'It's almost here': Chatting with Josh Pate as college football Saturdays near

With Week 0 quickly approaching, college football analyst Josh Pate joined us on Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Live to break down his top two tiers of the SEC and who he could see winning the conference. Pate also overviewed the talent and experience levels of QBs in the league.

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• Here’s what you have to do: You have to maintain perspective in times like these. For us who are over ten years old, think back to 2020 when we fought battles, going, “Are we even going to have a season this year?” I revisited that whole period. The Pac-12, an entire football conference, was waiting to see what the Big Ten did. Then the SEC said they were going to have a season. The Big Ten was going to have one, but teams like Michigan said they wouldn’t play Ohio State even though we just had a season. At least it's not that.
   
• The whole purpose of the tiers was looking at odds, my own feelings and predictions. Do you think it's true that most people look at the conference and go there’s a top four of Alabama, Texas, Georgia and LSU, and then there'd be a drop off to the next tier? Is that fair? 
   
• You and I agree on this, but I don’t think we are in the majority. Maybe LSU is not even the fourth team out of the four. Most people would say LSU is unique only among the top four. My point in doing tier one and two was to illustrate how the tiers are almost irrelevant this year because there’s virtually no separation between the one and two.
   
• Less than a decade ago, it was Alabama. Occasionally, once Kirby Smart got on the field, it was Alabama and maybe Georgia. There was this drop off to where if you suggested anyone but that team, someone would’ve said, “What, are they going to be critically injured? What’s going to happen? What type of disaster has to happen in Tuscaloosa?”
   
• That’s not the landscape of the conference. If you say, “I don’t think Georgia or Texas is going to win the league.” You believe it's going to be a nice, really competitive top end of the conference. I’m not just saying it's going to be competitive, but there’s not much that has to go wrong, so to speak, for Oklahoma, South Carolina, Florida or Texas A&M to win the conference.
   
• I’m talking about Mike Elko holding up the SEC Championship trophy in Atlanta in December. It’s not crazy. It doesn’t mean I'm predicting it, but it's not crazy.
   
• My whole thing with tier one and tier two is the question of how wide the gap is from tier one to tier two. I think the gap in the Big Ten is very noticeable. I think there is barely a gap in the SEC between the two tiers.
   
• I don’t know if it's big enough to be a trend, but we definitely have a growing sample size, whether it’s Stetson Bennett, if it’s J.J. McCarthy or if it’s Will Howard. What I'm noticing is that they all won a national championship as a quarterback. Here's what else. Had you or I predicted they would be a national championship-winning quarterback, we may have laughed at ourselves. We definitely would’ve been laughed at. Say it about Marcel Reed right now, and see what anyone says. Say it about Ty Simpson. You could say it about DJ Lagway and LaNorris Sellers right now and not get dismissed. But can you say it about Julian Sayin at Ohio State or Dante Moore at Oregon, where they are supported by a loaded supporting class?
   
• When you look at the top quarterbacks in the country, you think of someone who would dominate at the combine or skills position. You think about who gives the team the best chance to win a championship.
   
• I did a ranking without Garrett Nussmeier in my top four, and it's just roundly met with ridicule, scorn and anger. When you push people and talk about the critical factors, they don’t have pushback because they're not breaking their game down. They're just shouting into the ether because it's “supposed to happen.”
   
• At Texas A&M, if you have a huge year, it wouldn’t be something new. It would be more of the same. They have a quarterback no one was circling in the preseason. Because of a dominant ground game and a vastly improved defense, that’s what carried them. Reed just happened to have his hands on the wheel.
   
• I think where people get caught is thinking in highlight terms. Anyone who was a five-star out of high school was rated that way because of their physical attributes. It could be Arch Manning. It could be Sayin. There will be moments when it makes you put your jaw on the ground because they have the physical ability. Then there’s the guy who never spikes to an A-plus. He never throws 50 yards on a rope up 17 that ends up on a highlight tape for years to come. Jalen Milroe would do things that led to SportsCenter. He’d go and smoke someone by 30, but he’s the same quarterback that turned the ball over 30 times against Oklahoma.
   
• There are guys who will poison your mind. They'll poison your expectation, because once they do that incredible thing physically, you can never shake it. That’s not who he is. Who he is is what he does down-in and down-out. Now, if you recruit a really good roster and do not go the 2010 Cam Newton route, you will take the B to B-plus performer every day. I don’t care that he'll never be on the highlight reel because I know what he’s going to bring.
   
• My feeling on the John Mateer stuff is always the minimum 24-hour rule. I’m debating whether to even talk about this tonight. There’s no value in jumping the gun on this. What I do believe is that there’s not much more that will come from it. I do know that I am a full-grown adult male, and I'm still on my dad’s cellphone plan. He sends me a phone bill once a month. I’ll Venmo him payment for my phone bill. The emojis or description I'll put in there… if you looked at my history, it would lead you to believe that I'm doing anything but paying a phone bill. I think this is probably too much to do about nothing. But since you entered this sports gambling layer into it, it's not that. There’s something to it, but you said it happened at the worst time… In a way, I think you’re right, but Week 1 of college football season is like the great dam washing away everything you’re talking about. They need to step on it and squash this thing.
   
• It’s a very intangible thing when you’re explaining why you think Jon Gruden would be an infinitely better fit for college, because neither of them has been a college coach. You and I think that about him more than Bill Belichick, but you say you think he’s going to be a college coach. You get a lot of “Hahaha, is this dude joking?” Well, I'm clearly not joking because if I were, I'd be smiling and you’d be laughing. You’re not laughing, so I’m probably not joking.
   
• I said to everyone who pushed back on it that: What does Gruden not possess to win in college football? I listed what it would take for him to win. You have to hire an incredible staff. I believe you have to acquire talent through recruiting and the portal. You have to manage the cap space, which he has experience doing. Here’s what else, you have to light a fire under a fan base and donor base. I don’t know of anyone who’s outside of the college football hiring bubble more than Gruden. It feels like the hire Arkansas should make, but I believe there’s one other critical factor that it takes to win. You have to be able to roll with changes. You can’t get aggravated at the nonsensical churn that is college football.
   
• If you’re Belichick with two fistfuls of Super Bowl rings and you don’t need this... I just keep thinking, is it 2:30 in the afternoon with a pile of nonsense on his desk where he goes, am I really doing this? Like, what am I doing? If Jon Sumrall had taken the North Carolina job, he wouldn’t have that mentality because his legacy isn’t set. Belichick doesn’t need it, and Gruden doesn’t either. I think he wants it more.
   
• It’s so far out of the realm of believability that if it did happen, I'm trying to think how I'd even classify it. If he comes and does one in college, I think that’d be more impressive than if Nick Saban, after his college title, went and won a Super Bowl. I think winning in North Carolina is harder than winning the Super Bowl at any one pro organization in the NFL. I think for both of our sakes it had better not happen. We have to burn the tapes if it does. We’ve spent 10 minutes basically building our own prison.
   
• The reason Miami wins is because they are built the same way on the line of scrimmage. Notre Dame shouldn’t have a line of scrimmage edge over Miami. I’d argue Miami maybe should have the edge against them. Miami, last year, for all of their faults, had no problem starting out hot. They smoked Florida in Gainesville. They get Notre Dame at home, and it will be sold out. You’re not used to being that aesthetic at home.
   
• I asked everyone in the building about Carson Beck. They talked about his demeanor and mindset. He’s not Cam Ward. After a week or two, they had to take him out to lunch and ask if he was good, and he took control. He said I'm a little different, but I want to be here, and I'm really fired up. That’s a guy who thought he was going to be a first-round pick a year ago at this time. Not only is he not, but he isn’t in the same place. He has a metric ton on his shoulders to prove. You had the girlfriend thing off the field… If Beck tells me he’s healthy, I'm looking at him in Week 1. What if he wins 31-17, and he throws for 283 yards, three touchdowns and no picks? No one’s talking about him right now. Why do they lose?