Agent Palmer

Episode 77 features Ty Hildenbrandt, co-host of The Solid Verbal, a college football podcast.

We discuss college football, the changing sports media landscape, go behind the scenes of the podcast, dive into our formative years and the impact that SportsCenter had on us, and much much more.

Throughout the conversation, we discuss:

• Why College Football
• Sports Illustrated / Journalism
• Broadcast Journalism
• Sports Media
• Ty’s Career Trajectory
• It started with a blog…
• SportsCenter as something formative
• The Sports Reporters
• Growing up a Sports Fan
• Regional and Tribal College Football
• Notre Dame
• Penn State
• Choosing fandom
• The Saturday Campus Experience
• College Football’s proliferation
• FBS/FCS
• The year-round spectacle
• Everyone can find their home
• Losing team’s beat writer’s recap
• The Solid Verbal podcast history
• Rivalries
• And much more

Mentioned and Helpful Links from This Episode

The Solid Verbal

Music created and provided by Henno Heitur of Monkey Tongue Productions.

–End Show Notes Transmission–

–Begin Transcription–

00:00:00:01 – 00:00:23:47
Agent Palmer
Previously on Agent Palmer dot com Get lost in the Deep Purpose of Eleanor Rigby. Observations from the 2022 tour de France and food has become a recent theme for the podcast, but as we all learned last episode, we’re all foodies. This is The Palmer Files episode 77 with Ty Hildenbrandt, co-host of The Solid Verbal, a college football podcast. We discuss college football, of course, the changing sports media landscape.

00:00:23:53 – 00:01:02:58
Agent Palmer
Go behind the scenes of the podcast, dive into our formative years and the impact that Sports Center had on us, and much, much more. Are you ready? Let’s do the show.

00:01:03:03 – 00:01:26:23
Agent Palmer
Hello, and welcome to the Palmer Files. I’m your host, Jason Stershic. Also known as Agent Palmer. And on this 77th episode is Ty Hildenbrandt, brand co-host for the solid verbal, a podcast where Ty and his co-host Dan talk college football. From the regular season to the postseason to the off season. Because you don’t just love college football, you live it, which is a great description for their show as you’re about to hear.

00:01:26:24 – 00:01:49:36
Agent Palmer
But this isn’t just a conversation between two podcasters and two college football fans. This is a conversation about the growth and evolution of college football, about the behind the scenes of a Sports Conversation podcast. But it’s also just two sports fans. Even though we’re rivals in the Al East, that happen to enjoy what happens on the field, no matter the shape and size of that field.

00:01:49:41 – 00:02:12:40
Agent Palmer
You’ll hear us discuss why college football finding your home on the internet, Ty’s career trajectory, the regional and tribal nature versus nurture of football, fall Saturday campus culture, the proliferation of the college game on television, the early days of podcasting, rivalries and the losing teams. Beat writers recap all of that, and a whole lot more is coming your way shortly.

00:02:12:40 – 00:02:39:00
Agent Palmer
But first, if you want to discuss the episode as you listen or afterwards, you can tweet me at Agent Palmer, my guest, Ty Hildenbrandt at Ty Hildenbrandt, that’s Ty Hildenbrandt or at Solid Verbal. And this show at the Palmer Files. You can find more information about Ty at solid verbal.com, which is where you can learn more about the live shows, as well as catch up on new episodes in the archives.

00:02:39:04 – 00:02:55:59
Agent Palmer
Don’t forget, you can see all of my writings and rantings on Agent palmer.com. And of course email can be sent to the Palmer files at gmail.com. So without further ado, maybe score from the red zone this time.

00:02:56:04 – 00:03:05:56
Agent Palmer
Ty, you run a college football podcast and I wanted just to start with why college football?

00:03:06:01 – 00:03:35:27
Ty Hildenbrandt
Why college football? I have been a huge college football fan for as far back as I can remember, and back in 2004, blogging was a thing. Yep. And college football for me was like a topic that I could talk about, that I knew a lot about, that. I was passionate about, that I didn’t get tired of writing about, frankly, because that’s what a lot of this comes down to.

00:03:35:32 – 00:04:01:30
Ty Hildenbrandt
And over the course of time, I was kind of able to marry these two passions of mind, one being like sports in general and writing in some sort of media with A.V. Nerdery audio Nerdery. And so when it came time to start a podcast, the first podcast I did was actually a New York Yankees podcast. And so there’s always been that sports tie in.

00:04:01:35 – 00:04:25:47
Ty Hildenbrandt
But as I started writing more about college football, as I eventually met my co-host when we were both writing for Sports Illustrated, college football ended up being the topic, really that took off for us in the podcasting sense. So to to say that there was like an intentional strategic move to make it about college football. It like it just sort of organically happened for me.

00:04:25:51 – 00:04:31:48
Ty Hildenbrandt
And, I’m thankful it’s done well. So I don’t know if that’s really an answer, Jason, but.

00:04:31:53 – 00:04:54:59
Agent Palmer
I think it is. But I think it also begs the question of, you’re writing for Sports Illustrated. Are you, you know, was being in sports journalism what you wanted to do? And obviously you had achieved some level of that. And were you on a I mean, it’s a multiple level question, but were you on a beat specifically to what you wanted?

00:04:54:59 – 00:05:00:21
Agent Palmer
I mean, you said you had a passion for college football and, you know, you covered the Yankees. But yeah.

00:05:00:32 – 00:05:21:50
Ty Hildenbrandt
So I went to Penn State as a broadcast journalism major, and I did that for a year and a half. And it was at that point that my advisor, a very nice older gentleman, told me that if I continued down this track, I’d have no trouble getting a job for some comically low salary in Altoona. I don’t know how many listeners you have from Altoona.

00:05:21:50 – 00:05:24:28
Ty Hildenbrandt
Altoona is a very depressed area. It’s a very depressed town.

00:05:24:29 – 00:05:35:58
Agent Palmer
But I so I oh, hold on, I’m so confused. If you go down this. Why can you not take your degree and go to, I don’t know, a market larger than.

00:05:36:03 – 00:05:40:04
Ty Hildenbrandt
This is what they told me. It’s very much a pay your dues kind of industry okay.

00:05:40:04 – 00:05:43:13
Agent Palmer
So you’re going to start so so the idea is you’re going to start in Altoona.

00:05:43:27 – 00:06:09:01
Ty Hildenbrandt
Exactly right. You’ll start there. And then if you’re good you’ll you’ll work your way up. Again, no disrespect Altoona sure sounds that way. But so yeah, I, I always was on this track. I always wanted to do something in sports media, whether it’s announcing games or being a sports broadcaster. I like I always wanted to go down that track, and I came to this realization about a year and a half in at Penn State that I didn’t want to follow the track that this guy was telling me about.

00:06:09:01 – 00:06:10:32
Ty Hildenbrandt
That did not sound appealing to me.

00:06:10:32 – 00:06:11:16
Agent Palmer
Sure.

00:06:11:21 – 00:06:28:27
Ty Hildenbrandt
And so I switched. I went in a different direction, kind of with the with the intention, with the hope that at some point down the line I would find my way back into it, blaze my own trout, find my way back into it. You know, it was a pipe dream at that point. But interestingly enough, back to what I said earlier.

00:06:28:31 – 00:06:53:11
Ty Hildenbrandt
I graduate in 2004. Blogging is like taking off. Everybody in there wants a blog, and there were plenty of free ways you could do it. I did mine back in the day through AOL, right? And you could just write about sports there. And eventually Fox Sports had a big contest, and I won a big writing contest and got a contract with Fox Sports, and then eventually ended up writing with Sports Illustrated.

00:06:53:11 – 00:07:16:16
Ty Hildenbrandt
So I was never really on a beat. Okay, I always just had this passion to be involved somehow in sports media, whether it was through blogging or recording my own voice or what have you, and it all kind of like came together eventually, took a while into this thing. Now that we call the Solid Verbal, our college football show.

00:07:16:30 – 00:07:48:52
Agent Palmer
Now, when you were a kid as just a pure fan before the the, you start thinking about career tracks. Yeah. What are your sports that you are most geared up for? I mean, look, we all, I think I and I, I fall into this category. I grew up as a sports fan generally. Right. Like, I mean, my parents like to tell a story that, you know, when other kids would get up at super early on Saturday morning and watch cartoons, I got up and would put on Sportscenter.

00:07:49:07 – 00:08:11:07
Agent Palmer
Yep. And that’s, you know, and it like, I’m, I’m, you know, the Orioles are my love. But that’s for baseball. I also enjoy college football and college basketball. I, I’m a sports fan. So when when you’re, you know, let’s take you to, you know, maybe you know, eight, 1012 year old you are you a sports fan or do you have your things?

00:08:11:07 – 00:08:12:34
Agent Palmer
You get geared up for?

00:08:12:38 – 00:08:18:10
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, I lived breathed eight and slept baseball.

00:08:18:15 – 00:08:18:49
Agent Palmer
Okay.

00:08:18:54 – 00:08:41:26
Ty Hildenbrandt
I was all everything baseball all the time. I loved every second of baseball. When baseball was out of season, I was very much a football fan, mostly college football. I grew up in like a house that love Notre Dame football, that watched college football religiously every Saturday. Watch pro football, too, but it was just kind of like a sports house.

00:08:41:26 – 00:09:08:25
Ty Hildenbrandt
Sports was always on it. Who back in the day wasn’t a Michael Jordan fan or at least aware of Michael Jordan in a very serious way. So, you know, I feel like all of that stuff was a really prominent part of my childhood and turn me into, just, as you said, a general sports fan. The Sports Center tie in is actually quite interesting because, I think about that from time to time, especially if you try to turn on Sports Center now, it’s a lot different, yes, than it was 20 years ago.

00:09:08:25 – 00:09:36:46
Ty Hildenbrandt
But Sports Center, I think for me, probably for a lot of people in our age bracket, Jason Sports Center was a very formative thing. Sports center shaped the way we looked at sports, the way we felt about sports, where we talked about sports. And I’m sure if you dug deep enough and got me on like a psychologist’s couch, they could pick and pry different like idioms out of me that I pulled from Sports Center back in the day.

00:09:36:46 – 00:09:54:58
Ty Hildenbrandt
Like it? I feel like so much of my desire to go in this direction probably stems from the fact that I would tape Sports Center every morning, and if it wasn’t taping it, I’d watch it. You know? I was very passionate, not just about sports, but about the way that people would talk about sports on T.V..

00:09:55:03 – 00:10:14:02
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I, I remember, I think, I think the turning point for me in hindsight, as far as a sports fan versus a sports fanatic, was when I think back and I go, yeah, I was a ten year old watching the sports reporters. Yeah. And and just being like, why am I, why am.

00:10:14:03 – 00:10:17:44
Ty Hildenbrandt
Sharp on TV on a Sunday. Yeah. Like what we to what are we doing here.

00:10:17:45 – 00:10:43:07
Agent Palmer
Yeah. There’s no highlights. It’s just four guys sitting around talking about sports and I was there for it. And I, you know, some of that stuff has come full circle. I think one of the reasons that my personal ESPN flagship right now is PTI, and I didn’t know it at the time, was because I, I was a very, very young, formidable child.

00:10:43:16 – 00:11:11:44
Agent Palmer
I saw Kornheiser with hair in that chair next to Dick sharp. Right. And I saw Wilbon in that. And so I think these things kind of seep in. I have recently, I’m in our age bracket. I grew into becoming an NFL fan because of my love of college football, because I grew up in a Baltimore Colts household. So we didn’t talk about the NFL because the Colts left Baltimore.

00:11:11:52 – 00:11:39:10
Agent Palmer
That’s that’s just bottom line. So it wasn’t until so Saturday was Football Day. And it really wasn’t until like you start to, I don’t know, formalized like this is a progression. And then you go, well, I watched Peyton Manning at Tennessee for a few years. I’ll, I’ll watch him on Sunday and see what happens. And so I started to get into the NFL because of college football.

00:11:39:19 – 00:11:54:53
Agent Palmer
Like almost backwards in a sense, from everybody else I know who’s like, well, we I was a football fan and I fell in love with the Steelers or the Giants or whoever. And then I went backwards and I was like, oh, well, now there’s something to watch on Saturday.

00:11:54:57 – 00:12:15:49
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, I mean, the big the big secret and I don’t know if it’s a secret, but the, the sort of secret sauce, let’s say, for college football is that it’s very regional and very tribal, whereas the NFL is truly the National Football League. It’s a national sport. People talk about it from a zoomed out 30,000ft view all the time.

00:12:16:03 – 00:12:38:16
Ty Hildenbrandt
College football doesn’t really work like that. The fandom is different. You care about your team. Yeah, first and foremost. And then if you really like college football, you might care to listen to a show like mine where we talk about national college football stories and trends and storylines and narratives and things like that. But college football is different, and truly it depends on where you grow up.

00:12:38:16 – 00:13:00:41
Ty Hildenbrandt
It depends on the influences around you, depends on if if the people around you went to college, where they graduated from, what their rooting interests were in college football is, obviously a lot like other sports in that there’s a great deal of passion around it, but it runs very deep with college because if you go to Ole Miss, you’re going to be very passionate about Ole Miss.

00:13:00:41 – 00:13:25:19
Ty Hildenbrandt
You’re gonna think Ole Miss is the greatest college experience of all time. And when it comes to root for a team on Saturdays, you’re going to pick Ole Miss. How could you root for anyone other than Ole Miss? Like that is the way that people think about college football and specifically their teams. So truly, depending on where you grow up and what that culture is like, just, around the dinner table and around the TV on a Saturday, that’s going to determine where you stand on college football.

00:13:25:21 – 00:13:48:56
Ty Hildenbrandt
We live very close to Philadelphia. If you drive an hour south and get to Philly, there are plenty of people down there who couldn’t give a damn about college football. They don’t watch it on Saturdays. It’s not a fixture. It’s all eagles. Everything, all the time. The Eagles are the only show in town for them. Yeah. And I’ve always found that sort of that that contrast very interesting because it truly is a function of where you grew up and the people around you and what they’re into.

00:13:49:05 – 00:13:52:57
Agent Palmer
So you went to Penn State. Were you a Penn State fan growing up?

00:13:53:06 – 00:14:20:26
Ty Hildenbrandt
No. I hated Penn State with the fire of a Thousand Suns, and I it’s very strange, but I believe it stemmed partially from two things. The first was that my grandmother could not stand George Paterno, not Joe Paterno, George Paterno, who for a good long time was one of the commentators for Penn State football on the radio.

00:14:20:31 – 00:14:40:22
Ty Hildenbrandt
Okay. He just had it out for him. I never knew why, but she would always talk about, George Patton. We can’t listen. George Paterno, she she really had some disdain towards this dude, and I’m not really sure why, but okay, the second was that I felt like my family in particular really, like, was just tired of hearing about Penn State.

00:14:40:22 – 00:14:57:07
Ty Hildenbrandt
I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania. You open the newspaper, you turn on the local news, everyone’s talking Penn State football. They’re just tired of it. They didn’t like hearing about Penn State football. Raised in a Catholic family, there are a good number of Notre Dame fans in our area.

00:14:57:21 – 00:14:57:57
Agent Palmer
Yeah, for.

00:14:57:57 – 00:15:16:17
Ty Hildenbrandt
One reason or another, that is the team that my family picked gravitated towards. And I pretty much was raised to hate Penn State. I went to school at Penn State. I was there all four years in the student section at every home football game, openly rooting against Penn State.

00:15:16:21 – 00:15:46:27
Agent Palmer
So I will tell you, I also from the same area, grew up with a massive dislike of Penn State. For me, it’s very similar to you. I grew up in a Lehigh household, and because I didn’t understand at eight, nine and ten the concept of divisions and conferences in college football, as sometimes you don’t early on, you go, I just went to see Lehigh beat the crap out.

00:15:46:39 – 00:16:09:24
Agent Palmer
Holy Cross, how come the paper on Sunday is all about Penn State? Like, why is this the disconnect? So, when I got to a point where I started to understand conferences, I chose Michigan as my favorite non as my favorite D1 school. Right. Because I wanted to find somebody who played against Penn State and beat Penn State.

00:16:09:39 – 00:16:37:21
Agent Palmer
So that was I immediately went there. And I think in a weird way, for me, that opened the door for rooting interests in different conferences and not having a favorite team or a real true like this is the one I bleed by. I can turn on any game on Saturday and be completely happy just picking one team from me.

00:16:37:22 – 00:16:38:45
Agent Palmer
And you know what? Yeah.

00:16:38:50 – 00:16:59:29
Ty Hildenbrandt
There are a lot of folks like that. We hear from fans in all shapes and sizes throughout the course of a year, and there are a great number of them who just enjoy following along on our show. They enjoy listening to our banter, and they they kind of pick up different rooting interests from year to year. And so fans are different.

00:16:59:29 – 00:17:19:45
Ty Hildenbrandt
It really depends how you got started and why you got started. I think in our case, coming back to the Penn State thing, it was like an early form of internet trolling. Yeah, right. It was like, we’re tired of this and we’re so tired of it that we’re just going to openly root against it. So I did that for four years at Penn State.

00:17:19:57 – 00:17:45:11
Ty Hildenbrandt
I was I was not a Penn State fan. The moment for me now, I kind of I would say they’re my my second team behind Notre Dame. Notre Dame will always be my first, but when when all of the scandals broke in 2011, that to me was kind of a turning point that that definitely melted the permafrost for me when it came to Penn State football.

00:17:45:11 – 00:18:07:58
Ty Hildenbrandt
And, you know, not because the scandals were a good thing. They were horrible. But I found that as a new, a chance to maybe reboot the program, to start a to new hopefully in terms of making it better. And from that point forward, I’ve been, I’ve had a completely different outlook on Penn State football.

00:18:07:58 – 00:18:40:49
Agent Palmer
I, I, I have to I’m a bit jealous, because I went to Keystone College, which prior to the pandemic was getting ready for their first NJCAA college football season. So, yeah, which predates me by many years. So I my Saturday when I was in college was about turning on game day and watching whatever was on TV I didn’t have, even though you’re in the student section rooting against Penn State, I didn’t have that experience.

00:18:40:54 – 00:19:04:17
Agent Palmer
Yeah. And I, I want to ask, did the Saturday. I didn’t think about it, honestly, as much of a sports fan as I am, when I went to choose colleges, my circumstance dictated some of it, and the rest of it was just kind of like an afterthought. And it wasn’t until I’m on campus freshman year and it’s a Saturday that I go, oh, wait, there’s no football here.

00:19:04:22 – 00:19:14:17
Agent Palmer
Was was football. Peace. That there was a Saturday culture on campus of why you chose to go there.

00:19:14:26 – 00:19:16:40
Ty Hildenbrandt
Very, very, very much so.

00:19:16:45 – 00:19:17:08
Agent Palmer
Okay.

00:19:17:12 – 00:19:40:43
Ty Hildenbrandt
Very much so. I, I never played football. I’m not big enough to play football. I wouldn’t be fast enough or strong enough to play football, but I cared so much about it, and I felt like it was so much of the culture for me growing up at home, I couldn’t imagine going somewhere. This is 18 year old high, right?

00:19:40:43 – 00:19:41:14
Agent Palmer
Sure.

00:19:41:14 – 00:20:14:28
Ty Hildenbrandt
I couldn’t imagine in that day and age, for me, going somewhere where there wasn’t a very strong college football culture on Saturdays, and I applied to a handful of smaller schools that did not have that culture. And when push came to shove, even though I had been raised from birth, basically to be against everything Penn State football, the fact that Penn State had that really strong football culture on Saturdays, it absolutely played a factor in me going there.

00:20:14:39 – 00:20:35:18
Ty Hildenbrandt
It wasn’t the only factor, it wasn’t the most important factor. But sure, it was definitely something I saw as a perk. And look, there’s no place like Happy Valley on a Saturday. It’s an incredible game day experience. If people haven’t had a chance to get up there for a game, I’d recommend it. It’s, you know, you really get to experience college football the way it is supposed to be experienced.

00:20:35:23 – 00:20:43:36
Ty Hildenbrandt
I needed that, I wanted that, so yeah, at the end of the day, it was one of those things that helped push me over the top.

00:20:43:41 – 00:21:37:31
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I, I mean, my, I think because I grew up in a Lehigh household again like Lehigh football was my Saturday experience. And they still don’t have lights. So my Saturday experience is still fairly pure when I do get to games. That said, I think that the proliferation of cable television has kind of enabled mine and probably your fandom, because we went from when we were kids, maybe whatever was covered on the local station to being able to wake up and see kickoff at noon, straight through to whatever kickoff there is in the Pac 12 and just kind of have 14, 15 hours of uninterrupted college football.

00:21:37:36 – 00:21:56:29
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, I mean, look, the there’s so much change in college football right now. I don’t know how much of that you want to get into. We can get into as much or as or as we want. Yeah, but but the, the, the root of it all is exactly that proliferation on TV. Yeah. It’s how the media product around college football has grown.

00:21:56:29 – 00:22:20:13
Ty Hildenbrandt
How you can watch it a thousand different ways on cable TV, over the top streaming you can. If you want to watch college football on a Saturday, there’s 1,000,001 ways that you can do it. So that has certainly changed over the years. And even, you know, I’ll come back to what you said about the Lehigh household. The show that I do is predominantly FBS college football, right?

00:22:20:13 – 00:22:44:30
Ty Hildenbrandt
The big boys, the Blue Bloods. But, part of what I think we try to do is highlight some of the programs on that FCS high level, because it’s still a damn fun product. It’s still football. If you go to Lehigh game, they’re every bit as passionate about Lehigh football as they are Penn State there aren’t as many people know.

00:22:44:30 – 00:23:05:52
Ty Hildenbrandt
Maybe there isn’t quite the history and the pageantry that goes with it, but it’s a cool product and I enjoy going to those games too. So, you know, I think the the TV product has at least among the people that talk to us, the TV product is highlighted that there’s really good football at all levels. It doesn’t necessarily matter the size of the school.

00:23:05:52 – 00:23:24:14
Ty Hildenbrandt
Sure, if you’re Alabama, you’re going to dominate the headlines or if you’re Florida State or Notre Dame or Michigan. You know, these are schools that everybody knows. But, you know, on any given Saturday, you can tune on ESPN plus and you can watch an awesome FCS game because now those are available to you as well. Yeah, it’s really great.

00:23:24:14 – 00:23:24:47
Ty Hildenbrandt
It’s awesome.

00:23:24:47 – 00:23:55:09
Agent Palmer
It it is. But I it does. It’s the growth of college football as a sport. But it’s also the growth of college football into a year round spectacle. Almost. Gosh. And and and so you’ve had a podcast for long enough that when you started blogging and the podcast way back when college football started in August, what maybe you started your season previews in July.

00:23:55:14 – 00:24:24:15
Agent Palmer
Now, the moment the national championship game is complete, you might have a couple weeks off before there’s the transfer portal and there’s recruiting classes and scheduling that like you’ve kind of been in the medium of of digital media as college football went from, I don’t know, we’ll say eight months to 12 months.

00:24:24:20 – 00:24:50:57
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah. Not not even eight months. I mean, the very first year that we did our show was 2008 and we did that show from maybe like the second week of August through the national championship in January, and we stopped. Yeah, stopped. We didn’t know at that point if we wanted to keep doing it or what the plan would be if we tried to record a show in like March.

00:24:51:02 – 00:24:52:48
Ty Hildenbrandt
Nobody’s talking college football in March.

00:24:52:48 – 00:24:56:15
Agent Palmer
Who cares? No, everybody. Well, I mean, at that point, at.

00:24:56:15 – 00:24:57:10
Ty Hildenbrandt
That point, right.

00:24:57:19 – 00:25:21:05
Agent Palmer
At that point, you know, the and this is the part that this is how, you know, college football’s kind of jump the shark a bit. March was basketball. March was college basketball’s domain. And now you turn on Sports Center in March and you’re probably going to hear about, coaching higher in college football. And then they’ll talk about the tournament results.

00:25:21:05 – 00:25:51:46
Ty Hildenbrandt
Well, I mean, yeah. So I a lot has contributed to that. Certainly the money and the fact that let’s take ESPN, for example, there’s so invested in it financially that they have to talk about it. Right. They funded it so much that we have to eat it. Yes. And so there’s definitely an element there. Also the internet, as the internet has grown up, we’re living in a hyperconnected world now, especially as it relates to college football and message boards and recruiting and Twitter.

00:25:51:50 – 00:26:11:32
Ty Hildenbrandt
There are all these different ways that you can go about getting information. So if anything happens in college, you tend to know about it in a way that you didn’t before 14 years ago. It’s just word travels much faster and much wider now than it did back then. And so I think that factors in the schedules have also changed, right?

00:26:11:32 – 00:26:31:53
Ty Hildenbrandt
I mean, they’ve changed all of bowl season. There was day and age. Some of us are old enough to remember when they played all the games on New Year’s Day, and that was it. Yes. And now it’s like, okay, we’re going to have a full month of bowl games starting in mid-December. We’re going to run through all those games.

00:26:31:58 – 00:26:49:07
Ty Hildenbrandt
We’re going to have a playoff, we’re going to have a national championship that we play in the second week of January. They’ve pushed that schedule out. They’ve changed the recruiting calendar, they’ve changed the recruiting calendar. So there’s two signing days now. Whereas before there was just one day when everybody faxed in their letters of intent. Now there’s two.

00:26:49:12 – 00:27:14:19
Ty Hildenbrandt
And now as we add in things like the transfer portal, as we add in things like players being able to get sponsorships as we add in any number of different administrative moves, be it literal administrators moving from school to school or coaches going elsewhere, all the like. The schedule isn’t quite as compressed as it used to be, and because of that, it’s just bled out into all the other months.

00:27:14:19 – 00:27:37:42
Ty Hildenbrandt
So if this were 2008, yeah, this would be a much different conversation. Again, we shut down the Jets after January, but, over the course of time, we we did our best to try and listen to the audience and figure out, all right, what are they into in February? What are they into in May? And we would at least try to serve those people as best we could.

00:27:37:47 – 00:27:53:30
Ty Hildenbrandt
The people who were out there and still wanted to talk college football, even in the in the off season, we found throughout the course of time that those have generally been the folks that when they find us, they’re the most engaged. We’ve gained our most new listeners in the off season, generally speaking.

00:27:53:35 – 00:28:25:39
Agent Palmer
Well, they’re start I mean, that’s the thing about yeah, I think it’s it’s it’s about your show, but it’s also about on demand content at large. If you find what you’re looking for, especially in the off season, you know, if you want to talk about hot stove baseball in December, if you want to talk about college football in May, if you find that show that just put out an episode yester day when you’re looking for that, when you’re dying for that next fix, because kickoff for first pitch is months and months away.

00:28:25:44 – 00:28:28:22
Agent Palmer
Oh, I’m so happy I stumbled upon.

00:28:28:24 – 00:28:57:41
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, a friend of mine. And I’ll never forget this quote. He was talking about the internet and he said, the great thing about the internet is that everyone has a home. Everyone has a home. You may not know where that home is, but when you find it, I’m home. Everybody can find that thing on the internet. And, so whether it’s college football or hot stove baseball or, you know, history, politics, whatever, whatever you’re whatever is your poison, right?

00:28:57:41 – 00:29:28:58
Ty Hildenbrandt
Like you, you can you can find your home based somewhere on the internet. And so, yeah, over the course of time through our show, we pretty quickly switched up to a year round format. I think we want a year or two where we stopped it after the season and then picked it back up later, but we we got such strong feedback to keep doing it through the off season that we felt the need to serve that audience, the people who maybe felt like the solid verbal was was their home base as it related to college football, and we’ve been doing it ever since.

00:29:29:13 – 00:29:55:23
Agent Palmer
Now, what is it like, you know, from 30,000ft looking back? Because you, you know, you started this not thinking that it was going to be a year round thing. No. And so now you have to pay attention, 12 months of the year, what it was that I, I’m sure early on it was a bit novel, but, you know, it’s become a job for you.

00:29:55:28 – 00:30:00:54
Agent Palmer
And, you know, it’s now definitively 12 months of the year.

00:30:00:59 – 00:30:14:53
Ty Hildenbrandt
Well, at first it was just weird because I would dedicate 2 or 3 hours out of every week, at least during the fall, talking to a strange person on the internet who for a while I had actually met in person.

00:30:15:02 – 00:30:15:55
Agent Palmer
Okay.

00:30:16:00 – 00:30:40:42
Ty Hildenbrandt
And there’s not a lot there weren’t a lot of people at that time that could really relate to that. People would look at me like I had two heads. Why are you who? What? Why are you? So you know that that bit of it was, was definitely novel and and a lot to try and explain to people and certainly, you know, be back in oh eight when we started this thing, you know, I was talking into a webcam.

00:30:40:47 – 00:31:05:41
Ty Hildenbrandt
I didn’t have this equipment, I didn’t we weren’t set up for it. We we took it seriously. We wanted it to be as good as it could be. But yeah, we had we had no designs on it becoming a job for any of it. Like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Yeah. And so we definitely paid attention to it, but I don’t think we were quite as zoned in as we are now, you know?

00:31:05:41 – 00:31:23:49
Ty Hildenbrandt
Now, if I mess up a player’s name, I’m going to get ten emails about it. People on the internet telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Back then, it was almost novel. Like, if you don’t know a guy’s name and you say it wrong, you know, it’s like, so what? Podcasting? What’s podcasting? No one even knows what this thing is.

00:31:23:49 – 00:31:45:41
Ty Hildenbrandt
So I definitely think that the the media landscape around what we do is, has grown up, and there’s a level of sophistication and knowledge that is expected as a baseline. Otherwise you’re not going to get downloads. So that that’s kind of evolved over the course of time, for sure. Having to pay attention to it and to it to a much different level of intensity.

00:31:45:45 – 00:32:09:15
Ty Hildenbrandt
That’s it’s happened very slowly over the course of the last 15 years, for sure. There are plenty of times where I try to hearken back to those days back in oh eight, 909, in 2010, when I was a little bit more zoomed out because and everybody knows this, this isn’t unique to the podcast thing, but sometimes you’re so zoomed in on it that you you need to zoom out.

00:32:09:15 – 00:32:22:25
Ty Hildenbrandt
You need to loosen your grip a little bit, have fun with it in a way that, you know, can can let you relax a little bit because there’s just so much information all the time that you have to you have to give yourself some of those mental breaks.

00:32:22:30 – 00:32:44:48
Agent Palmer
So I guess let’s put you into an let’s say early mid September, early mid September, Saturday. Do you get to enjoy the game like do you get to sit down and pick a game or because of the show you’re, you know, flipping around the channels? You don’t get to just sit down and enjoy one game from start to finish.

00:32:44:48 – 00:33:05:36
Agent Palmer
I mean, that’s the other thing too. And I’ll say, I’m guilty of this. I don’t think I’ve ever I don’t think in the last decade I’ve watched one game in any given kickoff window because it’s just too easy to hit recall or previous channel or whatever it is on your remote to at least go from this game to this game.

00:33:05:36 – 00:33:17:43
Agent Palmer
And so, yeah, but you’re doing it for almost quote unquote research. I don’t want to say it. It is, but it kind of is. So do you get to just enjoy a game on a Saturday or.

00:33:17:48 – 00:33:40:49
Ty Hildenbrandt
If if it’s my team and if they’re winning then then yeah, I’ll, I’ll enjoy it. If Notre Dame’s on Notre Dame’s on a TV, if Penn State’s on, Penn State’s probably on a TV somewhere. I try it. If you’re not watching your own teams, what’s the point of this? Right? You got you get you have to enjoy your own fandom.

00:33:40:58 – 00:34:11:25
Ty Hildenbrandt
So yeah, I’m I’m watching for sure my own team’s games as much as I can. But my Saturday ritual is really I scan a lot. I’m not good at having multiple screens go at once. I can’t, I can’t pay attention to two TVs at once. It’s just like too much for me. So what I’ll try to do is use Twitter, use some other resources on the internet as a guide for which games are at critical junctures.

00:34:11:25 – 00:34:12:28
Agent Palmer
Okay.

00:34:12:33 – 00:34:36:49
Ty Hildenbrandt
Which games should I tune into now if I want to try and get the the summary of how this game is going or a general sense for the tone and tenor of a game, because that’s what I’m reporting when I when I’m doing a show, a recap show on Sundays, you can read a box score with stats on it, but you can find that anywhere you go find the score, you can go on YouTube, you can find highlights.

00:34:36:49 – 00:35:06:27
Ty Hildenbrandt
But I think where people come to us is for the narratives that come as a result of a game and the weird tones and inside jokes that come out of any one college football game. So a lot of what I’m doing is scanning to try and find those moments that I could talk about on a Sunday. I typically will just have a couple channels queued up and I’ll leave back and forth if my team’s not on.

00:35:06:32 – 00:35:39:24
Ty Hildenbrandt
The other thing that I do a lot is I read about a great number, more games than I actually watch. And I said this time and again, the people who listen to me know that I talk about this all the time. I am really big on going after the fact to the losing teams beat writers game recap. Because the winning team, whoever is writing the beat for them a lot of times, more often than not, it’s puppy dogs and ice cream is a great game.

00:35:39:24 – 00:35:55:32
Ty Hildenbrandt
This is what we did. Well, you know, even if we didn’t do well, this these were the highlights for our team. And you’re going to get a few blurbs about the other team, maybe how many stats or how many touchdowns a quarterback threw for something like that. But the losing team, they’re going to tell you what they did wrong.

00:35:55:37 – 00:36:28:37
Ty Hildenbrandt
They’re going to tell you the highlights for what the winning team did. Right. You just I get more information out of that. So the long winded answer to your question, Saturdays are, for first and foremost, my own teams. Secondly, scanning around to see if I can pick up the vibe in any other game that’s on. And then thirdly, reading about games either as they’re in progress via people on Twitter, or immediately after they’re over just to try and get again more of those, those contextual clues that I can piece together into some form of a podcast on Sunday morning.

00:36:28:42 – 00:37:10:22
Agent Palmer
I like that you said the losing teams beat writers because I am an Orioles fan, and as we sit here recording this, they’re enjoying some success. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but what I will say is, one of the interesting things is I’m not in the Baltimore market, so I have MLB.tv and I will usually, if I can watch maybe the first inning or two of a new series against a team, watch the other teams broadcast to see what they’re saying about might I know what my broadcasters are going to say about the Orioles?

00:37:10:27 – 00:37:41:48
Agent Palmer
I know what the faults are and what the who they’re hyping and who they’re excited for. I want to know what the Cubs are saying. I want to know what the Yankees are saying. I want to know what the other guys are saying, because you get such a different perspective on your own team because even when they lose, sometimes your homer broadcast team is still maybe not puppy dogs and ice cream, but it’s puppy dogs and cookies.

00:37:41:48 – 00:37:43:47
Agent Palmer
Like, it’s just it’s just slightly tweaked.

00:37:43:47 – 00:38:09:54
Ty Hildenbrandt
There’s still it’s yeah, there’s you get more information. Even if they’re saying the exact same thing. Yeah. An example would be if you go to a, let’s just say Florida State website, after they win a game, they will talk about how they ran the ball. Well, they will talk about how their quarterback threw for three touchdowns. One of their receivers caught two of them.

00:38:09:58 – 00:38:21:57
Ty Hildenbrandt
The defense played well, yada yada yada. If you go on the flip side, let’s say they played against North Carolina. Not that there are a great number of North Carolina football sites out there, but this.

00:38:21:58 – 00:38:22:30
Agent Palmer
Is yeah.

00:38:22:30 – 00:38:46:33
Ty Hildenbrandt
For the purposes of our example, that website would be a little bit more inclined to say, Florida State ran the ball really well. They kept beating us on an outside zone play. Our defensive line was getting blown off the ball. Their quarterback threw three touchdowns. One of them was a tip pass from our cornerback or one of them was as a result of our quarterback falling down.

00:38:46:38 – 00:39:11:37
Ty Hildenbrandt
You know, I just I’ve always found that I get more context when I’m reading the losing teams perspective, even if it’s the exact same information, even if it’s not like slanted in a really biased way, they just tend to include more detail that you can use. And especially again when I’m trying to put together the vibe and figure out a game that like a Purdue Illinois game.

00:39:11:37 – 00:39:15:29
Ty Hildenbrandt
I’m not watching that on a Saturday. You got to be kidding me. And there’s no.

00:39:15:29 – 00:39:22:02
Agent Palmer
Chance. Yeah, I think you named one of the few Big Ten matchups without a, trophy, by the way, I’m pretty sure.

00:39:22:07 – 00:39:39:40
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, like, I’m not watching that. There are Purdue fans who don’t want to watch that. So how how do you get the context for that kind of game? You read about it. Yeah. And you read the losing teams box score because they’re always going to give you more information. And you look at the box score on your own, and then you can piece together what exactly took place in a game.

00:39:39:40 – 00:40:01:57
Ty Hildenbrandt
But it’s it’s taken me a while to, to hone in on my process and get it to a point where I’m comfortable, or I can go through 65 college football games every Saturday night slash Sunday morning before I record and be able to speak knowledgeably about about the sport as a whole. But I’m at a place now where I, I feel like I’ve got it down to a bit of a science.

00:40:02:02 – 00:40:29:51
Agent Palmer
Now, I do want to ask something that’s very specific to college football, and that is maybe even more so than college basketball. The rivalries mean just a little bit more, and there’s more of them. When we get to. And look, I know that they’re not always there, but like, when we get to, like, mid-November, when there’s at least one rivalry game all the time, and then we get to like rivalry weekend.

00:40:29:56 – 00:40:49:57
Agent Palmer
Do you find fans getting amped up a little bit more? It’s not I, I and I want to say this for people that don’t understand college football or aren’t fans of it, that are listening to this, you know, it’s not just that the media hypes. They’re like, that stuff exists in the DNA. It’s, you know, go back to Lehigh.

00:40:49:59 – 00:41:11:52
Agent Palmer
The Lehigh band will march around campus the entire week before they play Lafayette. Right. Like it’s it’s about the community and so do you, you know, feel maybe a little bit of extra pressure leading up to those particular games or, you know, because they, you know, they do mean a little bit more.

00:41:12:06 – 00:41:31:15
Ty Hildenbrandt
Well, so so here’s how I would describe to people who are in college football fans, everyone’s high school had a rival. Yep. Everyone’s high school had a rival. And they made a big deal of it. I went to Northampton High School locally. Our our rival was catty every year. It was a big deal. It was a big deal.

00:41:31:15 – 00:41:53:37
Ty Hildenbrandt
There were plenty of people who went to that game on Thanksgiving Day and didn’t give a damn about football, but they cared about the rivalry, us against them. It was fun. Yeah, college football is that times a thousand, right? So as you said, there are rivalries throughout the course of the year. There’s a whole rivalry week in week 13 of the season, which is in late November like Thanksgiving time.

00:41:53:42 – 00:42:28:40
Ty Hildenbrandt
It it do I feel pressure I don’t feel pressure in the sense that I need to make sure I am getting all of my facts straight and saying everyone’s name correctly. I’m not like tight about the broadcast that we do, but I do definitely feel a little bit of an added impetus to make sure that the show we’re doing covers as many rivalries as we can, makes every fan base feel somewhat served, that we would at least mention their team and pays tribute to some of these great rivalries.

00:42:28:40 – 00:42:54:25
Ty Hildenbrandt
They are meaningful. You will have teams that go 1 in 11 if that one win is over a rival. The seasons a success. Yeah, it means something. The rivalry games do mean more and it’s kind of the secret sauce of college football. It’s what people care about first and foremost, beyond their own team, beyond their own team.

00:42:54:25 – 00:43:21:09
Ty Hildenbrandt
It’s about hating the rival. Yeah. Making sure at a minimum, we beat the rival. So yeah, it’s, it’s a special week. It’s a very busy week for us because you’ll have plenty of games where, if if it weren’t for the fact their rivalry, nobody would care. Like, generally what happens throughout the course of the year, not take too much of a step back is seasons starts up and Labor Day weekend interest is at a fever pitch.

00:43:21:16 – 00:43:41:40
Ty Hildenbrandt
Everybody seems undefeated. Yep. Inevitably, teams start losing throughout the course of September and October, and you’ll generally see the interest in college football wane. We can see it in download numbers like that. The interest wanes over the course of time. But rivalry week, you always see that bump. You always see that bump because everybody cares about their team.

00:43:41:44 – 00:43:59:45
Ty Hildenbrandt
We have a joke on our show. You throw out the records, right? You throw out the records. Records don’t matter. Yeah, it’s about playing old state and and trying to win. And so, we, we do our best to try and cover as much as we can in as fun away as we can to get people ready for rivalry week.

00:43:59:45 – 00:44:09:16
Ty Hildenbrandt
And, you know, just to make sure that everybody knows that that, we think rivalries are just as special as they do.

00:44:09:21 – 00:44:36:53
Agent Palmer
Now, I’m going to say this. The podcast is successful and I’ve listened. I usually I’m one of your I don’t know what you would call me. I’m one of your big news ticket listeners. I’m not listening week to week. I’m listening when something happens. Or just, you know, for national championship or like, quote unquote unofficial semifinal where two conference foes are going to knock each other out of the whatever.

00:44:37:02 – 00:45:09:52
Agent Palmer
I’m, I’m, I’m around for those conversations or in the case of I don’t know if it was last year or two years ago, the Oklahoma and Texas game. That was just what I will call crazy. I, I, I go, what what are the solid verbal guys think of that? Because I’m, I know you’re not covering Lehigh, but I’m also watching all these games and so it’s, it’s that one game that I’m like, oh what what what are they what do they have to say about this one?

00:45:09:57 – 00:45:32:20
Agent Palmer
But I wanted to say, you guys are starting to go on tour and you’re going to get out there. Was this I mean, I’m I’m talking to you. You’ve done this show for 14, 15 years. Like you had no idea what this was going to be. You. Now you’re going to take a show on the road.

00:45:32:25 – 00:45:41:05
Agent Palmer
Are you looking at something bigger? Maybe. Or, you know, just incremental steps. This is just the next step.

00:45:41:05 – 00:46:01:33
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, it’s it’s incremental. Again, I, I started this I was living at home. I was doing it out of my old bedroom at my mom’s house, and my co-host was living with his parents in California, doing it out of a spare bedroom there. So to say we had any great plan for this and what, like, no, of course not.

00:46:01:33 – 00:46:19:20
Ty Hildenbrandt
It it there were a great number of things that happened to get our show to this point where we’re able to call it our full time gig and we’re, we’re super fortunate and grateful for that. I mean, it’s it’s a dream come true. It’s it’s a ton of fun. I’m, I get to work on something I care about every day.

00:46:19:25 – 00:46:38:24
Ty Hildenbrandt
And and there are a lot of people in the world that can’t say that. So I’m. I’m very fortunate in that sense. I never thought it would get here. The the live tour. You know, we’ve done shows on the road before, but it’s obviously because of Covid. Been a couple years since we were actually able to do them.

00:46:38:28 – 00:47:05:31
Ty Hildenbrandt
And now that we can, we decided we wanted to do more than just one. So we’ve got four that are in the in the queue for the football season before, during and after the football season in in four different cities. That aspect of what we do is, is definitely bigger since we’ve, I think, focused more of our energy on the solid verbal and not on other jobs that both my co-host and I have had over the course of time.

00:47:05:36 – 00:47:30:36
Ty Hildenbrandt
I like to think the product, the show itself, has gotten better. I know some of the other things that we are doing on the side to broaden what we do. That is all better. So to say that I have designs on this being a bigger thing, I think would be accurate. I don’t necessarily know what that is at this point.

00:47:30:41 – 00:47:50:08
Ty Hildenbrandt
I know that Dan and I are both creative. I know we like to tinker. I know we like to try things all the time that that is, among the many things we have in common. That’s probably the thing we have the most in common. We always like to tinker and try new things. And so I like to think it’s only a matter of time before we find a thing that we can grow kind of in parallel.

00:47:50:22 – 00:48:18:49
Ty Hildenbrandt
And, and maybe that would help make the, the business bigger, that would make the show itself bigger. Just some portion of what we do bigger. I don’t, I don’t know, but certainly having added focus that we can put on our show day in and day out has made it better and has has at least enabled it in some sense to scale up in a way that, you know, we haven’t done we’ve been doing it for this is going to be a 15th season of doing it.

00:48:18:54 – 00:48:28:25
Ty Hildenbrandt
The show. You know, we are never really serious about turning it into a bigger thing in the way that we are now. We’re we’re very committed to it.

00:48:28:30 – 00:48:32:04
Agent Palmer
Have you ever been approached to do play by play?

00:48:32:09 – 00:48:33:05
Ty Hildenbrandt
No.

00:48:33:10 – 00:48:37:01
Agent Palmer
Is it something you would want to do?

00:48:37:06 – 00:48:56:33
Ty Hildenbrandt
I like the idea of it. I think more than the actual act of doing it. It’s very hard to do play by play. It is very hard to do play by play. I am certainly no stranger to making fun of announcers I have. Everybody makes fun of announcers. I try a lot more to not make fun of announcers.

00:48:56:38 – 00:48:59:51
Ty Hildenbrandt
Well, the more I’ve got, the more I’ve gotten to know guys who do it.

00:48:59:52 – 00:49:03:12
Agent Palmer
Okay, I was going to say you you’ve started to have announcers on the show, right?

00:49:03:12 – 00:49:26:38
Ty Hildenbrandt
Like, right. And it it changes your view of it. It’s a really hard job. It’s a really hard job. So it seems like it’d be something that’d be fun to try. But if we did it, it would sound a lot different than what you hear on Fox Sports on the Saturday. You know, hours would be a little bit more personality driven.

00:49:26:38 – 00:49:40:31
Ty Hildenbrandt
It’d be a lot more like doing a podcast, to do the traditional play by play thing. I don’t know, man. It’s just so hard to do that. So freaking hard.

00:49:40:36 – 00:49:45:03
Agent Palmer
You.

00:49:45:08 – 00:50:06:46
Agent Palmer
I believe that college football, perhaps romanticized more than other collegiate sports, is genuinely as much pop as it is circumstance. When you remove the TV contracts and blackout restrictions, it’s like the Beach Boys said, be true to your school, and even Ty now has divided loyalties, although I believe it’s easy to see which side he’d root for if the two were ever to play against each other.

00:50:06:51 – 00:50:29:10
Agent Palmer
But that pomp and circumstance is something that other sports lack generally across the board at your average school, with a football program of any level, there is going to be a scene. On Saturdays, there will be tailgating, and the band will march through the parking lot to the stadium with much fanfare. There will be a sea of color for the home team and a swatch of another shade for the visitors.

00:50:29:15 – 00:50:56:17
Agent Palmer
And no matter the color combinations, you found your home. Perhaps more emblematic than finding your home on the internet, you can look around at a football game on your college campus and know that you’re among your people, and that’s at every level of college football, from junior college to the FBS and FCS. If you can earn a degree at a campus where there is a game on the gridiron, then tradition with all of the pomp and circumstance will follow.

00:50:56:22 – 00:51:21:38
Agent Palmer
Yeah, you can fall in love with the game like Ty and I have, and watch as much as you can, but there are plenty of college football fans that are there just for the camaraderie of a home game. The product on the field is secondary. No matter the reason there is a finale to college football and all college sports for that matter, which makes them special, perhaps even more special than the professional ranks.

00:51:21:43 – 00:51:43:02
Agent Palmer
You can follow a guy like Tom Brady for more than two decades in the NFL, but you can only watch him play up to four years at the University of Michigan. Even then, Brady didn’t get the start. All four years either. You only have so much NCAA eligibility as a college athlete, so it makes that time rare. It makes those cheering you on cheer a little more.

00:51:43:05 – 00:52:07:19
Agent Palmer
Because it’s my school and because you can only do this for a limited time. Perhaps this episode has given you a little more insight into that passion behind college football. If you are a fan, you get it. This wasn’t an episode created to change the minds of those who weren’t, but maybe understanding the passion and the pride that college football carries will bring more fans and friends to the bleachers next season.

00:52:07:24 – 00:52:31:22
Agent Palmer
Thanks for listening to The Palmer Files episode 77. As a reminder, all links are available in the show notes. And now for the official business. The Palmer Files releases every two weeks on Tuesdays. If you’re still listening, I encourage you to join the discussion. You can tweet me at Agent Palmer, my guest, Ty Hildebrand at Ty Hildebrand, that’s Ty Hill, LD n brand or at Solid Verbal.

00:52:31:22 – 00:52:49:09
Agent Palmer
And this show at The Palmer Files. You can find more information about Ty and Solid Verbal at Solid verbal.com, which is where you can learn more about the live shows, as well as catch up on new episodes in the archives. Whether the season is in full swing or not, email can be sent to this show at the Palmer Files at gmail.com.

00:52:49:09 – 00:53:03:45
Agent Palmer
And remember, you’re home for all things. Agent Palmer is Agent palmer.com.

00:53:03:50 – 00:53:34:57
Agent Palmer
You.

00:53:35:02 – 00:53:39:39
Agent Palmer
See.

00:53:39:44 – 00:53:41:50
Agent Palmer
All right. Ty, do you have one final question for me?

00:53:41:57 – 00:54:00:39
Ty Hildenbrandt
I do, actually, I want to I want to go back to the beginning of the episode. You said you’re an Orioles fan. I am in 1996, Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs. He did. It was a huge home run spike. Before that. I think the most he had in one season was 21. He did have 24. I’m looking at a stat line here.

00:54:00:39 – 00:54:06:39
Ty Hildenbrandt
I’m cheating. Yeah, a couple of years later. But it’s widely assumed that Brady Anderson was on steroids.

00:54:06:49 – 00:54:07:31
Agent Palmer
Yes.

00:54:07:36 – 00:54:22:41
Ty Hildenbrandt
Back in 1996 when he hit 50 home runs. Yep. There is zero evidence. Zero evidence. There’s nothing out there that he was actually using steroids beyond that home run spike. So my question to you is, was Brady Anderson on steroids?

00:54:22:43 – 00:54:33:04
Agent Palmer
I’m going to say first of okay, so there’s a couple full disclosures here. Up until I think I think in my youth Brady was probably my favorite oriole.

00:54:33:08 – 00:54:36:05
Ty Hildenbrandt
Okay. I didn’t know that this is a good question.

00:54:36:05 – 00:55:12:37
Agent Palmer
I had sideburn because of Brady Anderson. And, you know, the other day, the Orioles won their ninth straight game. I just happened to dig out my Brady Anderson jersey t shirt because he was number nine to wear when I went out to lunch that day. Okay, so I’m I’m a fan. I’m going to say, yeah, probably was on something because one of the things I know about that particular year is that he was a bit bigger that year than he normally was.

00:55:12:42 – 00:55:13:00
Agent Palmer
And.

00:55:13:05 – 00:55:16:36
Ty Hildenbrandt
He was 32. He hit 50 home runs at 32.

00:55:16:36 – 00:55:44:07
Agent Palmer
But but but I what I will say is I look at it the same way I look at Maguire. Maguire, in his early days in the A’s, was a stringy guy who could hit the ball out in 20 or 30 a year, and Anderson was a leadoff guy. He was a speed guy. And I think actually during that 50, he hit like 10 or 12 lead off home runs, which set at the very least a franchise record at the time.

00:55:44:12 – 00:56:04:53
Agent Palmer
Look at his baseball card that he looks like a different guy. He’s got a bigger neck I like I’m sure it’s possible he just changed his, his strength routine for that one year. But it doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t keep that up and hit 40 for the next year. Right? Right.

00:56:04:58 – 00:56:09:30
Ty Hildenbrandt
And he had he had 37 doubles, two, which is another indicator of power.

00:56:09:30 – 00:56:30:10
Agent Palmer
And that’s the thing, right. And I, I, I’m going to say it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m going to say I’m leaning towards. Yes, but I also know and and it’s my, my knowledge base is Orioles baseball. But like Brian Roberts hit like 60 doubles or 54 doubles and everybody was like, when’s he going to turn it around. Yeah.

00:56:30:12 – 00:57:00:39
Agent Palmer
And Jones early on was the same way. And I I’m always you and I are both old enough to remember when the home run was just a marketing tool. It wasn’t the power metric that it is now. And I’ve always wondered why we’ve moved away from just hit the ball like the Orioles are winning, right? Are in a win streak right now.

00:57:00:39 – 00:57:25:30
Agent Palmer
And it’s because they’re batting three. They’re batting over 350 with two outs and runners in scoring position. That’s just singles. That’s all that is that since I’ve watched almost every inning of the streak that singles, that doubles, that’s hitting the gap or hitting the ball to where they aren’t, we don’t need home run to the I don’t know I I’ll I’m becoming old and I’m becoming a very old man.

00:57:25:30 – 00:57:30:23
Agent Palmer
As I as I watch more baseball and I go like, well just just just hit the ball the other way.

00:57:30:23 – 00:57:34:27
Ty Hildenbrandt
Well, here’s my second question that I’m taking two questions. I don’t know if that’s allowed. Yeah.

00:57:34:27 – 00:57:35:49
Agent Palmer
No. Oh, yeah.

00:57:35:54 – 00:57:39:22
Ty Hildenbrandt
On the topic of steroids, do you care? Do you care?

00:57:39:22 – 00:58:09:08
Agent Palmer
It’s really hard for me to care. And I’ll tell you why. Because it we’ve whether you agree or not, a lot of the league was cheating. Like, are you telling me that Mark McGwire in an A’s uniform may or be. Or maybe not. Roid it up. Hitting a home run off a maybe or maybe not. Roy, did Roger Clemens is any more or less hard than a clean guy hitting it off a clean guy?

00:58:09:08 – 00:58:34:33
Agent Palmer
Like, we know it was rampant. We know it was widespread. And at least for a time, there, it was commonplace, but maybe not reported on as such. I don’t know, I, I, I said, I’m a sports fan. I also enjoy the tour de France. It’s really hard for me to take some of the tour history seriously when they go, we won’t.

00:58:34:33 – 00:58:59:10
Agent Palmer
Acknowledged Lance Armstrong. Seven wins because he was doping. But in order to tell you who the winner was, we have to go back to who finished in fifth place because first, second, third and fourth were all cheating. Well then it was a fairly even light. I’m sorry. In in my estimation, that’s a fairly even field, and so it gets a lot harder to take it seriously.

00:58:59:15 – 00:59:10:56
Agent Palmer
I don’t know, I think in general things change. But I, I just want to see the game. Like I want to see the game.

00:59:11:01 – 00:59:24:08
Ty Hildenbrandt
See here here’s the thing. You care about guys following the rules to some extent. Yes. You want the game to be clean. Yeah. That said, it was pretty much an open secret that everybody was juicing.

00:59:24:12 – 00:59:52:14
Agent Palmer
Yeah. You can’t, you can’t. So I know and look, I’m biased a bit, but I’m not a homer enough to like I know that after the strike, Ripken Streak brought people back to the ballpark and back to baseball, but it wasn’t until 98 that people fell back in love with baseball. Right? And Cal and his streak was something to romanticize.

00:59:52:14 – 01:00:23:21
Agent Palmer
And it opened the door for everybody to come back in 98 and watch Sosa and McGuire and, you know, that was compelling baseball. Would it have been less compelling if, you know, they were clean? No, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The they were it was a duel. And you could pick a side. And, you know, if you were rooting for Sosa because you hated McGuire or vice versa, like, every good sport needs a villain.

01:00:23:26 – 01:00:40:17
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, I see, I just don’t care, I don’t care. Yeah, yeah. You know, you want guys to follow the rules, but at the same time, this was kind of the steroid era. Yeah. There you go. Through different eras. There was a dead ball era, too, where you kind of take the stats and and look at them in a different light.

01:00:40:22 – 01:01:10:43
Ty Hildenbrandt
I remember Jason Giambi talking about things after the fact and, you know, because he kind of came clean with his steroid use and he talked pretty openly about, look, I was I was playing in Oakland. I was going into my 30s. I had made close to $10 million total in salary up to that point. And I knew if I took steroids and if I got a little bit stronger and hit more home runs, that I could get a bigger contract from the Yankees.

01:01:10:43 – 01:01:12:02
Ty Hildenbrandt
He did it for money, essentially.

01:01:12:02 – 01:01:12:30
Agent Palmer
Yeah.

01:01:12:35 – 01:01:39:53
Ty Hildenbrandt
But from that point forward, he signed a deal in 2002 with the Yankees, and he’s getting paid $10 million a year. Remember, it was like 100 million, some odd dollar contract. That was a big deal. And everybody was getting these huge, huge deals. And he did it for money. And a lot of these guys did. I’m I’m so steroid it out with the congressional hearings and with, trying to demonize these guys who, again, I’m not trying to make them sound innocent.

01:01:39:53 – 01:01:48:31
Ty Hildenbrandt
You know, they broke the rules or that. But I think from a fan’s perspective, I just don’t care anymore. Well, I don’t care if they were on him, then I kind of don’t care if they’re on him. Now. I just want to watch a game.

01:01:48:31 – 01:02:16:45
Agent Palmer
Well, they’re not innocent. But at the same time, the Yankees aren’t taking down any banners that Giambi on steroids help. Right? Like like that. One of the things that that congressional hearing did was it made villains of the players, but the teams got to keep those wins. Those runs still counted nothing. None of that went away. And so it doesn’t do anything other than create a few victims if we want to, or demons if we want.

01:02:16:50 – 01:02:38:20
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah, I, I don’t know. So I’m, I’m, the steroid era. I kind of look back somewhat lovingly of the steroid era just because it was such a weird time in baseball. Baseball’s such a weird sport to begin with, and to kind of have this weird cloud that hung over it for, I mean, God knows how long. They’ve probably been doing it forever.

01:02:38:25 – 01:03:01:40
Ty Hildenbrandt
But certainly in that day and age when you’ve got Sammy, Sammy Sosa hit 60 home runs three seasons, not in a row, but there were three times in Sammy Sosa his career. I believe that he hit 60 home runs or more. What a crazy era of baseball that was. And I’m glad we got to live through and see it like that’s incredible.

01:03:01:40 – 01:03:04:09
Ty Hildenbrandt
And something that we can tell our kids about, you know? Yeah.

01:03:04:09 – 01:03:24:56
Agent Palmer
And what’s weird about it is that that’s, Well, we we can call it the steroid era. It was very much a hybrid era because you had these guys that were swinging for the fences and and and juiced, but the there was a lot of other people still around that were old school enough to try and bat 300 by hitting the ball the other way.

01:03:25:01 – 01:03:45:15
Agent Palmer
And so Sosa is hitting three run homers because the guys in front of him are hitting 310. Good luck. Like three, 310 was something to shoot for, but it was average. Guys were hitting. No one’s ever going to hit 400. Our kids are not going to see four, a 400 batter.

01:03:45:15 – 01:03:49:45
Ty Hildenbrandt
So dude, they’re you’re lucky to have guys hitting 300. Now I it’s just a different game.

01:03:49:45 – 01:04:12:58
Agent Palmer
Yeah. So I, I look back at it is like a weird hybrid but it didn’t. Yeah. It’s for me I care about the product on the field. And you know you do kind of care about if it’s clean or not a little bit. But really I think the money is the bigger issue because you end up with strikes and you end up with seasons that don’t happen.

01:04:12:58 – 01:04:20:41
Agent Palmer
And that’s yeah, that’s a different issue. But I see that as a bigger issue than a couple, you know, even half the league juicing.

01:04:20:46 – 01:04:22:48
Ty Hildenbrandt
Yeah. No I, I think I’m with you on that one.

–End Transcription–

This transcription was processed by PalmerTech 3.1 and may contain errors for HUMINT (human intelligence).