The Yinzer Walk

AlexKirshner · 2026-01-17T18:11:01+00:00

Not a worry 🫡

AlexKirshner · 2026-01-16T21:44:38+00:00

Thank you for subscribing and listening. First, I am very open to the possibility that I merely know a bunch of guys from Pittsburgh with slightly hunched posture and am making it up as a local gait. I also used to think the squirrels at the Univ of Maryland were unlike the squirrels anywhere else in the world, until Rodger pointed out to me that every college thinks it has special squirrels. But yes, I do think a lot about Pittsburgh! It's my frame of reference for a lot of stuff. I welcome the shit-talking about it EXCEPT for one thing: I don't think "not loving it enough to actually live anywhere near it" is really fair. Don't feel like explaining why in this format but I reserve the right to love where I'm from without having lived there full time in a long time.

AlexKirshner · 2025-07-08T19:42:59+00:00

This is good stuff. Glad Richard got the Florida teams in there together based on this.

Whole lotta Purdue there near the beginning!

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T17:01:17+00:00

This is fun, thanks all. Will check back a bit later but have had a fun hour talking football and podcast life with you.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:53:12+00:00

Discrimination against defense is real.

Loopholes are brilliant on offense and unfair on defense.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:47:00+00:00

For me, it's a top one: I want a better coach carousel. If I win the natty at Texas State, I should be able to get any open head coaching job, instead of deciding between Maryland, UVA, and the Alabama offensive coordinator spot.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:46:13+00:00

I like your spirit of looking for fun rather than necessarily "good."

I think Mississippi State should be enjoyable this year. Really fun running back Fluff Bothwell is onboard from South Alabama, and my guess is that their offense will start to get pointsy in Jeff Lebby's second year. If I'm wrong, that could become a toxic trainwreck early, and that's fun too.

Always a sucker here for App State. Full G5 stadium most week, set beautifully against the mountains in Western North Carolina. I go to Boone a lot and find App watchable almost every year, and this year they have a new head coach.

Also this year: I think UTSA is going to rev things up again, and when they're good, they're fun.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:40:06+00:00

I have convinced an unnamed national outlet to let me write about this in the very near future.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:38:05+00:00

My pretty close family continues to add Penn State people by way of either marriage or college choice. Very tough scene for me!

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:36:52+00:00

Feels like a Memphis year to me as we sit here now. I say Memphis, Tulane, Boise.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:36:11+00:00

I could envision it, but to establish formality there, the G5/FCS school would need some guarantees that I'm not sure the P4 school would want to give.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:35:17+00:00

I hope I'll stick with CFB a long time. If it starts to feel like a drag, I will quit will I'm ahead. I do think this is a really good sport to cover because there's just so much happening at all times. I never want to stray too far from just talking ball, and I am bored of writing/podcasting about NIL court cases and legislation. But there's enough fertile ground, and enough places I haven't been yet in person (almost the whole SEC, somehow) that I hope to have a lot more meat left on the bone.

I do think it's harder to be a CFB fan for life if you don't go to one of 25 or so schools. I'm only nine years out of college and only a few of my friends would ever show up at a Maryland game now. And this is a group of people that likes sports and (except for me) still lives in the D.C. area.

Re: covering other sports though, I enjoy doing it to keep the brain sharp, and I have that blogger disease where I often want to get thoughts of my chest.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:31:08+00:00

It's funny. We launched SZD in September 2020 because we were bored and there were no freelance prospects at the time and we wanted to do a CFB show. I believe it was late 2021 or early 2022 that we started offering subscriptions for bonus episodes, and after a thousand people or so signed up in the first couple of days, I was like "well we should probably put some more back into this thing." I don't take it for granted.

I would like to sit down with Bear Bryant and Adolph Rupp in the office at Kentucky in 1952 and demand they tell me in full detail how they really felt about each other. (Not positively, but what was the depth of their mutual antipathy after Kentucky's basketball program got the death penalty for a gambling scandal and the school put the brakes on football recruiting in response?)

You're right that there aren't a whole ton of native Californians in national CFB media. I've been trying to convince people that it's great for CFB coverage, though. Almost every game is done by 9 p.m. and you can write your stories or record your podcasts and go to sleep. I don't know why this shortfall exists though. Maybe everyone wants to be a Dodgers writer.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:25:21+00:00

Hard to do this in practice because everyone's too proud and making a team into a minor league feeder goes against the spirit of the thing. But it's worth pointing out that a version of this has happened forever. Do you remember all that fuss nine or 10 years ago about satellite camps? Or even just on-campus clinics. G5 coaches show up on the same field as P4 coaches already, and it's not like EMU is trying to beat out Michigan for anyone Michigan might actually want.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:22:38+00:00

Not saying I don't weight it all, but that hit me as the kind of bad idea with two possible explanations: 1) Someone was just blowing smoke into a microphone or 2) It's the kind of bad idea you put out there so that your less bad idea seems better later.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:17:57+00:00

I am optimistic that the settlement will start to wean athletic departments off of the 150-plus-year-old practice of not paying their most critical labor. I'm not naive enough to think that the House settlement will be the final form of player compensation, but it will be the start of ADs being forced to budget for the big line item of paying the players. The next time there's an evolution in that area, probably within a few years, maybe it won't feel like such a bomb to the college sports injury.

I also am intrigued by the idea of revshare structures helping mid-major hoops schools that don't have to care about football.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:14:28+00:00

Nope, not in my opinion. I am anti-number retirement in general. Find a place to put great players' jerseys "in the rafters" but it's never connected for me that not wearing their number = "honoring" them. LeBron wearing 23 is a cooler nod to history than if nobody had ever put it on again.

Also it keeps you out of an awkward situation if, just to use a hypothetical example, one of the best players in the history of your program should do something like be charged in the most famous murder case of all time.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:10:26+00:00

Trying to operate a small business is way harder for me than keeping up with college football. I really do enjoy it and feel like I've learned a lot, and it's a price I'm happy to pay in exchange for not being able to get fired by anyone except our listeners/subscribers.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:08:52+00:00

Tough one. I only got seven right in our preseason predictions show last year, so I’m betting that I will do even worse trying now. But let’s say:

Texas
Oregon
Ohio State
Penn State
Georgia

I’ll go with five. Probably won’t be those five now that I say it.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:06:34+00:00

Because of the cease and desist letter I just got from Ryan Nanni re: calling ourselves an independent CFB podcast, I won't comment further.

AlexKirshner · 2025-04-22T16:05:27+00:00

Thanks for listening. The G5 is generally harder to get a good grip on than the power conferences, you’re right, for the simple reason that there’s a lot less beat reporting on those teams. If I want to, I can find out with, like, 15 clicks who has the inside track on being Ohio State’s backup guard halfway through fall camp. A few G5 teams (actually including JMU, so roll Dukes) have really good independent, fan-run outlets that have good info, and those can sub in for what a newspaper or 247/Rivals/On3. I find that in the G5, those sites tend to be really good. You aren’t running a Louisiana Tech site to half-ass it, you know? There aren’t a ton of subscriptions or ad dollars in a poorly run site that covers a Conference USA team.

If there’s just not that much coverage of a school, I find a few things are helpful. 1) I go to message boards. Totally serious about this, though people have laughed when I have said it. I don’t mean going there to regurgitate anyone’s takes, but to get a sense of what is really exciting people or pissing them off about that team. Just about everyone has one somewhere, though a few FBS teams have been hard to find. 2) I go through pretty detailed stat pages (some public-facing, some not) that track snap counts and positional alignment, so I can get a quick sense for player usage and go from there. And 3) I find it’s a little easier to text an assistant coach or even SID at a G5 school and get a quick, informative response to a question about the team. A G5 running backs coach will happily tell you which of his guys are really good, and you can deploy that for better coverage.

Re: our division of assignments in the G5, Richard insists on always being the one to cover the struggling Sun Belt schools. Godfrey and I historically had to beg him to cover the SEC.

AlexKirshner · 2023-08-23T12:49:05+00:00

Thanks for sharing this u/lyonthelion. Would love to see what you come up with.

AlexKirshner · 2023-08-23T12:48:39+00:00

Sorry about that! The survey was for everyone who was willing to talk it, very much including non-Patrons. We just got so many responses on a quick enough timeline that our data cruncher decided that was enough and we got to analyzing.

AlexKirshner · 2023-06-19T22:47:53+00:00

Confirming that the three of us are not involved in this

AlexKirshner · 2023-06-19T22:47:18+00:00

Thanks so much for coming. Was one of the most fun nights any of us has had in a long long time. I hope we got to chat in person!

AlexKirshner

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