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Hayduke

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  1. A standalone condom? That sounds like something an A&M engineering post-doc might invent.
  2. I've got faculty friends who have told their kids to consider these options -- and who lament that they can't switch to a trade or craft now that their knees and backs are going. Many, if not most, college degrees aren't the ticket they were when many Surly posters were in school. Our weekly happy hour has three professors (one retired), a retired school superintendent, a couple of IT guys, and an electrician as its most regular members. Guess who's got the biggest damn house out of that bunch?
  3. Why you wanna bring North Korea into this? Oh, never mind. I see them now.
  4. In addition to federal contracts and grants, which are a significant part (probably 10-20%) of most large schools' budgets, federal student loans are a major factor that the government can use as a wedge. Those loans put butts in seats, helping with the tuition that's another substantial chunk of funding (often the biggest). Every school is different, but direct state support for schools has been shrinking for a long time, making tuition more important (and generally higher) with each year. Many state schools get less than 10 percent of their budget from annual state appropriations. Compliance with federal laws (privacy, student safety, occupational safety, Title IX, sexual harassment, all sorts of stuff) comes into play in lesser but important ways, as it does for private business. So, yeah, stuff like DEI, student protests, the number of international students -- all have played large roles in federal pressure on schools. Regardless, if anything can annoy or motivate enough of a politician's power base to help "work on" an issue, it's probably college football and bikini-clad women. Everything else is just small stuff (OK ... that was CR).
  5. I was pretty sure it was. But when you've got a mostly-nekkid and athletic female body on the rug, nobody cares about politics.
  6. Now we're talkin' sports.
  7. Yeah, me too ... I was covering a little bit of sports back when the AIAW was still the ruling body for women and it argued against being taken over by the NCAA and its corrupting influence (at the same time it was arguing that it needed more money and support). And now the AIAW is gone. I'm sure at least some of its members thought it would always be there. At least good ol' Wayland Baptist and Delta State have continued their dominance of intercollegiate women's basketball, though. But those were pretty different times. Title IX had just come into effect and it forced the formation of large numbers of women's teams to try to demonstrate some kind of "equity" in men's and women's sports. Now Title IX is being taken apart before our very eyes and nobody's talking about it -- NIL and SCORE are a big part of that, especially the latter if it passes in anything close to its current form. Revenue is the biggest factor in this equation, and now that people are finally talking about that, they're rethinking non-revenue sports. Part of SCORE could remove student fees from the equation. If that happens, a ton of smaller sports are going to be toast. I don't see any way that won't happen. Don't know if you saw what I posted in the recruiting forum about that, but most smaller schools and even a decent number of the bigger ones rely to a very substantial extent on student fees to fund intercollegiate sports. And believe me, both students and families are increasingly questioning both the value of college degrees and where their money is going within those colleges.
  8. That's some first-class CR trolling there ... well done.
  9. Agree in principle, but I'd say one person "should not" instead of "cannot." It's pretty clear that one person can have an outsized influence on an issue -- not just the president and not just this issue, but Trump does tend to have outsized influence. My first thought in looking at the executive order was that it probably written with the help of AI. I wrote on another forum that the presence of the "reported" fact of one team paying $35-40 million for its football team this coming season seems to come directly from the internet rumor. The revenue cut-offs in the executive order seem arbitrary and potentially very problematic. But now they're numbers that are out there, and we'd all be fooling ourselves if we didn't admit to the possibility that they could take on substantial weight before anybody knew exactly why or how.
  10. This is one of those borderline topics that, sadly, will probably end up in CR because it will get CRed up. Once it's there, it's probably not going to be very good sports discussion, as most folks will probably avoid it. I think folks always have the potential to talk about this stuff without the partisanship and name-calling. I'm sure that some will say I or others have already made it political, or that it's inherently too political. But I'm trying pretty hard not to be political -- just pragmatic and sports-focused, with an emphasis on where things are going that will affect the field of competition.
  11. So now I'll venture my best guess. Nothing these folks do will stop the flow of money upward to the bigs. In the near term, successful football and basketball schools will keep winning. Consolidation at the top will continue. So that's kinda "free market" and kinda not. If I'm interpreting correctly, it looks like @TornACL is saying that the executive order is a little anticompetitive, and I think there's a very strong argument to be made there. Some folks might even look at it and say that it's a little "socialistic" -- especially if you change the topic from college sports to something else, like professional sports or maybe electronics stores. It's pretty crazy stuff. I think, ultimately, it's going to hasten the shuttering of lots of lesser football programs and smaller team sports. That's one way of looking at it, but what I'm trying to do is look at the bigger picture of how everyone ELSE is going to react to that symbolic nothingness. I have no idea what the hell is going on around college sports right now. But I'm paying very close attention to it for several reasons. One is that I work for a university and am particularly close to the issue of how "policy," law and power work, both for internal and external issues. Another is that I have a young adult-child who's off to college in a year and is on the cusp of minor D1 sports competition -- not scholarship level, in almost all certainty, but the combination of scholarly and athletic ability are going to be very attractive to colleges who are begging for students and, in particular, students who have what they are looking for beyond just tuition dollars. Next week, we'll probably hit one major D1 university and one excellent D3 school that really emphasizes sports. What I'm not sure of is how my offspring feels about sport in either or both of these places, and whether the team we'll look at will even exist at the D3 school four or five years from now.
  12. I wouldn't write off its potential impact that quickly. For one thing, it already mirrors much of what the House seems to be trying to do with the SCORE Act, and I'm not sure that SCORE would generally be able to hold up well in court in different times. Now, with legislative and executive branches a little more aligned, it could have a lot more teeth. This is close enough to CR as it is, and I'm trying to stick more to general facts and avoid value judgments. But I think folks can agree -- regardless of where anyone is on the political spectrum -- that we're not operating under the same political rules this year that we were last year. We've already seen how this administration has reshaped, at least temporarily, the executive's ability to implement actual changes in things like the size of government departments, funding for science, and how DEI is implemented (in this case, no longer implemented) in educational settings. And universities, facing declining enrollments and unilateral cuts in scientific funding, consider themselves especially vulnerable to the will of the administration. If anyone here has been paying attention to the way Columbia, for instance, has approached pressure from the administration, it's pretty obvious that universities are very attentive to what the administration wants. Only a very few universities -- such as Harvard -- have fought back. The real questions come from how this will all play out with regard to the interactions among the administration, Congress, the NCAA, the big schools, the small schools, and both courts and lawyers. My guess is that between this order and SCORE, there will be more immediate shakeups than we anticipated, and even if folks try to dial it back a little when we get further down the road, the explosions will have already occurred and there will be a lot to clean up.
  13. Here's the executive order for anyone who wants to read it. I've read parts carefully and skimmed the rest, and it looks like this is going to butt up against both what the House is trying to do and what is actually going on with schools and collectives. My guess is Trump really trusted somebody else pretty completely on this order, and whoever it was didn't bother to do much in-depth analysis of the broader issue. The biggest clue is the speculative phrase "football players at one university will reportedly be paid $35-40 million." (is this Texas living rent-free in the collective D.C. consciousness?) Can't wait for the in-season lawsuits and injunctions.
  14. Well, that's pretty damn different than what the article conveys, but also not surprising. Just goes to show that a writer ought to read the bill they're writing about. The disappointing part is that the article is still more complete than most of what we can find out there. Not much info on the post, but that language on it is so broad that it could mean everything, or nothing. I'm sure we'll hear plenty about it in the coming days. Trying not to go CR, but if there's anybody I don't want ruling unilaterally on college sports, it's Donald Trump. Not sure he's even a real sports fan, but he's definitely more confident in his own correctness about everything than would seem helpful here.
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