2023 NCAA Football Thread

[Deleterious]

This is pretty good.

https://pac-4.com/

[Hongbit]

It will be a Hollywood ending when Caleb Williams wins his 2nd Heisman and leads USC to the PAC-12’s  only title of the playoff era.  

[casimir]

Has UConn to the PACfew been announced yet?

[casimir]

Remember when San Diego State declined the invite?  A little bit of truth serum there would be fun.

[gehringer_2]

UM Regent Jordan Acker unloads on the NCAA:

https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/2023/08/michigan-regent-pokes-ncaa-mall-cops-for-standing-idle-during-big-ten-expansion.html

or 

https://twitter.com/JordanAckerMI/status/1688240170682769409

Quote

“This is where I find the NCAA and its behavior so wildly offensive,” Acker wrote. “If this alleged oversight body, which claims it is high and mighty every time it runs to Congress demanding action, really cared about student athletes, they’d get this nonsense under control.

“Instead, they run around finding minor violations while ignoring the very real impact that a weeknight competition in Seattle would have on student athletes with classes in College Park.”

Acker went a step further, calling the NCAA “mall cops that are way in over their heads” bowing to TV executives “who do their jobs” and school presidents who “protect their institutions.”

“If the NCAA were a real oversight body, it would be the grown up in the room,” Acker wrote. “Instead, it sits around policing minor violations while 115 year old conferences are simply blown up.”

He also took aim at leadership of the Big Ten, ACC and SEC, for chastising student-athletes for taking advantage of NIL and the transfer portal, “then go to transfer portal a conference in a week in August.”

 

Edited August 7, 2023 by gehringer_2

[buddha]

easy to rip them when youre michigan.  is michigan going to share its money with cmu or emu?

nyah.

[gehringer_2]

51 minutes ago, buddha said:

easy to rip them when youre michigan.  is michigan going to share its money with cmu or emu?

nyah.

I thought the comment at the end about revenue sharing was curious - or at least a lot easier to toss out there in principle than to make workable in practice - which I take is your point.

I thought it was interesting because it goes so exactly against the direction I think college football is inevitably going to trend, which will be the rich getting richer and cutting out the rest rather than sharing with the rest. I mean, I can imagine a world where every dollar of FCS television revenue is put in a pot and then doled out equally to all 13x teams. But imagination is as far as I get with the idea. 

The other question is how representative of the whole board is Acker's take here? Based on politics, he's pretty much in the same pod (Dem) as the majority, but I don't know  that there is any predictable red vs blue take on NCAA issues.

If his is a common view on the board, you wonder if it's common to any of the other schools, or at least some others with independent boards.

Edited August 7, 2023 by gehringer_2

[casimir]

7 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

UM Regent Jordan Acker unloads on the NCAA:

https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/2023/08/michigan-regent-pokes-ncaa-mall-cops-for-standing-idle-during-big-ten-expansion.html

or 

https://twitter.com/JordanAckerMI/status/1688240170682769409

 

Did Michigan (or any other team in the Big Ten that now wants to pretend hand wring) vote to accept Washington & Oregon?  USC & UCLA?  Rutgers & Maryland?

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, casimir said:

Did Michigan (or any other team in the Big Ten that now wants to pretend hand wring) vote to accept Washington & Oregon?  USC & UCLA?  Rutgers & Maryland?

Whether honest or not, I think his complaint is that the schools find themselves having no choice but to put out current fires (i.e conference re-alignments) because the NCAA has failed to do any fire prevention (system reform). I haven't seen anything about what kind of debates have taken place inside the UM regents about any of these decisions but it's a fair question. Press reporting was that the decision to let UCLA move was contentious for UCal. But again the reports were that the financial pressure at UCLA was so severe UCal Regents didn't see any other option for how the program at UCLA could survive without the injection of income the B10 offered. 

I think at some schools, maybe in the AAU or where research and medicine are really huge $$, top administration looks at their AD depts as a  "We have people for that" situation. They only tend to be involved themselves when there is a crisis.

Edited August 7, 2023 by gehringer_2

[buddha]

3 hours ago, casimir said:

Did Michigan (or any other team in the Big Ten that now wants to pretend hand wring) vote to accept Washington & Oregon?  USC & UCLA?  Rutgers & Maryland?

the big ten is all about hand wringing.  they didnt want to break up the pac 12?  they took usc and ucla!  

now, the pac 12 might have broken up anyway, but the big ten started it.  the holier than thou **** from the  big ten and from michigan is just after the fact bull****.

next up: florida state.

[casimir]

9 minutes ago, buddha said:

the big ten is all about hand wringing.  they didnt want to break up the pac 12?  they took usc and ucla!  

now, the pac 12 might have broken up anyway, but the big ten started it.  the holier than thou **** from the  big ten and from michigan is just after the fact bull****.

next up: florida state.

It makes for nice cover to push the little Northwestern thingy to the back burner.

[gehringer_2]

Not that I care about Acker, but to be fair, these are big institutions with a lot of different voices and internal constituencies. Maybe Acker did lobby and vote against  expansion when he could (pretty sure he wasn't there for Nebraska or  Rutgers/Maryland). That's probably giving him more credit than he deserves, but I have no idea one way or the other.

[casimir]

3 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not that I care about Acker, but to be fair, these are big institutions with a lot of different voices and internal constituencies. Maybe Acker did lobby and vote against  expansion when he could (pretty sure he wasn't there for Nebraska or  Rutgers/Maryland). That's probably giving him more credit than he deserves, but I have no idea one way or the other.

Oh, "Acker" can be replaced with "Ohio State" or any other person/institution in charge that wants to publicly bemoan what is going on but probably offers no resistance in the meetings/conversations that matter.

[gehringer_2]

25 minutes ago, casimir said:

Oh, "Acker" can be replaced with "Ohio State" or any other person/institution in charge that wants to publicly bemoan what is going on but probably offers no resistance in the meetings/conversations that matter.

It's also probably more work to understand in sufficient detail than your average college board members is willing to do or maybe even should. The board is there only for the broadest policy guidance - and fundraising. 99% of the time if the admin says "We have to do this" they are going to go along because they basically trust the expertise they have put in place in the admin. I think the bigger breakdown comes with the fact the at a big research university, the Athletic Dept is an unnatural cultural graft onto the rest of the institution. The top admin and the AD and coaches are from different worlds, speak different languages and largely have different overall objectives. So before you even get to any disconnect between the admin and the board, you have a disconnect between the admin and Athl Dept. And  so same phenomenon where the AD tells the University President "We HAVE to do this" and he is more or less captive.

Edited August 7, 2023 by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

LOL - if you wonder why the NCAA is so desperate for Congress to act, these are the reasons:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/07/pac-12-collapse-conference-realignment-ncaa-college-athletics/

If NCAA member schools are going to screw CA, CA is going to screw the NCAA right back!

Quote

nothing will change the game more dramatically than a bill making its way through the California legislature that would require Division 1 schools in the state to set aside 50 percent of the revenue they generate from lucrative television contracts and other sources to be paid as much as $25,000 a year to players. Now, that is big time.

The first to receive the cash would be the athletes whose teams are raking it in for the campus finance office: men’s football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. What’s left over would go to athletes in sports television networks love less: lacrosse, rowing, volleyball, swimming, track and field, and so on.

Colleges, naturally, already are howling at this prospect. 

 

[Motor City Sonics]

This should be it.  The NCAA is a ****ing joke and it has been for DECADES.     And we thought FIFA was corrupt.   

They are heading for a cliff and for some reason these conferences, who pretty much act independently anyway, still cling to them for some reason. 

Enough already.   

Just end it.   Order the NCAA some ACME Rocket Skates and let nature take it's course.  

These are major billion-dollar corporations who will sell their souls or stab their own kin in the back for a buck.   Just stop the ****ing pretending already.   Pay your employees (players), because that's EXACTLY how they are treated.    No pay is a form of slavery.   All of this NIL, backdoor money is so damn stupid.  Just flat-out pay them and can we stop pretending that many of them are students first?   That's a joke.    Some do take advantage of school and make the most of getting a free education, but most don't.   We all know the reason they are there.   Let these players unionize and get some rights, you know the rank & file players who aren't getting the big money but losing everything if they get injured.  Give them some rights.   

And can we stop deifying these damn coaches.   Jim Harbaugh and Mel Tucker are horrible human beings.  They all are.   Dabo Swinney is a loudmouth hypocrite,  Nick Saban is practically a mob boss.    

 

With all that said..........

 

24 DAYS TIL KICKOFF !!!

 

[casimir]

I heard this elsewhere.  Ultimately college football will have two mega conferences.  One will be called ESPN and the other will be called FOX.

[gehringer_2]

46 minutes ago, Motor City Sonics said:

All of this NIL, backdoor money is so damn stupid.

Absolutely. Hard to imagine you could rig up a system more ripe for graft and abuse than funneling $$$ to athletes through third parties if you had sat down and tried.

Edited August 9, 2023 by gehringer_2

[Deleterious]

This is why you fire everyone.

 

[Deleterious]

 

[Deleterious]

The Transfer QB Era is Accelerating: Over 62% of projected Power 5 starters are transfers

[gehringer_2]

23 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

 

But TV contracts and networks are transient. What happens when current tv contracts expire and Fox changes its mind? Do we go through conference re-alignments every time we get new media contracts? That should work well.

 

[buddha]

6 hours ago, Deleterious said:

This is why you fire everyone.

 

because the whole thing is bull****.

[Hongbit]

9 hours ago, buddha said:

because the whole thing is bull****.

It’s crazy that one guy gets 4 games for purposely lying to the NCAA about an infraction that he absolutely committed while another guy gets fired for hearsay on events that he was a 3rd party.   Bull**** indeed.  

[gehringer_2]

53 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

It’s crazy that one guy gets 4 games for purposely lying to the NCAA about an infraction that he absolutely committed while another guy gets fired for hearsay on events that he was a 3rd party.   Bull**** indeed.  

you can put it that way, but willful ignorance has always been the go to defense for coaches, which is why 'institutional control' - that they are absolutely responsible for what other people are doing, is a concept that applies to them to a degree that doesn't apply to most people in normal society. So I get why Fitzgerald is being hammered. 

But I also agree on Harbaugh - that whole episode was an unforced error he put a lot of effort into committing, so he can go ahead and enjoy the V-days.