The greatest program in FCS is moving to the Mountain West, effective this upcoming season. North Dakota State won 10 of the past 15 FCS national titles and decided to try something new. It’s a huge move, giving FBS a new contender for the Group of 6 spot in the Playoff and reshaping the competitive pecking order in FCS. But we’ve still got many questions to talk through:

* Why now? NDSU had batted around this idea for years

* Does the money make sense? (NDSU probably wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t, but the additional expenses will be millions per year)

* Why the Mountain West and not the new Pac-12?

* How good will the Bison be right away?

* Is it ever right to be bored of success?

* Is it time to update our priors on how hard it is for teams to successfully leap from FCS to FBS?

* TRIVIA: Which seven states still don’t have an FBS team?

Also, we talk about the college elements of the Super Bowl and Bobby Hauck’s very brief retirement from coaching. Producer: Anthony Vito

Thanks to our partners, Homefield and Nokian Tyres.

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By no means do we stop talking about college football in the offseason. We take the opportunity to get creative and bring subscribers all sorts of deep dives on CFB history, the coaching carousel, Xs and Os, and plenty more. Help us make the show and get lots more of it by becoming a paid subscriber.

The Big Ten’s commissioner, Tony Petitti, spent much of this season trying to do two things: 1) Expand the Playoff to his liking, and 2) Get his member schools to sign a big private capital deal. Neither happened, and the conference now appears to have wasted a lot of time off the field even as it was winning a third-straight national championship on it. Matt Brown of the tremendous Extra Points newsletter and document library joins Alex and Richard to talk about these misadventures, in particular:

* How Petitti has made himself the sport’s main bureaucratic villain, taking a role that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey may have seen as his birthright

* Why a lot of the Big Ten wanted this private capital deal

* Why it didn’t ultimately come together, despite those wishes

* The one actual good reason for wanting the deal, explained by Matt

* Why Rutgers’ finances are so bad

You can read Matt several times every week by subscribing to his Extra Points newsletter. We are both happy subscribers, along with most conference commissioners, countless athletic directors, and anyone else who cares about being informed on the off-field movements shaping college football.

SZD paying subscribers will hear a lot more from Matt later this week

He’ll join us on a subscriber episode to discuss Playoff non-expansion, the state of the football calendar, the NCAA’s stalled (?) efforts to get an antitrust exemption from Congress, the eligibility crisis in multiple sports, the race to fund excess NIL money on top of the House settlement, and the topic that’s always on all of our minds: basketball video game licensing.

Before the season, Godfrey, Richard, and Alex made a bunch of predictions and buried them in a time capsule. Time to dig it up! What did everyone learn over the course of the season? How were our prior opinions challenged? Where we got things wildly wrong, was that bad luck (Penn State) or the sign of missing something much deeper (arguably Clemson)? Let’s review in detail:

* How each FBS conference met or didn’t meet our expectations

* Conference USA and the MAC will just never make sense

* The shocking collapses of Penn State and Clemson and the still-pretty-surprising three-loss season that Texas had

* Godfrey’s almost legendary spotting of a North Texas QB

* What will we think about in a different way heading into 2026?

Producer: Anthony Vito.

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