Pete Thamel enters transfer portal, CFE bids farewell | College Football Enquirer
Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel and Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde discuss Pete Thamel’s decision to make a move into the transfer portal and head to ESPN, and debate if Pete is now on the hook for all bar tabs going forward.
Video transcript
[CHEERING]
DAN WETZEL: All right. Welcome to the pod. I'm going to start with a quote, William Christopher Dabo Sweeney. "It's total chaos right now, tampering galore, kids are being manipulated, grass is greener, and all that stuff opposed to putting in the work in graduating. No consequences." So you got agents and NIL and tampering and freaking Wog jumping in on this stealing players, and you've got no consequences. No consequences equals no conscious. There's no reason for pause, no barriers, nothing.
PAT FORDE: Nothing is sacred.
DAN WETZEL: The last thing right now, preach it, William Christopher. Damn transfer portal has hit the podcast.
[LAUGHTER]
PAT FORDE: Pete Thamel is in the portal. And no, we don't respect your decision. Well, we kind of do, but not that much.
[LAUGHTER]
DAN WETZEL: Pete, explain yourself.
PETE THAMEL: All right. I am in the dwindling days of my Yahoo career. And yeah, I will be leaving come this weekend to start a job at the worldwide leader, ESPN, to be called--
DAN WETZEL: Oh, spare us the marketing thing. You're working for ESPN. We don't need that. See, you're already a company man with that world wide leader.
PAT FORDE: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
DAN WETZEL: I can assure you, Yahoo has a tremendous, tremendous reach into mainland China, we go beyond, worldwide. Hold on now.
PETE THAMEL: Hey, Dan, it just means more, Dan. OK? It just means more. All right?
PAT FORDE: The Bristol Death Star. OK.
DAN WETZEL: We're going to support this as long as we don't listen to propaganda.
[LAUGHTER]
PETE THAMEL: Yeah.
DAN WETZEL: Go ahead, go ahead.
PETE THAMEL: Yeah. I'm going to be a senior college football writer, probably the most notable change is that our faithful listeners are used to hearing my voice, but I'll probably be on TV a little bit more. So much so that upon hearing the news, my wife Kate went out and bought a nose hair trimmer immediately, like an electronic fancy one.
[LAUGHTER]
PAT FORDE: That's love. That's love right there.
PETE THAMEL: That thing thing showed up on Amazon two hours later.
DAN WETZEL: She's like, oh no.
PETE THAMEL: Yeah. She was like you're going to make sure that mistake's not made. So yeah. Yeah, that's the new gig is going to be talking about football and still writing about football a lot, obviously, in some different places and around some different faces. So I will certainly miss the pod. The pod, as anyone who knows the pod-- in fact, our most vociferous critics always say we just laugh too much. Like, that's the biggest criticism. Those guys just sit around and laugh.
DAN WETZEL: It's true. That is true.
PETE THAMEL: We have awful laughs, by the way. I have an awful laugh. Pat's laugh is like an assault on the senses. Dan kind of has a hunk cackle that goes through. So yes. But as anyone who listens and whenever I bump into somebody in a press box or whatever and they say they listen, I tend to say as you can tell by listening to us, we have a lot of fun doing it because a third of it is just guffaws and jokes and such.
So certainly I will miss the pod. I've started to grovel through Sully for the occasional guest appearance to come on, maybe for a like a bigger moment. But I don't know. I do know Dan's going to be a pretty--
DAN WETZEL: Eh. We'll see.
- Once you break on Mac's strength coach, maybe.
PETE THAMEL: Yeah. OK.
[LAUGHTER]
- Realignment, nah.
PETE THAMEL: We'll do the Mac's strength coach. Mac's strength coach break down in May.
PAT FORDE: Justice Sullivan has laid down the guidelines.
PETE THAMEL: Yes.
PAT FORDE: For your guest appearance.
PETE THAMEL: Those are very fair guidelines. So, no, in seriousness, will miss the pod. It was the highlight of my work week every week. And I think you guys would probably concur with that. And yeah, I think especially the pod really picked up momentum during the pandemic. 2020 when things were dark and football was uncertain, and I think that's when the pod really sort of found its niche as a place where the insanity can be discussed in satire in the sport. And you can just kind of come and take a listen to people who really love the sport and want to see the best for it.
And it was a little bit of group therapy then. And yeah, the pandemic sucked. And it was fun for us to just sit on the screen for a couple of hours and not worry about masks and going outside and the fatalism that accompanied everything. So yeah, I will miss you gentlemen. You're certainly not going to just be able to ditch me in real life this easy.
PAT FORDE: Ah, try us, try us.
PETE THAMEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DAN WETZEL: He's got this fat ESPN contract now, we'll see where you are when the bill shows up. Bar tab. The bar tab shows up, we can get your expenses up.
PAT FORDE: That's true, that's true. You have priced yourself in dangerous territory when we do meet up with you.
DAN WETZEL: Tell Jimmy Pitaro I said it's OK that you buy us all the drinks, OK? We go way back.
