College athletics is in its full-blown post-NIL fever dream — boosters writing checks like venture capitalists, coaches chasing the next bag before the confetti hits the floor, and athletic departments quietly Googling 'how do payrolls work.' So naturally, the Macrodosing crew did what any responsible podcast would do: they called a sitting United States Senator to sort it out.
PFT Commenter walks Sen. Eric Schmitt through whether schools can actually keep running their own teams under the current model.
Schmitt is the Missouri senator who keeps popping up in sports-policy conversations, and the pitch on the pod is straightforward: the current setup, where every school is locked in a spending arms race with no salary structure, no real contracts, and a transfer portal that turns rosters into group texts, isn't built to last. That's not a hot take anymore — even Nick Saban, the guy who basically invented the modern recruiting machine, is out here using the words 'race to the bottom.'
Saban's warning to college sports about the NIL spending spiral.
Schmitt's proposed fix, as floated on the show, is what he's calling the 'Lane Kiffin Rule' — a nod to the Ole Miss head coach whose name has become shorthand for the kind of job-hopping, portal-churning chaos that defines the sport right now. The bit basically writes itself, but Schmitt is using it to make a real point about wanting some structure around movement and money before the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
Schmitt lays out what the 'Lane Kiffin Rule' would actually do.
Of course, not everyone in the Barstool universe wants the chaos cleaned up. Conner Knapp's whole pitch is that college football being dumb is the entire appeal — the realignment, the Tuesday-night transfer announcements, the boosters who think they're Jerry Jones. Strip that away and you've got the NFL with worse uniforms.
Knapp argues the stupidity is a feature, not a bug, with Schmitt sitting across from him.
Where this actually goes is anyone's guess — Congress moves at roughly the speed of an Alabama timeout, and any federal NIL framework is going to get lobbied to death by the SEC, Big Ten, and every collective with a Venmo account. But the fact that the conversation is now happening on a comedy podcast with a sitting senator instead of in a SACSCOC committee room tells you exactly where college sports is in 2026. The grown-ups have left the building, and Big Cat is holding the gavel.