by Patrick Zier | Jan 26, 2026 |
Despite the fact they were at the front of the field, Ricky Stenhouse didn’t have control of the race and neither did Joey Logano, because nobody really controls what happens in superspeedway racing, but here they were, vying for the lead on the last lap of the 2023 Daytona 500 as cars crashed behind them.
A fitting climax to what this race, and superspeedway racing in general, are all about. You don’t need to be a good driver. You don’t need to have a good car. You just need to be lucky enough to avoid the “Big Wreck,” three of which had occurred in this event, taking out 38 cars, and lucky enough to be in the right line at the right time on the last lap, which Stenhouse was.
Driving for the obscure JTG Daugherty team, whose only claim to fame is that it was partially owned by former NBA star Brad Daugherty, Stenhouse got a push from Christopher Bell, edging Logano to take the checkered flag.
In 2024, Stenhouse won another superspeedway event, Talladega’s Yellawood 500, and in all, he has now won four. But he has never won a race on any other kind of track and never even been a serious contender to win one. And this is not unusual for many drivers who win on one of the three superspeedways, Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta.
The superspeedways produce shooting stars, drivers who flash briefly across the NASCAR stage and then fade back into the obscurity from which they came, because superspeedway racing is totally different than anything else and there is absolutely no correlation between running well on these tracks and being competitive on the others.
Kyle Busch, for example, has never won the Daytona 500 despite being one of the most talented drivers in NASCAR. He has two superspeedway wins, but even without counting those, nine times in his Hall-of-Fame career, Bush has won four or more races on regular tracks, equaling or exceeding in a single season the number of wins Stenhouse has in his entire career.
And with NASCAR shifting to the Next-Gen car, more and more drivers like Stenhouse are getting wins on NASCAR’s biggest venues. As a rookie in 2022, Austin Cindric had only run eight Cup races in his life before winning the Daytona 500. Since then, he has also won another superspeedway race, Talladega’s Jack Link’s 500 last year.
But despite the fact he is driving for Penske Motorsports, one of the best teams in racing, Cindric has struggled on normal tracks, where he has only one win, and his job is in jeopardy.
And then there’s Dennis Suarez, who won the 2024 Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta. Suarez has been bouncing around Cup racing for nine years, and off the superspeedways, he has found winning much tougher. He has won only one other race and was finally released last year by Trackhouse, his fourth Cup team.
Harrison Burton’s Cup career has been much shorter, but driving for the Wood brothers, he won Daytona’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 in 2024. Like the others, the fact that he didn’t have a dominant car and wasn’t really competitive didn’t matter at Daytona, but it showed up everyplace else and he never won another race, was let go and is no longer in Cup.
Of the 24 races on superspeedways since 2022, when the Next-Gen car was introduced, five, or almost 20 percent, have been won by drivers and teams which have never been a factor anywhere else.
That is in sharp contrast to the 120 races run on ovals or road courses, where the best teams dominate. Cars fielded by Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Penske Motorsports, NASCAR’s Big Three, have combined to win 82 of those events.
Trackhouse and 23XI, two teams just a step below the Big Three, have won 19 more. Out of 120 races, only four have been won by teams or drivers who have not really been competitive.
When the Next-Gen car was rolled out, NASCAR’s goal was to even the competition. All the teams got their parts and pieces from a single source supplier and they weren’t allowed to modify them in any way, so all the cars were basically the same.
This caused a huge problem on the superspeedways, where drafting plays a major role in the racing. In the draft, the lead car punches a hole in the air allowing the trailing car to move into the vacuum created behind it. That compresses the air between the two which makes both cars go faster.
The more cars you get running nose-to-tail behind the lead car, the faster all of them will go. This has led to long lines of cars, sometimes 10 or more deep, roaring around the speedway.
And because all the cars are equal and nobody can pass without help, everybody tends to stay in line. About the only time the line breaks apart is if somebody in one line feels another line has more momentum, drops out of the line he’s in and tries to squeeze into the other one.
This creates a gap in the first line, breaking the draft and slowing that line down, allowing the second line to charge into the lead. As cars move back and forth between lines, the lead moves back and forth as well, but it isn’t really passing in the true sense of the word.
The long lines are also the primary reason for the “Big Wrecks,” because with all the cars running so close together, if somebody gets in trouble there is less chance to avoid it.
But while superspeedway winners can come out of no where, that doesn’t mean the best cars and drivers don’t win. JGR’s Denny Hamlin has won the Daytona 500 three times. Hendricks’ William Byron, the defending champion, has won two in a row.
They validate their superspeedway wins by the way they run at other tracks, though, and drivers like Stenhouse, Cindric, Suarez and Burton don’t. So, while superspeedway racing can provide a lot of thrills, winning some of its biggest races, like the Daytona 500, doesn’t mean anything except that on this particular day, you lucked out.
by Patrick Zier | Jan 15, 2026 |
Indiana 38, Alabama 3. If the SEC needed a wake-up call, this was it. Alabama, once the gold standard for a league that was considered the gold standard of college football, totally embarrassed by an upstart Indiana team that has used NIL, revenue sharing and a total dismantling of the sport’s system of governance to rise to the top.
Alabama doesn’t lose like this. In fact for 17 years under Nick Saban, it barely lost at all. The last time an Alabama team was beaten this badly was in 1998, pre-Saban, when it was taken down by Arkansas, 42-6.
And during Saban’s 17-year run, outside of his first year when he was 7-6 in 2007 and when he lost three games in 2010, Saban’s teams never lost more than two games in a single season.
That laid the foundation for the SEC to become the best league in the country, with Alabama, Georgia and LSU generally leading the way. But it wasn’t only the big three.
Florida was a powerhouse. Auburn could beat anybody on a given Saturday. So could Tennessee. And, as the league continued to grow, adding teams like Missouri, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Texas, you had to clear even more hurdles to stay of top. And that’s what made the SEC so good. It had depth.
Other conferences, particularly the Big Ten, could pretty much stand toe-to-toe with the SEC when it came to squaring off at the highest level, but the Big Ten had no answer for teams like Florida, Auburn, Tennessee and some others who could come out of the pack and hold their own against anybody.
Once Congress and the courts said anything goes, though, everything changed. There was no one in control anymore, not the NCAA, not the conferences, not anybody. Players could move freely from school to school. They could make money off NIL. And now, beginning in 2026, revenue-sharing, outright cash payments to players for their services, takes effect.
College football has become a mini-NFL and, as a general rule, the more money you spend the better your team will be. The best example of this is Texas Tech, which poured cash into the transfer portal to get the players it needed to win and made the playoffs this year.
These changes have hit the SEC hard. Good players who, in the Saban era, would have stayed on at SEC schools now started going to other places where they could play immediately and make more money, and the depth wasn’t there anymore.
That was apparent this year when the SEC posted a 4-10 record in postseason competition while the Big Ten went 9-4 and has Indiana playing in the CFP championship game Monday.
So the SEC has had to adjust, reorganize, re-think what it needed to do to win. A case in point is Florida, which has fallen into mediocrity the last few years and is far removed from the Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer eras.
Frustrated by the way the program has collapsed, Florida now seems to better understand what it needs to do to not only bring in championship talent, but keep it and build around it.
“We can only maximize our potential with your full support,” Florida’s new coach, John Sumrall, said at his opening press conference as reported on the Gators’ athletic website. Sumrall was referring to boosters and others necessary to making a college program successful in the new era.
“It takes all of us working together to win championships,” Sumrall continued. “The standard here is championships, and that’s why I came. Winners win. I’m a winner and we’re going to win,” he predicted.
In addition to Sumrall, Florida made a key administrative hire when it brought in Dave Caldwell, an experienced NFL exec, to be the program’s general manager.
“I believe retention of the base (keeping the players you bring in) is the most important thing to build on. We need those guys to stay,” Sumrall went on. This in contrast to schools like Ole Miss and Texas Tech which seem willing to turn over almost their entire roster every year.
“I believe the life blood of your program is recruiting good high school players and, at Florida, elite high school players, and keeping them,” Sumrall remarked.
That has proven difficult at most places, because players don’t want to sit and will leave for more money and a chance to play elsewhere. Defending national champion Ohio State, for example, has lost 30 players in the portal. Still, it has the resources necessary to replace them.
“I think with the model we’re in now, it’s not going to be a deal where Dave (Caldwell) goes out and gets players and hopes it works out,” Sumrall said. “I’m going to be very involved. We’re going to be in partnership and we’re going to be in lockstep on how we put together our roster.
“The head coach gets pulled in a lot of different directions now but my No. 1 job, and I have a sign in my office that says “Coach the team,” is to coach the team,” Sumrall emphasized.
Sumrall dismissed the notion that the Gators are in desperate shape. “I think there’s a lot right with this program,” he said. “I have to diagnose all of that and it will take some time. But we’re going to do everything we can to win fast and I also have a plan for how we can win long term.”
Sumrall seems to have his priorities right here, because as Indiana, Vanderbilt and a few others have shown, you can win fast. And if you don’t win fast, you’re not going to win long term because you won’t be around.
Note: There will be a new college football story or NASCAR piece up on oldguysport.com each week.
by Patrick Zier | Dec 30, 2025 |
Texas Tech has the best team money can buy and now, it’s trying to prove it’s college football’s best team – period.
Texas Tech meets Oregon in one of the CFP’s quarterfinal games Thursday, and both are symbolic of the new model for team building as we move into a new era for college athletics.
In short, money talks. Take Texas Tech, the latest and best example. Once the courts threw out all the rules and regulations governing college sports, the best way to get the best players and build the best teams was to buy them.
And after years of being mired in mediocrity; Texas Tech had never won a Big 12 championship before this year despite being one of the league’s founding members in 1996, some big donors said “enough”.
Led by Cody Campbell, chairman of the Board of Regents and founder of Double Eagle Energy, Texas Tech boosters poured millions into the program this year. They spent $12 million on 21 transfer portal players and put another $28 million into NIL and roster building.
Armed with his new bank roll, Texas Tech’s veteran coach, Joey McGuire, totally reshaped his team. To go along with the new players, he brought in new offensive and defensive coordinators and made other changes in his coaching staff.
The model was Oregon, which, with backing from Phil Knight and Nike, has been at this for a while and transformed Oregon into a national power. It’s estimated that Oregon’s roster this year cost over $40 million.
“First, they’ve (Oregon) done a good job of hiring coaches,” McGuire commented at a press conference before Thursday’s game. “(Dan) Lanning was a slam dunk.
“Second, they’ve made it cool to be an Oregon Duck. I mean they’ve got every uniform known to man and players love that. With Adidas and Patrick Mahomes, We’re doing the same thing,” McGuire continued.
“We’re really fortunate with Adidas as our partner,” McGuire went on. “We’ve got some great looks.
“And then you know they’ve got a great booster in Phil Knight who said ‘Hey, we’re going to win at the highest level and there’s no excuses when it comes to finances.’
“And you know, you turn that around and I think we’ve shown that we’re doing that. I think we’re really comparable (to Oregon). We’ve got guys that have really stepped up and done a great job,” McGuire said.
“I kind of call them the big five,” McGuire said of the quintet, all of whom are worth millions and at least one of whom, Cody Campbell, is worth billions.
“Whenever you talk about Cody and John (Sellers) and Mike (Wallace) and Dusty (Womble) and Gary (Petersen), those guys and everybody else in Red Raider nation, we’re kind of comparable (to Oregon) on and off the field. They’ve just done it for a little longer,” McGuire said.
“He’s built a great roster,” Oregon’s Lanning said of McGuire, also at a press conference before their playoff game. “College football’s about adapting and this (Texas Tech) is obviously a program that’s done an unbelievable job adapting and saying ‘OK, let’s make our team the best it can possibly be’.
“They’ve done that this year,” Lanning said. “So they deserve credit for that because you have to evaluate; there’s a lot of teams that take people out of the portal, right?
“There’s not a lot of teams that necessarily have success,” Lanning continued. “It’s about evaluating that talent, getting them to play together and creating a team that does that. This is a team that’s done that.
“There’s just kind of an admiration and respect for teams that are doing it at a high level and Texas Tech’s certainly one of those teams.”
While some play down Texas Tech’s accomplishments because they don’t consider the Big 12 to be a very strong conference, Lanning is not one of them.
“Good football is good football and I’ve kind of always said that regardless of what conference you’re in,” Lanning remarked. “Are you playing a high level of ball? and these guys (Texas Tech) play a really high level of football, right?
“And they’ve not just beaten opponents, they’ve dominated them, right? And to dominate the way they’ve dominated speaks volumes about what kind of team this is. So we’ve got a ton of respect for them because they’ve got the winning formula.”
That may be true, and it is true that Texas Tech has turned things around and accomplished a lot this year. Beating Oregon, though, will require Tech’s best effort, because these Ducks aren’t quacks.
by Patrick Zier | Dec 6, 2025 |
For Brian Hartline, who will be officially announced as South Florida’s new coach Monday, the job isn’t about picking up the pieces, starting over. His job will be to build on the foundation Alex Golish has laid down.
Hartline appears to be a solid hire. He is highly regarded as Ohio State’s offensive coordinator and considered an outstanding recruiter. He has an impressive pedigree as a player, first at Ohio State and then in the NFL.
His approach will no doubt be different from Golishes; it is likely to be less intense because Hartline appears more confident than Golish, who seemed to be driven, in large part, by a need to prove himself.
The unexpected end of the Golish era was a sharp contrast from its beginnings. At least publicly, it was somewhat messy and tumultuous, a bit out of control. And that was totally different from the way Golish ran his program, where everything seemed precisely planned and well thought out with definite goals in mind.
It appears that Golish was more open with the USF administration, which seemed to know he had gotten some offers and was considering them, than he was with the media and the USF fan base.
Even as more and more reports linking him to other jobs surfaced, Golish continued to insist he wasn’t seeking other opportunities, that he was happy at USF and that he hadn’t completed his rebuild yet. All of that was undoubtedly true.
It was what he didn’t say that was troubling. While he said he wasn’t seeking other jobs, he didn’t say he wouldn’t consider other offers. And all the talk about being happy in Tampa and having all the resources he needed to build a nationally relevant program at USF, which gave the impression he wasn’t going to leave, was misleading at best and dishonest at worst.
And so Golesh has packed up and headed to Auburn, a step up from USF but a gamble on his part. In many ways, Auburn is much like Tennessee, where Golesh was before he came to USF. Both schools have a rich SEC history and are trying to reclaim it. This is particularly true of Auburn, which has struggled to reach the .500 mark over the last several seasons.
At USF, Golesh pretty much had a straight line to football success. The Bulls have made and are making sizable investments in new facilities and a stadium. They plan to spend the full $20.5 million allotted to schools in recent court settlements on players, the only Group of 5 school to do so.
If all goes well, meaning primarily if it can bring in enough money to pay for the stadium, USF will have an advantage virtually every year as far as being the Group of 5 representative in the College Football Playoffs.
In contrast, Auburn has some huge hurdles to overcome just to be competitive in the SEC, and even being competitive is no guarantee you will get to the championship game or the playoffs.
So Hartline takes over USF at a time when the school seems ready to break out of the American, to establish itself as a mid-major, not quite up to Power 4 standards but a notch above everybody in the Group of 5. And that’s a very advantageous position to be in.
“Brian Hartline was our clear-cut first choice to lead our football program into the most exciting era in program history and I am fired up to have him leading the Bulls,” Rob Higgins, CEO of Athletics, said in a USF press release.
“A relentless recruiter, outstanding developer of talent and a gritty competitor, he comes from a championship background and is obsessed with instilling championship excellence in his players and teams. He is ready to lead our program to the next level,” Higgins said.
And Hartline is off to a good start. Even with Golesh gone, USF’s recruiting class pretty much held together on early signing day. According to rivals.com, the Bulls signed the 10th best class among all Group of 5 teams and the third best in the American. And as yet, we have not heard anything about a mass exodus of players via the transfer portal.
“Coach Brian Hartline is a proven winner who has experienced success at the highest level,” Will Weatherford, USF Board of Trustees chair, commented, also in the press release. Weatherford was the driving force behind getting a stadium built and most of the other infrastructure improvements in USF’s athletic facilities.
“He (Hartline) shares our vision for winning championships, developing student-athletes and providing them with a world-class experience and positioning our university on the national stage,” Weatherford added.
So USF is ready to roll. Let the games begin.
by Patrick Zier | Nov 26, 2025 |
Alex Golesh had apparently dealt with it. With his name popping up in connection with coaching vacancies across the country, the South Florida coach attempted to put everyone at ease.
“I have not,” Golesh stated before this week’s game against Rice when asked if he had engaged in talks with Oklahoma State about the opening there. “I addressed this a couple weeks ago,” the South Florida coach continued.
“I’m so focused and locked in on this program, this team; we’ve got so much work to do, but I have not,” Golesh emphasized. “For me, and I said it a couple weeks ago, it’s humbling that people bring your name up.
“But it’s because these guys (his players) have done an elite job of building this place to where people are taking notice. It’s a credit to our kids, a credit to our staff. But I have not,” Golish insisted in regard to any talks with Oklahoma State.
It’s doubtful that Golesh ever was directly involved with Oklahoma State, since the Cowboys just announced that North Texas’ Eric Morris has accepted the job.
Still, it was always difficult to ascertain just where Golesh stood in relation to USF, although he seemed to be committed to rebuilding the program.
“I came here to build something really special,” Golesh said before all the rumors started circulating. “I see this place as a really cool spot where you can build it the way you want to build it.
“They’ve (USF) invested greatly as they promised they would,” Golesh continued. “They’ve kept every promise that they’ve ever made to us. I’ve never in my career, outside of coming here, chased a job and I don’t intend to.
“I’ve got more than I’ve ever dreamed of. We’re super happy here, my family is incredibly happy here,” Golesh said. “To me, that’s more important than any conference affiliation.
“I’ve never, just never thought of it in the sense of ‘I’ve got to go chase a job,’ just never have and certainly this profession is getting crazier by the minute,” Golesh remarked.
“But when you have good people working for you and you feel like there’s a ceiling that you’re nowhere near achieving; I’m just not ready to say ‘well, what else is out there?’ That’s just me,” Golesh said.
“I’m sure some people will call BS on it but hopefully, when you look at my career, however long it is, when you look at what I’ve done in terms of I’ve never ever chased a job and I’m not intending to do so, if people are talking about us that’s a huge credit to our players, to our staff and to our university,” Golesh declared.
With the early signing date approaching, high school recruits can sign on Dec. 3rd, USF and Golesh needed to get his status settled as soon as possible.
“I tell guys the same exact thing I said here at the podium a few weeks ago,” Golesh commented. “We’re working incredibly hard to go finish the season the right way.
“We have chased nothing. We’ve had no conversations. All we care about right now is building on today. And as guys ask, as they should, they’re coming here to play for our staff, I get that, I’ve been as honest with them as I have with you guys (the media),” Golesh remarked. “I understand the concern.”
Off his remarks, Golesh seems to be a guy motivated more by making the College Football Playoff than making more money. But the way he has approached this always left you uneasy.
That’s because he really didn’t commit himself to anything beyond this year. He never said definitively that he wouldn’t listen to offers after this season.
And USF seemed to think he was on board. “Coach Golesh’s representatives and I continue to have a lot of great conversations and both they and Coach Golesh know how fully invested we are in his long term future at USF,” South Florida Athletic Director Rob Higgins said a few days ago.
“We won’t discuss the details of those conversations publicly and we appreciate how totally locked in Coach Golesh has stayed to our program and student athletes throughout the season despite what a lot of false reports that continue to circulate on line suggest,” Higgins concluded.
P.S. – Unconfirmed report: Alex Golesh has accepted an offer to become the next coach at Arkansas.
