Camel Fighting, Dodo Birds, and Leaky Black: A Guide to the Inside Jokes of the Eye on College Basketball Podcast with Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander

David Glidden
18 min readMar 13, 2023
Photo by Saj Shafique on Unsplash

As is the case with any long-running friendship, inside jokes have flourished during the decade-plus tenure of Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander hosting the Eye on College Basketball podcast. Often a result of Parrish’s spontaneous and eccentric focus on a mundane topic or off-hand comment by Norlander, these inside jokes fuel the fan culture around college basketball’s most popular podcast.

“Camel fighting, dodo birds, and Leaky Black”

These days, every episode of the Eye on College Basketball podcast includes as its opening intro this absurdity of a phrase, jubilantly belted out by Gary Parrish:

Welcome to the Eye on College Basketball podcast, where we sometimes discuss camel fighting, dodo birds, and Leaky Black.

It wasn’t always this way, and for a two-year stretch it was just “where we sometimes discuss camel fighting and Leaky Black”, without any mention of the extinct dodo. This is that story.

Note: exact timestamps may change over time as ads of varying length are retroactively added to old episodes.

Camel Fighting

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David Glidden

In the District of Columbia with @egbarnett. Ops at @TheoremOne.