um, company corporation, but as you're doing kind of evaluating on what products to develop, what matters, what's your process there and how does that really feed back into that contractor driven innovations?

We, yes, Duralast is a brand within a much larger Amrise.

And I, I think one of the things that the Amrise, uh, connection gives us is we get more people looking at these problems or pain points or opportunities that come back with creative solutions.

So we have access to that.

We have a great team here at DuraLast.

But if they get stuck on something, they collaborate with their counterparts and they may come at it from a completely different direction and provide a better solution or vice versa.

Our DuraLast people weigh in on other things as well.

Talk a little bit about that VEDA and the Duralast solution.

Sumo con

bay hit.

Driven back.

ECU standing tall.

Skip liked to go physical, but what does that mean when it comes to tackling a Chris Johnson, Dominique Lindsey, Brandon Simmons? How do you handle that at practice? Be physical, but not injure a guy.

I'll tell you how I handled it.

If you were Chris Johnson, you're never playing again.

I was like, hey, wrap him up, keep him up, and tell him good job.

So, Hud, you wanted the offense to look good or attempt to look good against you, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Because, you know, good on good and big on big is, you know, ones on one is the only way you're going to improve.

you know, your starters, and you can go all day against backups or scout team and just get a look.

But that's one thing, you know, Skip did is we did a lot of good on good, and we did it throughout the season.

We didn't back off of it.

We might have lowered the reps, and we got good at staying off the ground.

What's that like, year one, when you come into a situation like that?

For pretty much the full 60-minute hoist evolution, the entire helicopter shook to the point where, you know, if you're quickly l- trying to look at the dash or one of our s- our nav displays, it was shaking violently the entire time.

And they had a blackout on the ship, right? So they had no power, no communications, so we didn't have a report that they had run aground.

We were just looking for a boat in the water that lost power.

To see it up against the shore kind of blends in, you know, unnatural, something we weren't expecting.

It's like, "Oh, uh, uh, that's the boat.

Okay, that's on the shore now.

It's, it's actually smashed into the rocks.

Let's, uh, get her done."

What were your thoughts when you saw Chris earlier today?

Yeah.

it was, it was, it was tough to see.

I mean, that's, uh, um, it was hard.

Yeah.

It shook me.

It shook me pretty good for, for a little bit this morning for a lot of bit, uh, just to know, you know, where he was at his peak.

But I know they're working every day at it.

oh wow hey so you're you're going you know campus to campus and traveling through these great states in the united states uh do you have a favorite like a new favorite maybe that uh you have enjoyed here uh on your trips the last couple years

i'll tell you what i did go through uh when i left east carolina uh last week i uh i went through You know, the Triangle and then Greensboro, stopped at Wake, and then shot down and stayed with Skip.

He's about 25 minutes north of Clemson.

And when I left there, that big lake area he's living on, the drive from there up through to... into Tennessee, into Knoxville, but the drive through the northern part of South Carolina was beautiful.

That was a good one.

Have not done that one.

But how about their move to the Big Ten? How has that been good or bad for them?

That stuck them a little bit because of their recruiting.

So basically you get

to decide.

I think it can be a slippery slope depending on if you think your value is this and to the media or to the fan base that's actually going to view it.

It's not, and you come back with – Okay, we thought, we were hoping, okay, to make this amount of money, we need 1.2 million viewers and you get 300,000.

You know the you got to sell your brand and is your brand worth somebody you know Following and and do you have that many people that that's where the just see the disparity is between The Big Ten and the SEC when you just look at okay the perception is okay these SEC teams all got all kinds of money and Well, there's two that really do.

Right.

Even Texas Tech, even though they're not in the SEC, they've got that billionaire guy.

If I told you in 2016 you had 60 newcomers, how would you feel about that?

That's an issue.

This kid, when they came out and said he has a gambling addiction and he has anxiety...

As a person in recovery, this guy is masking his emotions and his feelings of something else that's bothering him, that's manifested for years.

And the feeling he gets when he places that bet and watches that game makes him feel better than he does without it.

That's why people drink, because they don't like the way they feel about themselves sober.

So if I put this medicine, this Tylenol in me, you know, Crown Royal, my feelings change and then it masks how I really feel about myself and I feel better about myself even though it's a facade.

So I have sympathy for what he's going through individually.

So they're all,

But if you start 8-0 and lose four games versus your 4-4 and win the last four, that's a huge difference, right?

Yeah, and a lot of times the timing of when that loss comes is directly equated to the stature of your program and your university.

Because speaking of Coughlin, I've been on a team where we won every game until that very last one.

Was that B.C.? We beat Florida State and lost to B.C. in the last game of the year.

It really cost us the national championship.

And I'm telling you what, The rest of that week in the office, we might as well have won six games.

It was brutal.

Hood, where are you at as you watch this going on right now?