College Football is NOT broken | Engel Angle

It's Christmas season, the most terrifying season for any middle-aged man, because we
have to take stock in our life.
Our priority is to get rid of everything.
Mack Engle, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Engle Angle Podcast, here on the Sunset Lounge.
Some things to talk about here on this episode, number one about a man who I didn't handle
an exit the right way, and I want to share this anecdote.
And then two, the beauty of the college football playoff, and my college football is not broken.
On Saturday in Dallas, we lost a good man.
Tom Hicks died at the age of 79.
Tom owned the Dallas Stars from 1995 to 2010, and he owned the Texas Rangers from 1998 to 2011.
He also owned, briefly, FC Liverpool, the English Premier League, as well as the Mesquite Professional
Rodeo Circuit, for I think about a decade.
So when there, Tom was a significant member of the University of Texas Booster Community.
He was a member of its Board of Regents for a while.
And then Tom was a good guy.
And the reason why I want to take a minute or two to say this is to talk about Tom is because
I have a couple of anecdotes to share with you, and one specifically that I hope you can
hear and apply to your own life.
Tom is really nice to me.
I covered the Texas Rangers as a beat reporter from the start telegram in 2001, 2002, and
then I went over to cover the Dallas Stars for three or four years.
So obviously, I was tasked to interview Tom, and at that time, I was very young, and
I was pretty impressionable, and Tom was a tall man.
So the height differential, like I'm six feet tall, legitimate, by the way, that's very
important.
Tom was a big guy, six four, maybe.
So that could be a little intimidating, and obviously, this is extremely wealthy.
And anybody in those situations knows the dynamic, which is on the reporter, and I'm asking
you for your time, and this and that and the other, Tom was great.
Tom was great.
And for whatever reason, reasons I'll never know, he liked me, and I really liked him.
He was a really good guy.
So when I covered the Rangers, I got to know him a little bit, but I really got to know him
was when I covered the Dallas Stars.
And Tom, unbeknownst to me until a couple of years later, really didn't know that much
about hockey.
But the beauty of Tom was that Tom would listen to the people around him, but what he really
wanted to do was win, really wanted to win.
That was very important to him.
Tom loved sports, and he loved owning sports teams, and he loved cheating.
He loved trying to win.
Like most owners, Tom had a little bit of a juxtapher element to him, and that's not
a criticism.
It's more of an observation.
But he loved athletes and talking about the games and all that, and you forget one of
the legacies, many legacies that Tom left on sports is that he really set a new standard
in contracts in this country for professional athletes.
In 2000, on the winner of 2000, it was Tom Hicks, who signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year
$252 million contract.
That was in 2000, and 2000, that was unheard of, and even more unheard of was the idea that
the Texas Rangers were going to sign by far away what was, at the time, who was at the
time, the most attractive free agent ever to hit the market in baseball because A-Rod was
so young and a terrific player.
And Tom made that deal happen.
He outbid everybody else by like 10% to bring A-Rod to the Rangers.
Now one detail about that, A-Rod never wanted to be here, but he had a lot of pressure
to take that contract, both internally and certainly from the players union, so he took
the deal and it didn't work.
But Tom tried, he really, really tried, and it failed, and Tom eventually traded him after
three years because the contract just became too much.
They didn't make the kind of money that they were expecting to make.
Also in 1998, one detail hockey fans will remember, it was Tom who went out and pushed
the stars to sign Brett Hall as a free agent from the St. Louis Blues.
The next year, Brett Hall scored the Stanley Cup winning goal in game six in Buffalo to win
the star Stanley Cup in 1999.
Stars made the Stanley Cup again in 2000, lost in the championship.
So Tom cared tremendously, and he wasn't like Jerry Jones, but he had a significant impact,
not just in Texas, pardon me, not just in North Texas, but on the state in general, because
he transformed downtown Dallas.
Tom was a big piece of the American Airlines Center getting built and opened in 2002, I believe
2001, rather.
And as a result, downtown Dallas completely changed.
That whole area had been an industrial dumpster waste site zone.
And because of the American Airlines Center, the city of Dallas, its citizens, Tom Hicks,
they redeveloped that whole area around it, and it really flourished for quite a while.
So then this is where I, the part of it that, when my relationship with Tom changed a little
bit.
And like 2004, the NHL had a lockout.
And I was covering the national hockey league then, and the lockout obviously was a big deal.
So I was talking to Tom, and by that point, he and I established a rapport.
And in fact, I'll never forget this when he called me, when we were talking, and he said,
what do you think?
Now for a beat reporter to be asked, what do you think about a team by an owner?
That was kind of a big deal to me.
And you could have knocked me over with a feather when he asked it.
I was like, you care what I think?
And it hit me later, why?
Because I was on the road with the team.
This is back when we traveled.
I was in a locker room.
A lot of times I stayed in the team hotel, and I talked to everybody.
And so I understood that there was a level of things that I could see anecdotally here,
second hand, third hand, or directly, that they may not, he may not hear, that would help
sort of establish a clearer vision or opinion on an issue.
In fact, I even remember the Dallas stars were a heavy favorite to go to the Stanley Cup
in 2003, I think.
They had gone outside all these big freeages, and they had a really good year with Mike
Madonna, with Bill Garen and all these guys.
And then they get to the second round, and they get upset by the Anaheim Ducks, who were
riding a red-hot goalie in John Sebastian, Shiger, and Dallas goes out and loses in the
second round.
To a Ducks team that eventually would make it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final.
So I called Tom the next year for the last, and yeah, I just never forget he said, why
is that?
What happened?
We just didn't hit anybody.
And this was stuff that I wouldn't use, doesn't matter now.
This was stuff that I wouldn't use.
But it was just that kind of discussion that I didn't expect as a beat reporter with the
owner of the team, because the owner of the team, in this case, was a massive fan of
the team.
He desperately wanted to win.
And because he loved the feeling when the stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999, and he's
on the ice, taking the team picture, and he's drinking from the Stanley Cup and high-fiving
and celebrating everybody else.
It made me appreciate the fact that he always knew to listen to the people that he
hired.
And Tom knew that he didn't know everything.
That's what made him a little bit different than Jerry Jones, not the Jerry thinks he
knows everything.
There's a lot of misconceptions about Jerry Jones.
But one of the things that Jerry played football, people forget that, Jerry played from the
National Championship Arkansas Razorbacks team in the 60s.
He's one of the few owners who played that level, and which has always given him kind of
this idea that he knows more than the other gyms or people, and sometimes he's right,
sometimes he's wrong.
Tom never had that.
Even though Tom was a good high school athlete, Tom never had that, certainly not with hockey.
So that was kind of where our relationship and our friendship sort of took off.
And at one point, I remember, so doing the lockout, he and I talked quite a bit, because
I was looking for updates, and I was looking for season to go on, or whatever else.
So I happened to be in San Diego.
The time I was covering everything, just anything to keep busy.
And I was in San Diego, where the chargers had training camp.
And in fact, this would have been in August of four.
I think that's right.
And I was going to interview LeDanian Tomonson, former TCU guys, obviously having a great
Hall of Fame career with the chargers.
And on that day, I'm driving to Chargers camp.
I'm listening to sports talk radio that Rafael Palmero has been popped for steroid use.
I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm supposed to go to interview Tom Hicks tomorrow at his house
in LeVoyak San Diego.
I couldn't believe it.
I'm like, well, I have to ask you about this.
Are you going to be in L.T.?
That's a great time.
It's kind of a fun anecdote about that.
When I interviewed L.T., I had in my bag something that I had found in a trash can, like
seven years before.
I had found quite accidentally LeDanian Tomonson's practice jersey from when he was at TCU.
I had my closet.
And I thought, I'll give it to him.
That's a nice thing to do.
I didn't have any use for it.
I thought he might like it as a little keepsake.
So I finished interview in L.T. and I said, hey, by the way, I have something you might
want.
And I handed it to him.
He said, what did you find this?
I said, I found on a trash can in TCU's athletic offices.
And he's like, are you serious?
And I said, yeah, do you want it?
He's like, no, man, I don't like that old stinky jersey.
That's why I tend to be nice.
So the next day, I got a little boy in California, and I'm driving around in my rental car.
And these really, this really tight neighborhood with these houses are like squirts together.
And I'm looking at all of them, like, a billionaire lives here.
And the house looks like it's some 1,500 square foot house on the street.
Again, this car is parked everywhere up and down the street.
This is a really tight and like, this can't be right.
There's no way a billionaire lives in this house.
Bring the doorbell.
There's Tom Hicks.
Hey, Mac.
Mr. Hicks.
I think I might have called him Tom.
Tom is nice to see you.
And in his house, he has copies of the Dallas Morning News in Fort Worth Star Telegram,
physical copies, pre-internet at his house.
He had them delivered to his house every day so we could read the sports section.
So we go sit down.
He has a personal chef.
Make us lunch.
I don't know if he was like fish or something, with a beautiful view of the beach.
And at this point, I see now why he's living in this house.
It was like three stories had beach access, these massive windows that looked down on the
Pacific Ocean.
And we sat there outside on his patio and talked for about three or four hours.
And it was a great conversation.
A lot of it was on the record, some of it was off the record.
And we talked about everything.
I talked about USC football.
He earned a degree from USC, talked about Texas football.
And we just totally hit it off.
So at one point, I said, we're signing you a rod of mistake.
He said, yeah, it was.
And at the time, he asked me not to, he said, don't put that in there.
It says 20 years ago, it doesn't matter now.
But it just didn't work.
And you know, it's, that's the kind of relationship that we had and we got along terrific.
So then a couple years later, he reaches out to me and says, would you like to come work
for the Rangers?
I've not really ever talked about this.
I think this is like 2007.
And this is the part where it's kind of bittersweet for me.
So I went through the interview process and it was going to be in the marketing department.
And the second interview I had, the first one was with their president, really good guy.
The second one was with the general manager, John Daniels.
And we have it at the last cleanest four seasons in the restaurant.
John and I sit and talk for a couple of hours.
And I kind of realize this job is not marketing, probably.
It sounds like it's more baseball ops oriented.
And I was seriously thinking about doing it.
The money wasn't great.
It was a little bit more than what I made at the time.
So I called a friend of mine who worked for the Rangers for a while and worked in Major
League Baseball for 20 years.
And I said, this is what they're offering.
What do you think?
And he knew I had covered a professional baseball and he knew I knew what that schedule
was like.
And he said, what are they telling you what the schedule is?
That I said basically that it's nine to five or whatever it was and that I didn't have
to go to all the home games, which this is a really good point for people who want to
enter the world of professional sports as an employee, not a player or anything.
Never say do I have to go to all the games, say do I get to go to all the games at that
point in my life.
I knew what that schedule meant.
It was nine to five and then five to 11 because that's when the game ended.
And at that point in my life, I was married, we were thinking about starting a family.
I knew that was not going to work at all.
And I'm so glad I had that conversation with with that guy because if I had done that,
you know, my life would look a lot differently.
No one knows.
Maybe I go on and do something else with within Major League Baseball, but I knew that
was what I did not want at that point in my life.
Now I've done it.
Had I been 24 rather a college or something, yeah, I would have done it.
But I was in my 30s and it just wasn't the right time.
So I had to sit down.
Oh, and part of this, other than you, Tom had me at his house.
And he lived in, I would think the highest dollar neighborhood of North Dallas.
He lived down the street from President Bush to get a community.
And I go in and as I'm driving down the driveway, he's, he's sold the house several years
ago for like 60 million dollars.
So as I'm driving down the driveway, the house is massive.
The grounds are massive.
There's a second house off to the right.
And I see in the driveway, orange cones.
That's how fucking big his house was.
It needed orange cones to divert traffic.
So I go into his house and we talked about the Rangers in its future and where they were
going and all that.
His son Tommy is really nice guy.
He was there with us.
And I was really close to doing it, but I'm really glad I didn't.
And here's the part that that pertains to the lesson that I tried to have learned from.
When I called Tom to say no, he didn't answer his, so I left a message and I never talked
to him again.
I always regret that.
Every now and then I knew he eventually he sold because of bankruptcy, his professional
holdings got in trouble.
And so we had to sell both the Rangers.
One of the Rangers in 2010, he sold the stars in 2011 through bankruptcy, he got out
of sports basically.
And he kind of faded from public life.
And I was regretted and obviously willed to my last day.
I always regretted the fact that I never thanked him and I didn't handle that better.
And I thought about him last week.
I was talking to a friend of mine about Tom and specifically about Tom's involvement
in the University of Texas football.
When Tom tried to get Mac Brown to retire and have Nick Sabin replace him and that went
to hell.
And I thought I need to reach out to him.
I need to reach out to him and just to thank him and I never did.
And I was always very sad about that that I never did it.
He was a good guy.
And I mean, Texas is better off because of Tom Hicks.
And so if any family or friends are happy to be listening to this, he's a good guy.
I don't really miss him.
And if you get a chance to make a relationship like that that had some meaning to you and
you want to put a little bit better ending on it or maybe take some accountability, I
highly encourage you to do it rather than today, rather than tomorrow because you don't
know if that person is not going to be here anymore.
Back in a second.
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Okay, so on Sunday, the College Football Playoff Committee released its 12 teams for the,
what I call the big SEC invitational, it's not really a playoff, you'll notice nobody
in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS complains about how they do the playoffs.
The only ones where they pitch an S storm is college football.
Now you have to accommodate 60 summer teams as opposed to the 30th in those other teams
in those other leagues.
And oh yeah, every conference has differences and there's talent disparities and money
disparities and all this other stuff, but the boy was every year they do this and every
year they fuck it up because there is no good way to do it.
It's going to be a mess every year.
And in fact, that mess is one of the reasons why we're drawn to it.
It is the reality TV show, reality TV shows are scripted by producers to engineer and
focus on the mess.
Not the part where everybody gets along and high fives each other and has fun, that's
not really the fun part, it's the other part, it's the confrontation, it's the screw ups,
that's the part that we don't want to watch.
And that's what the College Football Playoff and season basically is.
It's all this nonsensical BS unfair drama that we are insatiably attracted to.
So anybody sits there and says, college football is broken?
No, it's not.
College football is an unfair mess, okay, I'll give you that.
The system is unsustainable, prove it to me otherwise.
It is fine and it is thriving, what it will continue to do is tweak itself and the hopes
of maybe eventually getting it right, which it never will.
I was not insulted by this latest college football playoff bracket where Alabama gets
in at nine and three and Notre Dame has left out.
College football has always been run by the fronts of the name of the jerseys.
If Alabama was named Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi state, it's
not getting in the playoff.
It is getting in the playoff because it is Alabama.
I once asked when were Kansas coach Mark Mangino about this?
Now Mark Mangino famously went on a rant after his team, Kansas, blew a game late against
the University of Texas and Vincere.
They had to get him in the bag and they blew it.
Mark Mangino goes into the press conference and just rips the officials.
A new one says this is all about money.
They protected Texas to make sure Texas gets into the BCS.
This is like an 05 or 4 or something.
So years later I asked Mark, Mark got fined like $10,000.
So years later I called Mark and I asked him about and he said, listen, this is how this
is done.
If you're picking a contractor, who are you going to pick?
The contractor that you know and everybody says, they do a great job.
You're going to go with the contractor that you've never, that you don't know anything
about.
He's like, human instinct says, you're going to go to the one that you know something
about.
Like, okay, it's flawed, but I get it.
That's the logic of it.
So that's why Alabama is in, even though it's 9-3 and got its ass handed to him by Georgia
and the SEC title game.
That's why BYU is not in when it should be.
This is my gripe.
The playoffs, historically, something went to a playoff model in 2014.
The playoffs have mostly been blowouts, mostly.
The vast majority of them have been two score games and now we had some good games last
year.
See, Penn State, Notre Dame was a great game.
The national title game was very exciting.
Notre Dame almost came back and beat Ohio State.
The Ohio State Texas game was phenomenal.
The first round, mostly kind of a lot of sighted.
I expect this first round to be kind of a lot of sighted.
That's a college football problem because the disparity in talent that exists in those
games, anyways, not maybe during a regular season, but in those games specifically.
The issue I have is that the college football playoff committee accommodated two group of
five teams.
James Madison is in, Tulane is in.
I love it that they're in.
I am a sucker for the small school that gets in and gets a shot.
I love it.
I absolutely love it.
I will watch it and I will hope that somehow Tulane wins.
I will watch it at Ole Miss.
They might.
You never know.
Ole Miss.
You never know.
I got a new coaching staff.
I love it.
I hope that somehow James Madison can go into Eugene and shock the world and beat Oregon.
Those are great stories.
The NCAA men's basketball tournament, it was built on Cinderella in that opening weekend
when 12 can be a four, 15 beats a two.
That's what built it.
It wasn't Syracuse, nox off Kansas.
That's Walmart beats Goldman Sachs.
We've seen it a thousand times.
The mystery and the magic of the NCAA tournament is that open weekend.
No one gambling.
That's what college football is trying to replicate, maybe not intentionally, but trying
to get one of those games.
For the purposes of this selection committee and bracket and all that, I hope one of those
games turns out the right way.
There's nothing that tells me that both of these schools deserve to be in that 12-team
bracket.
One of them is fine.
Both of them are you going to tell me James Madison and Tulane to me, they're the same
team.
They're better than BYU.
Are you going to tell me BYU, well, 11 and 2, lost to the same team twice, a Texas
tech team that is legit national championship good.
Are you going to tell me they're better than Texas?
Are you going to tell me, I'm sorry, I don't think Texas deserve to be in.
Are you going to tell me that Tulane or James Madison, they're better than Texas?
Are you going to sit here and tell me that they're better than Notre Dame?
That's my problem with it.
My other problem now are these teams specifically looking at you, Notre Dame, that lost the
benefit of a system that's engineered for everybody else, but it accommodates you because
you're special.
And then you get mad when those standards that screw other teams like Vanderbilt, like
Texas, then you get mad and say, we're not going to play Notre Dame has opted out of its
bowl game, a team opt out, they're not going to play in the bowl game, Victor are going
to play in the Pop Tarts bowl, and now are, you know, aggrieved feelings are hurt, that's
bullshit.
And however much campaigning and whining is a norm on the college football schedule every
December, Steve Sarkeesian had to go lobby for his team to get him to play off, throws
out all these kinds of threatening terms, oh, it's a disservice if we don't get in, we're
going to change our future schedule, nothing or not, shut up, but that's the job, but you
have to do it.
The athletic director from Notre Dame out there campaigning and whining, that's the job,
I understand you got to do it.
You play the next game, I understand why I was dating Kansas State, opted out of their
game, they got a new coaching staff.
The Notre Dame one is just hurt feelings, I realized I'm somewhat biased with this following
opinion, but it would apply in 2014, TCU was the team that got screwed out of a spot
in the first ever playoff.
They were number three going into the final ranking, they blow out Iowa State and their
final regular season game, then the next ranking comes out, they're not in it, the head
football coach at the time, Gary Patterson goes and tells his team, it's not right, we're
going to go out there and play this game and show everybody that got the wrong and they
went out and destroyed Ole Miss and the pitch bowl.
That's the right thing to do, Florida State, Florida State got screwed out of a position
in the playoff a few years ago because it's starting quarterbacked out hurt.
Then played the game, now half the team opted out, but they played the game, they showed
up, you show up, you're part of the system, and a system that has gone out of its way
to benefit and include you, you're part of it, show up and play the game, even if it's
just showing up in name only, hell that's half of these bowls anyways.
This system has benefited Notre Dame and for them to duck and run on this is just the
worst message, where are we telling our young people and all that crap, it's awful, play
the damn game, I understand, part of the college football's frustration is that it is so
flawed, that's a big reason why we're so attracted to it too, and gambling, it will never
be perfect, it is not broken, this idea that it's unsustainable, I highly question that
to give the amount of money that's flooding around, it needs to be better, and that would
start by fixing a calendar with a sport ends in the first semester of college, rather
than going into the second semester, there are ways to fix this, but if there's anything
that the last 50 years of college football has taught us, is that they will get to it
in their own time, and Notre Dame will do it at walks, see you next time.
This is a stolen water media production.