WTKA Roundtable 4/11/2024: Unsafe at Any Speed
Things Discussed:
- Frozen Four: Battle of the Blue Bloods. Usually you're counting on single-elimination hockey to off one of the impossibly good teams but NOT THIS YEAR. BC is fully of snipers—their top four forwards are shooting 18% to 21%.
- Michigan's chances rely on controlling the puck, scoring on their cycling, and Barzo stepping up to cancel out the corners.
- Past BC it's the #1 overall pick or a Denver team full of draft picks.
- College hockey right now: draft picks will coalesce at a few bluebloods like BC, BU, Denver, Minnesota, and Michigan, but the mid-majors are filled up with overagers trying to stay in the game. Also the NHL is enamored with college hockey players, and the US development program has succeeded in keeping talent home that five years ago and beyond we were losing to Canadian Juniors. So there's as much talent and skill in college hockey now as there's been in a very long time.
- Naurauto: He's on track for the perfect roster construction, which is two lines of highly skilled early NHL picks and Quinnipiac's top line, bunch of guys who are just on the cusp of NHL ability and are thus behooved to play out their eligibility in college.
- Break: What's going on at tight end? Beetham in the portal—is that about money? Michigan doesn't seem to have an inline guy this year.
- After Break: Women's basketball gone national. You can tell it's come on because sports fans are filling the hate boxes instead of being patronizing.
- Michigan othersports: wrestling is #2 in the Big Ten (better than Iowa) and is full of transfers! We love softball, women's gymnastics has a following, debate won a national championship.
- Is there enough NIL to go around at Michigan? Probably not, because we want to compete in every sport and donors are getting fatigued. The system doesn't work for anyone except the administrators who are getting the fans to pay out the nose for everything and want to shunt NIL on them too.
[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]
You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
Segment 2 is here. You can watch the video here:
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There will be no bad goals, because BC doesn't score bad goals.
April 11th, 2024 at 10:54 AM ^
Why couldn't we hold on to Hibner? He could have started as the inline guy this year.
I agree with Brian, this NIL bubble is gonna burst in a few years.
April 11th, 2024 at 11:45 AM ^
Am I the only person to think NIL was unsustainable to begin with?
Brian finally got the model right. Sure, it was a way to finally pay the players "over the table", but it was a way to pay the players in a way that didn't threaten the billions going into the NCAA's insatiable maw. So, yeah, we're still paying for (increasingly expensive) tickets and subscriptions and parking and merch and $20 watery beers and then everyone's supposed to fork over NIL money on top of all that? And many of these young men are demanding more than I make in a year.
So NIL was always going to mostly come from bored rich people with nothing better to do with their money than throw it at athletes for literally no reason but fandom, but there are only so many of those.
Folks here keep pounding the table to "fix Michigan's NIL" but Michigan's fundamental problem is that -- from the donors' perspective -- NIL is a terribly stupid way to spend money, and Michigan alumni are generally on the smarter side with their finances. Like, even if I had millions to spend, the NIL pitch is basically, "We're a billion-dollar franchise but we need you to give us your millions so one high-schooler will wear a blue shirt instead of a purple shirt." My reaction is, what the fuck.
April 11th, 2024 at 12:10 PM ^
My assumption is that NIL is basically zero sum with booster payments to the athletic department. The big schools all have development officers devoted to squeezing money from boosters, and they can redirect that money to NIL if they want to, but they probably can't get those people to double their payments.
IMHO, if the schools pay players directly, they will still tap boosters to fund it to the extent they can, but the big differences will be that as far as I can tell, (1) payments to the athletic department are more likely to be tax deductible, and (2) Title IX is likely to require schools to have the same payrolls for mens' and womens' sports.
April 11th, 2024 at 12:19 PM ^
I'm inclined to agree, but I think the "it's legal now!" cry a few years ago created the expectation that every program has an untapped pile of boosters-that-weren't-until-now, because they follow the rules, or something, which is a laughably delusional idea based on everything I've witnessed about high-revenue sports.
Anyone inclined to funnel personal funds into a damn collegiate sports program had been doing so all along. So yeah, it's the same people with the same money, but everyone thought NIL was going to magically create another huge pile of money out of thin air, and that it's not is causing serious problems.
April 11th, 2024 at 12:55 PM ^
Even worse from an investment standpoint is the fact that the High-schooler can at any time change their mind and go purple or some other colour and collect another cheque. How anyone thinks that makes sense is beyond me...
And many of these young men are demanding more than I make in a year.
Or several years.
I'm being nice. Bryce Underwood is apparently getting offered well more than I've made in my entire life.
He may be a hard worker, but considering his age vs. the sleep debt I built up just from my years as an engineer, I don't think he's outworked my entire adult career.
I'm OK with athletes making money, but there's something audacious about asking fans to directly foot this bill on top of everything else.
I think it's an important distinction between pro athletes paid by a business, which in turn is patronized by the fans (and the degree of patronization depends on the team's success), compared to pro athletes who are paid effectively via straight donation from the fans. The presence of the pro team as a middleman business is actually valuable, because they have to make operating profits, which in turn provides a degree of confidence that the players' and coaches' salaries are in-line with the value they bring to their team.
April 11th, 2024 at 11:46 AM ^
Hill-Green is visiting? I don't like this. He left program, and then left Charlotte and Biff. Now transferring again? Those who stay.... do not want.
April 11th, 2024 at 12:03 PM ^
He left because he was limited by an injury, it is my understanding that he no longer has that limitation.
April 11th, 2024 at 12:16 PM ^
Just view it as a stint in the minors where he could still see the field and stay ready at Charlotte.
I’m still concerned about the curse that will linger over Michigan hockey until the MGoBlog guys figure out how to pronounce Quinnipiac correctly. Hopefully I will be proven wrong tonight and Saturday.
One other thought, I have to quibble with Brian's take on women's basketball.
I remember seeing some of those old UConn games and yeah they were boring, but the lack of hate wasn't the problem. The problem is that UConn games were a team of well-coached athletes destroying disorganized piles of stiff, unconditioned, clumsy intramural casuals. And that would be like the NCAA quarterfinals.
These days. . . OK, the back half of bubble rosters still look rather stiff, but I mean even an 8-9 match will have some real ballin'. There are still more programs than talent to go around, but it's gotten legitimately watchable -- and as a result, people are watching.
It's not like it suddenly got good because people now care. It's that it finally got good enough to give a damn about.
TL,DR: Yes, there was a large talent imbalance, but it's smoothed out somewhat, and even before that imbalance the women could play.
I disagree with this, to a degree.
For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes. They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.
With the advent of Title IX and greater overall acceptance (and money!) for women's sports, there was an influx of talent, distributed unevenly. Well-coached teams like Tennessee could now get dominant players who could explode for buckets whenever they wanted, and the rich got richer.
Then the tide started lifting more boats, and teams other than UConn and Tennessee started getting more talent. The last tournament's TV ratings were largely driven by Clarke, and they'll fall back some, but some of the fans who tuned in to watch Clarke will stay to watch Watkins and the next generation.
For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes. They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.
What era are you talking about? Because I heard this a lot maybe ten years ago, and it was applicable then, but UConn's dominance goes back a good twenty years, and women's b-ball in the early aughts was horrid. Like, to hell with "team basketball" -- some scholarship players, on tournament teams, playing meaningful minutes, looked like they barely exercised.
Forget "above the rim" freaks; the game at one point was so atrocious that it questioned the notion of women being athletes. Teams that looked barely coached at all were making the tournament as if the prevailing attitude of WBB coaches was, "I'm here to undermine Title IX." UConn was one of a few programs that affirmed their players were indeed serious athletes.
But the obvious result of that disparity in approach was unwatchable. Today's game is real, and I daresay UConn's blowout wins played a role in that. They weren't doing anything special; they were largely showing what women could do if you took their game seriously, because back then that wasn't the norm. They made it the norm.
The notion that women or their coaches/schools 'weren't taking the game seriously. . .' dubious AF. Your post is chauvinism hopped up in a spandex of sophistry.
For the naive, Pollyanna sorts like myself, NIL was the answer to 3 problems.
- Allow athletes to benefit from fans buying items featuring the athletes’ NIL. You can call this the Fab 5/Denard Robinson issue.
- Allow athletes to benefit from their images being used in video games. This is the Ed O’Bannon issue.
- Allow athletes to use fancy cars and get free tattoos provided they contribute the bare minimum to advertising for the car dealership/tattoo parlor. This is the OSU issue.
I still think this version of NIL works, but it requires a regulatory body that gives a 💩.
I have one slight pushback to Seth’s, “they’ve earned it” comments regarding NIL. (I don’t know if he made that comment here, but he’s voiced it before.) Players are worth what someone is willing to pay them. In that sense, they’ve earned the “NIL” (booster $, formerly under the table inducements). A monopoly - the NCAA- stands in the way of that. But the incoming freshmen haven’t earned any of the three NIL sources I mentioned. No one buys incoming freshman X’s uniform before they sign. How many Semaj Morgan jerseys were sold last season compared to JJ jerseys? If Semaj has a huge year, his jersey will sell and he will have earned a portion of the sales. I dare say no one would buy a video game to play with a bunch of almost completely unknown freshmen. Would you buy a car from Columbus Honda because some 5* safety leans against an Accord and smiles? So go to the University, earn your starting position and then start making actual NIL money. But no one wants to accept that because the cat is out of the bag. (Or maybe the cat is in the bag with the $$$?)
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