I don’t want to disagree with the idea, but the Chargers’ social media team has been weird for years. Last year’s theme was anime and yeah it was nerdy enough that I’m sure Kris Jenkins, Jr. would approve.
Yup, but I daresay, being able to say "fine" requires perspective.
Back when I was helping my (now late) mother manage her retirement, she suggested investing in the stock market and I very firmly advised her against it. I said there didn't seem to be anything propping up these insane stock prices -- they're going up up up in a fundamentally weak market, damn if I know why, it didn't make sense, I have the heebie-jeebies. This was back in 2005. Three years later, the economy imploded. At the time, I'm sure our conservatism looked crazy. It was the rest of the world that was crazy.
NIL could well be in a bubble. We suspect, but don't know for sure either way, that teams are engaging in unsustainable practices, even eating their seed corn (donor goodwill). If so, Michigan looks crazy. But maybe it's everyone else.
We're doing "fine" in that we kept our key starters, extremely valuable players like arguably the #1 DT and #1 CB in the country in Mason Graham and Will Johnson. We're thin on depth because we're not outbidding for depth pieces. Some find that worrying, others are screaming. I think it's "fine".
As Keynes said, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So ten years might go by and Michigan might still be "struggling" with NIL. Time will tell, but I suspect it's Michigan that's "fine" and OSU and LSU are betting the farm.
Seth, why are you lecturing Craig Ross about times he lived through? Also, that Lorraine HS cheer sounds raunchy as all get out.
As for NIL, the donors don't need to be "conditioned"; they're fine the way they are. It's the OSUs and LSUs that are f'ed up. They spend all their money on football because they live in shitholes, when they don't realize they live in shitholes because they spend all their money on football.
I like football and I get that MGoBlog makes a living off it, but I guess we're the crazies for prioritizing kids in hospitals over outbidding for 3rd-string cornerbacks. If that's crazy, then to hell with sanity.
Though one imagines the recruiting industry was better at selecting five-stars has improved in general
I don't. OK, lemme nuance that a little. I think the recruiting sites have improved at evaluating individual talent. Put a kid in front of them and they've gotten better at predicting if that one kid has NFL potential. But they're gazing at fish in increasingly smaller ponds.
Sure he was driven in part by necessity, but I'd say Harbaugh realized the scouting agencies had sold out, so he Moneyballed recruits in areas the services wrote off in their cost-cutting frenzy. Meanwhile OSU and Alabama kept trusting the system, going to the big box store and plucking the most expensive items off the shelf, not realizing they were increasingly buying overpriced commodities. Even when a 5-star is a 5-star, it's an open question if you can build a team around a well-publicized HS kid. I'm not insinuating Bryce Underwood is hard to get along with; I'm saying once you've poured $3 million into a single player, what do you have left? 84+ players to go, LSU!
It's an oversimplification -- I'm not going to match the depth of Seth's piece with just a comment -- but my point is that not only did Harbaugh's program scout & develop the crap out of players, the over-reliance on increasingly compromised industry scouting at programs like OSU and Alabama left them weaker. Oh, they're still elite, but I daresay Saban retired not merely because he lost the Rose Bowl, but because Harbaugh exposed the emerging weakness of the industrial star-bag system that had served Saban so long. Overhauling that would take years AND a change of heart Saban would never entertain, let alone in his 70s.
Sorry, misspoke a bit there. They don't exist yet because we're not there yet. I'm saying after everything's been burned to the ground, there will be studies, because there always are, and they will overwhelmingly show that any destruction was politically motivated, not pragmatically forced.
Fact is, the current situation is that most football programs vastly overspend to justify their own overspending. "We have to spend this much, or we'll cease to exist." But it's all bullshit. The sport can be as simple as getting a field, some pipe chairs, some pads, and a coach or two. Div III teams exist. Heck, high school teams exist. Small high schools in effin' Idaho have football teams. There is nothing inherently cost-prohibitive about football for an academy of any size. So it's all about managing expenses, and most programs (such as Rutgers and LSU) deliberately mismanage their expenses to scandalous, well-documented and well-publicized extremes for the malicious intent of crying poverty when the knives come out.
So there is financially absolutely no problem with paying players. No, they won't be all paid the same, but where does that ever happen? Does everyone get paid the same where you work? Oh, there'll be some shouting and fist-pounding, but inevitably the third-string lacrosse player will not make as much as the starting quarterback.
But a lot of places will cut their lacrosse programs not because they can't afford it, but to convince everyone that the big bad mean gummint forced them into financial ruin. But what's really happening is, they are sociopaths who will not hesitate to annihilate college lacrosse to fabricate a point about how sharing is evil. And I'm saying, don't fall for it. These people have less than zero credibility.
I feel like softball is way outperforming expectations, and it's a young team! Maybe not quite ready to catch Northwestern, but I don't think "catch Northwestern" was on anyone's minds at the start of the season.
Brian: that's a marketing fee; they can just cut back on marketing.
Entitled people give up nothing. Not a penny. It doesn't matter that they're sitting on billions; it's about principle to them. It's an insult to so much as impede their quest for more, let alone demand that anything go to anyone else.
Force athletic departments to choose between having all of the money and dying or taking part in a rising tide lifting all boats, and they will burn it all down out of pure spite. They'll cancel all sports except football and basketball and blame it all on everyone else, even with reams of studies published that it wouldn't have been difficult to make it work.
I have to imagine there would be quite a few states in this country that are falling all over themselves to get any access to that sweet, sweet UAE money. As in, literally all of them.
I'll be shocked if there's a state in the Union that has the principle to say no, because I'm basically shocked when I see someone act on principle at all.
I'm gonna knock the system. Billions of TV revenue are disappeared on a scale that would make Al Capone blush in his grave, so coaches are reduced to begging for money on the phone because some 17-year-old thinks he's entitled to be a millionaire before he's even put on the uniform.
It's embarrassing that May and Day are spending significant working hours on fundraising a glorified money laundering operation for teenagers. They're both extremely wealthy (or will be soon, in May's case) but explicitly forbidden from even treating a player to a damn burger with their own money. It's madness.
Yeah, imagine the positional improvement they could've had the past few years over schlubs like CJ Stroud (1st round pick), MHJ (1st round pick), Garret Wilson (1st round pick), Chris Olave (1st round pick), Paris Johnson Jr. (1st round pick), and Smith-Njigba (1st round pick), if only they had their booster program's shit together. If only! Just imagine the superior talent they could've acquired instead.
I think those are kinda funny. Pondered making one myself, for the irony. Get me a spoiler like it came off the boom of a P-38, 'cuz I ain't dusting anyone with 1.5L under the hood. But -- and here's the rub -- I decided that'd be a ridiculous waste of money for a joke.
Nah, this is more like, when I see a Ford F-750 or whatever with those big rig vertical exhaust systems and six tires and truck nuts and patriotic decals. . . and a perfectly pristine cargo bed. Meaning it's not a work truck, it's a gorram white-collar commuter. You could be doing the exact same thing in a used Kia, but you're mortgaging your future on a boner surrogate.
They're always stacked. I've been following B1G football since the mid-90s and there was never a year OSU was not stacked.
They're going to do well and they might actually beat us. What's tragically hilarious is just how far they have to go. I mean, that they'd:
Put a HC with a career 56-8 (!!!!) record in the hot seat,
Run a good starting QB out of town, and
Sell their parents to glue factories just to beat Michigan
. . . All in the same year? Imma say it: that's Little Brother II. I ain't saying that because the last three years made me forget the prior twenty-some ass-kickings. "Little Brother" isn't about rivalry records; it's how much the program's identity is warped by Michigan Complex. While not quite to the level of STAEE yet, this is getting silly.
Only if the problem is something like football. Then the wallets open up and flip upside down. If the problem is humanitarian, no, sorry, there just isn't enough to go around.
Ohio has a lot of stupid money sloshing around, apparently.
I love football, but in my head, I put it in its place as entertainment. There are tons of things these benefactors could spend their fuck-you money on to improve that shithole of a state, but this is what they're doing.
P.S. Random thought: imagine the boost to Ohio's economy if they put all this NIL money toward academic scholarships instead.
Title IX is a red herring, and a particularly odious one at that, because a lot of bad people are extremely eager to get rid of it. Not saying you are, I'm just saying, be skeptical of vocal opinions about Title IX when they say, "This could be a potential problem," because that's usually a dogwhistle for, "I want this to be a problem, for want of an excuse to repeal it."
Fact is, even before we get to Title IX, we're gonna have an extremely heated debate about players on the same team. The starting QB is naturally going to demand more money than the third-string linebacker, and the latter is going to naturally argue for equal payment for all. As far as precedent goes, no one expects all employees at any workplace to make the same money, and this status quo coasts along fine next to equal opportunity laws. Equal opportunity =/= equal pay. So, once they're considered employees, I see the starting QB winning this battle.
Which means pay is going to be unequal before female athletes factor in the conversation. And since women's athletics don't bring in nearly as much revenue, that they won't get paid as much will inevitably result in a slew of Title IX lawsuits that I predict with confidence won't get very far, excepting special cases like Caitlin Clark (who single-handedly raised basketball ratings during her time in college).
Sorry, I think I'm being misunderstood a bit here. The conversation upthread is focused on program-player negotiations, but I'm not on that. I was replying to bluebyyou on this:
Regarding Brian's comment that the single transfer rule was correct, I would agree that the rule would significantly reduce movement in and out of the portal.
I'm specifically focused on Brian's rant (starting about 29:50) about portal abuse, and him saying the NCAA should use loss of eligibility to restrict that. I'm opposed to using the NCAA for anything, but also against restricting horizontal movement in general. The courts ruled against it for a reason. (But I'm also saying Brian should be able to point a finger at someone like Derrick Harmon and laugh.)
I think that's a moot question, at least as far as Michigan goes. In every case I've seen, a walk-on that gets significant playing time gets awarded a scholarship, and anyone who doesn't, doesn't go to the NFL.
There's the rub though: wrt employment agreements, treating them as such would be nice, because something like signing contracts would go a long way toward providing stability. But I consider that a different approach than going, "NCAA, fix this," because the very reason programs can't offer contracts is the NCAA's insistence that players aren't employees. Putting the fox in charge of henhouse security doesn't go well.
I also don't think it's a controversial take to say that Derrick Harmon isn't made of the same stuff as Michael Barrett.
I don't know if regulating behavior of this sort ever works for the better. We're not talking about crimes here; we're talking about simple self-interest. Brian doesn't like the optics, but he's really just bitching about the world we all live in now.
That said, while I wouldn't try to throw regs at a portal frequent flyer, I think it's long past time we drop the "happy trails" bullshit and call a spade a spade: if you're transferring multiple times for more PT, you're a coward. Seriously. You're in competitive sports and the first thing you do when the coach starts someone else is to run away from competition?
Let's not have the NCAA -- a embarrassingly incompetent institution -- try to implement a fix here. But can we at least throw tomatoes at fragile snowflakes who transfer more times than they have years of eligibility? I ain't rooting for a player whose first reaction to adversity is to leave town. After all, a guy who soils his pants next to a teammate probably lacks the requisite mental toughness to face a powerhouse opponent.
They’re also dumb. Like, really dumb. Dangerously dumb. I’m seeing Harvard grads everywhere turning everything they touch to shit, and that’s because you don’t need to study if legacy is your qualification. The ones who get in the hard way are sharp as razors but they’re a vanishingly small minority that serve to legitimize the American Habsburgs.
It’s to the point I consider Harvard a degree mill now, except no one’s caught up to reality. That's terrifying, and visibly damaging the country.
Recent Comments
I don’t want to disagree with the idea, but the Chargers’ social media team has been weird for years. Last year’s theme was anime and yeah it was nerdy enough that I’m sure Kris Jenkins, Jr. would approve.
Every time someone punts in el Assico? Are you trying to get people killed??
Well the answer is obvious, in order to score more points, MSU is going to have to put more Hitlers on their scoreboard.
Welcome to OT season, biatch!
That was (chief's kiss)
I mean (chef's kiss)
P.S. Don't blink. It is packed with references.
Revenge Tour (?) at 1:07
Tom Brady at 2:39
I feel old.
What Aamir might look like
/it's Aamar-vel of engineering
So. . . who’s gonna outbid us this time?
We gotta keep explaining defensive pessimism to some folks I guess
Yup, but I daresay, being able to say "fine" requires perspective.
Back when I was helping my (now late) mother manage her retirement, she suggested investing in the stock market and I very firmly advised her against it. I said there didn't seem to be anything propping up these insane stock prices -- they're going up up up in a fundamentally weak market, damn if I know why, it didn't make sense, I have the heebie-jeebies. This was back in 2005. Three years later, the economy imploded. At the time, I'm sure our conservatism looked crazy. It was the rest of the world that was crazy.
NIL could well be in a bubble. We suspect, but don't know for sure either way, that teams are engaging in unsustainable practices, even eating their seed corn (donor goodwill). If so, Michigan looks crazy. But maybe it's everyone else.
We're doing "fine" in that we kept our key starters, extremely valuable players like arguably the #1 DT and #1 CB in the country in Mason Graham and Will Johnson. We're thin on depth because we're not outbidding for depth pieces. Some find that worrying, others are screaming. I think it's "fine".
As Keynes said, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So ten years might go by and Michigan might still be "struggling" with NIL. Time will tell, but I suspect it's Michigan that's "fine" and OSU and LSU are betting the farm.
That are a good one.
Seth, why are you lecturing Craig Ross about times he lived through? Also, that Lorraine HS cheer sounds raunchy as all get out.
As for NIL, the donors don't need to be "conditioned"; they're fine the way they are. It's the OSUs and LSUs that are f'ed up. They spend all their money on football because they live in shitholes, when they don't realize they live in shitholes because they spend all their money on football.
I like football and I get that MGoBlog makes a living off it, but I guess we're the crazies for prioritizing kids in hospitals over outbidding for 3rd-string cornerbacks. If that's crazy, then to hell with sanity.
Might be a good experience for them.
Congrats ladies!!
I don't. OK, lemme nuance that a little. I think the recruiting sites have improved at evaluating individual talent. Put a kid in front of them and they've gotten better at predicting if that one kid has NFL potential. But they're gazing at fish in increasingly smaller ponds.
Sure he was driven in part by necessity, but I'd say Harbaugh realized the scouting agencies had sold out, so he Moneyballed recruits in areas the services wrote off in their cost-cutting frenzy. Meanwhile OSU and Alabama kept trusting the system, going to the big box store and plucking the most expensive items off the shelf, not realizing they were increasingly buying overpriced commodities. Even when a 5-star is a 5-star, it's an open question if you can build a team around a well-publicized HS kid. I'm not insinuating Bryce Underwood is hard to get along with; I'm saying once you've poured $3 million into a single player, what do you have left? 84+ players to go, LSU!
It's an oversimplification -- I'm not going to match the depth of Seth's piece with just a comment -- but my point is that not only did Harbaugh's program scout & develop the crap out of players, the over-reliance on increasingly compromised industry scouting at programs like OSU and Alabama left them weaker. Oh, they're still elite, but I daresay Saban retired not merely because he lost the Rose Bowl, but because Harbaugh exposed the emerging weakness of the industrial star-bag system that had served Saban so long. Overhauling that would take years AND a change of heart Saban would never entertain, let alone in his 70s.
Does he have a brother? We need at least one more, for when the Casons go rolling along.
/ over hill, over dale, we will hit the Dusty trail
Don’t forget “you would do the exact same thing”
I couldn’t tell good form from my own ass but it looks to me like she’s trying to make contact with a breaking ball.
Sorry, misspoke a bit there. They don't exist yet because we're not there yet. I'm saying after everything's been burned to the ground, there will be studies, because there always are, and they will overwhelmingly show that any destruction was politically motivated, not pragmatically forced.
Fact is, the current situation is that most football programs vastly overspend to justify their own overspending. "We have to spend this much, or we'll cease to exist." But it's all bullshit. The sport can be as simple as getting a field, some pipe chairs, some pads, and a coach or two. Div III teams exist. Heck, high school teams exist. Small high schools in effin' Idaho have football teams. There is nothing inherently cost-prohibitive about football for an academy of any size. So it's all about managing expenses, and most programs (such as Rutgers and LSU) deliberately mismanage their expenses to scandalous, well-documented and well-publicized extremes for the malicious intent of crying poverty when the knives come out.
So there is financially absolutely no problem with paying players. No, they won't be all paid the same, but where does that ever happen? Does everyone get paid the same where you work? Oh, there'll be some shouting and fist-pounding, but inevitably the third-string lacrosse player will not make as much as the starting quarterback.
But a lot of places will cut their lacrosse programs not because they can't afford it, but to convince everyone that the big bad mean gummint forced them into financial ruin. But what's really happening is, they are sociopaths who will not hesitate to annihilate college lacrosse to fabricate a point about how sharing is evil. And I'm saying, don't fall for it. These people have less than zero credibility.
I feel like softball is way outperforming expectations, and it's a young team! Maybe not quite ready to catch Northwestern, but I don't think "catch Northwestern" was on anyone's minds at the start of the season.
Entitled people give up nothing. Not a penny. It doesn't matter that they're sitting on billions; it's about principle to them. It's an insult to so much as impede their quest for more, let alone demand that anything go to anyone else.
Force athletic departments to choose between having all of the money and dying or taking part in a rising tide lifting all boats, and they will burn it all down out of pure spite. They'll cancel all sports except football and basketball and blame it all on everyone else, even with reams of studies published that it wouldn't have been difficult to make it work.
Bilbo "stole" a cup = Lake-town must burn.
Mrs. dragonchild (OSU alum) and I agreed that the current President of OSU being a cryptobro is a bona fide scandal.
I mean, he's a cryptobro. The drugs were the least of the problems.
I have to imagine there would be quite a few states in this country that are falling all over themselves to get any access to that sweet, sweet UAE money. As in, literally all of them.
I'll be shocked if there's a state in the Union that has the principle to say no, because I'm basically shocked when I see someone act on principle at all.
Or the Michigan Wolverines (regionally extinct because people suck).
More like a one-two punch. Even OSU has standards, or did.
It’s not even the speech. Mrs. dragonchild went to OSU and she’s aghast to learn her alma mater’s been taken over by a fucking cryptobro.
OLU was pretty good during his time here.
Some people treat all written communication like gorram SMS and expect others to deal with their laziness.
Have you forgotten that this is one of the rags that tried to torpedo Michigan's football program for a few cheap clicks?
Well there's one rule, and that's that programs aren't allowed to pay players even federal minimum wage. NIL is just a money laundering loophole.
I'm gonna knock the system. Billions of TV revenue are disappeared on a scale that would make Al Capone blush in his grave, so coaches are reduced to begging for money on the phone because some 17-year-old thinks he's entitled to be a millionaire before he's even put on the uniform.
It's embarrassing that May and Day are spending significant working hours on fundraising a glorified money laundering operation for teenagers. They're both extremely wealthy (or will be soon, in May's case) but explicitly forbidden from even treating a player to a damn burger with their own money. It's madness.
Yeah, imagine the positional improvement they could've had the past few years over schlubs like CJ Stroud (1st round pick), MHJ (1st round pick), Garret Wilson (1st round pick), Chris Olave (1st round pick), Paris Johnson Jr. (1st round pick), and Smith-Njigba (1st round pick), if only they had their booster program's shit together. If only! Just imagine the superior talent they could've acquired instead.
Sigh. . . the world may never know.
At this stage I would assume any listing is a placeholder. These players haven't even scrimmaged together yet.
Feel free to endlessly speculate, though. It's what this site do.
Did something well? I think it's hilarious if they unironically think this is a good look. This is unhealthy obsession.
It's a joke, sir. (Not even mine, I stole it from Blinkin)
You're not obligated to find it funny, but an awkward forced chuckle would've been nice.
I think those are kinda funny. Pondered making one myself, for the irony. Get me a spoiler like it came off the boom of a P-38, 'cuz I ain't dusting anyone with 1.5L under the hood. But -- and here's the rub -- I decided that'd be a ridiculous waste of money for a joke.
Nah, this is more like, when I see a Ford F-750 or whatever with those big rig vertical exhaust systems and six tires and truck nuts and patriotic decals. . . and a perfectly pristine cargo bed. Meaning it's not a work truck, it's a gorram white-collar commuter. You could be doing the exact same thing in a used Kia, but you're mortgaging your future on a boner surrogate.
They're always stacked. I've been following B1G football since the mid-90s and there was never a year OSU was not stacked.
They're going to do well and they might actually beat us. What's tragically hilarious is just how far they have to go. I mean, that they'd:
. . . All in the same year? Imma say it: that's Little Brother II. I ain't saying that because the last three years made me forget the prior twenty-some ass-kickings. "Little Brother" isn't about rivalry records; it's how much the program's identity is warped by Michigan Complex. While not quite to the level of STAEE yet, this is getting silly.
You sure?
Only if the problem is something like football. Then the wallets open up and flip upside down. If the problem is humanitarian, no, sorry, there just isn't enough to go around.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. . .
Ohio has a lot of stupid money sloshing around, apparently.
I love football, but in my head, I put it in its place as entertainment. There are tons of things these benefactors could spend their fuck-you money on to improve that shithole of a state, but this is what they're doing.
P.S. Random thought: imagine the boost to Ohio's economy if they put all this NIL money toward academic scholarships instead.
Title IX is a red herring, and a particularly odious one at that, because a lot of bad people are extremely eager to get rid of it. Not saying you are, I'm just saying, be skeptical of vocal opinions about Title IX when they say, "This could be a potential problem," because that's usually a dogwhistle for, "I want this to be a problem, for want of an excuse to repeal it."
Fact is, even before we get to Title IX, we're gonna have an extremely heated debate about players on the same team. The starting QB is naturally going to demand more money than the third-string linebacker, and the latter is going to naturally argue for equal payment for all. As far as precedent goes, no one expects all employees at any workplace to make the same money, and this status quo coasts along fine next to equal opportunity laws. Equal opportunity =/= equal pay. So, once they're considered employees, I see the starting QB winning this battle.
Which means pay is going to be unequal before female athletes factor in the conversation. And since women's athletics don't bring in nearly as much revenue, that they won't get paid as much will inevitably result in a slew of Title IX lawsuits that I predict with confidence won't get very far, excepting special cases like Caitlin Clark (who single-handedly raised basketball ratings during her time in college).
Sorry, I think I'm being misunderstood a bit here. The conversation upthread is focused on program-player negotiations, but I'm not on that. I was replying to bluebyyou on this:
I'm specifically focused on Brian's rant (starting about 29:50) about portal abuse, and him saying the NCAA should use loss of eligibility to restrict that. I'm opposed to using the NCAA for anything, but also against restricting horizontal movement in general. The courts ruled against it for a reason. (But I'm also saying Brian should be able to point a finger at someone like Derrick Harmon and laugh.)
I think that's a moot question, at least as far as Michigan goes. In every case I've seen, a walk-on that gets significant playing time gets awarded a scholarship, and anyone who doesn't, doesn't go to the NFL.
You're basically "what if"-ing every scenario Brian is not talking about.
There's the rub though: wrt employment agreements, treating them as such would be nice, because something like signing contracts would go a long way toward providing stability. But I consider that a different approach than going, "NCAA, fix this," because the very reason programs can't offer contracts is the NCAA's insistence that players aren't employees. Putting the fox in charge of henhouse security doesn't go well.
I also don't think it's a controversial take to say that Derrick Harmon isn't made of the same stuff as Michael Barrett.
I don't know if regulating behavior of this sort ever works for the better. We're not talking about crimes here; we're talking about simple self-interest. Brian doesn't like the optics, but he's really just bitching about the world we all live in now.
That said, while I wouldn't try to throw regs at a portal frequent flyer, I think it's long past time we drop the "happy trails" bullshit and call a spade a spade: if you're transferring multiple times for more PT, you're a coward. Seriously. You're in competitive sports and the first thing you do when the coach starts someone else is to run away from competition?
Let's not have the NCAA -- a embarrassingly incompetent institution -- try to implement a fix here. But can we at least throw tomatoes at fragile snowflakes who transfer more times than they have years of eligibility? I ain't rooting for a player whose first reaction to adversity is to leave town. After all, a guy who soils his pants next to a teammate probably lacks the requisite mental toughness to face a powerhouse opponent.
They’re also dumb. Like, really dumb. Dangerously dumb. I’m seeing Harvard grads everywhere turning everything they touch to shit, and that’s because you don’t need to study if legacy is your qualification. The ones who get in the hard way are sharp as razors but they’re a vanishingly small minority that serve to legitimize the American Habsburgs.
It’s to the point I consider Harvard a degree mill now, except no one’s caught up to reality. That's terrifying, and visibly damaging the country.
Image embedding is busted. Known issue, probably low priority.
Yeah, yikes. That’s a tough major without the time commitment from football.
Continuing the tradition (?) of brainy nerdy WRs named CJ.