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Joey Harrington on why college athletes shouldn't be paid (podcast)

Grandstanding: A Yahoo Sports podcast
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College football is just one week away, and we're happy to welcome aboard another college football legend to preview the upcoming season and give his take on the state of the game.

Joey Harrington quarterbacked the Oregon Ducks in the early 2000s, including a 2001 season when, by all rights, the Ducks should have gone to the national championship. (Thanks, computers.) He spent plenty of time with us talking every element of the college game, including:

• His take on whether college athletes should be paid: "When we were playing, all we wanted was to get on the depth chart high enough to see our number in the video game," he says. "It wasn't about getting a check for $173 in a class-action suit."

• "When you're running a business, the CEO makes the most money, the people at the top make the most money," he says. "The people who are making the product in the factories make the least money. For an 18, 19-year-old kid to come in and be offered, what, a quarter-million dollar education? ... I think that people are overlooking or downplaying the fact that these kids are being paid ... [Colleges] offer these players a chance to build connections, to open doors, to get started on a path."

• His intriguing thoughts on when Oregon got bounced from the national championship game in favor of a Nebraska team that didn't even win its conference championship. ("It was garbage," he says, but adds that there might have been a bright side to it all in that it sparked both change in the BCS and sustained success at Oregon.)

• How Oregon post-Mariota resembles Tennessee post-Peyton Manning

• The difference between quarterbacks in a system and quarterbacks who define a system

Harrington has an encyclopedic memory of the games he played, and recalls in exact detail routes and plays from games 15 years ago. He also hasn't forgotten the tricks Wisconsin allegedly pulled on Oregon when the Ducks visited Madison all those years back. For Pac-12 and Oregon fans, this is a must-listen; for everyone else, you'll learn plenty about West Coast football. Check it out.

Thanks for listening to the Grandstanding podcast with Jay Busbee and Kevin Kaduk. Hit us up on Twitter (@kevinkaduk and @jaybusbee) Facebook (Kaduk here, Busbee here) or via the hashtag #grandstanding. See you next ep!

[Music by Chris Salmon and Tobin Summerfield]

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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter.

And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too.