It does in the Sunbelt.

You know, I think geography is one of our superpowers.

And so that's one of the things that that we're always looking for is how the geographic fit work.

I also think, you know, we want passionate fan bases.

We want people who've had some success in sports.

I think all those things are really important.

And I think another thing that I think is is really we should be really proud of in the Sun Belt is at our level with our most of our peer conferences, when realignment happens, conferences get worse.

So what has Southern Miss meant to the Sun Belt? And have they overachieved? Have they surprised you with what they've been able to commit and make happen in the Sun Belt?

Right.

I think there's also a transition piece because, like some of that stuff is being, the way you described it, if you think about linear, you know, you're going from broadcast to broadcast all on the same channel.

Right

...

in a way that no one does, and that's what the studio really allows us to do.

And that's the kind of content that we've been trying to bring, and I think we're doing a good job of that.

Can we do more? We can certainly look into that to see if there's more that we can do.

But I do, I just don't want it to be lost on we're doing a lot more than, than most.

If you could magically wave that wand, what would you do to make it better?

Yeah, so the things that we love about it are the transfers, what it does in transfer space, what it does in eligibility, and some of the liability protections.

But where I think it falls short is it still allows people to seek remedies, whether it's the bill or those things, in state court, and that's a huge problem.

We've seen that before.

People can go in, contest eligibility.

State court, they generally always get it.

So I think all that kind of any private right of action any kind of a grievance that you have against something in the bill, that all should either be protected from an antitrust perspective or it's got to go to federal court.

When you talk about scheduling, is there any way that it can be assured that the premier schools would get to play each other during the regular season?

that big of a deal because it doesn't hurt them

yeah there's no question there's less opportunity in men's basketball to play those games even in women's basketball you know The teams are almost anytime, anywhere they'll play you.

But in men's basketball, it's really selective.

You are totally right.

They're playing a lot of games against each other, which limits those opportunities.

And and so it's a challenge.

So it's a new environment.

But I don't understand on how to get more people at the ballgames.

And then can you ex-- And can you quickly describe what the seed scrubbing process is? I know you guys have been doing it a lot over the past four or five days, but why did it wind up that Miami actually wound up getting scrubbed all the way down to where it was sitting there right on the edge?

Yeah.

So when we build our seed line, we, um, go back through it once we have it built, and we essentially scrub.

So we take each school's resumes that are next to each other, and we compare them both with the school above them and the school below them, and we look at those resumes to see if there are any reasons, um, that we would wanna, that we would wanna change the order of that seeding.

And when we went through that process and when we were looking at Miami's predictives and also, you know, kind of the, the quality win totals, um, it, it just allowed those schools to scrub up above them, and Miami, Miami ended up kind of in that at the last at large on our seedless position, but they weren't the last, um, at large team selected into the field.

Would it be safe to say when we boil down the conversation that the committee collectively, even though there's 12 different opinions, looked at a team that went undefeated in the regular season and said, "We need to have a team like this in our national tournament"? And then once they were safely in and you really started to debate those teams, you said, "But the predictives are so poor outside the top sixty, outside the top seventy, outside the top eighty," that you got to a point where we know they're gonna be in, but just from a team quality standpoint, we think they are the worst team among all the at largers.

[lips smack] No.

That, you know, that's not really the approach that we take, right? You know, we're looking for the 37 best at largers, and when we are selecting teams in the field, we focus a lot on the resume metrics.