
SL Xpress
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Neither are Gifford Nielson, Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Robbie Bosco, Ty Detmer, and John Walsh. BYU was arguably THE QB factory in college football under Lavell Edwards and OC Norm Chow. He won the Sammy Baugh trophy as college football's top passer, led the country with a 173.6 passer rating. BYU went 13-1 his senior season with Sarkisian passing for over 4000 yards and 33 touchdowns in a 14-1 game season, with BYU finishing in the top 5. The dude was a badass in college. The crazy thing is he gave up football for a while to concentrate on baseball. Anyway, I clearly remember him as a player. He was awesome, just like it seemed like everyone was who lined up behind center for BYU.
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I like the idea of getting concerned about Arch Manning's NFL career before he's ever taken a snap as the long term starter at Texas. To me, Sarkisian said it best. When asked about whether Manning would declare for the draft after this year, or stay in college an additional season like his uncles, Sarkisian replied, "I hope this season makes it a really tough decision."
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*(this is an obvious, "gird one's loins" type of situation)* That's Dad's phrase. Posted as PhxHorn on GoBig12/360 and Hornsfans. Man it's fun to see people using some of his phrases after all these years as part of the Longhorn lexicon. What a dude. Thanks @MuellerHorn.
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Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
Michael Schenker. Legend. -
Thanks for the post. That's exactly how someone covering recruiting should handle the Calicut situation. It's weird that other people chose to handle it differently. I will say on the Isaiah Bond situation it's my understanding the plaintiff and Bond came to some kind of settlement? I'm curious to see if the sexual assault charges end up being dropped, although I haven't seen anything official along those lines yet. I'm not sure he's going to be facing the multiple legal hurdles Burton is alluding to here. But maybe I'm wrong on that. I'm assuming Endries is going to be our leading receiver, at least in terms of catches. Possibly yards, too. I feel like he's going to be Arch's favorite check down target, not to mention a favored receiver on other routes. I'm also interested to see who we use as the 2nd tight end, and how effective they ended up being.
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"Steve Sarkisian has *signed eight recruits in the 2025 & 2026 recruiting cycles" *I don't think that word means what they think it does.
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So OU can be the Oakland A's of college football. I'm okay with that.
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Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
This has been by far the best offseason since the 2000s. And while there have been any number of reasons for it, Georgia nation losing their collective minds this past week is helping immensely to what had already been awesome sauce. The message boards are aflame with accusations. I've watched Mike Griffith lose his mind on Dawgnation as well as the Paul Finebaum show. "Of course Texas gets a bye week before they play Georgia. Of course they do." We caused Film Guy to go into an existential crisis regarding his offseason podcasts. "We cultivated a relationship with Tyler Atkinson since he was in the 8th grade. Do relationships even matter any more? What's the point of covering recruiting if it's all going to be transactional? Derrick Cooper didn't even visit Texas. The thing that really bothers me is the lack of transparency. Sarkisian up there flat out lying about we don't lead with NIL..." "...what do you guys think? What should the channel cover during the offseason since there's no point in talking about recruiting? This is the lifeblood of college football, but I'm seeing that people aren't going to even follow recruiting if this is what it's come down to." I'm paraphrasing here. Some guy named Coach Hayes brings up the clip of Mukuba hitting Stockton down near the goal line in the SEC championship game, playing in slow motion over and over again, saying this is what Texas teaches these kids. So many of the Georgia talking heads taking exception to Texas Longhorn fans arrogance on different social media outlets. Keep up the good work, everyone! And this is after we lost to them twice. Think what's going to happen to those poor souls when we put up a win streak against them. It's going to be Nebraska the sequel. I always said the SEC fan bases think Alabama fans are arrogant. They are only getting a taste so far. We are easily going to be the most hated program in the conference very quickly. As it should be. -
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!
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Sub-Educated Cretins: The SEC screenshot mega-thread
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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. -
Sub-Educated Cretins: The SEC screenshot mega-thread
SL Xpress replied to SimkinsMan's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
There's a lot of TL;DR in my life. -
Sub-Educated Cretins: The SEC screenshot mega-thread
SL Xpress replied to SimkinsMan's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Sub-Educated Cretins: The SEC screenshot mega-thread
SL Xpress replied to SimkinsMan's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Sub-Educated Cretins: The SEC screenshot mega-thread
SL Xpress replied to SimkinsMan's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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.- 1164 replies
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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.
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Here's the article:
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Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
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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. -
I found a longer video of a representation of A&M fans following their football team:
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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.
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Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
He visited for the Georgia game last year and then in April. Your point still stands. -
Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
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. -
Gerry Hamilton gushes about Cooper on this video about his commitment:
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