Virginia Tech has had a rough decade. Has the cavalry finally arrived to save the program from irrelevance? Tech hired James Franklin and appears to appears to be throwing huge sums of cash at his program in the hopes of stopping a backslide that started late in Frank Beamer’s career and then spun out of control under Justin F…

How are things going for all 16 teams in the SEC? Let’s discuss which way the arrow is pointing. Alex and Richard head to the Southeast on this latest Offseason Vibe Check, a chance to talk about actual football teams during the long, cold offseason. In this episode, the crew covers …

* 1:25: Texas’s offensive line problem and whether a nice finish to the regular season and a bowl win can be a springboard

* 5:16: Ole Miss’s Pete Golding era and the window that’s still open

* 9:41: LSU’s Lane Kiffin honeymoon period

* 13:45: Texas A&M’s opportunity depending on Marcel Reed’s growth

* 16:57: Arkansas’s Tyson money, Ryan Silverfield’s rough PR start, and a transfer class that makes you raise your eyebrows

* 22:18: Mississippi State’s reunion with an old friend

* 26:15: Vanderbilt’s post-Diego Pavia reset with five-star Jared Curtis

* 28:05: Alabama’s Ryan Williams retention and a quiet case for quarterback development. But what else is there?

* 33:29: Auburn’s clear and immediate upgrade at quarterback

* 36:26: Oklahoma’s OL portal haul

* 39:47: Florida’s Georgia Tech offensive import and Buster Faulkner’s fresh start

* 41:09: Kentucky’s CEO-style setup under Will Stein

* 44:14: Missouri’s dip down the prep recruiting rankings and whether Eli Drinkwitz can reverse that trend

* 48:49: Georgia’s spurning of the portal world

* 52:12: Tennessee’s latest blue-chip QB moment

* 58:27: South Carolina’s crossroads under Shane Beamer

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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

This is a subscriber episode

For $10 a month (or getting 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