My friendship with Paul Finebaum can best be summed up with the final few moments of our conversation last week when I told him I was sitting in the parking lot of a tattoo shop while I was talking to him.
“Be careful,” he laughed.
I don’t think it dawned on him that I may have been sitting there because I had just added to an already extensive sleeve of tattoos on my right arm. Then it hits me. Paul and I have only ever spent time together in winter. He’s only seen me in a suit or hoodie. He probably doesn’t know I have a bunch of tattoos, including one in honor of his new co-worker, Nick Saban.
Paul and I both have deep roots in Alabama, but we are of different generations. We know a lot of the same people in our business but met them at very different points of our respective careers. I have known Paul as both a role model and now as a friend. That’s pretty cool, I think.
I hope he doesn’t disavow our relationship when he reads this.
I was in college at the University of Alabama when Paul was still doing his show on a news/talk station in Birmingham. I’m a fan of SEC Network Paul Finebaum, but the Finebaum that hooked me as a listener was the one that relished being a bit more adversarial. That’s the Paul Finebaum that taught me it’s okay to publicly say when someone or something is being dumb, even if you love it. It’s the ethos that became the foundation for my relationship with college football and the SEC.
Living very much in the ACC footprint now, I am protective of Paul when friends call him a shill or a homer. I am especially adversarial with people that suggest the ACC Network should have its own version of The Paul Finebaum Show. To act like it’s easy fundamentally dismisses the history and the work put in long before anyone outside of the 205 and 336 area codes knew the man’s name.
Maybe Paul agrees with me, maybe not. He won’t say much about 24/7 Sports’ recent article other than that he was confused by coaches saying that no one on their network advocated for their teams the way they think Finebaum does for SEC teams.
“I was in an awkward spot because anything I said was going to sound like I was pushing my chest out,” he said. “I thought they did have a show. That was kind of the whole idea when the network started. They had a morning show. They tried to replicate us and then they switched it to the afternoon,” he says of the now defunct Packer & Durham.
“The commissioner of the ACC is a close friend of mine, Jim Phillips. I hope I don’t ruin his reputation by saying we have lunch occasionally and we really have fun with each other, but, I mean, I can’t run their network. Somebody with ESPN is in charge of that, so, I’ll leave it there.”
As ESPN rethinks its future, it’s clear that the network wants to be in the star business. A new ad running on the network hammers that point home by reminding viewers that it is the TV home of Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee and Mike Greenberg.
Finebaum is one of the stars that the network wants to be in business with. That was proven last week when the two sides agreed to a new multi-year deal. His eponymous show will continue on the SEC Network. Finebaum will also continue to make appearances on shows like First Take and SportsCenter.
First Take in particular has been an interesting way to watch Finebaum for someone like me, who has followed him for years. It drives me nuts to watch Stephen A. Smith and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo be framed as intellectual equals with Finebaum in discussions of college football and then hear them say something that makes it clear they do not watch as much of the sport as even I do, let alone Paul.
My frustration peaked last month when Mad Dog argued passionately that Finebaum was wrong to call Lincoln Riley a failure at USC because one of his quarterbacks won the Heisman Trophy. It’s an asinine statement. It’s also not hard to find even USC fans online saying “Hey, Lincoln Riley has kind of been a bust”.
Finebaum doesn’t see the debates that way at all.
“I enjoy being on First Take with those two because of the entertainment value. I understand purists looking at it and shaking their head, but I have plenty of high level, highbrow conversations about college football on our show and on other shows. To me, [First Take] is just play period. I mean, I get to go out and be a kid again with two of the greatest of all time.”
I told Paul that I don’t think of myself as a purist when it comes to the sport, but I was annoyed by the segment. It just didn’t feel genuine. Mad Dog didn’t have the credibility to be a part of that argument. Paul said I was taking it too seriously. The point of the segment was to entertain. That Mad Dog doesn’t have the credibility to be a part of that argument is what made it work.
“Whether he was using OJ Simpson to sell the fact that USC is one of the biggest names in college football history, or whether he mistakenly gave Jalen Hurts a Heisman Trophy at Oklahoma under Lincoln Riley, it doesn’t matter to me,” he says. “I mean, this is not Final Jeopardy.”
College football is entering one of its most important seasons in a long time – maybe ever. Between conference re-alignment, that all but killed the regionality the sport was built on, and the expansion of the College Football Playoff, there’s so much the sport needs to get right all at the same time.
“It may be the most eagerly anticipated season I can remember in college football history,” says Finebaum.
For him, the season is already here. It started on June 30 when his show was broadcast live from Austin, Texas. The next day, he was in Oklahoma City. It was all part of welcoming the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners to the SEC, one of the few new conference affiliations that makes not only economic sense, but regional sense as well.
College football needs this. The ratings are as strong as ever, but I would argue that the sport needs to figure out how to create more diehard fans. Until last year, ten championships in a row were won by Southern teams. Nine of those ten were won by schools inside of a six hour stretch along Interstates 85 and 20 between South Carolina and Alabama. You’ll forgive me for wondering if that hasn’t hurt fandom on the West Coast and the Midwest.
The return of EA Sports’ college football video game is a big deal. Finebaum has said before that he hopes conference commissioners understand that fact. Michigan’s title last year and the arrival of Deion Sanders are big deals too. They all expand the borders of significance in this sport beyond the South.
I lay out my theory to Paul and ask him if he thinks ESPN marketing the sport with a new anthem from country music star Jelly Roll or College GameDay rolling through a barrage of interchangeable thirty-something white guys that sing songs about old trucks, country girls and being raised right as celebrity guests is a little counterintuitive.
Country music, despite its overwhelming popularity, is heavily associated with the South and in recent years, many of the biggest hits have been about how people not from the South would never get our culture. If there was actually a commissioner or someone in charge of college football, it seems like they would step in and say, “this doesn’t seem like the right marketing strategy.”
“I agree with your premise,” Finebaum said. “I think if there was one person, but here’s how to burst that bubble,” he says, bringing me crashing back to Earth. “There never is going to be one person, and there are a lot of reasons for that.
I can’t tell you how many times, in the last year I’ve had people call me and say, ‘Hey, you think Nick Saban would be a great czar of college football?’ Well, yeah, he would be, but he’s not going to be because to get that to happen, you need the four power conferences now to actually agree on something and they never will. That’s really what makes college football so unique, but also it causes so many issues.”
You can love something so much and still recognize and call out the stupidity that surrounds it. Even as college football evolves, history tells us that the people in charge will continue to get in their own way. As long as they do, Paul Finebaum will have plenty to offer new fans and those of us that have been there since he was calling for Mike DuBose’s job.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
