Jump to content

SL Xpress

Full Members
  • Posts

    4055
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

SL Xpress last won the day on August 7 2021

SL Xpress had the most liked content!

Reputation

7840 Surly 1%

About SL Xpress

Recent Profile Visitors

5016 profile views
  1. I have learned to be careful about sweeping generalizations regarding the future of college football programs. I maintain that the current state of college athletics, and specifically college football, is unsustainable, so the future is going to be very different than what we see today. What that is and when it comes, I have no idea. I can foresee the disruption. I have no real insights into what it will eventually resemble, and I don't believe anyone when they say with conviction what it will become. It's all speculation. My speculation would be we see further constrictions into who is actually competitive at the highest levels, and that the Big 10/SEC carve up the rest of college football and form a new association which displaces the NCAA in many respects. But that's speculation. An individual like Larry Ellison getting involved in NIL, or someone with less net worth but willing to spend a much larger percentage of it to see their favorite team win, can quickly shift the dynamics of NIL the way it's currently executed. I still maintain the bottom line is you have to have the right coach. Finding and then keeping the right coach once you have him is still the biggest challenge of every program wanting to be elite. But having robust NIL support is now a critical component of that. Riley left OU and Saban stepped down at Alabama in part because of the resources to support them at their previous stint. Same thing with Brian Kelly to LSU and Jimbo Fisher to A&M, or DeBoer to Alabama. It's not that excellence can't be maintained through coaching changes. Look at Ohio State, which has still yet to make a truly bad hire since Woody Hayes in 1951. But you roll the dice every time. Every program not named Ohio State has gone through some lean years. Some, like us, more than we could possibly imagine. I had hopes OU would maintain their Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger (who I thought was a home run hire...nope!) John Blake succession ad infinitum, but it did not work out that way, unfortunately. But I'm enjoying their current struggles and I hope they continue for the rest of my lifetime, however long or short that may be and whatever the cause.
  2. Maybe so. But while it seems obvious in retrospect to start the Longhorn Foundation, tie donations to seat priority, and make donation money available across all sports, he's still the first one that did it. He also started the move to suites before any other program as well. And that took some level of vision because we went into a lot of debt to do it. But yes, I do agree with your point.
  3. Explain its origin so I can be thoroughly annoyed as well. Sounds like something I can quickly and easily get on board with.
  4. There were also administration issues. The chancellor and president were anti football. They wanted Texas to be a first rate research institute and they saw being a football factory as detrimental to those efforts. It's amazing how effectively we were chopping ourselves at the knees, while all the regional competition had a win at all costs mentality. Dodds figured out he could make his job security all about how much money he raised. And so he did.
  5. I'm hardly a fan of the guy. But starting the Longhorn Foundation and making this quote are the two contributions I'm grateful for. Other than that he set up a culture that did a lot of harm. The way I always described it is the people in the athletic department got their job security from raising money, not winning football games. They wanted the football team to win a few more games so they could go out and raise a few million more the next year, not the other way around, and that was a serious culture issue that led to us whoring the program out worse than any other program out there in many regards. But the fact is when he was hired the athletic program was a poor in ways we can't even begin to fathom now. We depended on having the Texas legislature wrapped around our fingers for making capital improvements., Coaches weren't really paid competitive salaries compared to market rate. Every program was responsible for fundraising themselves. It wasn't the only reason, but one of the reasons David McWilliams was hired after Fred Akers is because he was willing to come to Texas for cheap. We couldn't afford a big name coach. John Cooper inquired about the opening before he ever took the Ohio State job and said, "I'm getting paid more here at Arizona State."
  6. There's a whistling past the graveyard going on here. When I go over to OU sites and watch content from their insiders, I'd say they're pretty much done with the Venables era and they're just waiting for the string to play out. Sure, they'll get hopeful because that's what fans do, and they don't have the Battered Aggie Syndrome those cultheads do, but there's a part of the more rational ones that feels strongly things could easily go sideways again next year, and if so, the trigger is going to have to be pulled. They remind me of me during the dark periods of the 80s and 90s where I held onto the idea we hadn't been shut out in forever. They keep talking about their bowl streak like a mantra, to remind themselves Sooner football is still relevant, even when they know in their heart of hearts it really isn't right now. I think the more interesting part is the acknowledgement from the smarter ones they may not be able to keep up with the big dogs financially. Their athletic budget is fine, as far as that goes. But they don't have the deep bench of financial boosters, and they don't have the equivalent of Phil Knight or even a modern day T. Boone Pickens to make up the difference when it comes to NIL. They're in the same boat as fellow cheaters Alabama and Georgia. When it was all under the table, they were willing to match or surpass everyone else. Now that it's above board they're having a rough time competing. Honestly, I can't get enough of it.
  7. "We don't keep up with the Joneses. We are the Joneses." - Deloss Dodds
  8. That's interesting, because I find I don't give a fuck. I loathe the SEC. I loathe these hillbillies we're attached to. I'm so happy these neanderthal, incestual, deliverance style typecast collection of cavemen have already learned to hate our guts. In one year! Outstanding everyone! I appreciate the single-minded passion with which these hick town Walmart greeters approach college football, so we can rake in more money, travel to actual football stadiums rather than the wanna be high school tinker toys in the Big 12, and be more relevant in terms of the future of college football than we could ever be in the backwaters of the Big 12. But why in the world would you actually want to be associated with them? And I'll say Mizzou gets all kinds of shit for not really being a culture fit for the SEC. They don't win anything. I think there's a general, "what the fuck does Missouri add again?" attitude among other SEC fans. A&M is seen as a collection of weirdos, but let's face it. Demographically A&M and everything in Texas east of College Station/Bryan is an excellent cultural fit for the SEC. They've enjoyed ball gargling Alabama, Georgia, and LSU while those programs actually win something. Who can't appreciate a good BJ? I can understand why some of the SEC fans like keeping A&M around. They're like a good collie that's been neutered so they're less likely to pee on the shag carpet. One of my favorite parts of the season was going on the various SEC message boards and seeing all the different fan bases line up to compete with one another as to who wanted to see Texas lose the most in the playoffs, even after Tennessee and Georgia lost. The fuckwads thought they had some semblance of conference unity before. No program can unite a collection of fanbases quite like Texas and our ability to generate an incredible shared "anyone but Texas!" attitude among everyone. It's been fun seeing how quickly we've been able to spread the hate. I look forward to seeing it grow!
  9. My favorite posts from the Aggies are their braying, "WE TOLD YOU SO!" to other schools' fans about letting Texas into the conference. That's what I was thinking about while reading the recent Georgia mod comparing Texas to the Yankees/Dodgers.
  10. Oftentimes it's not a matter of buying it. It's being able to give attribution to someone else. People often aren't interested in the truth of it. Look at war reporting when there's obvious made up numbers being thrown around. They'll toss the numbers out there anyway and say, "According to the Russian Defense ministry...blah blah blah." There's no transparency in NIL. Ohio State is constantly being reported as having an NIL payroll of $20 million because that's what the athletic director said before the season. I've been told by some people in the space it was much closer to $25 million. But the $20 million is stated as fact because no one knows and they can attribute the number to someone. Oh, and an obligatory fuck Chip Brown.
  11. Is he going to start a Tongan/Samoan to Nigerian dating app? The payout would be 19 years in the future at best, but I think there's some high returns possible there.
  12. At some point I said I wish Texas was doing camps in the South Pacific to recruit Tongans/Samoans and in West Africa to recruit Nigeria/Ivory Coast. I didn't take it the next step to think of creating a crossbreeding program. This is genius.
  13. It's not a college athletics rule. It's a federal rule regarding student visas. It's come up before with high profile international students competing in college athletics. I have no idea how easy it is to get around. It feels naive to think no player in the US on a student visa has ever received improper benefits. But the consequences are different since it's not an NCAA rule or enforcement you're violating.
  14. A&M went from an all male college with a limited enrollment, to accepting ugly women in the 70s who didn't move the needle, to going Greek and expanding their enrollment in the 80s and 90s, using fishcamp and bonfire as their primary brainwashing tools rather than pretend army. The massively increased enrollment helped shift suburban Houston from a UT enclave to several places where Aggie hegemony rules. Since Perry and Sharp chose to deliberately turn A&M into a diploma mill, and their degree can't really gain them employment outside of their cultish oil and gas connections and their asinine faux military academy ring knocking, Houston suburbs have been overrun. Thankfully River Oaks and West University still offer safe passage. Yeah, there are Aggies around here, but they're not as numerous and easily dismissed as the odd mouth breather. As far as Fort Bend, you've got the massive Chinese churches imported by the real estate magnate behind Sienna Plantation, the huge Hindu temple just down the street from Dulles HS, the Pakistanistan west of Highway 6 looking for ways to terrorist bomb the temple out of existence, the Mormon temple, a couple of big Catholic churches that went from catering to Yankee immigrants in the 80s to almost wholly Mexican and central American descendants, and a dwindling white population that keeps moving further west because that's what white people do when people of color move in en masse, so that now Lamar Consolidated has schools rated better than FBISD. And then you've always had the eastern county precinct 1 which is the only place a Democrat+African American has ever been able to get elected. Yeah, it's not an A&M enclave. That's reserved for predominantly white suburbs like Katy and The Woodlands.
×
×
  • Create New...