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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. OU will always be the #1 rival. They can be trash for the next 20 years and I'll still hope they get worse. I want only bad things to befall them. A&M I just laugh at. It's hard to take them seriously. It's always been hard to take them seriously. It was hard to take them seriously when they were winning 10 out of 11 times. I just felt like the earth was rotating off of its usual axis during that time. Some of you think of Arkansas as a rivalry. The media is certainly starting to force that narrative. That is a one way rivalry. We don't collectively care about Arkansas and we haven't since the 60s. They hate our guts. They've always hated our guts. It was a great rivalry in the 60s when Arkansas was literally a top 5 program in the country. They haven't mattered since then. They did in basketball for a while under Abe Lemons and Tom Penders with Eddie Sutton and Strollin' Nolan, but for football they were the game that came right after OU and it sucked, because it was hard to get up for them after the annual war in Dallas. Never better exemplified than in 1981. But this Georgia thing I can get behind. It has been so fun going to their message boards and watching their talking heads whine in all kinds of forums and in all kinds of ways about Texas. It just feeds me. The level of hypocrisy is delicious. This is way better than Nebraska was at the beginning of the Big 12. Although that was fun, too. I want to bury their face in their own shit to help teach them not to make messes around the house. I think what makes it better is I have no real respect for their football program. This is so perfect. Talking about character, and how they value relationships while Texas is all about being transactional. Meanwhile their locker room is full of guys getting in legal trouble. Their incoming players are being arrested for domestic assault and crimes involving firearms. Now the big cry is that Texas is overpaying while Georgia is being judicious with the use of their money. This is going to be so much fun. So much fun!
  2. Yes, that's technically true. But before the Ivy League was formed, the 8 presidents of the Ivy League schools signed the first Ivy Group agreement in 1945 where they all agreed to not offer athletic scholarships or compensate financial expenses for students. I can talk about all kinds of workarounds they found, but in essence they've abided by that agreement even in the face of legal challenges ever since.
  3. There's a lot of TL;DR in my life.
  4. Not to make this about baseball, but some of the imbalances were ameliorated with the way cable contracts worked, and the fact that many regional baseball teams could make a mint off of cable subscriptions regardless of the demand for the programming. Now that the entire market has collapsed, the advantage the Yankees and Dodgers have over everyone else is further exaggerated. It's also been going on so long there's a certain acceptance among small market fans that there's no realistic chance their rosters will ever compete for the playoffs, and that's their lot in life. But that doesn't mean they like it. It helps that neither the Dodgers nor Yankees have been able to string together a series of World Series wins, even with their competitive advantages. I'm simply saying this idea there's no pushback regarding the competitive advantages the Yankees and Dodgers enjoy in baseball is not true.
  5. What? I hear how unfair it is in Major League Baseball for the Yankees and Dodgers on a regular basis. What I also hear about is how many baseball teams simply don't even try to be competitive any more. If you can't compete against the Dodgers and Yankees just slash the payroll to a minimum and make your overhead as limited as possible. Even the owner of the least competitive baseball team in the league is still the owner of a baseball team. And the investment tends to be about growth in value more than income anyway. The NFL is often lauded for having the most fair system in professional sports. I'd argue it's held up as an example of not having imbalances of power. I don't agree with some of the basic points you're trying to make here.
  6. I think there are very simple reasons for the contrast in reactions. The under the table payments have been going on since the beginning of college football. At the turn of the 20th century early college programs would bring in ringers - players that didn't even attend the school, sometimes players who were much older - to gain a competitive advantage. After WWII this started up on a more industrial scale, led by people in the state of Oklahoma to gain some kind of relevancy for their state and to combat the derogatory image of "Okies" from the dustbowl and books/movies like The Grapes of Wrath. OU football and the WWII veterans paid to play for the program help lift a different narrative for the state. This had a widespread adoption and led to the investigative/enforcement arm of the NCAA being formed, with headquarters in Kansas City under the leadership of Walter Byers. It also led to the Ivy League schools opting out of the business of college football. There was another spike in compensation in the 70s and 80s led by Switzer at OU, followed by Jimmy Johnson and Pat Jones, followed by nearly the entire Southwest Conference, most notably SMU and A&M. Jimmy Johnson took that formula to Miami, where it helped lead to 20 years of dominance under 4 different head coaches. There was another phase led by Saban at Alabama, who was the first to figure out a system to exploit the new third parties infiltrating the high school ranks the way it had long been done in basketball. The schools in the SEC were the best at bringing in players under this new system, with Alabama at their head. But also Clemson and Swinney got their own bag game going on. But all of this felt like business as usual. The rules breaking simply felt like the price of doing business. It's like the Greeks cheating on their taxes. At some point you're considered a sucker if you do pay your taxes. The cultural acceptance of it on such a wide scale led to a collective shrugging of shoulders. The allowance of NIL has been massively disruptive. People do not deal well with disruption. At least until disruption becomes the new normal. I have always felt there's a poor understanding of what letting the genie out of the bottle really meant. I've felt that way since the early 2000s when I first started entering conversations with folks about NIL and its ramifications. Because people didn't have realistic expectations, they were blind sided by the actual manifestation of NIL. I think a big part of the dismay are what the actual numbers look like. Folks are not ready for 17 and 18 year olds to suddenly be making millions of dollars a year for playing college football. It shakes up their image of what college football should really be about. It's not just a media thing. It's regular fans, too. I think a lot of Texas fans feel this way, especially more casual fans who don't follow the sport the way many of us do. But even on this board I've seen some difficulties in accepting that this is the market rate for top notch players, and you either pay the rate or you stop competing. I have always laughed in different settings when people say something is "not worth that much." Guess what? You don't get to decide. You don't get to decide if a painting is worth that much. If a house is worth that much. If a quarter ounce of pot is worth that much. If a cup of coffee at Starbucks is worth that much. If a barrel of oil is worth that much. You get to decide if you're going to pay that much or not, but if someone else is willing to, your decision doesn't mean anything. And if everyone else decides it's not worth that much, then the price goes down. Right now, college players are still being underpaid, even in this latest cycle, because there are very wealthy people who are willing to pay more for their program to win at the highest levels. And it doesn't take hundreds of people to set a market. Someone like Ojo is a bit of an outlier, but it's outliers who set markets. Unless something drastic happens at a federal level, 5 years from now Ojo's contract is going to seem quaint. There's a good chance it won't take 5 years. The growth in payments is on a massive growth spike. Sure, it could cause the market to collapse suddenly, but I for one don't think we're even close to that. Rich people are going to complain about how much it's costing to build competitive rosters, but it's still important enough in all kinds of ways that they're going to keep doing it, simply to see their alma mater be able to win championships. Eventually the market will collapse, and that's always ugly, but I think the first fallout won't be football compensation. It will be the dropping of other sports across the board, possibly including football. A talented football player is not a commodity. There is a huge difference in value in a Vince Young type versus another player. Or a NiJaree Canady. Or a Caitlin Clark type. And they're the ones who will continue to set the market, and then everyone else's value will be determined from that. As long as the numbers keep jumping up so much from year to year - and they're going to - I think we'll continue to see shocked reactions from media types. I also think that shocked reactions deliver views and interest. Calmly explaining this is market forces at work is really boring and isn't good content delivery. But that's what this all is.
  7. If you read the article they heavily discount the value of Texas Tech because it's in Lubbock. They value TCU more because it's in Fort Worth instead. There is a LOT of artistry in those values. Reading how they came up with the valuations made me feel like they decided on the ranking beforehand and then justified it afterwards for a lot of teams.
  8. Here's the article:
  9. It's just amazing the sense of entitlement the people of Georgia have based on a) their presence in the SEC while Alabama was eating their lunch b) their two back to back national championships. Don't get me wrong. I'd be feeling a sense of entitlement too if I had the recent track record Georgia has. I mean, I have a sense of entitlement and Texas doesn't have the recent skins that Georgia has, especially in the head to heads last year. But they act like Georgia has been special for a hundred years. It's recency bias. Georgia currently holds the #2 class. They're nip and tuck with USC for the #1 class. It's not like they're getting pounded on the recruiting trail. But the main school they're losing recruiting battles against is Texas, so of course they've got excuses that paint Texas as the villain and Georgia as wearing lily white. The amazing thing I love about the cognitive dissonance here is the admission "the SEC has always been cut throat in recruiting." What do you think he means by that, nod nod wink wink? We all know what he means. The SEC has always cheated their asses off. That's exactly what he means. In the meantime as Texas fans we know we just lost, what? nine recruiting battles in a row? If we're overpaying for every player, why are we losing out on any recruiting battle? Just take whoever we want. And it is about relationships. So Cooper didn't come to Austin a dozen times. He did come to Austin twice. The coaches went by his high school. The narrative they're trying to project is that Cooper hasn't even been in the state of Texas and yet the Longhorns swoop in and grab him at the last second, just like they did Terry. And people love making these distinctions between official and unofficial visits. I'm not saying there isn't one, because there is. Official visits definitely involve way more wining and dining and a much more choreographed effort by everyone involved. But no one is paying for these unofficial visits whatever school is involved. Anyway, I don't need to justify our efforts to this crowd. I'm preaching to the choir here. I just get so tickled at the unreliable narrative these guys fall into to justify to themselves why Georgia is so lily white versus the evil Longhorns.
  10. This just came up on my YouTube feed. I’m out and about so I’ll have to share it through Tapatalk, but it’s too delicious to sit on. I love this Georgia reaction so much.
  11. I found a longer video of a representation of A&M fans following their football team:
  12. JVC wasn't a brand in any 1965 automobile and there was no such thing as a tape deck. They should have focused on Alabama instead of Georgia where the fan could have said, "Oh, we're already paying them top dollar. Top. Dollar." And to make you happy they could have had a "Welcome to Selma!" sign in the background.
  13. I know what you mean. When I watched Jeremiah Smith at the same high school I just knew he was overrated. And after that piss poor freshman campaign now I know he was. It's easy to dominate in 1A Florida football, but you get to the big leagues and it doesn't come so easy any more.
  14. Not really. The questions were from the media. He just refused to get defensive to the media in front of the high school coaches. I don't have access to any personal conversations with coaches.
  15. He visited for the Georgia game last year and then in April. Your point still stands.
  16. It's a good talking point to the THSCA, but I watched the entire talk he gave on youtube a bit ago. There were some other things said. The question was about this year's class, and how only ten of the 21 commitments are from the state of Texas. Sarkisian did a great job of answering the question, but the clear message in the entire Q&A was that Texas unapologetically was going to go after the best talent across the country. He acknowledged that agents have diminished the role of Texas high school coaches in the process, but he challenged coaches not to just give up their role as advisors and mentors. He challenged them to man up and be a part of the process rather than throwing up their collective hands and saying, "what can you do? It's all about the agents now." He talked about how it's not just about Texas keeping the best players in the state. There were a lot of instate programs players could go to. Then he pointed out that many of the best players in the state were leaving for programs outside of Texas. He had the standard "if I could recruit my entire team from the state of Texas I would" line, but the clear message is that's not the world we live in. He refused to get defensive about it, which is exactly right. The truth is this recruiting season is a sea change from how Texas has always gone about its business. I doubt we ever see 80% of UT's draft picks to the NFL being instate kids ever again in my lifetime. Sarkisian has made a clear investment in going after the best players wherever they are, with an emphasis on the southeast and California. It's not just the NIL dollars spent. Or the commitments. Or even the visits, although all of those are a huge part of it. The coaches are investing their time and resources in travelling all over the country - not just to see specific kids, but to build connections in the high school for players in the current recruiting class, as well as who might be someone to look for in future classes. That's when you know Texas is serious about this. They're not just putting a sack of money in front of the player. They're going out and cultivating relationships because they want people to know they're in it for the long haul. That's how you help protect your program from bad seeds that poison the locker room and/or force your hand where you have to pull the lever to the trap door to get them out of Austin.
  17. Gerry Hamilton gushes about Cooper on this video about his commitment:
  18. Two of them. Asking back to back. The one I felt really bad for was Anthony Hill. So many Arch Manning questions. So many. Spiced up with a Colin Simmons question. You'd never know how good he is based on the questions he was asked at media day. Crazy.
  19. Of all the positions in football, I feel like running backs should max their value while they can. In that vein I'm a little sympathetic to Cooper trying to max his value. OTOH, I'll say that outside of WR, I feel like running back is the position where a true freshman can come in and make the biggest impact. I know it's a little different in Sarkisian's offense because of pass pro and how involved the running backs are in the passing game as targets - but when you have a special player you figure out a way to get them on the field where they can make an impact. I just feel like if he's truly playing games at this point, he's a likely flip target, and for all we know as the season goes on, other targets will make themselves available. Or we'll be on a special back in next year's class. As a fan that wants my dopamine hit I hope we get him, but the more rational side of me is going to be fine however it goes down. I like the room we have right now and I feel like opportunities are going to come up.
  20. You know what they had going for them? They were willing to do all the negotiations in private and then spring it on everyone as a fait accompli. Even kept everything from A&M because they would have gummed up the works until the whole deal was basically done, then strong armed the Aggies into voting for it so it would be a unanimous vote. The Big Ten wanted a public discourse about the possibility of allowing Oklahoma and Texas into the conference, which would have given the state legislature every opportunity to torpedo it - because you know they would have. We were blessed to have Eltife - or as I like to call him, Eljefe - because he was intimately aware of how elements of the legislature would react, and navigated it perfectly. We got everything done in an off year where only the governor could call a special conference, and of course Abbott was a friend to the cause and would do no such thing. The irony is that Big Ten's insistence on having an open dialogue because it wouldn't be right to make the decisions in secret, ended up with Oklahoma and Texas going straight into the arms of the SEC - which may have happened anyway, but they made sure they weren't an option. Then when the USC/UCLA deal happened, Fox made sure it was a done deal - in secret - before the California legislature could get involved. They still did, with the Board of Regents punishing UCLA a bit for asking for forgiveness rather than permission, but the deal still got done. I'm not sure that USC/UCLA deal gets done the way it did without the shock of OU/Texas doing the deal they did with the SEC. Fox made it clear it was unacceptable for USC/UCLA to go to the SEC as well, and they made sure the deal with Big Ten, with all its warts, got signed and delivered. In any case, I hate being in the SEC because of our compatriots, but not being in the conference meant we would have fallen behind in the new world order. Basically, I hate the collective fandoms, but their single minded passion regarding college football means the SEC has a dominance regarding the future of college football the other conferences outside the Big Ten would never have. We needed to get into either the SEC or the Big Ten to maintain our relevance. The timing was crucial. As much as I hate the SEC, I am grateful we're a part of it. Who knows what the future is going to bring? Without protection from federal legislation there's going to be more and more pressure for the Big Ten and SEC to do some kind of football merger, inviting whichever programs they want to be part of the whole thing. I'm not saying it's imminent, but it's inevitable. Without being able to control payroll - and it's going to be impossible to control payroll with the current dynamics in play - there will be constant pressure to raise revenue, and to split the revenue with fewer entities. This is market systems 101. Texas would have always had a seat at the table, but the membership in the SEC means we have more say over the process than we ever would have in the Big 12. The Big 12 was compromised anyway because outside of Texas and OU it was a conference of poors - some of the programs are REALLY poor - and their agendas would have never meshed with UT. Because of the television deal, every program in the SEC has at least some funds to work with, especially when compared to the Big 12, so there's at least a little bit of a unified front, even if none of them have the overall resources Texas does. I will say I do believe federal protection is going to come some day. I just don't know when that will be or what kind of messed up form it will take. Because you know it's going to be messed up in some way. It always is.
  21. It sounds like an amazing experience. That's such a great age, too. If you can afford it I'd grab the tickets now, that way it's done and you don't have to think about it. Then try not to look at ticket prices after that. They're going to go up. Sure, they may come down at some point, but you're taking risks and you've got a 12 year old and a 14 year old to think about. What I'd recommend is think about it as an investment. Being able to tell your kids they're going for sure, and to get hyped about it, is a gift in and of itself. I have great memories of going to football games with my Dad at that age. I wouldn't trade them for anything, and very few were close to as big time as heading to the Horseshoe for the opening game with a team as loaded as this one. But I also often say the easiest thing in the world is to spend someone else's money. If you're trying to cut costs because you're going to have to cut back on meals for a while, or your kids are going to be wearing shoes with holes in them for a year until you can save up the money to replace them, for goodness sakes don't do it. But if a part of you is mostly not wanting to be taken advantage of when lower price tickets could still be available, go ahead and pull the trigger. Let your kids get amped up.
  22. I mean, they're still there. I'm sure we'll play them again at some point. But in the context of your post, they sure got under the Aggie's skin. There was a time before premium seating meant visitor allotments were reduced and bands were put in the worst seats, the opposing team always brought their band to away games. Especially in state opponents. The way the Rice band would tweak the Aggies at Kyle Field was something else. Of course, they'd do the same to us, but we always thought it was a riot. It wasn't the band, but a couple of years ago I went to a volleyball game at Tudor Fieldhouse when Texas came to play for a preseason exhibition game, and the Rice student body (plus their smaller band that plays at the Fieldhouse) came out in force. At one point they all started chanting "safe-ty schoo-ool" over and over again, and you just had to laugh. I love Rice.
  23. I am extraordinarily grateful for the current state of Texas athletics. 1984 to 1997 I wasn't sure if Texas as an institution was going to even care that much about football any more. Then Hicks and Evans got involved at the board of regents level, helped bring Mack Brown on, and I've never had to question the commitment to football since. But even then I didn't really like Dodds or Brown, although I enjoyed our successes under them. That doesn't matter. I don't have to like the people in charge as long as we're winning. But the last two years have been ideal. On just about every level. I love our board of regents chair. I love our athletic director. Our coach feels like the right guy for the job. He's someone I'd love to sit down and have a beer with, and neither one of us drink. We're highly successful. We appear to have a plan on nearly every level. I have a huge amount of admiration for the people who took the initiative to put an NIL structure in place from the grass roots. I contributed jack squat to speak of to that effort but as a fan I've been able to reap the rewards. We need to win a title, but I feel confident that's coming. In the meantime, I have basked in our off season relevancy. We practically owned the SEC media day coverage. Even when we weren't' being talked about, it's like the people involved were going out of their way not to talk about Texas and Arch Manning because they were so sick of it. As far as Derrick Cooper, it's the Miami fans that have been fun to watch. They're acting like they're being walked to the guillotine. Hopefully the good guys come out on top today and I get to enjoy the regional fan bases go out of their minds again at another Texas recruiting victory.
  24. The hilarious thing to me is at the time I thought Tech was reaching when they forced him out. Did they really think they were going to do better? He was a good coach for them. Then they hired Mike Leach and he led them to the best years of their existence. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Mike Leach helped contribute to their current financial security when it comes to NIL, since he recruited and played both of the partners in Double Eagle. And Kingsbury is a direct lineage from Leach, who recruited and played Mahomes. And I thought they made a mistake. Lol. They did make a huge mistake in the way they handled the whole James situation, but that was just Texas Tech being Texas Tech. It's like the frog asking the scorpion not to sting it as he carries it across the river. They're going to do Texas Tech things.
  25. You probably think Bill Snyder is very mid, too. 27 years with only two conference championships. No national titles. Compare what coaches did before and after Leach at Texas Tech, Washington State, and Mississippi State. I find your measurements for success in sports across the board on every sport you choose to opine about to be unreasonably excessive. It makes me wonder if the people around you measure your successes and failures similarly, and let you know about it on a daily basis.
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