[00:00:00] Speaker A: We're going to talk about the MLB Draft today. Busy, busy weekend for the Razorbacks. Some good news for them, some news that they probably didn't want to get, but not too many big surprises. We'll get into that. I want to tell you that our podcast is brought to you by Eglin's Best in Arkansas. Greatness starts early. Before the pads go on. Before the crowd roars, the day begins at the breakfast table. Eglins best deliver superior nutrition with more vitamin D and less saturated fat than ordinary eggs. You can start strong with Eglin's Best Better taste, better nutrition, better eggs. We're also brought to you by Bentonville Glass. They've been serving their community since 1971. They're committed, professional and versatile. If you're looking for a quality leader in Northwest Arkansas or looking for skilled craftsmanship, look no further than Bentonville Glass for all your glass market needs with the highest quality products. You can come by and see them now at 507 South Main in Bentonville or online at bentonvilleglass.com if you're watching us on YouTube. Appreciate that. We also put our video on Facebook and Twitter. We post our podcast audio version on our Apple Podcasts and Spotify channels. Just search Whole Hog Sports on any of those platforms and you can find our latest podcast. We're daily during the during the season, I would say football, basketball, baseball season. We're weekly during the summer just because things are a little bit slower. Although they have not slowed down a whole lot here in Fayetteville this summer. This has been one of the busiest summers I can remember covering. The Razorbacks and MLB draft ended over the weekend. The Razorbacks had 12 players selected. That's a record for the program. And just to kind of give you an insight, the previous record was 11, which was set three times. And two of those times were when there was a 40 round draft. This is a 20 round draft. Now Arkansas with 12 players taken. They had three players who were committed from other D1 programs who were drafted. Two. Arkansas did not have any high school signings taken.
First time since 2004 that that's happened. Of course, Carson Wiggins was really the player I think everybody was watching. The closest he goes in the first round to the New York Mets. He'll sign, he'll go Pro.
These three D1 transfers who have been drafted, these are infielders Ben Cleary of Santa Clara, Wills McGinnis of Georgia State and Chris Diaz of Florida Gulf Coast. They were all drafted between the 11th and the 14th round where there's no suggested signing bonus, but you can't sign players for more than $150,000 without it counting towards your bonus to sign players in the first 10 rounds. The expectation, though, is that all three of those players are going to go pro, that there was probably an agreement in place with the team that drafted them. Tom Murphy is in here with me. Tom, when you look back at the MLB draft, I wonder what were your thoughts?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Well, my Braves buddies were okay, maybe a little bit mad with the Virginia outfielder. You probably gracia that they got in the first round and I did keep up with the Razorback some. And by the way, nice story today quoting Nate Thompson regarding how the draft dinged or didn't ding Arkansas. I think they were very happy, as you mentioned, that none of their high school signees were taken and that overall it wasn't as bad as it could have been, per Nate Thompson.
But you know, where they lost some of the transfers last year that maybe they were expecting, particularly at shortstop. Maybe this year they were better positioned to handle if these three guys that you just called out actually signed pro and that the roster will be in better shape than it was at this time last year when they, you know, were fighting it a little bit. And I have to say, this little plug here, I have neighbors around me who say that the podcast you and Bubba do during baseball season is the best.
Must watch out there regarding Razorback athletics. So kudos to you and Bubba for that.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: I appreciate that. Bubba, he makes, he's the star. I just sit here and let his star shine when he's in.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: He knows his stuff.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: He does. In fact, I saw Bubba yesterday. I took my son up to a, a hitting lesson at his facility and he and I talked a little bit about the draft.
You know, this was the Nate Thompson quote that Tom was referencing, by the way. This is what Nate said yesterday. He said, quote, just knowing what I knew going into it with what people's asking prices were going to be and that sort of thing, I feel really good about how it came out. He said, I felt like we could have had, we could have absolutely gotten hit harder. I'm really excited about the freshmen we've got coming in the portal guys we've got through and everything he said, I would say it's a net positive for sure. And net positive. That was actually my question to him. I said, when you look at everything that's happened, would you say that it was a net positive for you?
The one thing that really stands out to me about this draft and this isn't just Arkansas, but there is an Arkansas angle to this.
High school players are not getting drafted anymore.
They're getting drafted. Obviously Grady emerson was the second overall pick, but, but like there were 127 high school picks in 613 overall selections. That's less than 20% of all the players who were taken were from high schools. Something like 77%, I think came from four year Division 1 colleges.
There were also, you know, some junior colleges players in there too who were drafted. Like, you know, there's this talk where the owners, they want the draft to be no high school players beginning in 2028 when the new CBA is in place.
The players union is against it. But I mean there's some real ammunition I feel like for the owners who can say, like, look like, like the high school players, they're not irrelevant to the draft right now, but what teams want, they want these D1 guys who have gone through, you know, high level programs for two or three years and who are on the fast tracks to the majors. And you see this more and more and more now with a lot of these guys who are big time college prospects who they're in the majors in a year, two years. I mean, you know, just, just recent examples. Paul skeens, Wyatt Lankford, J.J. weatherford, right now with the St. Louis Cardinals. If you want to look at Arkansas, you know, 10 years ago, Andrew Benintendi, you know, he was on a pretty quick path to the majors. Garrett Crochet did this and there's tons of other examples. Dylan Cruz, you know, it's like there is a real formula right now. It feels like for a lot of these GMs where it's like we want to go get premium college players. This year it was position players because there weren't a whole lot of pitchers taken in the first round. And we want to fast track and we want to see if we can fly them through the minors and see if they can be part of our roster in a year or two.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's reflective of the modern game in that. And also it comes back down to parents. Like what do parents and their children want? And right now with nil money available, you're going to get great training in college. Just take Arkansas for an example. Every kid you see commit to Arkansas, it's like, I'm going to get developed here. The pitching lab is primo. And so I think parents evaluate the whole picture.
How is my kid going to get his best value, his best Training his best prospects for making the big money on the professional level. And, and if you get that in college and you get the nil while you're doing it, that's better than being on buses in high A ball or whatever. And so it's just a value judgment. And I think that's probably what plays into the numbers that you just quoted.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: And the facilities that you're in in college baseball are better than what you're going to see in the minors. Like, they're better in some cases the college baseball facilities. And this is the case in the SEC especially.
Like, I mean take the Hunt center, for example. You could take the Hunt center and you could put it up against a lot of the facilities that these major league teams have at their spring training facilities where a lot of their prospects are going and working out. You know, like, maybe especially right after they're drafted, you could certainly put it up against those. And in some cases I'm sure it's probably a better facility. And they're not the only ones with that. I mean, Tennessee's built one and Texas A and M's built one and everybody's building one right now. It's, it's you, you. It's a different, it's a different lifestyle. You can, you can now make some money as an 18 year old, but, but have a different lifestyle playing baseball than what it would have been 10 years ago to make money playing baseball at that age where you're riding buses and you're staying, you know, in motels and now you're staying in, you know, nicer hotels and you're taking charter planes and it's, it's a different deal.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: That's the exact point I was going to make. It's the quality of life. What do you want your 18, 19, 20 year old life to look like? And if you're in those high quality training environments, good team camaraderie. And it's not so much there's a certain thing that comes with professional contract and those guys, they're trying to make it to the majors. You don't know if everyone's on the same page. You're not necessarily trying to win a championship. And I think the competitive nature of trying to battle for a championship and competing is a big deal as well.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: And you're a star. And these 18 year old kids, they want to be known like, like they, they, they want, they want the, the TikTok followers, the Instagram followers, like they want all of this and you are a bigger star when you go and have success, say at Arkansas or LSU or Mississippi State or a place like that as a freshman than you would be if, say you're, you're hitting.290 for the Springfield Cardinals. It's, it's just a different. It's a different world.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Well, we've seen a shrinkage of the, of the minor leagues in recent years. That's.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: There's going to be more.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: You know, like part of the proposal that the owners have for the draft moving forward is that there would only be 12 rounds instead of 20. Like when I started doing this, Tom, there were 50. Yeah, there were 50 rounds in the major league baseball draft. And a lot of that is that there are fewer teams now. I think there's going to be fewer teams in the future too. I think there's going to be another consolidation of the minor leagues. I think at some point what you're going to see with minor league baseball is that there's only going to be what we would now consider Double A and Triple A. Maybe there's some sort of rookie league as like a transition, you know, like a fall league. They keep that in place. But I think a ball eventually will go away. I just don't think there's enough demand for it. And I don't think the owners want to continue to have that many players on the payroll.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Exactly. And you know, it's a changing market. It's a changing game. I mean, teams like the Savannah Bananas go around selling out and you're, your minor league teams are like in competition with the Savannah Bananas and those guys.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: That's sad. That hurts to say that about the Bananas.
So Arkansas, we mentioned they get all their freshmen through. You know, they get these portal guys and these are the, these are really the portal guys that stand out to me that they got through. These aren't all the portal commitments because some of the portal commits they got were not draft eligible this year. But the ones who were eligible for the draft, who, as of right now, it looks like they're coming to Arkansas. I guess somebody could still sign a free agent contract. But I think that we're at the point where if it hasn't happened yet, it's probably not going to happen. The big name is A.J. vasco. He's the big six foot six outfielder from Kansas State.
64 analytics has him as the number 13 prospect in this year's portal.
Zeb Allen of UCA. He's UCA's all time home run leader.
He's an outfielder too. Manny Marin of Tennessee, he was A sophomore draft eligible shortstop, Dawson Bryce of Charlotte. I'm a little surprised they got him through because there had been some, you know, some whispers that he might be going pro. So they get him through.
And then Michael Malky is a right handed pitcher from Cal Baptist who's also sophomore draft eligible and he gets through too. You know, when they committed Manny Marin on, I think it was June 24th, 25th, somewhere in that range. They had been Cleary on board for a couple, three weeks at that point.
And when they recruited another shortstop, like committed another shortstop, to me that was a big red flag of somebody that they have committed is a draft risk. And I don't know if they thought Ben Cleary was a draft risk. I don't know if maybe they thought Wills McGinnis was a draft risk.
But it seemed to me like they knew somebody was a draft risk. And they've been burned at shortstop a couple of times in the last few years. You think about the last year, I mean, you've heard Dave Van Horn mention this a couple times. Dylan Grego, the Ball State All American, who, you know, he goes pro, I don't think they thought he was going to go pro for the amount of money that he signed for. And then, you know, even a few years, maybe two or three years before that, there was a shortstop. I got him right here. It was Jordan Sprinkle from UC Santa Barbara. This was in 2022.
And he ended up getting a contract with the White Sox.
And I think that was the year they ended up with John Bolton as their starting shortstop.
And you know what you see with, with Sprinkle and what you saw with Grego was that I don't know that they were prepared to lose those guys at shortstop. And it's a huge deal when you lose a short like, like that is a position that you don't want to be, you know, you know, caught kind of flat footed at.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: You know, this year they made it work. Cam Kozal ends up being an All America shortstop. That's not for his defense, that's, that's for his bat. But I feel like when you're strong at shortstop, it really changes your team. And I feel like they made sure that they were going to be prepared for a lot of different things that potentially could happen at shortstop.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Right?
[00:13:49] Speaker A: And you know, they had Marin to back up. Cleary going right.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: And so now you can start seeing how things could slot in. Sousa might have the opportunity to be good enough to play shortstop. Pompey could probably play short. All you Know, he's error prone at third, but you can see things starting to slot in, where guys might even hit in the batting order. And the fact that if the Portal guys produce like you feel they could, that Arkansas will have some depth to their. Their batting order and some. Potentially some backup. I mean, when you think about Rudin Bars coming back and Stewart, you know, Sousa.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Stewart won't be back.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: I'm sorry. I'm thinking of Turner. Yeah, yeah. Christian Turner.
That there could be some potential that you can have a deeper batting order than sometime. There were times where 7, 8, 9 in the order just didn't look very good.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: I think they've got some flexibility with what they can do with their infield because they're getting T.J. pompey back to, like Tom mentioned.
And that was a player who, when we talked to Van Horn toward the end of June, he thought Pompey was going pro.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: And so the fact that Pompey is back, I think, is a little bit of a surprise. It's one of those pleasant surprises. I think some of this stuff kind of balances out. You know, maybe you lose an infielder that you didn't think you were going to lose, but you get an infielder back who you thought you were going to lose. And, you know, Pompey, I know he had the.
He had a weird year. I don't know how you. I don't even know how you characterize his year. He sets the school record for 88 strikes.
He commits 11 errors, which is the most errors by anybody on the team. But you kind of break it down, Tom.
And in conference play, he was a much better hitter than he was overall. He hit 60 points higher in conference. All of his power numbers came in conference errors. He had more errors out of conference than he did in conference.
I don't know how you like. To me, what that tells me is that he was a player who.
And Nate put this in the story that I wrote today. He said he wasn't like an elite, elite player or anything, he said. But he was pretty solid at the end of the year. I thought you could see with him, and I thought you could see this with Sousa, too. They got better as the year went on. And I'll say this about both of them, and this may sound like an excuse, I don't mean for it to, but they Both missed the second half of 2025 with injuries. Sousa obviously with the labrum that I think affected him this year. Pompey was healthy this year, but he hurt his Wrist. I don't know if he broke it or not, but he hurt his wrist when he was at Texas Tech. You're talking about hundreds of game reps that those two players lost over the last half of 2025. And I think that stunts their development a little bit. You know, you hear Matt Hobbs likes to say this a lot, that players have their own time clock for development, and they don't necessarily develop when you're ready for them to develop. They develop when they are ready to develop. And that's not necessarily a mentality thing. That's just everybody's body is different. You know, everybody comes into their own at different times. And I think maybe you see that a little bit with Susan Pompey.
I don't know, maybe they don't have a good year next year, but I think that both of them, if this year and the growth that you could see from them from game one to the end of the season is any indication, I think that they could be in store for better years than what people might be expecting if they're just basing their expectations off the overall stats.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, Pompey, as you mentioned, he was some streaky hitter. I mean, he carried them on some conference weekends. You think about the walk off home run against Mississippi State, which was a huge win.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: He was the SEC player of the week when they beat Alabama. He had a monster weekend there and
[00:17:37] Speaker B: he had another big weekend somewhere. I think you mentioned it with the Oklahoma series, the champion, you know who they were in a trough when Oklahoma came to play Arkansas, and they bounced out of it right when they were leaving town. But yeah, I think if Pompey and Souza develop and become, they'll obviously have greater team leadership roles. You're starting to see the veteran presence they could give. And Nate seemed to be very pleased with Sousa's off season workouts. So pointing toward the right direction. And we haven't mentioned big country, you know, the possibility of having him back and what he could do at first base.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Yeah, he's an option at first. I feel like they've got to have more production at first.
You got to have more power. Yeah, you've got to have more power.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: His home run is just too low. And he hit some in Lawrence.
It was late in the year and like, where was that?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: And it was the same way the year before. You know, I mean, how many home runs he hit. But most of them were at the end of the year. He hit two against Texas. He hit one against Kate Anderson at the World Series.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: So he understands this.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Like, to me, I feel like you got to have more power at first base and you know, so I don't, I don't know what, what the plan is for Reese Robinette. I really don't. But he's a player who does have experience. He's a good defender. I think there's value there with him. But I don't know that he's their starting first baseman. I, maybe I'm wrong. I think he's going to be given every chance to start.
I think you, I think he's earned that, you know, with, with the fact that if nothing else, he stayed with the program when he could have been out the door a long time ago. He is a rare bird in not just baseball, any sport. The fact that, you know, in my mind this is a guy who could go to a mid major program and be a really, really strong player at the mid major level. But Arkansas is where he wanted to be. You know, he's gone through some years where he didn't play. You know, he red shirted or maybe there was a year where, you know, he only played a handful of games.
I think you gave that guy a lot of credit for just sticking with it and just being an ultimate team guy. Just doing whatever the team needs.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: The teams. The times we've talked to Reese, great, great attitude. He had to have a ton of patience to just say, this is where I am. And going through whole seasons where you're just not doing a whole lot on the field and so, but you know, you got to hit 260 or something and you got to put up some power numbers. I know we hit a lot of warning track flies. I know we hit one off the top of the fence in Hoover, didn't he? Right off the top. That was a double. That would have been a big deal in that game. But then the power came along late. So if he can drive in some runs, especially if he's doing it from like the seven hole or something, then he will obviously add big value.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: I want to mention this real quick some, some summer. So this is relative to players who will be back. A player who's really caught my eye this summer is Jackson Kersher.
And I'm going to have something actually written on him today on our
[email protected] but this is a guy who the command was all over the place. And you know, he freely admitted that whenever I talked to him recently.
I think nerves were a big factor this year for him. But you look at what he's doing at the Cape Cod League right now. He's had seven appearances, 11⅓ innings. These have all been in relief. I think he might get some opportunity to start after some of these draft guys. Cycle out of the Cape cod League, but seven appearances, 11⅓ innings, zero earned runs, three hits, three walks, 14 strikeouts. He's got a whip of.051 batters are hitting.0.79 against him.
We've seen guys have summers where they come back and the summer does not translate. We've seen guys where the summer is an indication of something to come.
I tend to think he's going to be in that latter category. I thought that he had a lot of potential when he transferred to Arkansas from OU last summer.
Again, he's one of those guys where maybe the development clock is just a little bit different for him. But to me, I feel like hitting at the Cape Cod League is well ahead of pitching. And so Mike Anu, last year, you know, he was at Cape Cod, had a monster year offensively. He was their player of the year.
That didn't really translate when he got to the sec.
I'm not saying that every hitter who has good numbers there, that it doesn't translate, but what I'm saying is when a pitcher has big numbers against the older hitters who were there, that stands out to me a little bit more. And so this is really notable, I think, with Kerscher.
I did see that Dave Van Horn is in tweeting season right now. He tweets about three or four times a year, and it's typically after Cape Codley games. And I feel like when you get your picture with Van Horn on his Twitter account, it's kind of like a you're in, you know, like, this is his seal of approval for what you're doing right now. And Kersher was one of the ones who got their picture with Van Horn last week.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: It's a badge of honor, man. And the more arms. You know, honestly, Matt, if you look at last year, I think the number of arms that they really trusted when they got to the postseason had dwindled some.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: It's that way.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: It hurt.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: It's that way every year. I got to think about some of the best teams they've had. 18, 19, 22. Like. Like it it. Bubba and I call it the circle of trust. The circle of trust gets very small when the postseason comes around.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And last year it was obviously fairly small to the point that you're starting Will, you know, Ethan McIlvaine yeah, in your last game. And I thought it was a very clutch, very gutsy performance on a hot day that he gave him as much as he did.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Very hot. Especially for Kansas. That was a real hot day for Kansas.
Looks like Arkansas is probably going to have somewhere around 40 players. The roster has not fully shaken out yet. I think there's going to be maybe another player or two who nobody knows about yet who ends up on this roster this year. Maybe there's players who are still, as I would say, in the fold. People who have eligibility left and they didn't enter the transfer portal. Who, maybe they don't, they don't end up back here, you know, maybe, who knows?
But right now I think they're going to end up having around 40. You know, the limit for baseball roster is 34 players, but you can exceed 34 with these designated student athlete tags. And if you don't know what designated Student athletes are, DSAs.
These came as part of the house settlement last summer where the judge in California didn't want all of these, you know, didn't want all of these caps coming into place and then having just a bunch of players across all sports just kind of out in the window.
And so it allows them. It's kind of like, and it's weird how we say Covid was another era, but it's kind of like this era's Covid year where you got that boat, you know, where you just, you kind of have a transition period because of something really monumental that has happened that has shaken things up. That's what the house settlement is, you know, for, for this. And the eras get much smaller in college sports. You know, like eras used to be like 20 years, now it's like two. Like the house settlement is the big, you know, shake up event of this era. But I think they'll probably end up with somewhere around 40 players.
You know, they can only, they can only Travel and play 34 on a conference weekend.
But you know, it is. And you're going to have injuries too, but it's nice to be able to have some numbers so you can kind of evaluate a little bit more in the fall. And then if you've got injuries, guys that you might be able to plug in. I think that was something that really concerned coaches when they put this 34 man cap in place, was what happens if we have a rash of injuries and all of a sudden our 34 man roster just went down to 29. Well, that's a big deal, especially if you have a cluster of injuries at one position.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: And I think as we get close to wrapping this thing up, I would think Razorback fans watching this podcast want to know, can next year's Arkansas baseball team be in the Dave Van Horn the current era mode? And your answer to that would be,
[00:25:58] Speaker A: what do you mean in the current era mode?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Compete for the SEC championship?
[00:26:02] Speaker A: I think, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if.
I want you to think about this. If it wasn't for Georgia being far and away better than everybody else this year, Arkansas's in contention for the conference title with about two weeks left in the season and they won their last two series.
But like, Georgia was so much better than everybody else that there was never really any conference race. But Arkansas, they end up with 17 wins. There are some years where 17 wins is going to get you within two or three wins of the conference title.
So, you know, this year, I still say this year it was substandard for Arkansas in a lot of ways. But part of, you know, I think part of the, part of maybe the impression that Arkansas left on people had to do, I think with the fact that you had this really great team in the SEC in Georgia, and they just totally ran away with it. 17 and 13 is not a bad year in the SEC.
It's, it's really not. Now. It's not 18 and 12, 19, 11, 2010, some of those type seasons that we've seen from Arkansas, but it wasn't, it wasn't a terrible year.
If this is your, if your bad year is 17 SEC wins and a regional runner up and 12 draft players, like, you've set a pretty high bar for yourself.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And Georgia ultimately gets the same fate that Arkansas 2021, best team in the country.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: That happens in Tennessee.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: 2022. Those two years in Georgia this year, same fate.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: Real quick. SEC media days. They announced this morning that Arkansas is sending.
Okay, I think I've got this right. Sutton Smith, Quincy Rhodes and Kaden Kittler to SEC media days next week. You're going down there to Tampa. What are you expecting?
[00:27:47] Speaker B: That was correct. And you know, I think it's just a good blend. A guy who's played with Silverfield for his career. So Sutton Smith can talk to that and he's a well spoken kid from Marietta, Georgia. Quincy, the longtime Razorback, good team spokesman, the star of your team, basically. And then Kittler, a guy who transferred here but is a returning starter. So it's a good mix and I think will represent the team well.
I didn't think they would bring a quarterback and they didn't. And the only other option, in my view might have been Bradley Shaw, who's probably going to be the green dot at middle linebacker on defense.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Taking a quarterback is a tough proposition when you at least publicly maintain that you've got a quarterback battle.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So you really can. You can't bring them both. And then. So if you bring one, oh, that's. They're going to be their starter. So they weren't going to bring a quarterback.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: A little bit of news this morning from basketball, too. Big news. Caleb Origu committed to Arkansas. This is a 6 foot 10, 220 pounder. I mean, this is one of those Caliperi prospects who, you look at his offer list, it is the who's who of Blue Bloods. You know, Kentucky and UConn. I think he had visited both of those. He's reclassifying. He's a 20, 27 guy, but he's going to be like Cooper Flag. Maybe not the number one overall pick, but he's going to do like Cooper Flag. He's going to reclassify and he will be.
The expectation is that he will be with the team this season. Everybody's been waiting on like, like what's what. Like, like what's the. What's the shoe that's going to drop that's going to help Arkansas get a big man in place?
And I mean, this looks like this is going to be a centerpiece of their roster.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: It really does. I read Richard right up on him and you're right, it's the Blue Bloods. And Calipari has a way of keeping his team in the national spotlight and he's doing that and he's playing on Thanksgiving again. So Razorback fans, this is what you have now?
[00:29:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that was announced the other day. They're playing Michigan State on Thanksgiving. Can I make a bold prediction? This really isn't a bold prediction at all. They're not going to have the same TV ratings on Thanksgiving this year that they had last year. Last year, you know, because on Thanksgiving it rotates. So one year Fox will get the early game. The next year, cbs, Fox, cbs.
And what happened last year?
Last year was like this just great series of events that led to them and Duke getting the big number. Number one, you were playing the late game. Like you were following the late game on cbs. So there was football, but I think it was like on Peacock or something. I don't know.
They're also following the Cowboys and the Chiefs. They were following Dak against Mahomes.
And that game was the most watched regular season NFL game in history. Like 57 million people watch that game.
So you've got that lead in into your game. It's still going to be a big number. Thanksgiving Day games are a big number because there's a lot of people who they just leave their TV on and it's like, oh, I forgot to turn it to the Cowboys at 3:30. Never happens in my house. But that, that leads to big numbers for these Thanksgiving Day games. It's going to be a big rating. It's just not going to be the 6 million or 7 million or whatever they average for Duke last year.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: You're a TV ratings geek.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: I am. And this is interesting too, because this is going to be in Detroit. So they're going to be playing Michigan State like a few blocks away as the Lions game is wrapping up. So very interesting there. All right, Tom, you can read all of his coverage. And Ethan Westerman is going to be there, too, in Tampa next week at SEC football media days. Hope that we see at our website, wholehogsports.com we're cranking out stories like crazy this summer. There's really no off season on our website. Hope to see you there or on our next podcast. Have a great week, everybody.
