Interview: Nicole Auerbach on college football in 2020
The Athletic's Nicole Auerbach explains who is currently playing college football in the middle of this global pandemic, how people are justifying that decision, what we've learned about flexible scheduling, and if there will be bowl games and a playoff series this season.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Jessica here. Today’s interview is with The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach and it’s all about this season in college football. Two things before we dive in: first, we recorded this on Wednesday, September 30th – which might feel like forever ago, but was actually only eight days ago. Second, Nicole has an adorable dog named Red; you will probably hear him making some noise in the background during this interview because, well, dogs need and want love too. Okay, let’s go. So, I’m just gonna start with, who are you you and what do you do?
Nicole: I am Nicole Auerbach, and I’m a senior writer, I cover college football primarily for The Athletic.
Jessica: So, can you…I find this all very confusing, I’m not following college football very much anymore. Who is playing college football right now? Or maybe, is there anyone who’s not playing? What’s actually going on?
Nicole: As of Wednesday, September 30th, not everyone is playing. Leagues that have started to play are the SEC, the ACC, Big 12, the American, and Conference USA, and the Sun Belt, so we’re at 6 now.
Jessica: Okay.
Nicole: 6 of the 10 FBS leagues, which are the leagues that go to the college bowl playoffs and play bowl games. Most of FCS is not playing, so that is a lot of the leagues that are either basketball-centric or just aren’t as big time college sports. The FCS playoffs are also run by the NCAA, so they are not having fall championships. So that was also a factor, but the other ten leagues operate outside of the NCAA for football because they don’t run their postseasons. So as of now you have six leagues playing; 3 of the Power 5. But in the last couple of weeks we have gotten restart plans from everybody else.
Jessica: Oh, oaky.
Nicole: So in a few weeks the Big Ten will come back, the Pac-12 will come back, Mountain West will come back, MAC will come back. So, everyone has plans now to play in fall of 2020. They’re gonna play different amounts of games, and that’s even with the planned schedules, but obviously there’s gonna be postponements and cancellations. So we don’t actually know how many games everyone’s actually going to play.
Jessica: [laughs] Hard thing to answer. There’s been already a ton of postponed games, right? Like, it’s been a big mess. So what are the reasons that school presidents, conference commissioners, head coaches in the league, have given for returning to play? Even as we see universities themselves struggling on campuses – dorms locked down, issues with COVID all over the place. What are they actually saying is the reason they’re doing this?
Nicole: It’s a layered question, and a good one. So, back when some of these leagues did postpone – or at least the way that they talked about this back in, like, June and July – they were really nervous about campuses reopening in general and the regular student populations and the spikes that that would mean. I think there were a lot of people that expected that if there were 1000 cases at the University of Alabama, for example, that that school would shut down, that everyone would go online. It would be really hard to justify still playing sports. Really what happened in August and then early September was people just kept playing through. People didn’t shut down. I honestly kind of think that the turning point was when Notre Dame had its first outbreak with regular students back on campus, and instead of sending everybody home, which they said they considered, they just did a two week pause, basically. They said, “Everyone, just do online classes from your dorms, let’s get this outbreak under control and we’ll reevaluate in 2 weeks.” By not sending everyone home…Because I think that even in a place like Notre Dame it would be a hard sell to say, you know, this is a place that takes itself so seriously academically. I think it would be a hard sell to say we’re still gonna let our football teams be here.
Jessica: Is that your dog?
Nicole: That is Red.
Jessica: Red!
Nicole: Hey! Come here. [Jessica laughs] Come here. Okay. So, Notre Dame takes itself very seriously academically and I don’t think even though it has aspirations of big time football at all times, competing for national championships; I just think it still would’ve been a hard sell to keep the football team there if everyone else goes online.
Jessica: So you mean it would be a hard justification at that point?
Nicole: Yes.
Jessica: Okay.
Nicole: That’s been one of the big questions. It’s almost beyond an optics question but it’s definitely an optics problem if the entire campus is in remote learning and the football team is still practicing and playing. We have schools that are doing that right now as we speak, and I also think it’s an issue in terms of the NCAA model itself, because this is a model that has been challenged in court repeatedly and the defense is that they’re student athletes, that they are like other students. So there’s no other students there, and you can’t really make that claim. Also in some of these places you don’t even have other fall sports being played.
Jessica: Right.
Nicole: So they’re not even like other student athletes. But people are moving on anyway. Like, you asked what changed, and the justification: other people did it. Other people kept practicing and preparing for games, and there have been developments in testing. So, the leagues like the Big Ten and the Pac-12 that are coming back sooner than I anticipated…Because they were looking at the spring, then they were looking at January, and now the Big Ten’s coming back in October and the Pac-12’s coming back in November. They’re justifying it by saying, “We have secured daily antigen testing, so we are going to spend all of this money to have daily testing so that we know everyone’s gonna get tested, get the results, point of care testing, and then go on to the practice field, then go on to the game, so we know that everyone tests negative before they practice.” Because you have some of these programs – and this is what’s causing postponement – you have a lot of places where they’re doing two or three PCR tests a week. Those are the ones that are the gold standard, but you have to send them out to labs.
So what you’re seeing is sometimes a team gets tested and then two days of practice, everyone’s trying to follow all the right things. But again, they’re not in a bubble, they’re in a campus community, they’re around other people. Then it turns out days later you get the result back and someone had tested positive. All of the people who were in close contact with them now have to go into quarantine for contact tracing. So that’s where we’re seeing a lot of the postponements. It’s catching a lot of people in contact tracing. So, the leagues that are gonna go to daily testing are hoping that they won’t have that happen. They’ll be able to catch infections really soon before they can spread, before it becomes an outbreak. So that's again part of the justification, that now they have this testing piece they feel better moving forward. They also have been addressing the concerns around myocarditis, which is that heart inflammation issue, which early emerging data suggests that it might be tied to COVID-19 at a more alarming rate than other viruses.
They are getting more comfortable, again, because other leagues are doing this, saying, “Okay, we can’t prevent the spread of this virus. We can mitigate what we can, but all we can really do is do screening and tests and EKGs and all the stuff on the back end before we let someone go back to practice, because that’s dangerous, but we can manage by screening, we can identify and then figure out the plan of action from there before we let someone go back to practice or games or anything that’s really strenuous.” And people are more comfortable with that. I think that there were a lot of presidents and a lot of people understandably very nervous about this as you see the emerging data, and now they see people figuring out how to manage it and screen for it and test for it on the back end and they’re more comfortable moving forward.
So it’s really those two pieces from the medical standpoint, and then just the overarching backdrop of ‘people are doing this.’ I mean, it’s not been super smooth and there’s been a lot of postponements and cancellations, but people are playing. So that changes the equation too because they’re figuring out how to do it; you have a bunch of players and coaches being like, “How is it not safe for me but it's safe enough for this school?” Or, “Notre Dame is in the state over, how come they can do it and we can’t?” High school football in some of these states…There’s a lot. So, all of that dynamics and then those two medical pieces that they can use to kind of justify it, that’s how we get here.
Jessica: Do any of them actually talk about money? Because, I mean, the cynical part of me assumes that that’s a lot of what’s driving this.
Nicole: Well, a little bit. You’ve had a couple of presidents involved in these decisions to return say it’s not about money.
Jessica: Of course.
Nicole: To explain that actually, and this is a decent point: it’s gonna cost a lot of money to do this type of testing, so it’s not like, okay, now we just get our millions. They’re going to have to spend a lot to get through the season. There are gonna be, in the Big Ten and the Pac-12, no fans in the stands, so, no ticket revenue. But I think at the same time you’re seeing people be very honest about their financial hits to date. So you’ve had Big Ten athletic directors talk about how much they projected to lose with no season and then what the adjustment is with a truncated season, and then you also have places throughout the Big 12, throughout the ACC, that are playing – and even some have reduced capacity and are going to have fans, and they’re still saying, “We’re still gonna lose $40 million.” So, we’re still having layoffs, we’re still having pay cuts for our coaches and things like that. So I think the money conversation is there but no one’s coming out and saying, like, we want our media rights revenue, and it’s gonna be expensive to get there, and everyone’s angry and so we’re gonna do it to bring in some of that money even though we can’t bring in our ticket sale money. No one’s coming out and saying that specifically, but obviously it’s part of the factor. We already are seeing, again, the projected losses have been adjusted based on getting that media money, which is the majority…Maybe not the majority, but it is 50% of the revenue that these athletic departments bring in at that level.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely significant, like, the idea that that’s not a factor is ridiculous knowing that. So, what about the student athletes or the athletes themselves? Are we seeing players opt out? Can you tell us maybe about one of them and the story why they’ve chosen to sit out the season?
Nicole: Yeah, so it’s a good question because it’s shifted. I think you saw opt-outs start in the summer and as we approach the season, and then there was a flurry of that when people weren’t playing. So you’ve actually seen some of the Big Ten players who decided to opt out and either just spend time with their family or prepare for the NFL draft and just not really engage with the risk on a college campus. You’ve seen star players like Rashod Bateman at Minnesota get clearance from the NCAA to return because they wanted, now that they have a season, they wanted to come back. Again, they're justifying it by saying with these increased protocols, increased testing, I feel safer. But you have seen it in a fair amount with NFL draft hopefuls.
Jessica: Hmm. Okay.
Nicole: And I absolutely understand that. First of all, there’s risk of injury in a weird season that’s kind of disjointed. You didn’t have your full offseason for training. Then obviously the risk of COVID, I mean, you can control your own settings and hire an agent who can hire a personal trainer for you or something and just, again, control your own settings more, that’s better. So it made sense that you were seeing that, and now you’re seeing some of those guys come back because they do wanna play with their teammates and have their final year in college; you had a couple of players at Ohio State who did that as well. But you do have ones that just straight up opted out, and the NCAA made a rule that you have to honor that player’s scholarship for next year if they opt out for COVID reasons. I’ll give you an example of what that meant, like, the intent of that allowance.
Jessica: Okay.
Nicole: Because you had individual schools doing that, and leagues, but then to have it as a blanket rule…An example would be Memphis running back Kenneth Gainwell. He opted out of the season at the end of August, and he is a great player for Memphis, and he did it because, as his father told the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he had four family members die from COVID-19.
Jessica: Oh my.
Nicole: Including his uncle. So, the decision came after his uncle’s funeral. You obviously have players who have been impacted by this, and I think even on teams that are playing and guys that are playing through, you have people that have lost parents, that have lost relatives. Obviously, it’s a pandemic, and over 200,000 people have died. But that obviously is a driving force in people’s decisions, about how closely it’s impacted them and how safe they feel and their own read on their risk, or they wanna be around their family.
Jessica: Yeah.
Nicole: And not be separate from them, because you’re gonna be really isolated. You’re not gonna be able to go home every couple weeks if you’re used to that or things like that. So all of that factors in. Then I think you just also in general had, again, people who just maybe didn't wanna have to deal with the disjointed season and the potential other issues with that. I think there’s safety issues, physical safety issues. Then a college campus, like…I think about this myself. I’m not sure if I would’ve gone back if I was a regular student in this environment, right? So I think it’s really just evaluating all of those things. But I do think for the opt-outs that were related to COVID and not just preparing for the draft, I think that it absolutely mattered how closely you were impacted, did you lose loved ones? Because I think as we know across the country, the closer you are to COVID the more seriously you’ve been taking this, the more you understand all of the restrictions and you’ve been wearing masks longer, things like that. So it’s the same thing with these players trying to make a decision about a virus that maybe isn’t going to…They’re otherwise healthy, they’re 18-22, but maybe it’s impacting other people in their community or they don’t wanna potentially spread it within their own family if they see them. So you’ve had players make that decision.
Jessica: Wow, yeah, that's a lot. It would be so hard to make that choice, I can’t even imagine. So, we talked about the postponement of games, and there have been so many. I feel like every week it’s just like there’s a list of them. I mean, that’s one thing, but are there other issues that have arisen? I wanted to ask you, how are they scheduling games? Like, that’s been a problem, right? It’s not even…
Nicole: Oh, yeah.
Jessica: Scheduling, and then actually doing the games. Like, what other issues have you seen arise this season?
Nicole: Actually the scheduling piece is fascinating and really cool.
Jessica: Okay.
Nicole: It’s actually a piece that…This is a sport that always schedules things 10, 15 years out.
Jessica: Yes.
Nicole: Everyone always complains about that and they always claim that you have to do that or something, and now this whole offseason you’ve had people schedule games within like 3 hours, or 3 days.
Jessica: Wow.
Nicole: So I’m hoping that this actually carries over, this type of flexibility. But it’s funny because a number of leagues went conference only, so by doing that it gives them more flexibility. So Notre Dame’s playing an ACC schedule this year, they kind of swooped in and saved them because Notre Dame’s an independent. So, Notre Dame-Wake Forest gets postponed because of an outbreak at Notre Dame. Now, the ACC built their schedule with certain shared idle leagues, so they can plug that game to make it up somewhere else. So that’s been a cool factor.
Jessica: Okay.
Nicole: Everyone did their schedules in a way to maximize the rescheduling, and then also you have, again, the teams that are playing out of conference, or…BYU is an independent, just scheduling frantically and having kind of backup plans and people on the back burner with a shared open date if someone gets cancelled on. So it’s been kind of wild. You’ve had teams like North Carolina have three weeks off because of postponements, cancellations. You couldn’t find an opponent for one of the days they had open. They don’t wanna go three weeks without playing. And Houston has had five different scheduled season openers and hasn’t played yet – there have been outbreaks or contact tracing, again, limiting their opponents, and they have not played. They even got to the point against Baylor where that game got cancelled on Friday. So I can’t imagine the level of frustration there because none of the outbreaks or the roster restrictions have theirs, it’s been their opponent every single time. So they can be, like, “I’m doing everything right! We’re following all our rules, no outbreaks!” and then they’re getting these games cancelled. So, it is wild. They still have not played.
Jessica: Everything’s bigger in Texas. That’s interesting about that they had the idle weeks built into the schedule…All these moments where you’re like, oh, you realized…Like, you guys know that there are gonna be problems here, that it wasn’t gonna go off without a hitch. So is there gonna be a bowl season, and is there gonna be a playoff series? I know we’re talking about postponement and these built-in idle weeks, all these things, but what is the calendar at this point?
Nicole: So, this goes into scheduling a little bit as well as the playoff. They pushed everything back, so, normally, again, non-pandemic year, the conference championship games would’ve been, I believe, December 5th – that’s a Saturday. So, instead of December 5th all of these leagues push back. They said, we can also play on the 12th, we can also play on the 19th. So now everyone’s playing their championship games the weekend of the 19th and the college football playoff – which is very late, again, Christmas week – and the college football playoff is not picking its four teams until December 20th. So they’re gonna have a very short turnaround to prepare for the semi-finals which are right now scheduled for New Year’s Day, New Year’s Day bowls. Also, all of the other bowls are still theoretically operating. The NCAA removed its rule that you have to be 500 or better, which is usually 6 wins. So theoretically a 3-win SEC team could get invited to a bowl game.
Jessica: Huh.
Nicole: So, we don’t know. I mean, are we gonna have a bowl season? I dunno. Flu season is going to pick up, these campuses are kind of bracing for a second wave of outbreaks. We don’t know. But right now the bowls are planning to operate. The Bowl Association is planning to be involved. The playoff has their new selection date, and the plans move forward. But they did push everything back as much as possible to give those extra weeks to make up games on the back end of the season.
Jessica: It’s so interesting to think about…When I think about crowing a champion this year – and this feels true in most sports at this point – whether or not there’s an asterisk on that sort of stuff. I mean, I guess it’s good they have a playoff, so if and when that happens they’ll eventually be able to theoretically crown a champion, but it is kind of wild to think that we could have a team that wins that only played a handful of games.
Nicole: Yeah.
Jessica: Is that a possibility for crowning a champion this year?
Nicole: Well, I think that's what everyone is super curious about. If you have Ohio State out of the Big Ten and they only get through let’s say 7 or 8 games but Alabama gets through 10, how do you evaluate these teams that are playing different amounts of games?
Jessica: Yeah.
Nicole: The Pac-12 is playing even fewer because they’re starting the latest, they’re starting the weekend of November 7th. So, do you have to be in the same ballpark? Like, what will get to that point? Or what if it’s an 8 and 2 team in the SEC vs an undefeated Ohio State? It’s gonna be really fascinating because the whole system is set up with a human selection committee, so their is that subjectivity, but it's never been this hard before, and so reliant on the eye test, essentially, because you’re just not gonna have that many data points. I think that people are very curious to see how that’s gonna play out and how they’re going to actually compare these teams. But what happens if it’s really drastically different and they’re not in the same ballpark and its like 5 games to 8? 5 vs 9? I don't know.
Then, again, the other bowl games, the selection process, how do you do it? I mean, Houston obviously is not trying not to play their games right now, but they’re going to have a drastically different total number of games than other teams that have been able to play 3 or 4 games already. So it’s sort of wild, and no one really knows just how that’s going to play out, but I think adjusting these seasons…You know, the Pac-12 and the Big Ten in particular to have a chance to try to get in that ballpark, the idea is that it gives you something to play for and I think that that was really important and that’s kind of why you're seeing these players opt back in because there is something to play for. And even in the Pac-12 starting really late, maybe it's not the college football playoff but some pretty good bowl games, right? And obviously there’s money tied to playing and making these bowl games too, but it’s this idea of like a motivation for something, because if you move to the spring and you’re the only ones, what are you playing? Who’s gonna play? Who wants to play? That kind of messes up your whole timeline for spring, summer, and the fall of next year.
So those were all the motivating factors to get back into the fall, even if you’re praying against all odds that you’re not gonna have disruptions and you will be able to get enough games in to be considered for the big bowl games or the playoff. You might not, but there’s other benefits to still get in that timeframe.
Jessica: Hmm. It’s also interesting to think…You mentioned the second wave of COVID everyone’s sort of bracing for. I live in Austin and we’re all just excited we can go outside again because it’s been so hot, but yeah, a lot of the country’s about to go inside.
Nicole: Yup.
Jessica: Just even thinking about what impact that will have as we move deeper into the winter and we get closer to all this…[laughs]
Nicole: And, I mean, something just to follow…Basketball, college basketball. It’s an indoor sport, smaller rosters – so, again, contact tracing could take out more of your team.
Jessica: Right.
Nicole: I could be a mess. I mean, it’s already, the way people are starting to try to think about this and figure it out, set minimums for testing…It’s a huge challenge, and I do think you can do some true bubble environments for tournaments and knockout portions of the season that way, or the NCAA tournament. But that’s a huge question mark, and the NCAA revenue that comes from that tournament that they didn’t get last year, that is the next big thing to keep an eye on too. They’re playing in that time of the year that all of these scientists and doctors are telling us is going to be bad.
Jessica: Yeah. That’s interesting. We’ll have to have you come back and talk about that. But I’m interested in the idea of the bubble in general because it’s been mentally very exhausting for all these players, like, that’s one of the stories we’ve heard a lot, and just the idea of a “student-athlete” and what they’re being asked to do, without being paid for it. Okay, so, before I let you go, you have been reporting extensively…Obviously, you’re so knowledgable about this. I wanted to ask you, what is the wildest story that you’ve heard about or reported on around the return of college football? What’s bonkers?
Nicole: I mean, there’s been a lot of crazy rumors and things to chase down. This happens always with major stories, this happened with conference realignment, this happens all the time, but there were stretches where this Twitter account that we don’t need to tag – Sir Yacht was the name – they kept saying that the Big Ten was coming back, right after they voted to postpone. They kept saying, oh, there’s a meeting of the presidents this day; the presidents and ADs would come out and say, no, there’s no meeting. It would go on for weeks, but there was kind of this hope and people hoping that Sir Yacht was going to be right about this, and he just kind of threw a bunch of things out – different start dates that obviously didn’t end up happening, meetings throughout all…But there was this wild kind of alternate reality that was happening where people were just kind of trying to will the Big Ten to come back.
Jessica: [laughs] That sounds like the QAnon of college football.
Nicole: Yeah.
Jessica: Or something.
Nicole: It was wild. And again, there was a lot of just trying to will things to happen, and then if you didn’t participate in that you were rooting against football, so that was all happening as well. There were some crazy…Just like, you would talk to people and they would either not know what was going on in their own league or what their own president was doing, or it would change a half hour later. You would also have just so many crazy things where I would break the news to certain people about stuff that they were directly involved in because they just didn't know–
Jessica: Hadn’t heard. [laughs]
Nicole: Yeah, hadn’t heard yet. It was so wild, and it was just moving so fast. Things were changing on a half hour to half hour basis. There was at one point someone I know who’s a scheduling guru who was helping these conferences build these really kind of “collapsible” schedules, was they way he called them. So, they had these shared open dates. He told me he was on a conference call, a Zoom call, that was scheduled for 1am eastern time. [laughs] I was just like, this is incredible.
Jessica: Wow.
Nicole: It was just an insane two month stretch.
Jessica: Yeah.
Nicole: I mean, it was insane the entire time through the pandemic; you had so many, like, ADs in the same conference were meeting every single day, and everyone’s sick of each other by now.
Jessica: Of course.
Nicole: And I’m sure they’re sick of hearing from me. But it was just wild because the two months where you really had to make the decisions – postpone or go – and then the five, six weeks where some of those leagues that postponed then flipped…It was just insane. It was insanity. It was 24/7 for everyone in college sports, and you just had to keep up with it because it was literally changing minute by minute.
Jessica: Yeah, I would go to your Twitter, that’s the only way I kept up, was like, what is it Nicole says is happening? Because it’s too hard, and especially for someone like me who doesn’t pay close attention I have to have people tell me who’s winning and losing games or I just miss it totally. Okay, final question: is there a good story? Is there anything positive or hopeful that made you feel good in all of this?
Nicole: So, as I mentioned earlier I think there have been a couple of things that I hope stick from what we’ve learned during all of this; scheduling being number one. I think we all learned everyone can be a lot nimble. I think we’re learning even with the way the playoff adjusted that, okay, you don’t need a month to prepare for a national semi-final game. You can do two weeks and you’ll be okay. I think that it was maybe a little bit healthy for coaches to not have control over anything for six months.
Jessica: Interesting.
Nicole: I think they’re so used to that, and they didn’t handle it very well, I think, across the board. But I think it was probably almost a little bit of a reset where how these things work. I think a lot of college sports fans now understand the role presidents have in making the really really big decisions, and that their decisions may not align with their coaches because you had people like Jim Harbaugh and James Franklin rallying against the Big Ten when their presidents voted to postpone. So I think everyone understood some of that a little bit more and, again, just that coaches can’t make things happen on their own. I think, two, another thing that I liked was I’m doing a series of “only in 2020” stories–
Jessica: Oh, nice! Nice.
Nicole: And the first one was enjoyable to do, it was the guy who was in charge of disinfecting the turnover chain at Miami. It’s kind of this idea where it’s like, okay, it’s really cool, it’s the turnover prop that kind of started them all and is iconic, and having it on a sideline is like…There’s a sense of normalcy to that, and they force a turnover and everyone gets to celebrate around that guy. Then how do you make that work in a pandemic? So, the guy who normally is in charge of kind of securing it and holding it at all times, because there’s a lot of jewels on it; he now has to hand the player a mask, make sure he's wearing the mask before he can put it on–
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Nicole: And he has all these Lysol wipes so he can wipe it down before and after, but it still exists, right? So it’s kind of this…Kind of how college football looks weird, sounds a little bit different when you’re watching it, but it still exists. So there’s a sense of normalcy with also the adjustment of 2020. So, doing those types of stories I think are fun and they’re…I don’t know if they're good or positive, but I’m enjoying doing that because it’s kind of just about how versatile we are and how creative people are, and to have something that is important to them or a tradition or something that, again, feels normal to them, but make it work and make it work in a safe way I think is cool and I think it’s interesting. So I’m gonna be doing some stories like that, so if any of you listeners wanna send me ideas for them or if you see something, let me know. But I just think that there’s going to be a lot of unique things that people do to get through 2020 to have sports and be part of a team and things that are important to them that are weird and quirky and awesome, and I’m going to find them.
Jessica: That’s great. Please tell our listeners where they can read your work and where they can find you online.
Nicole: Yeah, so, my written work is at The Athletic; Twitter, I’m @nicoleauerbach, and I also do radio for Sirius XM and TV for the Big Ten Network. So that’s a little sporadic, but I will tell you when I’m doing it on Twitter.
Jessica: And you’ve been showing up on morning shows and stuff. You’ve been all over the place!
Nicole: I did. The ring light that I bought just in case has been very handy, and it’s been nice because some of those morning shows like CNN and The Today Show, it’s crazy hours.
Jessica: Yeah.
Nicole: So at least I was able to do them from my couch, that was appreciated.
Jessica: That’s nice. Thank you so much, Nicole, for being on Burn It All Down again and for bringing all this knowledge. I feel like I learned way more about college football in the last half hour than I’ve known in the last six months, so thank you.
Nicole: Anytime.