The North Carolina Tar Heels, led by previously-acclaimed Coach Bill Belichick, finished their season with a record of 4-8. Despite a $10 million annual salary and a subpar performance, it remains unclear if Belichick will remain as head coach for another year. Speaking of massive salaries, Louisiana State University’s new coach, Lane Kiffin, is now the second-highest-paid coach in college football with a $13 million salary.
Jen is joined by Pablo Torre for another episode of Offsides to talk about the role of money in sports, soccer taking up increasingly more space on American’s airways, and the bizarre FIFA Peace Prize.
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out .
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, it’s Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, and the Monday after Thanksgiving, it must be Pablo Torre. Pablo, welcome!
Pablo Torre
And good to be back, as always. As always, a lot is going on.
Jen Rubin
Yes, are your eyes glazed over from all of the games? Now, honestly, how many individual games did you watch all or part of?
Pablo Torre
At a certain point, you’re just sort of, like, absorbing it through osmosis. I would say that it became… it became a passive sort of receiving of sports, so somewhere between 3 and 30, I would say during the last, 5 days or so.
Jen Rubin
And when I have all four screens going on, I’m not sure I’m watching anything other than, you know, my little brain cells popping. So yeah, so it was quite a weekend for sports. So, first of all, let’s start with the college coaching news that we’ve all been anticipating. Yes, indeed, LSU has a new coach. What do you think? What do you, think about the amount of money he’s gonna receive?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so Lane Kiffin is this foremost… I’ll just call him a villain, a villainous character in the world of college sports, and we as journalists and gas bags love, love it when a character becomes an extreme version of, I think, a type. And the type is guy who is only out for himself.
And I wanna prevent us from collapsing onto our fainting couches, because of course this is capitalism, right? Like, there’s money on the table, there’s a better opportunity, of course he’s gonna go do it. The thing that’s different about this story is that he leaves Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin leaves Ole Miss, during the greatest season, you could argue, in Ole Miss’s history. They are about to be in the college football playoff, and what he has done is taken a bigger job at LSU, a hated rival of Ole Miss, and he’s doing it before the playoffs even start.
So, he is leaving a playoff team, and I will remind you, Jen, briefly, that the whole goal of sports is to, like, make the playoff, and it’s really hard, and he did it with Ole Miss, and so him saying to Ole Miss, you guys are not good enough for me to stick around to coach, is… Is kind of, like, the greatest insult you could have, because the counterpoint would be, like, but we’re in the playoff, and LSU is not.
LSU’s terrible right now. And so this is a story about what really matters in sports, which is, of course, money and brand name and the promise of something even greater, even though the thing that’s right in front of you is actually the goal that you want to reach. And so it’s just this paradoxical thing about what really even matters in sports anymore.
Jen Rubin
Now, to be clear, folks, he will not be with the team in the playoffs, That is in part because of the portal and the timing, and maybe we should talk about that for a bit. They don’t want him around these players at the time that the portal is opening, and the portal being… it is not the transporter, which I always think of, in connection with Star Trek, but it is the opening for players to say, I’d rather go to another school.
So, they don’t really want him around Old Miss players at the time the portal is opening to invite them all to come with him to LSU. Now, it’s true, he could pick up the phone and still talk to them, but he’s not going to be there with them on the phone. Is this screwed up, and why would you have the portal open just at the time of the playoffs, so that the top quarterback may not be with a team, the top coach may not be with a team. What’s going on?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so the structural calendar of college sports is making all of this worse. It’s an aggravating factor in all of it. So, National Signing Day, by the way, is this month now, December, which means that why is Lane Kiffin leaving his job now, instead of waiting until after Ole Miss’s playoff run resolves, whenever that is? It’s because his next job is already incentivizing him to want to go and recruit the best possible players as soon as possible. So that’s the recruiting side of it. The portal also being essentially perpetually open, makes it so that if you are Lane Kiffin, and you are coaching your Ole Miss team, knowing you’re going to leave. Ole Miss has made the decision, we don’t want you around, because we suspect that you’re just gonna steal all of our players and our coaching staff. We’re gonna give you more time to hang around the broken home that you have left, and taking all the pieces, all the players that are still valuable and very important to us.
We, Ole Miss, have decided to not let you do that, and I think that’s totally reasonable. Like, you don’t want this guy who is… eminently working for a competitor to be working for you, knowing that he’s not actually there in your best interest. So the whole thing is, I would say, again, the incentive structure of college sports, the whole thing is incentivized to resolve the way it has. It is merely an illustration. Really, the story is messy and delicious because it is an illustration of what incentives everyone is abiding by, first and foremost, and those interests, are of the category labeled self, which is, again, the story of college sports.
Jen Rubin
I mean, what’s wrong with opening the portal in January, for example, so that you at least leave teams and coaches intact during what’s supposed to be the high point of the whole season?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I would say that the devaluing of the playoff is one of the strange things, Jen, here, because the playoff, of course, from a pure economic imperative perspective, is the most important television product that you have. It is the thing that you’re all working towards. Why are you undermining it by having these other interests in conflict with the postseason?
And so, look, I would say that this is precisely one of those calendar problems that, I believe the committee is currently being run by the wrestler Triple H, as a related concern. Like, this is one of those things that Donald Trump’s counsel on college sports might take interest in if they were doing anything, but I fear that that is is not something that they are even remotely taking seriously, even though it is one of those things that would actually make a difference.
Yeah, lots of reforms should happen. It is the story, though, when it comes to Lane Kiffin, of just a brief bit of texture on him, he is somebody who has essentially left every job he’s ever had in some amount of disgrace. Some amount of people yelling at him on a tarmac, which is what happened, at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. It is the thing that happened when he was at, Tennessee, and Alabama, and Florida Atlantic, and the Raiders.
He just goes from place to place, because In the end, he is a very skilled offensive mind and recruiter and program builder. But he’s just someone that no one can really trust. And I think there is something perfect also in that bit of a character sketch.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, he’s going to go from a… let’s be honest, a relatively poor state of Mississippi to another relatively poor state of LSU, and going to be paid a giant amount of money, no doubt becoming one of the richest people in this state. Is that just the way it is now with, you know, all this, you know, NIL money floating around, that people can be incentivized to go places? Are schools, even in states that are not maybe rolling in dough, just able to finance whoever they want now?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, keep in mind that the Governor of Louisiana came out after LSU fired Brian Kelly, the predecessor now to Lane Kiffin, who is also making 8 figures annually, giant contract, and he came out and said that he is going to not let a bad contract like Brian Kelly’s happen again. He was going to basically take the steering wheel from LSU when it came to hiring the head football coach, who is, naturally and inevitably, the highest paid public employee in any given state in America at this point.
And so to follow Brian Kelly up immediately with another character who is making 8 figures and is going to be the highest paid public employee in the state, is not just, very funny from a just, like, what you just said the other thing, like, last week. It’s also the reality that in college football, the number two most popular sport in America-- it is a sport built on coaches.
It’s a sport built on, effectively, management that also gets to be labor. It is management that has I would say this, too, so much less of the hand-wringing, morally, around freedom of movement and employment as there is with players, and the transfer portal, and the perpetual free agency that someone like Nick Saban has decried. Like, all these coaches have decried how players can do whatever they want now, and it’s total chaos, and they’re not… wrong in that it is chaotic and players can do more than they could before. But the coach has always been able to cash in, basically at his own personal whim, and there has been no call to prevent that freedom of movement from being exactly what it is, which is insanely disruptive to everybody.
Jen Rubin
Dare I say, could we use some salary caps in college sports? My word. What a concept. That would blow their mind. Speaking of college football coaches, what’s going on over at North Carolina with Bill Belichick?
Pablo Torre
So, North Carolina has finished its season, officially. They just got blown out by NC State, which is a sentence that no North Carolina booster imagined when they hired Bill Belichick to be the highest-paid public employee, of course, in the state of North Carolina, which he remains at $10 million a year, as I often say.
To pick up the thread from last week, when you were asking me, what have I heard from Jordan Hudson, who is Bill Belichick’s business partner and girlfriend, and as I call her, “momager”, like, this person who is both, like, his representative in all things, the person kind of, like, steering him in his new public life. I can report that there has been no legal notice or letter or communique of any kind sent to me.
Still, I have not been sued by Jordan Hudson, despite her threatening to do so on Instagram last week, which is a fun sentence that I Never get tired of saying out loud. I can further add to the clarity of the dynamic that the University of North Carolina, who I contacted. has made clear to me that they have no part in any of the legal threats at all made by Jordan Hudson. I had sent immediately, hours after I saw the Instagram caption, an email, a letter to North Carolina’s public relations and sports information staff asking for clarity about what this is, because they’d never pushed back on any of the facts I had presented, and in fact, I outline in the letter which I put on X, what those demands, and questions were, and yeah, I can just tell you that they had no part and have no involvement with her in any of these ways. So, just another bit of context for that.
Jen Rubin
And there’s no sign that they’re gonna give him the boot, correct? He is apparently gonna be back next season, what, for another season of embarrassing losses?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so they’re 4-8, that’s how they ended the season, which is… embarrassing, to say the least. And, look, if they… I think they have two choices. One is to, eat the sunk cost and get rid of him in the off-season, which would be more than deserved, based purely in terms of on-the-field performance, and what kind of net result they’ve gotten for all the money they’ve invested. I have a sense, though, that the sunk cost fallacy is going to reign supreme, as in, they want to get another year out of this, they don’t want to admit how wrong they were in bringing him in. So, we will get yet another season of this before the plug, presumably gets pulled, which is… not gonna be great. Not gonna be fun for Carolina fans, I would wager.
Jen Rubin
So let’s skip over to pro football, from whence Bill Belichick came. You have a division, for example, where the top team is at 500. It’s really hard to find not only a dominant team, but a team that displays excellence week after week. I guess the closest you might come to are maybe the Broncos? Maybe New England? Is this just parody? Is this just everyone having kind of a subpar season at the same time?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I think, in my personal power rankings, for whatever that’s worth, which is extraordinarily little. The Patriots, who are playing on Monday night against the Giants, they are 10-2, are…
Pablo Torre: I think the best team in the NFL? Question mark? And I say that with very little confidence, because parody, as we often say, is a synonym for mediocrity, and the Patriots are not a great team, but they are the one that has won the most persuasively. They’ve won 9 in a row, and the Broncos, to your point, are right behind them. But then, week to week, you know, the Rams were the team where it was like, oh man, this team looks like a Super Bowl favorite. In fact, the betting markets like them still to be a favorite, but they just lost to the sad Panthers, this past weekend.
And so it really is one of those yeah, seasons, let alone months, where just anyone can get upset, and the question then becomes, is it even really an upset, when everyone’s kind of in that same morass of just sort of the same stuff? It’s been… despite all of that, of course, an extraordinarily popular and successful season for the NFL, because the demand for football of any kind is effectively inelastic, which owes to, I think, the theme of this entire conversation so far, is that people will watch, no matter what you throw out there. But, in this case, the NFL, from a game-to-game product perspective, has been meh. And I think it’s okay for us to admit that it’s a meh sort of a season from a, what are we watching, is it great, or is it something less than?
Jen Rubin
Right. Now, even less than meh is the Kansas City Chiefs football team, which is now at 6-6, and is number, at risk of missing the playoffs, but very likely, to miss the playoffs. They’re not out of it, but, why are they playing so…Meh.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, they have a… I’m checking this right now, they have a 36% chance to make the postseason. And this is my preseason Super Bowl favorite. The theory has always been that… in a world of mediocrity, just bet on the team with the strongest track record, and the Super Bowl has been… the AFC title game, at the very least, has been essentially a home game for the Chiefs for as long as I can, you know, the last half decade, as long as I can remember, in the modern era of, what otherwise has been, like, a random number generator.
Postseason has long been that, but the Patriots rested control of it. and the Chiefs did… and now the question is, is anyone driving this car anymore? And so the Chiefs’ question, I think it owes to a bunch of things. I think the defense, I think Mahomes, even though he has flashes of brilliance. Has not been quite the magician that he has been historically. But, at the same time, if you were to tell me that the… I think there are two possibilities right now on the table as a 36% odds of making the playoffs is in front of me. I think if you were to tell me, a month from now, the Chiefs did not make the postseason, I’d be like, yeah, that makes sense, they were only 36%. If you told me that the Chiefs are making a run through the postseason, and are about to win the Super Bowl, I’d be like, well, that’s exactly what I picked, and that sounds about right, too.
In the playoffs, there’s a cliche, Jen, of, like, they’re the team you don’t want to face. Right. The Chiefs just have to be that. And I… I think that it’s not over yet, just because of how beatable everybody else seems to be.
Jen Rubin
Now, there is an analogy over in one of my favorite, sports, and that is Premier League Soccer in England. Liverpool had an outstanding, dominating season. They not only won in the Premier League, they won in other cups, other championships, and this year. They are downright, kind of, less than meh. And what’s worse is they spent $500 million on players, and they have gotten a meh team. Now, there’s lots of theories for why they’re so… meh. One is they’re an aging team, and this happens a lot. Man City last year was the aging team, although they’ve rebounded.
Another was that they bought a lot of flashy players that looked really good on paper, but they didn’t get what they really needed, which was some defense and a really good midfielder, and so they’re drifting along. And the question there—just like the question in pro football, just like the question in college football is: do you fire the manager? Does it make any sense when you really don’t even know kind of what’s wrong? But it is kind of another sign that for all this expertise and for all the algorithms These people don’t necessarily know what’s good for their own team, and they’ve now, like, been a disaster.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I’m looking at the, the accounting of this, and look, half a billion dollars should still have some sticker shock for us, even as we’re just throwing around 9 figures like, none of it really matters anymore. What’s interesting also, of course, is that this informs how Baseball fans are thinking about the Red Sox. So, again, the management team, Fenway Sports Group, which owns both Liverpool and the Red Sox, on some level, you are drawing from the same purse. And so, if half a billion dollars are going towards the football club, the question that you ask yourself as the Red Sox are trading away their high-priced star players, by the way, this past season, is whether they’re doing that in order to rob Peter to pay Paul, basically.
And that’s interesting. That’s an interesting perspective, but look, it’s a reminder, really, that in sports, as much as you want as much money as possible, because that is —especially in an uncapped sport, like you know, world football— that’s how you have the biggest advantage. It’s why Saudi Arabia is a petrostate that you want to have, like, behind you. It’s also not a guarantee that you’re gonna win. And so there is just this—there’s always this realization of… You get the money, but you can’t always buy the thing you want the most.
Jen Rubin
Right, exactly. And that’s why sports are great.
Pablo Torre
The richest kid isn’t always the most successful, and that’s, again, a refreshing sensation as we survey our world in general.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. There is another analogy between American football and world football, being soccer, what we call, and that is that it’s getting to be an unlimited demand. I found myself this weekend very happily watching the Champions League, which is one… the championship league, which is one level down. It’s not even the top, it’s like Double A ball.
It was extremely exciting, and most of those teams, because you have the relegation, have been up to the Premier Leagues, some of them very recently, have now come down. I could watch very happily. LaLiga, I could very happily watch Bundesliga. There is a lot out there, and I still remember, it seemed like, I don’t know, 5 years ago, when people said, oh, Americas will never watch soccer. Americans seem to be watching a lot of soccer, and you have multiple leagues, and multiple cups, and multiple championships, and people seem to be watching it all.
Pablo Torre
Oh yeah, I mean, look, the joke on soccer has long been, like, it’s been, America’s sport of the future for, like, 30 years. It’s always promised it’s gonna be the thing. But I would say that, frankly, the advent of all of these streaming services, as much as it has very messy to find anything. It has made it very easy to watch these games in the mornings, inevitably, during the weekends, that are taking place overseas.
And the fact that it’s happening as the World Cup is coming to North America, and as, by the way, to bring us back to, the, White House for a second. The head of FIFA is now teasing the new peace prize that he’s invented, and who’s gonna get it is gonna be a real… it’s gonna be a real shocker if it goes to the guy that he has been effectively, rhetorically fellating for the last year, the president of our country.
It all… it all just feels like… in all of these different ways, soccer, world football, is having a moment in America, and it’s having it in the realm of, corruption, as well as in terms of, like, on-the-field accessibility. And I think anecdotally, all of us know people—my brother has been radicalized into a Tottenham fan, because the internet has made it possible for him to find this tribe that is otherwise across the world that has nothing at all to do with them. And I’m just like, this is… this is actually the promise of modern sports, too.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, and I will say, this, that at least for the foreseeable future. You can probably go maybe almost 7 days a week, and see some form of soccer. You can really, like, watch some of it. And I must say, just to finish this off, I find the notion of a FIFA Peace Prize ludicrous and bizarre. The people who have had their hand in every corrupt, third world kind of deal over the years, they’ve come up with a peace prize? That’s kind of like, you know, the Pablo-Jen Peace Prize. Actually, ours would be a better choice.
Pablo Torre
We have a better claim to, evaluating the rightful recipient of a peace prize than, as you put it, Gianni Infantino, who, yeah, I mean, it’s just like, yeah, it’s like, what if Boss Tweed was also running a, children’s fund? It’s like, I guess, but, like, why would you?
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Well, let’s finish on a happy note. You are a OKC, fan, and an OKC coach fan. And they have a remarkable figure. Talk to us about him, and kind of what he’s done for the sports, for OKC, and kind of for those of us who’d like to think that sports and sports people can have an intellectual bent as well.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I’m an admirer of what Sam Presti has built, how he’s operated, as much as it’s been frustrating to try and, like, understand the black box that he has constructed. What he has built is pretty unparalleled when it comes to sports management.
And the story that brought this to the fore most recently is a story by Baxter Holmes at ESPN, who… reported this whole feature about how Sam Presti, the GM of the team, sees his entire life’s work through the lens of Robert Caro. And Robert Caro is something that any, is somebody that any political nerd is, of course, familiar with. The tomes on… LBJ, Robert Moses, like, these multi-volume sets, thousands upon thousands of pages. He’s still reporting the LBJ one—
Jen Rubin
Yes, he’s on Volume 5. We’re hoping he makes it through!
Pablo Torre
And to that point, Robert Caro has created, in his readership, which is expansive now, over decades upon decades, an appreciation for what it is to do something with the longest possible lens. And I think that that’s just this thing that sports also can teach us when we’re not just being distracted by the shiny object, which is, if you establish something resembling a process, and you have a fidelity to your principles and strategic rigor.
You can create something by merely committing to what you believe is right that can be not just better and more successful, but more lasting. in a world of, I would say, depressing disposability.
I feel this all the time, as we are both gen content creators, scare quotes around all of those words, but Robert Caro, is the opposite end of any online spectrum. He is deliberately offline. and making stuff through reporting that, the NBA, it turns out, when they have the time to contemplate, like, what are we even doing anymore, is turning.
It’s a matter of, like, a North Star in terms of how to build anything, which I think is great.
Jen Rubin
And it was very cute in this article that you referenced, they spoke to Robert Caro, and he said, well, I’m very touched. He seemed very embarrassed, almost, by this association that he has become, somehow, this folk hero. But for those of us who are Robert Caro junkies and, take his work as really kind of the mark of excellence. It’s very nice to see that at least there’s someone in the sports world. Kind of reminds me of the Warriors coach, Steve Kerr, who has an intellectual bent, a little bit of a philosophical outlook in life, and that’s, nice to hear, nice to see.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, you know, one last thought, Jen, is just that as I survey the world of sports, the story tends to be big money and big data. And in Robert Caro, you have somebody who is, certainly following the money and certainly fascinated by collecting more and more information, but also has this different throwback archetype that I’m not surprised thoughtful people in sports really do consider a patron saint of theirs.
It’s just that he’s so, he’s so quaint in terms of how he presents versus Silicon Valley, that it’s very funny to realize that, wait a minute, what if the center of our Venn diagram was someone like that? I think it’d be a better way forward if it was, like, let’s say Robert Caro instead of, like, David Sachs. I think that would be a nice sort of, like, choice in terms of who we choose to valorize.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if more people thought Robert Caro was the icon that one should pursue in terms of excellence, Well, as always, Pablo, we cover the entire universe, from the sublime to the ridiculous. So, enjoy your sports week. It’s a great time of year. Basketball, football, college football, playoffs, all the rest of it. So we will see you back next week. Have a great week.
Pablo Torre
See you, Jen. Take care.
