Alex talks with the wise baseball scribe (and USC football fan) Joe Sheehan of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter about how our sport is currently on a trajectory that looks awfully familiar to another sport’s recent arc.

College football is grappling with a long list of the same problems and proposals that have been bouncing around Major League Baseball for decades: Should the sport consolidate its media rights in the name of “competitive balance”? Can we even agree on what that term means and on how balanced the game is right now? How wide is too wide a gap between the richest teams and the poorest? To what extent should players be tied to their teams so that fans have a reason to build a connection with them? And what could college football’s leaders learn from the good and bad decisions baseball’s bosses have made over the past 50 years? What about from the rules of baseball that didn’t even come out of any one decision, but by accident? This episode covers all of that. Happy Opening Day, by the way.

Alex here with the strongest possible recommendation to check out and subscribe to Joe’s newsletter here. For me, Joe is a formative writer whose years of emails have shaped the way I think about one of my favorite sports. I appreciate him coming on SZD to indulge this theory of mine.

Producer: Anthony Vito

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The ACC Offseason Vibe Check is here. Alex and Richard check in with all 17 ACC football schools and throw in Notre Dame as well. In this episode …

* 1:31: Miami made a big playoff run and then simply reloaded

* 4:14: Duke won football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball conference titles in the same year, and yet still has bad vibes because of some devastating portal losses

* 7:47: Georgia Tech’s fourth defensive coordinator under Brent Key, the Buster Faulkner exodus to Florida, and whether Alberto Mendoza can be the next Haynes King

* 10:16: SMU’s offensive coordinator change leaves Kevin Jennings is looking around the empty house wondering who’s going to help him

* 13:29: Stanford brings on Tavita Pritchard as Andrew Luck’s handpicked guy, and Yale transfer Nico Brown is the portal add to watch

* 17:01: Virginia might really be building something now?

* 19:25: Cal has a legitimately improved talent picture under Tosh Lupoi

* 22:56: NC State went 8-5, but doesn’t feel like an 8-5 program

* 24:45: Louisville is setting itself up for another preseason hype cycle

* 28:17: Wake Forest had a great first year under Jake Dickert and may find itself strained to keep the momentum going

* 29:09: Boston College’s year-two flameout to 2-10 under Bill O’Brien leaves questions about what happens now

* 32:54: Syracuse continues to cook in recruiting, but will need a QB

* 34:32: North Carolina looks better, at least on the field

* 36:52: Clemson may – may! – be getting close to the end

* 41:52: Pitt kept its QB and OC, but the money situation is a big problem

* 45:40: Notre Dame brings back most of the band and takes a shot at an Ohio State wide receiver

* 51:30: Florida State’s early-season schedule could end the Mike Norvell era by mid-October

* 58:41: Virginia Tech is the most fascinating team in the sport to Alex, but we’ll mainly talk about the Hokies on a larger show next week

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Lucy Rohden has spent the past few college football seasons visiting dozens of stadiums for some of the biggest games of the year. What has she learned about the sport through these travels? She joins Richard to talk about her-long road trip through the sport. In this episode:

* 1:34: What constitutes a college town, plus the critical nature of a college town being easily walkable (sorry, South Bend and College Station)

* 6:58: Lucy’s proprietary system for ranking 50 college towns

* 8:27: The gameday environments she’s found overrated and underrated, and which places are too quiet because of either stadium design or the people who pack into the building

* 12:22: The 50/50 proposition of getting a good meal on a game weekend in a college town, and how Auburn’s restaurant seen is like New York’s

* 13:58: Lucy’s most overrated stadium in the sport

* 18:43: The very different ways the Big Ten and SEC situate their most famous stadiums as compared to the rest of campus. Plus, the majesty of a nice Friday afternoon walk around a campus you’re visiting for a game

* 20:16: Hater’s guide to College Station plus the gentrification of a lot of these towns. (See some of our old work on this topic here.)

* 25:02: The majesty of the trees in Gainesville, Florida

* 34:32: The contradiction of perhaps the greatest game environment in the sport, LSU, not even really being in a college town

You can find Lucy all over the internet. Her YouTube channel is here. We appreciate her stopping by and sharing some of her lessons from the road!

Producer: Anthony Vito

This is a subscriber episode

For $10 a month (or a free month with the whole year), you get:

* Roughly twice as many episodes (usually two bonus a week in season and once a week out of season, but sometimes more)

* Our entire back catalog of hundreds of bonus episodes, with many of them focused on evergreen topics from college football history

* Subscriber Q&A opportunities

* The knowledge that you’re helping us make an audience-driven podcast about college football and keeping this podcast alive and well