF, who week to week will give a production score.

we actually competition adjust our scoring. So, you again, it's one thing to go out and do something against, you know, like an FCS team, but then to go out and do something spectacular against a Michigan team, we would weight that more heavily or differently than if he was going against an inferior team. And we look at it from the, you know, how good was the defense? We even break it down to the actual unit. Well, how good was the secondary? How good were the safeties and corners that he went up against?

Chris Huston (33:26.454)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (33:44.707)
So, you we would look at it in that sense, you know, as well. We also then even intake, you know, now with the NIL era, we even showcase, you know, what is on three, we have a partnership there. What do they think about him in terms of his evaluation? We even have our own in-house evaluation on the player, which ebbs and flows week to week with their production, right? So, you know, we sort of, you know, in some of the things like the production doesn't have anything to do with his body type or his athleticism.

Chris Huston (34:05.622)
Got it.

Mark Branstad (34:13.827)
But in some cases, it's obviously interesting to take a look like with receivers, like a Jeremiah Smith. He was a guy who was a state champion hurdler right at six three 200 pounds. It is interesting to see sometimes how that can translate.

Chris Huston (34:26.486)
Right. Do you get feedback from teams, for example, like do they self scout on players? for example, if you provide data on a player who is maybe not getting that many minutes, but in those minutes you were able to show that they had this kind of score. Are you able to discern that this is helping to influence decisions, whether to play them more or not? that something that exists?

Mark Branstad (34:54.987)
Yeah, I think I certainly think that, you know, in this era of the transfer portal that our production score, for example, and some of the things that we do over on the SSA side, which, you know, I'll send you the screenshot to be able to see where we really break down, you know, some of the critical factors of, for example, John that's here and how we played week to week or, you know, it within a season. You know, I think that those things can factor in, you know, to some degree.

You know, I think a lot of the stuff on the athleticism front are really more for the initial recruiting I do think that that plays out when You know these guys are trying to factor in hey this guy's coming from an FCS school or he's coming from D2 and he wants to come and talk to G5 You know with skilled players and things, you know, we're told yeah, absolutely They're gonna use maybe our PAI score or their background athleticism to determine I get it that he's dominant production wise where he is

But does he also have the athleticism and the physical traits than to come here and to be successful? Right. I think when, you know, when we're talking about, you know, division one, you know, group of five power four, you know, production rules the day. And usually there they're going to look at like, you know, snap counts, right? Hey, does this guy have 200 or 300 snap counts within the season? Okay. He does. And he's in the portal or he, you know, if he projects again in the portal, we're going to want to look at him. And then they're going to look at, you know, well, what was his, his production score?

you know, interacting football, you know, what do they say? And then how does that correlate maybe to who we already have on the roster? Are we surprised, you know, by that? And they're gonna look at, you know, probably, you know, some other services and they've got their own internal grading. But I think that in terms of the way that they use our production analytics is probably after they've done their initial eval, they're gonna say, okay, let's take a look here. What did they say? Now that we've arrived at what we think, what do they have?

Chris Huston (36:33.578)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (36:45.033)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to present a challenge to you. that is, for years, decades, there's been constant talk about why don't office of linemen get more Heisman pub? Why don't defensive linemen, defensive players? And the answer I've always had for that is just, there's just fewer metrics, right? To, gauge their impact on a game, a left tackle. You can say didn't give up a sack, but that doesn't tell you what he proactively did. It tells you what he didn't.

do in a way, right? You don't know if how many times he even had to go back for pass protection necessarily. So is there metrics that can be created or have you ever thought about creating metrics that are more like consumable by media, for example, who are like, if you're looking to create an all American team for opposite line, it's almost impossible to really have any objective way to measure it.

and against one another, right? You could have the best left tackle in the country playing for North Dakota state. And other than some scouts saying, this guy's really athletic. You can't really gauge that person's performance against the left tackle for Alabama. so has there ever been any consideration to creating a more objective metric that can be applied across some of these other non-skill position players?

Mark Branstad (38:11.691)
Yeah, so that's a, you're right, that is a really difficult one. I think that there are some services out there that use computer vision that have, in fact, a lot of metrics on linemen. I think that some of those are met with skepticism because like you point out, I think we've heard from some coaching staffs that...

Chris Huston (38:20.127)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (38:34.689)
Well, especially with linemen, if you don't know what their assignments are, the blocking assignments, and actually one of the guys I started trying to bowl with was a long time line coach that he actually coached with me in high school. And he's always great. you don't know necessarily, like if we told him that he's got help with a chip block or whatever, you don't know what his assignment was. And if you don't know that on a

Chris Huston (38:50.09)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, PFF doesn't know that, but they're putting out a grade anyway.

Mark Branstad (39:00.607)
Right. And they do a terrific job with the alignment. that's how we're able to give a player production score on linemen using alignment and then some of the success in the running game and the passing game. But it's always kind of a proxy. So your point, it's really hard to pinpoint. And it's probably not doing ultimate justice to alignment on a player-by-player basis. It's really, really difficult. think that there are some, and we've been told,

Chris Huston (39:09.515)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (39:27.651)
There are some services that do it at a really high level with computer vision and things like that. But you're right, unless you, you really have to have, you know, what the coach was telling the player to do. Cause I think you brought up the Alabama example. think a couple of years ago in the title game, I forget who they were playing, but one tackle in particular, who I won't name, I think he was a first round pick, took a lot of heat for maybe allowing a couple of sacks. But we came to find out later that it was very open, that he was told.

you know, not to protect the inside gap. you know, coaching staff brought that up. Well, no, he did a great job. But I think he was graded that, hey, he got defeated multiple times in lot of multiple sacks, but he was just doing what he was told, right? And nobody knew that, you know, going into it. So it's really, really hard to accurately grade, you know, linemen in particular, one, because there's so much going on, but two, yeah, you don't have the coaching input.

Chris Huston (40:04.949)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (40:09.309)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Huston (40:24.235)
Yeah. And then, know, they, they, they say about defenders though, he plays assignment football. Well, sometimes you put, make you play, you do the assignment properly, but maybe, the play went a different way and maybe what you really need to have done was read and react and do something different. And sometimes that's what I think you get in certain players where, where they make the, they, they, they are put into a defense and they have an assignment, but they recognize.

that, this, this running back or this quarterback is going to do a, going to do a draw play and, something about, about it. And so they, they get away from their assignments, sniff out the play and make the tackle. And this can either become something that, that grades really well, based on someone not knowing the assignment or when the coach puts out the assignment grades later on, it's like, missed the grade on that.

Mark Branstad (41:14.851)
Yeah, yeah, you're on. Yeah, sometimes being an undisciplined player can on the stat sheet look really good, right? I think that's what you're making. sometimes disciplined guys who are doing what they're supposed to do within the scheme or the play call might end up looking bad, but that's what they were supposed to do. You know, you see that a lot with the kind of the memes and the things on Twitter sometimes where they they'll take the snapshot of the running back and they'll show all like the huge gap in the daylight. But, you know, it's like

Chris Huston (41:21.973)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (41:44.035)
Yeah, but you know, he might have been running, you know, it was his own play and he's supposed to follow like the guard, right? That's what he's supposed to do. you know, everybody points out, yeah, but there's this huge hole right to the left. If he just worked on left, would have, you know, had a 30-yard game. Instead, he had a negative two, but he was doing what, you know, what he was told in the play call, right? And we don't necessarily know what that was. And one of the best insights, you know, we had a guy that...

worked for Triton football for about a year, David Walker and he coached in the NFL running backs. He would tell us all the time that when they go and break down plays after games, he would constantly, he was always had his players. Hey coach, we actually weren't in that, we were in this. Oh, and like the head, you know, head NFL coaches, they're told by the players all the time, like coach, we checked to this. Oh, I didn't know that. So like if they don't know, how could somebody, you know, ancillary

Chris Huston (42:26.667)
Yeah.

Mark Branstad (42:40.449)
have any idea what's going on. And the truth is that they don't, they just do the best that they can. But one last one is, as I saw, like the example you bring up, I think the Bengals rookie, Shemar Stewart, I guess they said he scored spectacularly well on the advanced metrics, but his box score had zeros. Like he had no tackles, no sacks, no TFLs, no force fumbles, nothing, but he graded really, really well, right? So to your point,

Chris Huston (42:42.41)
Right.

Chris Huston (42:56.425)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (43:06.229)
Right.

Mark Branstad (43:07.723)
Like these advanced metrics are kind of showing like, hey, we can tell you when a guy isn't a stat stuffer, but he's played really well. So I think that's something else that probably the public is going to start to gravitate more towards these advanced statistics on lineman that probably really tell you do a better job of telling you how they actually played than the box score, right?

Chris Huston (43:25.929)
Yeah. Yeah. They used to put out, I mean, just even, pop popular stats like pancakes and decleaters. I mean, those used to be around. don't see those anymore. And I think it's cause the, the, the coaching staffs keep track of these types of things, but they don't release them publicly for some reason. but,

Mark Branstad (43:43.235)
Right, yeah, and I think they bend a little more subjective too, kind of like drops, like, right? You know, that's an, you know, that's an, it's hard to say, you know, objectively what a drop is, right? Yeah, exactly. So there's a little bit more subjectivity to, okay, you know, it's pretty clear when he does pancake, but hey, you know, it kind of knocked that guy off his feet. Was that actually a pancake or not? So a little bit of subjectivity to it.

Chris Huston (43:48.073)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (43:52.267)
term of art. Yeah.

Chris Huston (44:02.335)
Yeah, yeah. And, and then that's funny too, because knocking a guy at his feet are just buying time. so the quarterback can throw or equally as effective.

Mark Branstad (44:13.187)
Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of like total tackles, right? Sometimes people, if you look at the actual stats versus then the coaching stats, a lot of times, like tackles, solo tackles are going to be very, different than what the media has versus what the internal number is. Because sometimes a tackle isn't always a tackle, depending on who's with.

Chris Huston (44:17.749)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Huston (44:27.359)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sure, you know, it also you know the tackle some of these stats are depend on the press box the people that's keeping them some some press boxes By that I mean usually sports information offices are more liberal with defensive back past defenses and some are are you know much tighter and Some if you jump on the pile, I mean there are guys I remember back In the 80s, there'd be guys that supposedly had 206 tackles

in a season, right? And it's like, just doesn't happen anymore. And they've tightened all that up. And what I love about your whole approach is that I feel like there's a germ here of a future apparatus that can really create a much better way of comparing what players are doing. just launching into that a bit, have you thought about what your future is here with the organization?

Mark Branstad (45:01.303)
Right.

Chris Huston (45:28.927)
Where you see it going? Do you just consider doing team service? Just being your future? Because it's such a fascinating topic. And I feel like if more college football fans or football fans knew more about these types of things that are lurking in the background, that there's a forward-facing consumer-based approach that might be really popular that you guys could put out there.

Mark Branstad (45:55.937)
Yeah, I think linking this back to Marty with CFP stats and then Drew in the SSA side is that those guys do a terrific job with the production side data. they literally, Marty spends a tremendous amount of time cleansing that information from these SIDs. And sometimes it does matter to your point, like if there's a sax record and, hey, was that really a sax or was it really just, which should be marked as a TFL and.

Chris Huston (46:14.219)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (46:21.943)
you know, all those things and they do a great job of working through all that stuff. And, and yeah, I think one of the, one of the areas that, you know, we may move into is I think that the fans, you know, and football hobbyists are getting smarter all the time and demanding and wanting more information. You know, they want to know, you know, if they don't want to know the specific like athletic backgrounds, they kind of want to get, you know, a better, you know, more appropriate, you know, athletic metric as opposed to, you know, some people tell us like, Hey, we

you know, we use the EA sports score, right? You know, like that's all we got. You know, we got, you know, there's not a available track data point. You didn't run the 40. So we just, you know, we got, we got to use this, you know, 89 is this athleticism score of speed or whatever. And, you know, we could probably do better than that. But yeah, there's also people that, you know, I think consumers are getting smarter all the time and there is this want need for, you know, not only access to better raw data,

Chris Huston (46:53.419)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Branstad (47:19.363)
but then also analysis and PFF does a great job with what they do with consumers and everything else. I think that there are, when it comes to these advanced analytics, some consumers are really good with it, but then others, it's a little too complicated. They want something that's a little bit more surface level that they can really sink their teeth into. So, I think that's an area that we're trying to get into. We've got some media partnerships.

Chris Huston (47:36.555)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Branstad (47:45.155)
And some of our data actually does appear, I don't know, and we don't ask for it, but some of our stuff does appear. People just don't necessarily know. And then, we've got more agencies now that are reaching out to us. That's an area that we're doing more sports agents because they actually have to care about like, for example, high school kids now, which they never did before. So that's another area, but on the consumer front, I think over time that will continue to...

Chris Huston (48:02.581)
Sure.

Mark Branstad (48:13.278)
to be an opportunity for us that we may try to grow.

Chris Huston (48:16.295)
Awesome. Awesome. Well, this is tracking football.com is Mark Branstad. He is also a part of sports source analytics and CFB stats.com. know a lot of you out there use CFB stats.com. I certainly probably look at it every day. Man, I could talk about this kind of stuff forever, but I'm going to have to let you go here before we just keep going and going. So Mark Branstad, thanks so much for coming on the Heisman Trophy podcast. Such a fascinating conversation about what you guys do and man, I'm just excited to see you flourishing and talking about talent and evaluations and athletics on a regular basis.

Mark Branstad (48:57.175)
Well, Chris, I really appreciate it again. It's great to catch up. Great to see all the things that you've done with the Heisman Trophy group and everything that you do here. And really appreciate the invite. It's great chopping it up. And hopefully offline, we can continue to keep in touch and talk things through. But great to catch up with you.