One Shining Podcast with Tate Frazier - Podcast Rankings and reviews

This is the best college basketball podcast by a long shot. Love how quick they’ve been at getting tournament recaps up day-by-day. Tate has a great mix of knowledge and rumor, and Kyle Mann is a great recurring guest. While I miss Tate and Mark together, this is definitely the better option over Barstool.

I’ll start by saying I like this podcast. I’ve listened to this and Tate’s previous podcast since 2020. I’d call myself a fan of a team rather than the sport, so I appreciate the 10,000 foot view of what else is going on, along with Tate’s podcast demeanor.

Frankly, there’s never been a great depth of knowledge about west coast basketball on any iteration of a national college basketball podcast. That’s fine: it would be unreasonable to expect them to know every detail about every team. I do expect them to not be factually wrong on their platform, like calling a lead guard with a 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio a “turnover machine“, or saying that a 21-year-old is “in defiance of God still playing college basketball,” or claiming that continuity will be a plus on a team with 9 new players. I wouldn’t care if—in their analysis—they disagreed with my assessment of players, but true inaccuracies like these make me question how much they actually know about other teams.

There are many great media personalities with deep knowledge about west coast basketball. I hope in the future Tate will invite one of them on, rather than have national figures give their 30-second espn.com read-off on teams in the sport they cover.

First things first. This and The Mark Titus show are #1 and #2 for CBB podcasts. I don’t usually have time for both though, so I end up going to this first. Why? 1. Length. They keep it under 90 minutes and are sticking closer to the old OSP format than Titus (though Titus seems to be fixing this lately sticking to one guest per show). 2. J Kyle Mann is a better guest who has a better rapport with Tate than anyone Titus has brought on yet (again Titus has been closing the gap with Jake Marsh lately though). I’m surprised I’m going with OSP since I’m the same age as Titus, have enjoyed his stuff since the Club Trillion era, and generally felt he was a little better on the mic than Tate, but here we are.

I listen to at least 30 hours of podcasts a week so it has to keep my attention. This one does. I started it because it’s from TRU (the ringer universe) but I stayed because it’s really good. A little more Arkansas content would be great. 😊 Also I was at the “time out heard round the world game” so I love the intro…

Tate once again proves he’s woefully unqualified to have a podcast about college basketball outside of his school. If you are going to cover something on your podcast, like the Hunter Dickinson quote about Michigan, maybe actually do your job and listen to the interview, rather than perpetuate a snappy headline. The quote was taken out of context to enflame Michigan fans. What Hunter actually said was that Michigan people are nice, but that Ann Arbor has a more east coast feel because it’s a bigger, more metropolitan city than Lawrence, Kansas.

Also, calling Kansas an ally of the South? This is a blatant admission that you have never once researched the border war. Kansas and Missouri literally burned things down and people died in the civil war, because Missouri was a slave state and Kansas was a free state. It’s literally the basis for the entire rivalry. Just because Bill gives you a podcast doesn’t mean you get to say whatever you want. Your job is to do even just the bare minimum amount of research before you turn on the microphone, and you can’t manage to do that. Do better.

I listened for over a month and now I’m out. He can’t control his guests who talk over him and his attempts at humor often fall flat. His bit about Doc Rivers “playing with his meat” was par for the course. He never rises above middle school humor and he thinks things are funnier if you say them loud. I wish he and Titus would have stayed together but if I have to choose I choose Titus. I should have known better. I tried to listen to Pushin’ Thru and bailed on that too. He just works best as someone supporting the main host.