College Football 2019/20

[ursus arctos]

The sooner that football breaks off and runs itself on a SuperLeague/Premier League model, the better for the "non revenue" sports, which can be rearranged into leagues/conferences that make geographic sense.

[ursus arctos]

BTW, lots of the Yale colleges don't look like Hogwarts.

Some look like Faneuil Hall and a number look like Scandinavian Brutalist apartments.

This is even more true of my old pile of bricks.

[Hot Pepsi]

The sooner that football breaks off and runs itself on a SuperLeague/Premier League model, the better for the "non revenue" sports, which can be rearranged into leagues/conferences that make geographic sense.

Yes. That would actually be ideal. That would work especially well for men’s soccer and baseball.

It could even work for basketball if they could figure out how to get all the same games that people want on TV for the people who will pay to see them.

We could also see super leagues in other sports like women’s soccer or wrestling.



One thing I haven’t heard mentioned in all of this talk of super leagues and the “haves and have nots” is whether they’ll want to keep the dead weight. If it really is all about football revenue, then how long will Rutgers, Indiana, Northwestern, Minnesota, Vanderbilt, Kentucky etc get to sit with the cool kids?

That isn’t to disparage those programs as teams. They just don’t bring all that many eyeballs.

Rutgers and, to a lesser extent, Maryland, only got into the B1G because it would bring BTN to more people in those big cities.

But if that model of cable TV disappears, than they’re surplus to requirements.

[Hot Pepsi]

BTW, lots of the Yale colleges don't look like Hogwarts.

Some look like Faneuil Hall and a number look like Scandinavian Brutalist apartments.

This is even more true of my old pile of bricks.

Of course, it’s not all like that. IIRC, Chicago is actually the most Hogwartsian campus.

But my point is that there’s a lot of expenditure, and required maintenance, that isn’t strictly necessary for research or teaching and it’s always been that way. It’s all about image and “experience” and, dare I say it, “branding.”

If a school can break even or turn a profit on sports, that’s a good bargain for name recognition and alumni relations.

Of course, if they’re losing a ton of money on it, than that’s dumb. UConn and UMass would be much better off just spending that money on scholarships or nicer dorms or literally almost anything.

[ursus arctos]

FWIW, my experience is that is that Ivies actually do less of that kind of "lifestyle" spending than many more "aspirational" schools, but that is grounded very much in the fact that their physical plants were better to start with (particularly in terms of not having shared cinder block doubles) and that they don't need fancy gyms or lazy rivers in order to draw applicants.

It is unfortunate that college football has become a Titanic battleground for supremacy between Disney and Fox, but it really doesn't need to distort the rest of the college sport experience (even including men's basketball).

[Hot Pepsi]

Right. The ivies don’t need gimmicks*, but they are, umm, “heavily capitalized” and can spend on lots of support staff and upkeep.

They aren’t competing with anyone except each other for prestige and applicants, so they can just decide which arms races they want to be in and which they will avoid. Cancelling all the sports and in-person classes during COVID was quite a flex. It was like they were saying “what are you gonna do? Go to Vassar?! Hah!!”


I think the current cable model will blow up at some point, but that’s really all the more incentive for the universities to try to maximize their revenue from it right now while they still can.

It especially sucks for all those schools - including FCS schools - that can’t afford to keep up in football but also can’t convince their alumni and boosters to pull the plug.

The ones that already gave up - UVM, Denver, all of the current Big East - will be in a better position.


*And the Ivies generally and their traditional feeder prep schools aren’t football powers, but they offer more sports opportunities than any other schools and have nice facilities for them. The boat houses, Dartmouth’s rugby-specific stadium, the squash courts and so forth.

[ursus arctos]

Yes, and they have all put considerable.monwy into those facilities since my time, in part because the Stanford's, Dukes, Michigan's and Cals are genuine rivals for students they want (as are Juillard, CalTech, St. John's (NM).and other institutions that are world class in certain fields.

[Hot Pepsi]

It’s all a bit absurd, isn’t it?

[ursus arctos]

Massively so

I can't understand why anyone would want to be a university president

[Hot Pepsi]

It’s like herding cats. Thousands and thousands of cats who all think they are much, much, much smarter than you. (I guess that describes most cats anyway).

It pays well, but not nearly as well as other CEO jobs and, in a lot of ways, they have less power to change much.

I can’t imagine being able to do that job year after year - all those press conferences and luncheons and board meetings - and never once accidentally, or very deliberately, telling somebody to “fuck off” out loud.

Being that composed all the time would warp one’s brain.

[Incandenza]

Well the UCLA chancellor's house has a nice pool, and Andy Warhol's painting of Kareem above a fireplace (some staff get invited for music performances by students, and I went once). Though UCLA's current chancellor used to live in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson when he was the president of Virginia.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yeah, but I suspect they could have all of those things with a lot less hassle in the private sector.

W&M’s president lives in one of the original buildings of the college. Or at least, it’s on top of where that building once was. There were a lot of fires in the the 18th and 19th century.

Penn State’s presidents house is just a few blocks from where I grew up. The house was there before the neighborhood.

https://www.statecollegemagazine.com...of-two-houses/

[Incandenza]

I watched the Manti Te'o documentary on Netflix. Not sure why it was divided into two episodes, as it's around two-hours long (I guess it's part of some series they have rather than being presented as a stand-alone documentary).

I still have a few questions about the logistics of how the person who catfished him did it. There is a lot of Naya Tuiasosopo, formerly Ronaiah (they have recently transitioned), and I still wonder how many people who knew the actual woman in the photos of his girlfriend must have seen the media coverage and knew that something weird was going on. It's a good picture of a time when online behavior and knowledge of what could happen still wasn't that widespread--people weren't familiar with catfishing, and in the media clips shown in the documentary, so many reporters/talking heads were just confused and couldn't believe that a young person who only ever had an online relationship with someone could imagine calling that person their girlfriend.

It was interesting to see Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey from Deadspin, and how they investigated the story. A bit naive of them to be surprised that what they thought was a story about the media and how it didn't do any basic fact checking on Teo's girlfriend was instead taken by that same media and spun around and twisted into it being Te'o trying to fool people rather than them doing some soul searching and changing their ways.

I think it's very well done, and Te'o is a very sympathetic person that seems to have dealt with this as best as he can. It doesn't really go into his NFL career, and what he is doing now. I just hope that he's happy.

[ursus arctos]

The process of participating in this and the generally favourable reaction seem to have helped him a good deal, though he had to be in a better place even to consider participating

I think the chances are that he doesn't play in the league again, but that doesn't seem to be consuming him.

[Incandenza]

I think that even in those few years between then and now there has been a lot of change in how people think about how media attention and scrutiny affects players and there is more understanding about mental health. Some of the media clips shown in the movie are disturbing to see. I think the story would be somewhat different if it happened today, but sadly some of the same sports media industry would probably have similar reactions.

[Hot Pepsi]

It was interesting to see Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey from Deadspin, and how they investigated the story. A bit naive of them to be surprised that what they thought was a story about the media and how it didn't do any basic fact checking on Teo's girlfriend was instead taken by that same media and spun around and twisted into it being Te'o trying to fool people rather than them doing some soul searching and changing their ways.

I kinda feel like Deadspin and whatever the not-deadspin-but-most-of-the-same-people is called now are the New Atheists of sports media. Yeah, they do point out some real problems in the sports industry and sports media, but often that just devolves into shittng on people for the sake of shitting on people and acting morally superior. It's tiresome and unnecessary.

[ursus arctos]

That was a lot of the Gawker/Nick Denton mindset, but different members of staff bought onto that to a different extent.

Burke, for instance, seems like a genuinely decent person.

[Hot Pepsi]

That was a lot of the Gawker/Nick Denton mindset, but different members of staff bought onto that to a different extent.

Burke, for instance, seems like a genuinely decent person.

Yes, it definitely varied by writer and there were a lot of good ones, but it seems to be the MO of their "stars."

It also was the dominant vibe of the comments. Why did/do I read the comments? I. do. not. know. It's like telling somebody not to look at a major fire.

[ursus arctos]

The comments quickly became a place for performative assholery and snark, because that was what was encouraged and rewarded (to the point where some high profile commenters got gigs).

[Hot Pepsi]

The comments quickly became a place for performative assholery and snark, because that was what was encouraged and rewarded (to the point where some high profile commenters got gigs).

Performative Assholery would be a good name for a racehorse.

[Incandenza]

That was a lot of the Gawker/Nick Denton mindset, but different members of staff bought onto that to a different extent.

Burke, for instance, seems like a genuinely decent person.

Burke does a great service with his archiving. The Deadspin people that left and started Defector are far from the early 2010s snark types like Daulerio and others, but I think people also did some growth--I knew Drew Magary has apologized and said how he feels embarrassed seeing some of the things he wrote at Deadspin and KSK way back when.

[ursus arctos]

I was already practicing law when Nebraska bestrode the landscape like a colossus.

It really happened, kids.

[Cal Alamein]

From seeing them in the 70s, 80s and 90s, still wild to think of the Cornhuskers as a consistent sub-500 team. In the Better Call Saul thread there were cracks about Bo Pelini, but any NU fan today would love to be assured of Bo's worst record of 9-4.
https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb...ska/index.html

Looks like they play a couple of powderpuffs before OU plays them in Lincoln. Last year's game was close and I'd bet this year's will be too.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/nicoleauerbach/status/1565778316321226753?s=21&t=aSSHnN1PiqWeL-BYg_tq3A

[caja-dglh]

Given that the whole playoff emerged from the rankings being so subjective, why on earth would you design a structure that provides byes based on those rankings?