If I'm a cellist, I can get paid by my university to play cello. I can play cello for third parties and get paid by them. I can transfer to another university and play cello for them immediately.
All the recent changes in college athletics have been to allow college athletes the same basic freedoms as every other student in every other specialty on a college campus.
There are two differences remaining between the cellist and the football player:
The cellist can get paid directly by the university.
The cellist can major in cello, while the football player cannot major in football, even though both are legitimate professional fields.
I know it feels wrong to have these players transferring around constantly, but this is much more in line with what it means to be an amateur college student than the previous model.
I'm with you on the TRUE tournament idea. Every college sport has a national tournament where every conference champion is guaranteed a spot. If FBS was structured like CBB and college hockey (with a similar fraction of participants making the tournament), we'd have either a 24- or 32-team tournament with all 10 conference champions guaranteed a spot.
It's incredibly unfortunate that the very structure that made CFB unique and quirky and interesting and lovable (the bowl postseason based on tradition and rivalries over money and even fairness) is exactly what created the opening for money to completely take over the sport in a way that hasn't happened anywhere else. Because the postseason was defined by numerous private organizations with fuzzy objectives, it was comparatively easy for money to push out tradition as the dominant motivation. If FBS football had had an NCAA-administered postseason like every other sport, it would have been much harder for the various conferences, schools, factions, and administrators to exert structural influence in the same way, because the basic idea of national fairness would have excluded such pressures.
No one argues Atlantic Hockey or the Big South shouldn't have an auto bid to their respective tournaments, so it's wild to me that giving auto bids to all FBS conferences is such a nonstarter. The old rhetoric of how "unique" and "special" FBS football is, with its "tradition" and "history" that used to justify the weird postseason is now useless. There is literally no argument for the FBS postseason to be the way that it is. The FBS postseason is the way it is purely because the factions with political power right now are exerting all the influence they can to bend the entire structure of the sport to their favor.
Numbers update: Brian's percentages project an expected 7.41 transfers in, for an expected roster size of 14.41. This is down 0.25 players from Monday.
Yep. If it's better to play all 25 year olds, then recruit that demographic. There's a reason the Michigans of the world recruit young, talented players, and it's because it usually take you farther than the over-agers.
But it's not like BC's roster construction should be news to anyone. I've seen this board have exactly the same conversations about football and basketball, too: The best way to field a team is a solid mix of a few young ultra-talented players, a few older mid-career guys, and a few grizzled "glue guy" veterans with enough talent to keep up but not so much they're of professional interest. All veterans gives you a high floor, and all young talent gives you a high ceiling, but the best way to maximize everyone is to mix it up.
This latest batch of numbers comes out to an estimated 7.66 portals in, for a roster size of 14.66, an increase of 0.4 players from last time Brian did one of these.
Realistically my numbers mean that Brian's speculative percentages are slightly on the high side, and there's an extra 126% in there somewhere, distributed among those players. But for total guesstimates, that's actually quite close.
I count 4 returners, 3 incoming freshmen, and an expected value of 7.26 portals in, according to Brian's speculative percentages, for a total expected roster size of 14.26 players.
I know at times MTU's roster has been up to half Canadian, and more recently we've had Swedes, Finns, and Australians as well. Programs like UM tend to be more American, but still fill out with at least a handful of Canadians and usually one or two from further abroad.
Tech hockey is THE sport in Houghton (where I am) as well, but is there enough money in a 20,000-person micropolitan area to fund any kind of competitive NIL? Probably not, especially when considering that Yoopers are some of the most crotchety, old-fashioned, get-off-my-lawn people in existence. Marquette is a bit more modern and cosmopolitan (by Yooper standards) but I still don't think it's enough.
I'd say we're heading for a P5-G5 style split, but I'm not sure there are enough P5-style programs in college hockey to actually make that happen.
For the record, playing a football game on an aircraft carrier in the middle of Lake Michigan would be incredibly cool and also the most American thing ever done. Can you imagine the blimp shots of that?
In football and basketball NIL has leveled the playing field in some ways (and not in others). Hockey, however, has only a handful of programs that could wield NIL in any meaningful way, so I suspect more NIL involvement in hockey would increase the disparity between the haves and the have nots, rather than decrease it. Michigan being one of the "haves" in hockey, I'd guess most people wouldn't mind that too much, but I do know that many here miss the days of the old CCHA and WCHA, pre-B1G, when you could have weird rivalries like Michigan-Ferris State, and NIL getting more involved in hockey is going to move the sport further from those days rather than closer.
Obviously, as a fan of a small school, I have my own opinions on this, but I don't think anything I said above is controversial in terms of facts and projections.
Assuming that there was only one B1G team in the final four each of those years, and assuming that all final four teams have an equal chance of winning it all, the probability of no B1G teams having done so is 1.3%
I have no doubt in Moore's ability to field the best 2nd Half Penn State offense the world has ever seen. But I don't think a full season of 2nd Half Penn State offense is going to do a whole lot to this schedule. This feels like a lot of 20-13 games, with a coin flip determining who wins.
Tbf, I'd rather have someone else's guys than no guys. You can't build a functional roster overnight, and there will still be growing pains until May's been recruiting for a few years.
I could see a guy like that wanting to prove he's not just there because the coach slept with his mom. If he really is that entitled, it won't go well no matter where he is. I could also Juwan advising him to stay, because it seems Juwan really does love and respect Michigan. That being said, if I were in his position I think I might go elsewhere for a fresh start.
The best way to mock incompetence is excellence. The juxtaposition between the two titles as is mocks the other one way better than sarcastic imitation. You made the right choice.
Blake Pietila is good, but not as good as he as last year, and our defense has been improving throughout the year but still very shaky. Honestly I'm just happy we pulled our act together enough to make the tourney, and I'll be very pleased if we can keep the final score respectable. Even 4-1 would be fine. Just not another 8-0 debacle like last year (even though I can definitely see that happening). Go huskies!
He may not have been passive behind the scenes, but if that's true, then he's terrible at PR, which is also a big part of the AD's job. Either he's doing a bad job, or he looks like he's doing a bad job, and either one is an indictment on his job performance.
I lived in a tent for 6 months hiking the PCT, and yep. I remember when finding a picnic table at a rustic campground felt like the height of luxury, so having a couch in a living room? Amazing.
I'm not a "Warde Manuel is bad at everything" guy, but this defense of doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Retaining Jim Harbaugh was a good decision, and well executed. Whether or not this was done out of laziness (as some claim) or genuine analysis, the public will never know. But it's indisputable that this turned out to be a great decision and a well-executed process, so kudos for that.
Brandon Naurato was hired as the only viable candidate at an extremely bad time in the year purely because Manuel had neither fired nor signed Pearson to a new contract for many months after receiving the results of an investigation that found fireable offenses. In this case, Manuel had two competing interests: ethics and winning/stability, and he accomplished neither. We can say with near certainty that the Pearson scandal was handled extremely poorly, and UM hockey ended up with what appears to be a very good coach in spite of Manuel, not because of him. I'd also say the jury's still out on Naurato, too, because he's only been HC for 2 years in a sport with a lot of recruiting momentum. At this point in Juwan Howard's tenure, we were extolling him as potentially better than Beilein.
Sherrone Moore was an incredibly obvious candidate. It would have been a shocking upset if the guy currently on staff who'd interim-coached 4 games that year wasn't hired as the HC in a year with no particularly impressive outside candidates available at the time. He also hasn't coached a single game as full-time HC yet (Harbaugh was still the HC during the week when he was suspended). While Moore seems like a good decision, let's not congratulate Manuel too much for hiring the obvious in-house candidate.
Dusty May, by all accounts, seems to be a great outside hire as the result of a well-executed plan. Manuel should absolutely be given credit for this.
So of the cases you cited, we have 2 well-executed plans with good results, 1 hire so obvious my wife could have made it, and 1 obvious hire that turned out well in spite of the terrible mismanagement that led to it. While it's not the track record of utter ineptitude some make it out to be, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Manuel as a top-tier AD, either.
Agreed. Nobody's perfect, and some of us have flaws (and lives) that are more visible than others. By all accounts, Juwan Howard has always tried to live the right way, even though his temper gets the better of him on occasion. I will always be a fan of Howard, even if he wasn't the right fit for this particular job at this particular time.
2500 is pretty small, even by college hockey home site standards. It's Lindenwood's home ice, apparently, and ranks 16 in smallest size among DI men's arenas, which is 15th percentile. Tech plays in a 4400-seat arena in a city of 7000 people. No idea what the NCAA is thinking. Maybe it's a trial run to see how a small rink would handle a regional in a future home sites scenario?
I think the point is that one of the NCAAs arguments for not having the regionals at home sites is because they want the cachet of playing in larger buildings. If they're fine putting a neutral regional in a 2500-seat arena, it completely invalidates that argument. So not only in the NCAA incompetent at creating an exciting regional environment, they're also incompetent at defending their stance against it.
Okay, and...? There are nonpartisan races in American elections. Being an elected position doesn't require party affiliation. University governance is a field that has very little to do with party politics, so it should be a nonpartisan election. This isn't that difficult to understand.
That's exactly what they're doing and why. Their agents are probably looking at the history of similar guys in the combine and figuring there's a higher probability of moving down than up if they do combine stuff. Bad days happen to everyone, and you wouldn't want a single bad day to detract from a career's worth of work.
Well sure, I just have no idea what it has to do with running a university. It's like reading "Republican John Smith, president of State University, met with the Democrat Athletic Director Jane Doe yesterday regarding the construction of a practice field for the lacrosse team". It's obviously irrelevant information that serves no purpose except to set people against each other.
The future of two Michigan State University trustees now rests with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Trustees voted 6-2 to censure and refer misconduct allegations against former Chair Rema Vassar and Trustee Dennis Denno under a Michigan law that allows the governor to remove elected officials. Vassar and Denno were the no votes.
I'm really not trying to be an ass, and I know the state of journalism these days is such that all of the relevant information is usually in the headline, but it does help to click through just to check, especially if you're wondering about something specific.
Is it just me, or is it jarring to read party affiliations before each of these board members' names? I mean, what in God's green earth does political party have to do with running a university? It's no wonder there's dysfunction if this is how this kind of position is filled.
Every other sport has this happen occasionally and they deal with it just fine. College football fans are acting like they have to completely reinvent the wheel here and every possible inefficiency with a large playoff model is a deal-breaker. There are pros and cons to every model. Every con brought up about a large playoff model for FBS football is one every other sport (and even every other level of college football) has considered and ultimately decided is worth it. I haven't yet heard a single argument against a large playoff model that's actually unique to FBS football and hasn't already been worked out in some other sport.
Having a bunch of scrub teams that get completely pantsed is a thing that happens in every other NCAA postseason tournament. Even March Madness historically features a first round of lopsided games involved the top 3 and bottom 3 seeds. That's what makes the upsets so much fun when they do happen (*cough* Middle Tennessee State *cough*). Yet in every other sport, the lopsided games are considered a worthy price to pay for the basic fairness of including every conference in the postseason.
One of my big issues with the move to 5+7 is it's acquiescing to the drive for money at the expense of fans and student athletes, rather than pushing back against it. If we had a 16-team playoff but every conference champion was guaranteed a spot (technically 10 at the moment but soon to be 9), it would give pause to the push for superconferences, because the larger your conference is, the harder it becomes to make it to the playoff. It would also force people to think clearly about whether the G5 is really part of this division or not.
Obviously no one's ever going to push back against the search for more money, because all of these organizations are just collectives of the schools themselves that are searching for more money. But it would be nice to see some kind of force pushing back so that compromises have to be made.
Trend lines are important. Brady Hoke had an 11-2 year and was fired after only 4 years on the job because the trend lines were down. Yes, Juwan's had success, but the success was early on and the trend lines are down. This isn't a blip, it's the next logical step in a progression that has continued steadily downward since Howard arrived.
Do Juwan's systems work? Yes, in some ways. He's clearly developing players because we've seen guys like Diabate and Bufkin get better throughout the year and then go pro before they're able to really do any damage in college ball. His in-game coaching is probably at least decent given the results we got early in his tenure, although the inability to close out close games suggests there are some issues there.
The big problem is that the further we get from Beilein, the worse the roster construction becomes. Furthermore, if players are checked out, that's on the head coach, whose job it is to recruit players who won't check out and to inspire and motivate them throughout the season.
Good coaches have players that consistently give effort, because one of the college coach's many jobs is to motivate. You don't see good coaches have an off year because the players just don't happen to care that year. Players play for their coaches.
As best as I can tell, Howard is pretty good at the tactical and developmental aspects of basketball. However, he seems to be pretty bad at roster construction, culture-building, and motivation. At this level, that's not good enough to be a good head coach.
I mostly liked Costa when he was on Big Drew and Jim but haven't heard him since then. At the time I thought they had much more reasonable takes and discussion than the national media, although they're still sports media personalities so having a few stupid discussions and hot takes is a requirement. I wouldn't be surprised if he became a hot take artist since then, though. He was trending in that direction when he was solo on "And Jim".
They'll "pass the eye test" so no one will be talking about their schedule, but we all know the "eye test" is just "flashy offense". Those that know football were hyping up Michigan all season, but those that don't were harping on the schedule because they wouldn't know good football if it won a national championship game right in front of their eyes.
This setup would probably result in less money being paid out per school because fewer people are going to watch Tier 2 if they're not playing Tier 1 schools. Michigan-USC is going to draw a lot of eyeballs. Michigan-Indiana is going to draw fewer eyeballs, but still quite a bit simply because Michigan. Indiana-Illinois isn't drawing anything. Having more Michigan-USC style games will not make up for the fact that no one's watching any Indiana games anymore because they never play anyone.
On the other hand, what if it does work and the Tier 1 games make up for the Tier 2 games? Then you have massive instability where Tier 1 schools are dragging the other half along despite never playing them. It's one thing to subsidize Indiana when you play them regularly and have tons of history together. It's quite another thing to subsidize them when you have nothing in common at all anymore. Tier 1 would break off into its own conference pretty quickly to have access to all that money. Right now the only thing holding the Tier 2 schools in the B1G is tradition and momentum. If you do this Tier 1 and Tier 2 thing, you do the hard work of eliminating tradition and momentum up front, so there's almost no barrier remaining to the Tier 1 schools breaking away completely.
I'm assuming here that the schools in Tier 1 and Tier 2 remain pretty stable, which is a good assumption. If, when playing similar schedules for a century, the conference naturally settles into tiers of competitiveness that stay mostly stable for decades at a time, then formally dividing these tiers is not suddenly going to create more parity. The only thing a relegation model does is pave the way for the conference to formally divide into the haves and have nots.
Relegation won't happen with college sports for the same reason everything else is happening: money. Everyone wants a stable source of high conference income, so the top brands are clambering for the B1G and SEC money streams. The networks want all the top brands consolidated in a few super-conferences because it produces big games that generate viewers.
Who's going to watch Tier 2 games? Nobody. So the networks aren't going to pay as much for them, resulting in decreased conference revenue. What if Tier 2 had decreased revenue? Why on earth would the schools agree to that? With that Tier 1, a down year for any of those teams could result in relegation. No one would be absolutely safe. That would result in a year of MUCH lower revenue, which would be terrible for budgeting. It would also be terrible for recruiting. Either you get a wide variety of teams cycling through the two tiers regularly, in which case no one's getting the reliable high revenue stream they signed up for, or you end up with the same 6 teams getting flipped back and forth every year, creating what amounts to a P5 and G5 conference with a weird relationship. In that case, the schools in Tier 2 never get the high revenue, and nobody in Tier 1 knows who's going to end up getting flipped back and forth a lot until it happens.
And this doesn't even begin to consider other sports. Are all the other sports getting jerked around by the performance of football? Or is football completely decoupled from the other sports and conference affiliation is now by sport? Both would require massive changes to how college athletics is run.
If the #1 concern for the schools is football fan service, then sure, they might consider relegation. But if we've learned anything over the last few years, it's that the schools don't give two shits about the fans in the pursuit of money and wins. Relegation, therefore, is completely off the table as an option until either people stop watching college football, or the schools decide that money and winning aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Recent Comments
If I'm a cellist, I can get paid by my university to play cello. I can play cello for third parties and get paid by them. I can transfer to another university and play cello for them immediately.
All the recent changes in college athletics have been to allow college athletes the same basic freedoms as every other student in every other specialty on a college campus.
There are two differences remaining between the cellist and the football player:
I know it feels wrong to have these players transferring around constantly, but this is much more in line with what it means to be an amateur college student than the previous model.
I'm with you on the TRUE tournament idea. Every college sport has a national tournament where every conference champion is guaranteed a spot. If FBS was structured like CBB and college hockey (with a similar fraction of participants making the tournament), we'd have either a 24- or 32-team tournament with all 10 conference champions guaranteed a spot.
It's incredibly unfortunate that the very structure that made CFB unique and quirky and interesting and lovable (the bowl postseason based on tradition and rivalries over money and even fairness) is exactly what created the opening for money to completely take over the sport in a way that hasn't happened anywhere else. Because the postseason was defined by numerous private organizations with fuzzy objectives, it was comparatively easy for money to push out tradition as the dominant motivation. If FBS football had had an NCAA-administered postseason like every other sport, it would have been much harder for the various conferences, schools, factions, and administrators to exert structural influence in the same way, because the basic idea of national fairness would have excluded such pressures.
No one argues Atlantic Hockey or the Big South shouldn't have an auto bid to their respective tournaments, so it's wild to me that giving auto bids to all FBS conferences is such a nonstarter. The old rhetoric of how "unique" and "special" FBS football is, with its "tradition" and "history" that used to justify the weird postseason is now useless. There is literally no argument for the FBS postseason to be the way that it is. The FBS postseason is the way it is purely because the factions with political power right now are exerting all the influence they can to bend the entire structure of the sport to their favor.
Returning scholarship players: 4
Committed incoming freshmen: 2
Committed incoming transfers: 4
Expected additional additions per Brian's percentages: 3.91
Expected total roster size: 13.91 players, down 0.5 players from Thursday.
EDIT: This was before Gayle's commitment, which changes the speculative percentages, so I won't attempt to update the numbers thusly.
Hey nice! I was in Science O for GRCHS back in the day (class of '11).
Or be everything Iowa wishes they could be
You mean former Michigan Tech all-american goalie and national champion Tony Esposito?
Holding steady at 7.41 expected additions, for a total roster size of 14.41.
Would like to get some of these out of the "expected" column and into the "actual" column.
Numbers update: Brian's percentages project an expected 7.41 transfers in, for an expected roster size of 14.41. This is down 0.25 players from Monday.
Yep. If it's better to play all 25 year olds, then recruit that demographic. There's a reason the Michigans of the world recruit young, talented players, and it's because it usually take you farther than the over-agers.
But it's not like BC's roster construction should be news to anyone. I've seen this board have exactly the same conversations about football and basketball, too: The best way to field a team is a solid mix of a few young ultra-talented players, a few older mid-career guys, and a few grizzled "glue guy" veterans with enough talent to keep up but not so much they're of professional interest. All veterans gives you a high floor, and all young talent gives you a high ceiling, but the best way to maximize everyone is to mix it up.
This latest batch of numbers comes out to an estimated 7.66 portals in, for a roster size of 14.66, an increase of 0.4 players from last time Brian did one of these.
Realistically my numbers mean that Brian's speculative percentages are slightly on the high side, and there's an extra 126% in there somewhere, distributed among those players. But for total guesstimates, that's actually quite close.
I count 4 returners, 3 incoming freshmen, and an expected value of 7.26 portals in, according to Brian's speculative percentages, for a total expected roster size of 14.26 players.
I know at times MTU's roster has been up to half Canadian, and more recently we've had Swedes, Finns, and Australians as well. Programs like UM tend to be more American, but still fill out with at least a handful of Canadians and usually one or two from further abroad.
Tech hockey is THE sport in Houghton (where I am) as well, but is there enough money in a 20,000-person micropolitan area to fund any kind of competitive NIL? Probably not, especially when considering that Yoopers are some of the most crotchety, old-fashioned, get-off-my-lawn people in existence. Marquette is a bit more modern and cosmopolitan (by Yooper standards) but I still don't think it's enough.
I'd say we're heading for a P5-G5 style split, but I'm not sure there are enough P5-style programs in college hockey to actually make that happen.
For the record, playing a football game on an aircraft carrier in the middle of Lake Michigan would be incredibly cool and also the most American thing ever done. Can you imagine the blimp shots of that?
If you do an expected value calculation by just adding up all the percentages, it comes out to 5.86 added players from that list.
In football and basketball NIL has leveled the playing field in some ways (and not in others). Hockey, however, has only a handful of programs that could wield NIL in any meaningful way, so I suspect more NIL involvement in hockey would increase the disparity between the haves and the have nots, rather than decrease it. Michigan being one of the "haves" in hockey, I'd guess most people wouldn't mind that too much, but I do know that many here miss the days of the old CCHA and WCHA, pre-B1G, when you could have weird rivalries like Michigan-Ferris State, and NIL getting more involved in hockey is going to move the sport further from those days rather than closer.
Obviously, as a fan of a small school, I have my own opinions on this, but I don't think anything I said above is controversial in terms of facts and projections.
Assuming that there was only one B1G team in the final four each of those years, and assuming that all final four teams have an equal chance of winning it all, the probability of no B1G teams having done so is 1.3%
I have no doubt in Moore's ability to field the best 2nd Half Penn State offense the world has ever seen. But I don't think a full season of 2nd Half Penn State offense is going to do a whole lot to this schedule. This feels like a lot of 20-13 games, with a coin flip determining who wins.
Tbf, I'd rather have someone else's guys than no guys. You can't build a functional roster overnight, and there will still be growing pains until May's been recruiting for a few years.
I could see a guy like that wanting to prove he's not just there because the coach slept with his mom. If he really is that entitled, it won't go well no matter where he is. I could also Juwan advising him to stay, because it seems Juwan really does love and respect Michigan. That being said, if I were in his position I think I might go elsewhere for a fresh start.
I hate semantic bleaching.
I think it's Lindenwood's home ice, which is a new program. I guess that's allowed because Lindenwood isn't eligible for the postseason until 2026-27.
I'm *hoping* that this is a trial run of a smaller arena to get some data on how home ice regionals might work.
The best way to mock incompetence is excellence. The juxtaposition between the two titles as is mocks the other one way better than sarcastic imitation. You made the right choice.
Lol, against this BC team? I'll be perfectly happy with a 4-1 loss, because I'm fully expecting another 8-0.
Blake Pietila is good, but not as good as he as last year, and our defense has been improving throughout the year but still very shaky. Honestly I'm just happy we pulled our act together enough to make the tourney, and I'll be very pleased if we can keep the final score respectable. Even 4-1 would be fine. Just not another 8-0 debacle like last year (even though I can definitely see that happening). Go huskies!
He may not have been passive behind the scenes, but if that's true, then he's terrible at PR, which is also a big part of the AD's job. Either he's doing a bad job, or he looks like he's doing a bad job, and either one is an indictment on his job performance.
I lived in a tent for 6 months hiking the PCT, and yep. I remember when finding a picnic table at a rustic campground felt like the height of luxury, so having a couch in a living room? Amazing.
I'm not a "Warde Manuel is bad at everything" guy, but this defense of doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Retaining Jim Harbaugh was a good decision, and well executed. Whether or not this was done out of laziness (as some claim) or genuine analysis, the public will never know. But it's indisputable that this turned out to be a great decision and a well-executed process, so kudos for that.
Brandon Naurato was hired as the only viable candidate at an extremely bad time in the year purely because Manuel had neither fired nor signed Pearson to a new contract for many months after receiving the results of an investigation that found fireable offenses. In this case, Manuel had two competing interests: ethics and winning/stability, and he accomplished neither. We can say with near certainty that the Pearson scandal was handled extremely poorly, and UM hockey ended up with what appears to be a very good coach in spite of Manuel, not because of him. I'd also say the jury's still out on Naurato, too, because he's only been HC for 2 years in a sport with a lot of recruiting momentum. At this point in Juwan Howard's tenure, we were extolling him as potentially better than Beilein.
Sherrone Moore was an incredibly obvious candidate. It would have been a shocking upset if the guy currently on staff who'd interim-coached 4 games that year wasn't hired as the HC in a year with no particularly impressive outside candidates available at the time. He also hasn't coached a single game as full-time HC yet (Harbaugh was still the HC during the week when he was suspended). While Moore seems like a good decision, let's not congratulate Manuel too much for hiring the obvious in-house candidate.
Dusty May, by all accounts, seems to be a great outside hire as the result of a well-executed plan. Manuel should absolutely be given credit for this.
So of the cases you cited, we have 2 well-executed plans with good results, 1 hire so obvious my wife could have made it, and 1 obvious hire that turned out well in spite of the terrible mismanagement that led to it. While it's not the track record of utter ineptitude some make it out to be, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Manuel as a top-tier AD, either.
Agreed. Nobody's perfect, and some of us have flaws (and lives) that are more visible than others. By all accounts, Juwan Howard has always tried to live the right way, even though his temper gets the better of him on occasion. I will always be a fan of Howard, even if he wasn't the right fit for this particular job at this particular time.
2500 is pretty small, even by college hockey home site standards. It's Lindenwood's home ice, apparently, and ranks 16 in smallest size among DI men's arenas, which is 15th percentile. Tech plays in a 4400-seat arena in a city of 7000 people. No idea what the NCAA is thinking. Maybe it's a trial run to see how a small rink would handle a regional in a future home sites scenario?
In that case you'd better hope for no CCHA refs, too.
I think the point is that one of the NCAAs arguments for not having the regionals at home sites is because they want the cachet of playing in larger buildings. If they're fine putting a neutral regional in a 2500-seat arena, it completely invalidates that argument. So not only in the NCAA incompetent at creating an exciting regional environment, they're also incompetent at defending their stance against it.
Can confirm, this documentary is amazing. The Barkley Marathons is such a fascinating event.
Ah, that would make more sense.
Okay, and...? There are nonpartisan races in American elections. Being an elected position doesn't require party affiliation. University governance is a field that has very little to do with party politics, so it should be a nonpartisan election. This isn't that difficult to understand.
That's exactly what they're doing and why. Their agents are probably looking at the history of similar guys in the combine and figuring there's a higher probability of moving down than up if they do combine stuff. Bad days happen to everyone, and you wouldn't want a single bad day to detract from a career's worth of work.
I'm intrigued by how information can be both confidential and inaccurate.
Well sure, I just have no idea what it has to do with running a university. It's like reading "Republican John Smith, president of State University, met with the Democrat Athletic Director Jane Doe yesterday regarding the construction of a practice field for the lacrosse team". It's obviously irrelevant information that serves no purpose except to set people against each other.
It's literally the 3rd sentence of the article.
I'm really not trying to be an ass, and I know the state of journalism these days is such that all of the relevant information is usually in the headline, but it does help to click through just to check, especially if you're wondering about something specific.
Is it just me, or is it jarring to read party affiliations before each of these board members' names? I mean, what in God's green earth does political party have to do with running a university? It's no wonder there's dysfunction if this is how this kind of position is filled.
Have we finally found the meaning of "Overtaking Ass"?
Every other sport has this happen occasionally and they deal with it just fine. College football fans are acting like they have to completely reinvent the wheel here and every possible inefficiency with a large playoff model is a deal-breaker. There are pros and cons to every model. Every con brought up about a large playoff model for FBS football is one every other sport (and even every other level of college football) has considered and ultimately decided is worth it. I haven't yet heard a single argument against a large playoff model that's actually unique to FBS football and hasn't already been worked out in some other sport.
Having a bunch of scrub teams that get completely pantsed is a thing that happens in every other NCAA postseason tournament. Even March Madness historically features a first round of lopsided games involved the top 3 and bottom 3 seeds. That's what makes the upsets so much fun when they do happen (*cough* Middle Tennessee State *cough*). Yet in every other sport, the lopsided games are considered a worthy price to pay for the basic fairness of including every conference in the postseason.
One of my big issues with the move to 5+7 is it's acquiescing to the drive for money at the expense of fans and student athletes, rather than pushing back against it. If we had a 16-team playoff but every conference champion was guaranteed a spot (technically 10 at the moment but soon to be 9), it would give pause to the push for superconferences, because the larger your conference is, the harder it becomes to make it to the playoff. It would also force people to think clearly about whether the G5 is really part of this division or not.
Obviously no one's ever going to push back against the search for more money, because all of these organizations are just collectives of the schools themselves that are searching for more money. But it would be nice to see some kind of force pushing back so that compromises have to be made.
Trend lines are important. Brady Hoke had an 11-2 year and was fired after only 4 years on the job because the trend lines were down. Yes, Juwan's had success, but the success was early on and the trend lines are down. This isn't a blip, it's the next logical step in a progression that has continued steadily downward since Howard arrived.
Do Juwan's systems work? Yes, in some ways. He's clearly developing players because we've seen guys like Diabate and Bufkin get better throughout the year and then go pro before they're able to really do any damage in college ball. His in-game coaching is probably at least decent given the results we got early in his tenure, although the inability to close out close games suggests there are some issues there.
The big problem is that the further we get from Beilein, the worse the roster construction becomes. Furthermore, if players are checked out, that's on the head coach, whose job it is to recruit players who won't check out and to inspire and motivate them throughout the season.
Good coaches have players that consistently give effort, because one of the college coach's many jobs is to motivate. You don't see good coaches have an off year because the players just don't happen to care that year. Players play for their coaches.
As best as I can tell, Howard is pretty good at the tactical and developmental aspects of basketball. However, he seems to be pretty bad at roster construction, culture-building, and motivation. At this level, that's not good enough to be a good head coach.
I mostly liked Costa when he was on Big Drew and Jim but haven't heard him since then. At the time I thought they had much more reasonable takes and discussion than the national media, although they're still sports media personalities so having a few stupid discussions and hot takes is a requirement. I wouldn't be surprised if he became a hot take artist since then, though. He was trending in that direction when he was solo on "And Jim".
They'll "pass the eye test" so no one will be talking about their schedule, but we all know the "eye test" is just "flashy offense". Those that know football were hyping up Michigan all season, but those that don't were harping on the schedule because they wouldn't know good football if it won a national championship game right in front of their eyes.
This setup would probably result in less money being paid out per school because fewer people are going to watch Tier 2 if they're not playing Tier 1 schools. Michigan-USC is going to draw a lot of eyeballs. Michigan-Indiana is going to draw fewer eyeballs, but still quite a bit simply because Michigan. Indiana-Illinois isn't drawing anything. Having more Michigan-USC style games will not make up for the fact that no one's watching any Indiana games anymore because they never play anyone.
On the other hand, what if it does work and the Tier 1 games make up for the Tier 2 games? Then you have massive instability where Tier 1 schools are dragging the other half along despite never playing them. It's one thing to subsidize Indiana when you play them regularly and have tons of history together. It's quite another thing to subsidize them when you have nothing in common at all anymore. Tier 1 would break off into its own conference pretty quickly to have access to all that money. Right now the only thing holding the Tier 2 schools in the B1G is tradition and momentum. If you do this Tier 1 and Tier 2 thing, you do the hard work of eliminating tradition and momentum up front, so there's almost no barrier remaining to the Tier 1 schools breaking away completely.
I'm assuming here that the schools in Tier 1 and Tier 2 remain pretty stable, which is a good assumption. If, when playing similar schedules for a century, the conference naturally settles into tiers of competitiveness that stay mostly stable for decades at a time, then formally dividing these tiers is not suddenly going to create more parity. The only thing a relegation model does is pave the way for the conference to formally divide into the haves and have nots.
Relegation won't happen with college sports for the same reason everything else is happening: money. Everyone wants a stable source of high conference income, so the top brands are clambering for the B1G and SEC money streams. The networks want all the top brands consolidated in a few super-conferences because it produces big games that generate viewers.
Who's going to watch Tier 2 games? Nobody. So the networks aren't going to pay as much for them, resulting in decreased conference revenue. What if Tier 2 had decreased revenue? Why on earth would the schools agree to that? With that Tier 1, a down year for any of those teams could result in relegation. No one would be absolutely safe. That would result in a year of MUCH lower revenue, which would be terrible for budgeting. It would also be terrible for recruiting. Either you get a wide variety of teams cycling through the two tiers regularly, in which case no one's getting the reliable high revenue stream they signed up for, or you end up with the same 6 teams getting flipped back and forth every year, creating what amounts to a P5 and G5 conference with a weird relationship. In that case, the schools in Tier 2 never get the high revenue, and nobody in Tier 1 knows who's going to end up getting flipped back and forth a lot until it happens.
And this doesn't even begin to consider other sports. Are all the other sports getting jerked around by the performance of football? Or is football completely decoupled from the other sports and conference affiliation is now by sport? Both would require massive changes to how college athletics is run.
If the #1 concern for the schools is football fan service, then sure, they might consider relegation. But if we've learned anything over the last few years, it's that the schools don't give two shits about the fans in the pursuit of money and wins. Relegation, therefore, is completely off the table as an option until either people stop watching college football, or the schools decide that money and winning aren't all they're cracked up to be.