No Longer Credentialed

In the world of college athletics, there's a version of success that looks like a rocket ship. You start at a mid-major program, you grind, you move, you climb. Each stop is bigger than the last. Each title is more impressive. Director. Associate AD. Award winner. You are, by every measure anyone in the industry would use... arriving.

Louisiana Lafayette. Then Marshall. Then Baylor. Then the University of Miami. Then Georgia Tech. That was the career trajectory of our guest on this week’s episode, Chris Yandle. Onwards and upwards.  

And then, in 2016, at one of the most prestigious athletic programs in the country... he was fired. There's something nobody tells you about rocket ships. The higher they go... the harder they fall.

For nearly a decade, he poured everything he had into college athletics. He moved his family four times in nine years. He chased titles, bigger programs, bigger platforms. And somewhere along the way, the work stopped being something he did... and became everything he was.

And when it all came apart — and it did come apart — he was left with the hardest question a person can face. Who am I... if I'm not this?

The road back wasn't linear. It never is. There was therapy. There was teaching. There was a PhD. There was a communications job outside of sports. There were handwritten notes slipped into his daughter's lunchbox that became a book titled Lucky Enough: A Year of a Dad's Daily Notes of Encouragement and Life Lessons to His Daughter. And then one day, standing in a Target in Lafayette over Thanksgiving — his phone lit up. The Today Show wanted to do an interview about his notes to his daughter. And then, the Kelly Clarkson Show called. 

The comeback was longer than the climb. And it was worth every step.

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

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Lucky Enough: A Year of a Dad's Daily Notes of Encouragement and Life Lessons to His Daughter

Dad pens over 600 inspirational notes for daughter - Today Show

Dad Writes Daily Lunch Notes To Help Daughter Overcome Bullying - Kelly Clarkson Show 

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Matt Olinger, a longtime college basketball jack of all trades who has been on the front lines as an assistant coach, Director of Operations, Director of Recruiting and everything else under the sun. 

Matt began his career as a manager at Liberty University under Richie McKay and eventually worked his way to an assistant coach position with the Flames. He then joined Bryce Drew’s staff at Vanderbilt as the Director of Basketball Operations, where Boggs worked with him for three seasons, and after his stint with the Commodores, he joined Mike Young’s staff at Virginia Tech as the Director of Recruiting until 2024.

With all of the winter weather affecting games across the south, we wanted to get his perspective on being a Director of Operations at a high major level and what went into operating on the fly in situations out of your control.

However, after reminiscing about harrowing travel in his career and the attitude it takes to be an operations person in a high-stress position, our conversation thoughtfully turned to why he left the business, the mental toll of the 24-hour, 365-day grind of being a college basketball coach, how your identity as a person shifts the moment you leave the industry, the gratitude he has for the mentors and places he has been, and the question a lot of face when we leave the profession - how much am I going to miss this when I’m gone?

Timestamps

02:04 - The overnight bus snowstorm story begins

08:20 - Stuck behind Travis Tritt's tour bus

20:24 - Making the decision to leave coaching

27:50 - The adrenaline rush you can't replace

37:00 - Mental health and the basketball bubble

43:50 - Identity crisis after leaving sports

50:50 - The universe sending signs to leave

59:20 - Telling the kids he's leaving coaching

1:07:40 - March Madness memories

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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This week on the podcast, we take a shot at our own version of “Half-Baked Ideas” with a segment titled, Insane Sports Things We’d Pay Money To See - which evolved into content ideas we think would kill on Netflix. 

We found some new sponsors! Prime Fine and Circus Contracts, step right up. We hope your check is in the mail.

Also, our area of the country experienced a devastating weather event last week, and we watched a crisis communication 101 class happen right before our eyes. And it may be safe to say there were some folks who didn’t stay awake for the lectures. We’ll get into the wrongs and rights of crisis PR.

Timestamps

3:20 - Crisis communications masterclass: Nashville power outage response failures

10:04 - Fining players who aren't employees and the absurdity of college sports

20:17 - Alex Honnold's skyscraper climb on Netflix sparks "Insane Sports Things We'd Pay Money to See"

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.
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This week, two-time University of Wyoming grad and former Cowboy Director of Athletic Academic Services and Coordinator for football, women's volleyball, and golf Delaney Mullins joins us on a fact-finding mission on the NCAA Transfer Portal and the impact on the people that actually make things happen behind the scenes.

Mullins, who we actually found on TikTok (@Delaney_Ruthh), where she has found quite the following and fame, has over 11,000 followers and over 1.3 million likes on the platform -  with a lot of the traction coming from her talks about her time as an academic advisor, how the transfer portal really works and the toll it takes on the people who have to deliver the goods in such a short amount of time.

We’ll speak with Delaney about her personal experiences working in a high-stress environment, how difficult it is to put all of the puzzle pieces together to get someone through the portal, and how she reached her breaking point to leave the business. She currently serves as an Admissions Counselor and Recruiter for the University of Arkansas.

Timestamps:

5:13 - Josh Allen and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

11:37- Telling a coach no

14:26 - The harsh reality of the portal

25:57- Delaney's breaking point in athletics

32:50 - How ethics get challenged as an academic advisor

35:17 - Do high-level academic schools struggle to compete in today's transfer portal era?

41:15 Delaney's emotional decision to leave after seeing her first recruiting class graduate

50:30 - Why college athletics experience makes you overqualified (but employers don't see it)

1:01:05 - The tablecloth controversy in college admissions recruiting

1:05:40 - Why sports matter

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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Longtime friend and collegiate athletic trainer Jeff Carrico joins the podcast, where we ask him about all things about the field - a day in the life, what’s changed since he started in the business 30 years ago, what he would change, words of advice for those considering the field, his start in the business, and what he deems as the essential skill you must possess to making your experience as an athletic trainer a memorable one, despite the long hours, hard work, and low pay.

Carrico worked with Boggs at Marshall University in the early aughts, where they roomed on the road and experienced the highs and lows of mid-major basketball. 

The Cincinnati, Ohio, native has over 30 years of collegiate athletic training experience and has worked at Northern Illinois, Marshall, Cincinnati, DePaul, Central Michigan and his alma mater, Eastern Kentucky, where he served until 2023. He is currently an Outreach Athletic Trainer with the University of Kentucky Health System.

Timestamps

16:50 - The Reality of Athletic Training Hours

26:02 - The Revolving Door of NIL and Transfer Portal

30:28 - Healthcare Has the Word CARE in It

32:00 - The Power of Face-to-Face Communication

36:23 - Saving An Athlete In Need

43:30 - Making A Difference

54:39 - Athletic Trainers Should Be in Coaching Interviews

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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Welcome back, NLCPod people! We kick off 2026 with a deep dive into college football's broken bowl system, exposing how bowl executives rake in millions while athletic departments struggle and follow the money trail through the $1.3 billion ESPN CFP deal, revealing nonprofit bowl games paying CEOs over $1 million annually. We then ask, how do you remove the fat cats from the bowl money trough?

We’ll also tackle another edition of our multi-part series, "Coaches That Can't Help Themselves," dissecting UCLA women's basketball coach Cori Close's media coverage complaints and offering a hilarious checklist for coaches obsessed with press attention. We’ll also discuss the toxic dynamics between coaches and support staff and the mental health ramifications of those interactions. 

Plus, we’ll debut a new segment: "Poking the Boggs" with rapid-fire reactions to sports headlines.

Timestamps

6:36 - Boggs goes Pablo Torre on college football’s deeply corrupt bowl system. Where does all of the money go?

36:29 - Another rendition of Coaches That Can’t Help Themselves. This time, we talk about a coach who didn’t think there was enough media at their road game right after Christmas.

1:10:46 - A new segment, Poke The Boggs. Find out if Barca can make steam come from his ears. 

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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This episode originally aired on May 12, 2025, and we really liked it, even if it was only our second episode. So here it is again.

In Episode 2 of No Longer Credentialed, we tackle the five suckiest jobs in sports (⁠2:28⁠) from two industry veterans. We also interview ticket office legend Eric “Stoosh” Jones (⁠52:49⁠), who tells us a doozy of a Christmas Day story, and after years of entertaining the masses on birthdays, he ranks his top three ice cream cakes. 

Finally, Boggs is "Up To His Ears" about TV broadcast assignments. 

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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This episode originally aired on July 14, 2025, and is our most listened-to episode to date. So, we thought we’d run it back.

We’ve spent much of our time on this podcast speaking about the burnout associated with working in college sports and how it affected our personal and work lives. In this week’s episode, we speak to someone who has quantified our feelings into groundbreaking research.

Dr. Matt Huml, an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati, teaches sport administration courses in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services. He is also on the forefront of the work issues that people working in college sports face every day. We ran across a piece in Sportico he and Dr. Elizabeth Taylor wrote in 2022 titled - Why Employees Are Fleeing The College Athletics Industry - and quickly chased down the rabbit hole of his work, which explains a lot about the current state of the business. We identified with his research, personified it, and we wanted to talk with him.

In 2019, he helped write a groundbreaking study titled Workaholism In Sport: A Mediated Model Of Work–Family Conflict And Burnout, which detailed the conflict that many of us have faced doing a job that we were passionate about. He’s also studied remote work for college athletic department personnel, he’s done research on the spouses of sports workers, and recently, published a study called Working to Live or Living to Work? How Daily Work Experiences Affect Sport Employees’ Biometric Health. 

In this episode, we’ll talk to Dr. Huml about some of the things he found out in his initial work on burnout (5:04), his findings and insight into work-family dynamics (9:55), the jaw-dropping turnover rate in collegiate sports (12:02), what burnout really is (18:21), how culture applies to actions on the field and not for the athletic department (27:45), do athletic directors really understand what’s happening (29:50), would staffers ever walk out (35:25), what he learned from actual staffers to try to even out work-life balance (36:50), and his advice for senior leadership to address burnout and to actually value the time of their staffers (37:20).

Dr. Huml also answers questions about generational trends in the industry (40:28), whether higher-ups will start building athletic culture around real family (41:30), and what would be the one big thing he would recommend for athletic directors (44:39). We wrap up the interview with Dr. Huml asking us a big question (58:46).

Special thanks to Dr. Huml for his time and insight for this fascinating interview. 

For more of Dr. Huml’s research, you can find it here.

Oh, and before we forget, we want to thank our newest sponsors, Slim’s Magic Carpet Rides and We Build Moats (32:19). We hope to see their multi-figured check in the mail soon. 

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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In our last recording of 2025, we’ll take a look back at some of the things we learned this year, from the most mundane to the most thought-provoking.

We’ll also have an 80’s fever-dream of a recap of our show so far, and dive into our Spotify Wrapped for the year. We’ve got fans all over the world, people.

Timestamps

3:29 – College sports will never be fixed: the endless cycle of issues 

9:31 — The Super League and Relegation in College Football

27:00 — The ACC Scheduling Fiasco

28:07 – Tennessee’s million-dollar balloon budget

33:01 - Boggs’ cat is smarter than a majority of collegiate administrators

52:48 – The episode that validated the mental health toll of working in sports 

55:24 – Guests’ wisdom: lessons from the brave 

1:03:10 – Golf Channel secrets: finding the TV camera 

1:04:10 – Ice cream cake: the office secret weapon

1:04:31 – The Epstein mystery: why we’ll never get to the bottom of it 

1:07:19 – Rapid fire: nuggets from 2025 and lessons learned 

This episode was produced and written by Brandon Barca and Andy Boggs.

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NLCPod

X: https://x.com/nlcpod

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/nlcpod

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We’re back and better than ever and we’re in it to win it, people.

This week, after seeing a team radio sideline reporter reveal some interesting dynamics on a team charter flight, we dive into what these flights are all about (since we’ve been on a few in our day) and agree that making details public from a team’s inner sanctum is a complete no-no.

But, this conversation leads to what Boggs believes is the number-one conundrum facing sports PR pros in the 21st century. Access. Who gets it? How much should the media get? And, is it worth it, in the end, to give too much of it? Plus, we’ll address what happens behind the scenes when someone you trust, as a part of the team party, decides to go rogue and out some very private team interactions that involve your future star and recent number-one draft pick.

And, not everyone working in sports can afford a pool with their Christmas bonus, because, surprise, no one gets one working in the business. We think that should stop and offer up our ideas on what GMs and ADs could do to help out their staffers, who make little to no money in their demanding jobs.

Timestamps

16:17 - The Balancing Act of PR

18:02 - The Unwritten Rules of Access

22:23 - The Nightmare for PR Pros

23:48 - The Fallout: Who Gets Banned?

25:02 - The GM's Wrath and Tightening Access

29:05 - The Sacredness of Team Flights

30:28 - The Domino Effect of Broken Trust

38:21 - The Unintended Consequences for Staff

40:03 - The Credentialing Dilemma

54:08 - The Trailblazers' Playoff Bonus Example

58:28 - The Reality of Staff Bonuses in Sports

59:41 - The Importance of Taking Care of Staff

Find us on all of the socials at NLCPod.

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Link: Athletes.Org Collective Bargaining Proposal Framework