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statsman

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  1. Here is a thought- all recruitniks get excited about the blue chips, because great teams are built with blue chips, and we want great teams. I was remembering a couple of big blue chips from 15 years ago, DTs. Malcom Brown and Taylor Bible. I remember Brown being more sought after, but that could be my memory exercising a bias because Brown panned out big time and Bible didn’t. They were both major blue chips (google tells me that Bible was the #26 Texas schoolboy, all positions). In today’s environment, how much would Brown be worth to sign? Low seven figures? High six? How about Bible? Because the “market” of 15 years ago had them valued similarly out of HS. What happens when a big amount of money is allotted to a HS signee, and he busts? That has to be a miserable conversation with the player and parents, but it has to be had, because it’s worse to have dead money in the locker room. How to play it? I think that to pay big money to a HS kid to sign, you better be damned sure he’s worth it, and that you are ready to manage it if he busts. If Texas is using the senior year to gain data on the kid and make a better evaluation, that’s probably the right way to play it.
  2. Brother, you don’t k ow the half of it
  3. I’m going to guess you never saw the photo that the tyke’s mom posted, with almost 20 lines of welt scars from switch strokes.
  4. William CowperBrann, although I don’t mean to defend him. He would have been just find with the horrible Waco lynching of Jesse Washington
  5. Yeah, I get (like Texas does, I think) having a staff to sift through all the HUDL video to provide a slate of recruits for the assistant coaches to review, after basic minimal physical and athletic traits are vetted. That saves a ton of time (so the assistant can actually coach) and allows a wider net. But, having a personnel staff prepare the list of offers? In a properly working system, the assistant actually should be a value-add in scouting, more than just a recruiting-monkey. They should be able to tell qualitatively if the player has traits that make them more or less coachable, objective metrics aside. (And it helps in signing a kid if he and his parents can tell that the assistant really wants him). It’s like if you have ever worked for an organization that only hires “A” students. Eventually, you meet the “B” candidate that works a full time job at night while going to school, to support a family, and you pull your hair out trying to get the organization to hire this kid that you know would be a tremendous asset. Or to not hire the “A” candidate with a great resume that flippantly admits he really just wants to bide his time with your company until he can get into the industry he really wants.
  6. OU’s strategy is to “moneyball” this. (In MLB, it turned out that having resources like the NYY is a better approach)
  7. SoonerScoop poster took notes from meet-and-greet with OU football GM Him Nagy:
  8. I’ve been following Texas recruiting for forty years. Which means nothing, because this environment is different from what we’ve seen before and Sark’s recruiting approach is different from any Texas coach we’ve seen before. For example- Mack Brown used recruiting to get talent into the program, and he was good at it. For Sark, recruiting is just the first step of amassing talent. The next steps- the conditioning, the coaching, the drill work- Brown never had it like this. He is Saban-like in how he recruits guys that have the potential to be NFL guys, and are willing to work to be NFL players. The funny thing is g about recruiting is how many blue chips miss. Nationwide, about half the five stars (the “sure things”) make the NFL (and at Texas, from about 2009-2020, it was a lot less than half), about 1/4 of the four stars, and so on. Sark is outperforming those percentages. Some of you know more about what’s going on inside the program. I wonder if the long period between summer and NSD is an evaluation time for Texas? Is Sark using that time to figure out who is serious about doing the work to develop their potential (and is worth setting a market for), and who (like so many blue chips Brown, Strong and Herman signed) just wants to parlay athletic potential into a fun college experience? I think it’s very telling that, unlike Mack’s most talented teams (the “family environment”), and like Saban’s, Sark’s guys leave for the draft as soon as they can (too much work at Texas to do for Anything less than the best pay you can get). The players like it here, but a big part of the sell is that Texas will work you hard, but it’s worth it because Texas will get you to the league. Texas wants to sign the best, and some blue chips are worth setting a market for, and others aren’t, and I don’t think Sark is in a rush to figure out which are which.
  9. Much like the fictional Derry, Maine, there is an ancient and powerful evil under the surface of Waco, Texas. Occasionally it bubbles up and manifests in the physical world- a gunning down of an editorialist, a murder by a spirit group at halftime of a Baylor/A&M game, Branch Davidians, Dotson murder, Baylor football rapes, Twin Peaks shoot out,… I don’t know how the story of Chip and Joanna Gaines ends, but it will be horrific.
  10. So many of us old timers fear a return to the 1980’s, when SMU, OU and TAMU were setting the market, UH, TT and others were participating, the Texas coaches knew exactly what was needed and the word from the Tower to Bellmont was “thou shalt not”. I don’t think the UT administration will take the same attitude now. We have Eltife leading the regents, and we have a lot of supportive regents. I don’t think they will allow athletics to do anything to embarrass the university, but otherwise will be supportive of competing.
  11. Clark really needs to get a team together for an off season Euro tour. I remember when the Oklahoman had that headline after a bad Durant game- “Mr. Unreliable”. LeBron said, “Do they not realize he can be a free agent?” The WNBA needs to have it shoved in their face that their most marketable player has options.
  12. The league has to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a game of skill and athleticism? Or a hard-nosed brutal test of aggression? Ice hockey has dealt with that question for decades, without really resolving it. The “mean girls” aspect is something new, though.
  13. So,…looking at SEC staying at eight conference games? And a 5-11 model for CFP? Last year, that would have put five SEC teams in the CFP, and one B12 team. Why wouldn’t the B12 and ACC sign up for two AQs? I have a theory- those two leagues need good media contracts, so they need good ratings. With 11 at large bids in play, they (and their networks) can market a ton of November games as having “playoff impact”, even if they really don’t. Any team with two or fewer losses can be called a CFp contender. Last November, weren’t their six teams with a possible path to the one B12 AW spot?
  14. That’s a good explanation of the Sooner defense. I do fear that OU will be able to replicate their 2023 RRS performance. I remember listening to IT podcasts before, and discussions of how Texas was just demonstrably better (true), Gabriel wasn’t a threat to run (he had not been), and how OU didn’t run tempo (they had not). That RRS was OU’s first challenging game and they broke all those tendencies while playing with a maniacal fervor. Even then, Texas probably wins if Majors doesn’t get hurt in the first quarter. Or if a number of other breaks don’t go OU’s way. OU laid it all out there, glories and gloated in the win, and was unable to approach that level of play for the rest of the season, losing to OSU and KU. Still, the Okie fans were happy and enjoyed a full year of “Texas really isn’t any better than us”. I expect them to to treat this RRS similarly, but they have to play a decent Michigan team and a (perhaps) good Auburn team first. Auburn is a game they can’t look past, because the Venables regime may not be able to weather a loss at home to Jackson Arnold. Hopefully, Texas takes OU very seriously, too, and takes care of business. A final thought- OU’s schedule is backloaded, with @Bama, Ole Miss, LSU, Mizzou, @Tennessee and @S. Carolina following Texas. Expend too much at the RRS and they will have to pay later, much as they did in 2023.
  15. We have learned that players know what each other are making, roughly. Jimbo’s ag team fell apart, in large part, because there was a disconnect between compensation and performance (starters wondered why they were supposed to give it their all, when their freshman backup was getting paid five times as much). Texas has a salary structure that is aligned with contribution and understands that you don’t revise it for just one recruit or player.
  16. Iran provided Hamas with material and training support for Oct 7, per a WSJ article linked 19 months ago. Arguably, they set this whole thread off. They have been offered many exit ramps, wrt Houthi support and their nuke program, and they have passed on all of them. FAFO, indeed.
  17. I think we will get real time input into what it means by watching what Oregon does.
  18. Buddy Deeds in “Lone Star”. That actor stole the movie in two scenes.
  19. Easily forecastable. Will there be an injunction stopping schools from proceeding with ADs cutting checks to players? Even after some have written contracts?
  20. “The Rhule Model”. That is a strategy. For it to work you have to: 1. Actually develop players. This means elite positional coaching, and not every program does that. 2. Be patient. Rhule recruited two and three stars with traits, and developed them into all B12 and even draft picks. That took a few years. The best of these won’t show for a couple of years. 3. Have a plan for line play in the SEC? In the B12 and ACC, OL and DL can be a little less massive, because they only go up against massive, elite counterparts in a few scattered games. Not so in the SEC. Interesting strategy
  21. I encourage all those nations (especially those that have recognized a Palestinian state) to establish consulates in Gaza and the West Bank.
  22. They’re really not fucking around
  23. Yeah, I was drinking a little while posting. Missed some autocorrects (“dies” vs “does”), and, yeah, the population of a state can grow while the number of reps can drop, if the national population grows at a faster rate. Still, the point remains- Oklahoma’s population isn’t producing the number of players needed to compete on a national level
  24. Correcting: “One more thing- OU desegregated in 1957 and re-segregated a few years later. They deserve credit for the former (which they happily claim) and not for the latter.”
  25. Alriy, deep dive into OU chicanery part 1. First, a couple of things to understand: 1. One of the great things about college football is also the source of its greatest misunderstandings. There is incredible diversity in colleges- how they are organized, how they are governed, their culture, their values. Pro sports are cookie cutter leagues, every organization functionally the same. Not so in college football, although sports media keeps taking the lazy path and writing as if it were. OU has gotten a lot of mileage out of these assumptions, shielding it from proper recognition of its misdeeds. 2. Demographic trends. The simplest way to describe this is to use congressional delegation size through the years. The HoR has 435 members, reapportioned every ten years with the census. As states grow or shrink in populations, the number of representatives dies the same. Here are the numbers for three states: Texas - Oklahoma - Nebraska 1920: 18 - 8 - 6 1940: 21 - 9 - 5 1960: 22 - 6 - 4 1980: 24 - 6 - 3 2000: 30 - 6 - 3 2020: 36 - 5 - 3 There you have it- Oklahoma is on the demographic path that doomed Nebraska. It’s only path to national success is getting players out of state, and it has known this for eighty years. In 1946, OU had a new president, George Cross, who was a football fan. He and their board had a plan to emphasize football success to rally the state from its chronic and growing sense of inferiority. They knew there were a bunch of servicemen with football ability coming to colleges, and they decided to build a program on this swell of talent. They hired Jim Tatum, perhaps more impressed with his chief assistant, Bud Wilkinson. Wilkinson, of course, got the job the next year, when Tatum left, and built a monster. OU formed a booster group, the Touchdown Club, which funded extra benefits for recruits and players. All of this was actually legal in the late ‘40s (or at least not illegal). Texas was doing the same (DX Bible instituted “The Bible Plan”, where alumni were assigned different parts of the state). OU became a national power- based on Wilkinson’s coaching at an elite level of organization, and recruiting Texas. In the early ‘59s, the NCAA came up with rules on scholarships, recruiting and benefits, and was given enforcement power. OU was turned in twice in the’50s, by rival Big 6 programs. The Sooners denied everything, and Cross was fine with that. He figured the program got itself into trouble, and it was up to the program to get itself out. He felt no need to enforce propriety or honesty. The NcAA found plenty of guys recruited by OU at other programs, willing to talk, and penalized the Sooners both times. It didn’t really slow the Sooners down much. They had a huge advantage in the weakness of their schedules during the Wilkinson years. Many years, they would be the only Big 6 team to finish ranked. They had superior talent and only a couple of games to get up for. One more thing- OU desegregated in 1957 and desegregated a few years later. They deserve credit for the former (which they happily claim) and not for the latter. Royal started kicking their ass and no one was too sad when Wilkinson decided to step aside and try politics in 1964.
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