WTKA Roundtable 5/18/2023: That Man is Orange
Things Discussed:
- Seth on early to talk about Michigan's transfer process.
- Caleb Love? Need to get on this because it's not tenable for the program.
- Are the other transfers at risk? TJ is a grad transfer, Nimari it's probably a thing where he's willing to give up credits to get here.
- RayJ Dennis: Was on campus. TAKE! Better than Love! Can we beat Illinois for him? Would you play for Brad Underwood?
- Phat-Phat: Think he's AJ Hoggard.
- Lacrosse: Big upset over Big Red, can they beat Duke? Yeah?
- Tennis: Women lost close, making a run next year. Men still in it.
- ACC Rumbles/Expansion: Washington and Oregon have been vetted, but vetting turned up they don't bring more than the mean. FSU if they can get into the AAU, Clemson, Notre Dame, and then maybe UNC, Virginia, and Duke are options.
- Why all this? Because teams are jockeying for an inevitable future where players are under contract and getting a piece of the TV money.
[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]
You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
Seth's segment on credit transfers is here. Segment two is here. You can watch the video here:
MGoBlog Roundtable https://t.co/N1fK5TwNxb
— The Michigan Insider (@michiganinsider) May 18, 2023
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I talked to my friend who went to Illinois and he had to burn his degree after they let in Shannon. They all lost their jobs too.
That is funny, UW and Oregon are worth less than the mean ACC team!!!
No, they're worth less than the mean B10 team.
Yeah, UW and Oregon (from a media market and national profile/financial perspective) just aren't that valuable. What I've read around them is the Big 10 would likely go after them at some point just for logistical purposes; if you're sending PSU or Rutgers to California for some games you can "justify" the cost a bit more if you throw in a stop in Eugene or Seattle for conference play. That presupposes the conference will look to expand in the coming years but logistically it makes as much sense as trying to make inroads in Florida, for example.
Bringing in Washington and Oregon would capture a large chunk of Pacific Northwest eyeballs; the combined population of the Seattle and Portland metro areas is over 6 million.
What is the population in Iowa City? Lincoln? Happy Valley? West Lafayette? Bloomington?
The state of Oregon just isn't that populous, has two Power 5 universities, and I'm not sure the state cares that much. If Nike weren't located in the state, it wouldn't even be in the conversation.
Seattle is a pro sports town with a lot of transplants (people from out of the area) who aren't UW fans in the first place.
You really believe Penn State has a less impactful fan base than the University of Oregon?
But Nike IS located in Oregon and Phil Knight does do everything he can to give Oregon football any sort of national relevance. What does PSU truly offer except for being really good a few decades ago?
PSU is one of the largest brands in CFB in terms of TV viewership & merchandise sales. By any objective financial metric Penn State is a top 20 brand.
Can't disagree with this. The west coast market is really California.
There are a million different ways to rate program value, but SI, Medium, and 247 all say PSU is more valuable as a football program and overall than Oregon and Washington (and FSU, for that matter).
Medium:
Ranking the most valuable college football programs
Here are the new and updated rankings. Remember, these are focused on football only.
- Ohio State
- Michigan
- Alabama
- Notre Dame
- LSU
- Georgia
- Penn State
- Texas
- Auburn
- Oklahoma
- Florida
- Clemson
- Texas A&M
- Tennessee
- Wisconsin
- Nebraska
- Florida State
- Michigan State
- Iowa
- Southern Cal
- South Carolina
- Arkansas
- Mississippi
- Miami
- Washington
- Oregon
SI:
- ohio state
- Michigan
- notre dame
- Texas
- Georgia
- Florida
- Wisconsin
... 11. Penn State
... 15. Washington
... 19. Florida State
... 22. Oregon
247:
3. Michigan
... 5. ohio state
... 8. notre dame
... 13. Penn State
... 15-tie. Oregon and Florida State
... 19. Washington
...
MSU ahead of So Cal?
I would have lost that bet big. Might have to question the accuracy of the data.
PSU has a lot of East Coast fans from big cities just because they have a tradition being one of the top programs in a region that doesn’t produce many top programs.
I generally remove legacy teams in the conference when considering media markets; if you were building the Big 10 now you wouldn't really care about a lot of the western division. And Nebraska is a weird legacy brand that I still think UM made a mistake bringing on.
I get a sense that people don't view those two media markets as all that important, or at least not enough to justify the share of TV/media contract money that their inclusion would entail. Yes they are a combined 6M but, for example, Boston's media market is around 5M and there's a P5 program there that would fit better geographically and culturally but you don't see people really pushing for it. And in terms of talent access there isn't a ton of high-level talent in either region, at least compared to your random southeast or mid-atlantic school.
Personally I would love to add UW and UO to the B10 but in terms of media rights $$$ and tv/streaming/fan interest they just don't move the needle much. I think college sports, including football, are sort of niche interests in the Pacific NW.
While there are certainly some diehard Husky and Duck fans it's a proportionally smaller number than we're used to in the B10. And when those teams are mediocre or worse the number goes down further. Comparatively speaking several ACC schools are probably a better bet to move the needle and offer a more attractive B10 footprint for recruiting.
Don, you listed 5 current B10 cities - 3 of them were in the B10 before the invention of television. Does your including them suggest you think they should not just add Oregon & Washington but rather have them replace those smaller markets?
Of the other 2, they were football powerhouses long before joining the B10 and probably seemed like decent bets to remain so, while also expanding the then footprint of the conference geographically. That was deemed to provide a value at that time I suppose.
Obviously in the case of Nebraska that was a bad bet, and I wonder if their removal from AAU membership after joining the B10 gives the conference legal justification to uninvite them?
Had no idea former NU AD Jim Phillips runs the ACC now. Holy cow that guy went up.
Wrt the ACC shenanigans I disagree that it's all posturing. The grant of rights deal may or may not actually be breakable but Clemson, FSU and Miami have real market value. At some point their understandable panic over falling behind SEC and B10 schools will cause them to break out and risk the consequences.
Aside from FSU's AAU status, would the academic restrictions being tossed around the state of Florida by the current governor and legislature*, affect the academic/research priorities of the B1G and the assorted Chancellors and Presidents? I'm not saying that that would mean a lot in the long run, but it could put a damper on the likelihood of expanding in the immediate future.
* I'm offering an observation, not a comment on the politics in FL. For that, you will need to subscribe to my newsletter. /s
As a guy who has taught for FSU, now retired and teaching only occasionally--whose wife is a tenured professor here in Tallahassee--I can offer tentative answers. FSU has moved from somewhere around 65 on the US News public uni list to 19 over the last 20 years. That places FSU ahead of all but five B1G unis, for those who are counting, absolutely prime for entry into a new conference, in a town that holds the National Mag Lab and is objectively beautiful.
Much of that success owes to the very hard work of faculty, and the determination of Jeb Bush to raise the profile of FL unis by designating UF and FSU as the state flagships, and upping their budgets by tens of millions of dollars. (UF, from ca. 15 when I began work on my doctorate there, has moved to number 4-5.)
It is FSU's mission to enter the AAU, and its academic bona fides are there. But it lags UF in not being the land grant uni or having a strong traditional foothold in scientific research. It is also the fervent desire of many faculty to enter the B1G in order to help combat DeSantis and the far-right legislature.
Yes, DeSantis's actions threaten the status of both schools. When you bring in the far-right president of a little midwestern Christian college to run an enormous institution like UF you unsurprisingly end up with a poorly run school, a naif who has never seen the kinds of challenges his job presents.
The threat these people pose is no longer merely theatrical or performative. They are destroying institutions. At New College, a university a little like the UM's RC (of which I am a grad), they're ending programs and replacing long-time liberal faculty and admin with zealots. . . The changes have begun to run quite deep, and there is a serious chill, with some students feeling empowered to terrorize faculty. A colleague who showed a documentary about slave shipping recently had two white male students come up to her afterward and say they were going to report her for trying to indoctrinate them; they had grins on their faces. The thing is that some people's academic pursuits themselves are unacceptable to people now crawling around in pursuit of new prizes for their auto da fe.
The fascinating thing is that a highly flawed guy running on a Bernie-style platform lost to DeSantis two elections ago by less than a percentage point; until last year, FL had more registered Ds than Rs. You'd never know it from national headlines, but there is a lot of progressive ferment at ground level; a progressive D just won in J'ville, often called the nation's most conservative city, where Rs had held the mayoralty for 30 years. The right biotches have the place gerrymandered, however, such that we are in deep, deep water; it's deeply undemocratic. Which is too bad, bc it's f*cking beautiful here in Tally and the Panhandle, the most biodiverse place in N. America (I am an ecologist). But I have a brown daughter, and despite our longtime commitment to the fight, my wife and I are considering bailing when she retires.
That's great that FSU has gotten better and better, but like you pointed out, a certain governor and state legislature in Florida are doing everything they can to torpedo the validity and worth of the public universities' diplomas regardless of what the population really wants.
I feel a lot of sympathy reading this, but I have to point out that gerrymandering has no impact on the gubernatorial race where the little fascist won re-election by a huge margin.
Yes. I don't think that means that the population drank kool-aid and changed their political stripes overnight, but there's a lot to unpack there. In a different forum. All best.
No doubt, but control of the state legislature is big when it comes to determining national congressional districts, state congressional districts as well as approving or killing policies of the governor.
We've lived in Colorado for 20+ years and when we moved here it was more of a red state. Over the years it turned purple to blue'ish but that was due to large concentration of votes in the urban areas. State wide elections started going blue long before the state legislature went blue.
I love that you said newsletter rather than podcast!
I am all for UNC slander but we maybe need to move on from the fake classes talking point a bit. It went on for a long time but was also (seemingly) addressed and reformed almost a decade ago. I'm comfortable saying that it's likely not an issue any more at UNC, or no more so than at any other college. And while perhaps not to UNC's scale but UM had accusations of "favored" professors and classes for athletes as well. It feels a bit like when opposing fans bring up the Ed Martin scandal now as if it proves UM is always paying their players under the table and cheating.
I do wonder what happens with Burnett. He said at some point that he thought he'd graduate but that feels pretty squishy based on what we've seen with these guys. Maybe he doesn't care and will eat the credit loss, though it does bring up what Seth mentioned regarding you have to have a certain number of credits to remain eligible based on your class year. So I wouldn't be shocked if that became an issue as well.
As it relates to expansion with the ACC schools, I don't quite get FSU adding much. Yes they're historically pretty good at football, but otherwise I'm not sure they up your overall athletic profile and are they a big national market? I mean, to old folks like me who remember the 80s and 90s they are but are FSU fans dispersed across the country in a meaningful way? I guess for recruiting it helps but everyone already recruits Florida and having one school there doesn't seem like it'll dramatically shift the balance. ND feels like a safer bet for any number of reasons.
In and for itself FSU seems like a somewhat limited (hypothetical) addition to the B10. I think the combination of FSU and Miami, sort of like USC plus UCLA, makes more sense.
Those two schools are natural geographic rivals with some history (in football) and would establish a B10 beachhead in Florida, one of the most populous states in the US with lots of sports viewing eyeballs. Plus of course Florida is home to many alumni/fans of current B10 universities.
Yeah, if they bring in Florida that helps, though I also looked up how far Miami was from Tallashassee and realized it's nearly 500 miles by car; that's only about 90 miles less than State College to Chicago, for example, or 100 miles shorter than Ann Arbor to Rutgers. So it's not geographically all that close (as compared to USC and UCLA, who are a short bus apart) and while I'm sure there's some animosity Miami really isn't that big of a school and has a large number of OOS students.
Personally, I expect there to be something like 2 conferences and then everyone else in 10-ish years so expansion for the sake of it feels like it'll be the name of the game.
USC and UCLA, who are a short bus apart
With some workshopping, this sounds like the makings of a good comedy bit.
Their women's soccer team has been the best in the country for a decade; they draw huge crowds in Tallahassee. With UCLA, they would increase the profile of that sport. Women's softball has won several recent NCs, and volleyball would be right there with Minnesota. Men's baseball has faltered the last two years, but is a perennial top-five team. They might be expected to crush B1G competition--or, hopefully, raise the level of play/up the ante. Miami hoops was, of course, in the Final Four. Entry to B1G football would be a lifeline for a once-proud program.
None of this stuff is static, but both Cali and FL schools would hold their own across most sports. And--I've said this before--make the SEC look like a regional phenomenon. I have zero doubt that, at least at first, there would be/will be a lot of anticipation on fans' part.
I'm not sure if it's disingenuous or genuinely disconnected from reality that you just actually buffed up fsu's bona fides for B10 inclusion by listing all their successes in women's and non-revenue sports maddog?!
All any of this is about is money my man! All we're discussing here is how the B10 can grab as much as they need to satisfy themselves without ruining the conference most of us have followed from birth!
Maybe that includes expanding to Florida? But if it does it won't be to add a women's volleyball powerhouse!
seth:
"illinois fans are not saying, 'oh my god, my degree is destroyed, because we got terrance shannon last year.'"
i don't think anyone was or is legitimately suggesting this here as regards caleb love, either.
It seems to me that Seth made the salient points about Michigan's (undergrad) transfer issues.
** It's not admissions, it's the individual schools (LSA, etc) that stop up the works.
** Said school does not care one whit about changing its policies / timeline for an individual student-athlete, despite recruiting factors, etc.
** The important factor in many cases is a transfer holding onto enough credits to remain eligible. Eligibility seems to be a key. Freshman transfers are easier, grad transfers are simple, guys in the middle, not so much.
** One of the big issues, then, seems to be that the school / department won't give an indication ahead of time about whether or not a recruit will have enough credits accepted to remain eligible to play per NCAA / Title whatever rules. Again, this does not take into consideration recruiting timelines / deadlines / recruit patience, etc. Apparently, most other schools will give advance indications that are helpful to tell a coach whether or not to recruit a player.
TL;DR -- So what needs to change? Michigan's departmental policies, of course -- Seth related his experience with credits from the Sorbonne (?!?). But that won't happen.
At the very least, then, getting departments to give some advance indications that would assist coaches in recruiting efforts would be a huge help. Or we go the football route, taking only first/second year transfers, grad transfers, and apparently every good player from Stanford.
"Said school does not care one whit about changing its policies / timeline for an individual student-athlete, despite recruiting factors, etc."
...and why would they?
What incremental benefit accrues to the College of Engineering for letting in a substandard football player? They don't get any more tuition money. They already reject 75% of the people who want to get in. Why would some academic, who doesn't care at all about football... want to change their policies?
Because we said so?
There is a tool where a student can search to see what their prior courses are equivalent to at Michigan: https://transfercredit.ugadmiss.umich.edu/.
If this database is like the ones I'm familiar with, it's populated by course equivalencies determined by articulation agreements (normally other in state or nearby schools) or courses that have been previously evaluated because other students have transferred them in the relatively recent past. If the course at the other institution isn't there, then it someone has to research it to see what the course should count as. It's time consuming.
Seth has repeatedly used his own case from 30 years ago of transferring credit from a foreign institution as if it is a typical experience for a student in 2023, and I doubt that is really the the case. Also, as a PSA in case any reader is thinking of doing a study abroad, situations like Seth's transfer issue can normally be avoided by having your schedule evaluated and approved by your advisor before you go.
Two of the schools Love is looking at are Indiana and Illinois. Wouldn't it be great to play him next year like we did Shannon?!?
I don't understand why college football just doesn't adopt the same revenue sharing model the NFL has. Create 12 regional conferences and a 12 team playoff for the champs. How hard is that?
There is a decent amount of irony in the blog that ripped OSU for giving football players online classes calling for major changes on the academic side of the university because Howard’s latest transfer attempt didn’t get in. Maybe the useless Melvins that work for the university are out to destroy Howard just like when Lloyd Carr’s country club buddies destroyed poor Rich Rod.
Here’s some baseless speculation regarding Craig’s point on the UNC scandal, which did put their accreditation in jeopardy (they were put on probation for year; losing accreditation means losing federal funding which would kill the university so it almost never actually happens). That scandal didn’t just damage the reputation of UNC, but particularly tarnished the reputations of the schools/departments involved. For example, that scandal was big deal in African American studies, because that’s a field that is often explicitly or implicitly (unfairly in my view) seen as illegitimate, and UNC had a bunch of bullshit courses offered in that department.
If it is the departments that determine (or help determine) what credits transfer in, and Love was trying to transfer credits from one of the programs involved in the scandal, then that department is going to very, very, carefully review the request. And that might lead to a disconnect between UNC’s generally excellent academic reputation and the evaluation of the transfer request. Of course, no knows what the transfer file looked like, so who knows.
Also, Sam said they expected Love to come in as a grad transfer. I get that that decision is itself probably a function of Michigan’s stance on transfer credits. But if Michigan did expect Love to graduate, then I’m not sure if Seth’s timeline from the intro makes sense. The idea there was that Love won’t know if his credits will transfer, so they submit the transfer application and then the useless widgets take their time to make a decision and Love has to scramble to graduate once they reject 1/3 of his credits.
But if Love was expected to be a grad transfer, then they weren’t stuck waiting to see if the credits would transfer— they were waiting for him to graduate. Only after that didn’t happen would they be submitting stuff to see if 2/3rds or whatever credits would transfer.
What exactly was a fake class? Did it even have lectures? Someone explain. Because it was just on paper and no attendance or lessons of any sort then that's what likely did in Love.
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