CFB insider trashes Kirk Herbstreit, Nick Saban for takes on James Madison, Tulane

The college football collective media base seems to have pushed back against Tulane and James Madison.

They don't want Group of 5 teams in the College Football Playoff. They want the big names. They want Notre Dame.

And, well, The Athletic's Stewart Mandel is tired of this take machine. He pushed back in a new column on Friday.

And Mandel really didn't hold back on the big three he referenced: Kirk Herbstreit, Nick Saban and Joel Klatt.

"Apparently, life isn’t tough enough being a Sun Belt program whose football budget is barely one-tenth that of Alabama’s, whose head coach, Bob Chesney, has already been poached by a bigger school (UCLA), and whose best players will likely be next," Mandel writes. "You also have to put up with three of the most influential figures in college football media, who, between them, represent two of the most powerful companies in media, dunking all over you for the sole crime of finishing higher in the rankings than 8-5 Duke. To steal a line from Herbstreit: I think that’s bull—."

Klatt essentially trashed March Madness in his take and said no one cares about the Cinderella.

"No one cares about Cinderella in college football? Really?" Mandel pushed back. "I could have sworn people went absolutely nuts when Boise State beat Oklahoma on a Statue of Liberty play in the Fiesta Bowl. Or when then-FCS team Appalachian State beat No. 3 Michigan in the Big House. Or, just last year, when Northern Illinois knocked off Notre Dame."

Mandel also made quite an obvious point about the bigger conferences, too.

"Will Tulane (against Ole Miss) and JMU (against Oregon) get blown out in their first-round games Saturday? Quite possibly," he writes. "That happens sometimes in CFP games. Like last year, when the No. 1 team in the country, Big Ten champion Oregon, fell behind 34-0 in the second quarter to Ohio State."

He polished off his column with a video of Utah beating Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl, when the Utes were part of the Mountain West, part of what Saban would now call the "Triple-A baseball" of college football.

That's how you finish off an argument.

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