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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. Well, unless he isn't really given the reins. I know there are some detractors, but I love the guy. I'm very grateful he came on board. I remember talking to people when Dodds was still in place that told me he wouldn't leave TCU in part because of the big buyout. After the Peterson disaster and the interim reign of Mike Perrin, it sure is nice to have complete confidence in our athletic director. There's no one in the country I'd rather have. I didn't have the fondness for Dodds that I have for Del Conte. It will be so much fun winning national championships in beach volleyball. I can hardly wait!
  2. I couldn't care less what you think about me. I like you plenty. I'm glad you contribute to this site. You're a much better and more valuable contributor than I am, especially when it comes to women's sports. And if you're alluding to the fact I'm often pedantic, guilty as charged. Tough shit. It's not like you've never irritated anyone on this site. You do it regularly. I've noticed you feel similarly to me when it happens. Oh, and it's official. Stein Metzger is the new coach for the women's beach volleyball program.
  3. It takes like 30 seconds. It's not some kind of deep dive. People love to complain about how long my posts are. I do not understand the perception that reading takes so much time and energy. Or that skipping over it is such a chore. Not really attacking your post, because it's relevant. It just constantly shocks me at how relevant it is.
  4. That's a great article. If I had omnipotent power over everything that's written and said in the west about the upcoming offensive, I would make it so people were consistently downplaying the objectives that could be achieved with the upcoming counteroffensive. It does Ukraine very little good to talk about how successful it's going to be, even by someone as knowledgeable and prescient as Mark Hertling. In some ways even especially by him. I don't have that power, and there is some good served by giving out a positive narrative about Ukraine's capabilities and Russia's deficiencies. It's just in my opinion that whatever good is done by buoying spirits in the West as we wait for it to transpire are not as beneficial as lowering expectations so that what Ukraine does accomplish is seen as a spectacular success, whatever that is. But that's just me. I'll also say in reading that article it made me wonder if Douglas MacArthur wrote a similar letter prior to his landings at Inchon. Probably not.
  5. I'm appalled a member of Ukraine's Supreme Court has been arrested for receiving scandalous benefits up to $3 million USD as part of a larger corruption scheme among the court's leadership and judges. That such a thing could happen. The good news is we're finding this out as he's under arrest.
  6. Do they even have hundreds of Storm Shadow cruise missiles? I highly doubt it. I'm sure they're going deep into their stock in painful ways for their military readiness simply to supply what they're currently giving Ukraine. I'm grateful for it. It's difficult to say how critical their presence ends up being for the success of the upcoming counter offensive, but it could very well provide a huge difference in outcomes. Not just in terms of their actual effectiveness, but simply having them as a threat on the battlefield will have an outsized impact on Russian operations.
  7. Actually that's confined pretty much to football and men's basketball. Outside of that we're pretty much in a golden age. Of course, that's a little like "other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" but it's still not completely fair to throw the whole athletic program into the drink. It's pretty much the gold standard in all of college sports as an athletic program overall. Back to Ukraine, I'm extremely grateful to the UK for sending the Storm Shadow missiles, and the US for sending the MALDs being used. We deservedly get credit for providing the largest amount by far to help Ukraine, but the UK has regularly taken the lead in this fight in ways other countries have seemed reluctant to, and that's now under two different prime ministers. I'm also extremely grateful to Meloni of Italy, who has pretty much gone against the grain of both popular sentiment in Italy and with the longstanding opinions of the most powerful member of her party. And while I'm not entirely pleased with the results of the election in Turkiye, I'm a bit stunned a fair election can still be held there. I realize that's not directly germane to Ukraine, but rulers for life is the dynamic that Ukraine fought so bravely against, and continues to do so. What happens in Turkiye is of extreme importance. Erdogan and his party are simply not aligned long term with the West, and the direction that Ukrainian people die every day so their country can continue moving towards. I'd like to see any government formed there other than his, even if I have no illusions how effective it can be given that the only real common theme among the opposition is an "anyone but Erdogan" mentality.
  8. I’d put it differently. Elliott has been point man for getting the program up and running, but he’s not going to be Stein Metzger’s boss. CDC will be. CDC had final say. But I’m sure Elliott was instrumental in ways that weren’t always the case for CDC’s other hires. I’m also sure CDC wanted someone Elliott could work with, which is why he was the point man from the the get go. But in terms of salary, program resources, and whether Texas ever heads in another direction, that’s all going to be part of CDC’s responsibilities. Not Elliott’s. That’s what determines final say. But yes. I’m sure Elliott was a critical factor in getting Metzger on board if that’s what has actually happened.
  9. A friend of mine is the pastor for a pretty large church on the west side of the city. They left the Methodist Church a couple of years ago over this issue. But he also has a gay house guest (brother in law) living under his roof with he and his wife right now. They flat out don't believe marriage in the church should be anything but between a man and a woman, and they believe the bible is explicit about that. They also do not believe openly gay people should be ordained as ministers in the faith. But they have a lot of beliefs I don't subscribe to, and vice versa. I still have a tremendous respect for him as a person and a pastor. There is a traditionalist theme that people are trying to paint as the culpability of religion, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. There's almost this belief I see that people think the human race is destined to become more and more tolerant, and that the future of humanity is one of more openness, with anyone opposing it on the wrong side of history. I hope that's true - and that there's no unintentional consequences - but I don't believe it. I believe the history of the human race is one of tribalism, and if the fear mongering and division become intense enough, one side will try to wipe out or otherwise permanently repress the other one. That's repeated over and over again. So the challenge is to not demonize the other side as we naturally fall into our tribes, and to ensure we're strong enough militarily to both defend ourselves and other aligned tribes when those forces seeking violent solutions gather up around the world, as much as possible. I would like to see people be able to practice their faith, while somehow not encouraging overly intense reactions on one side or the other, regardless of how unrealistic that may be. There's a portion of the Methodist Church that feels the Bible can be interpreted to be supportive of gay pastoral leaders, and then there are a lot of people within the Methodist Church who don't agree, and are choosing to leave.
  10. Rumor on volleytalk from someone who has a track record of posting some inside information that Stein Metzger, the only coach at UCLA for their 11 year history, will be the beach volleyball coach at Texas. In terms of beach volleyball hires, that wouldn't just be a home run. That's hitting the ball to Dripping Springs. Of course, women's athletics will be quite the sausage fest among the head coaches, but I want to win.
  11. It's pretty easy to find. https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/who-are-arrested-air-national-guardsman-jack-teixeiras-parents/ Dad was a veteran. Not much known about him. Separated when the son was young. Still lives in the same town. Mom runs a floral shop out of their home. Does a lot of volunteer work for veterans organizations. The key one is the step dad. Retired after 34 years out of the same 102nd intelligence group the son was active in. I'm sure part of the issue with discovering this stuff was the vector. Counter intelligence is trained to look for giving the information to the enemy, not for bragging purposes on a small Discord server, and then having the teens on that server spread the docs to win various arguments on other Discord servers. A lonely kid with a messed up perspective who wanted to be a big shot in some way, with no understanding of what the consequences are for not being able to keep a secret. I'm sure he was confident in his own way that the documents he was sharing were going to stay within his small Discord group, but that's not how it works. Not trying to defend him. I hope they throw the book at him. I'm in full agreement it's fortunate the Russians didn't find out about this, nip it in the bud in some way, then use it to blackmail the kid into sharing more information. It's crazy to me that an E-3 had access to so much material, but I'm sure being the stepson of a 34 year air force veteran who had recently retired from that same unit played a huge role.
  12. “Thomas Jones officially started on the UT beat this week. Jones will cover the football team for the American-Statesman alongside Danny Davis, Kirk Bohls and Cedric Golden. He will also lead the American-Statesman's coverage of the men's basketball, volleyball, softball and soccer programs at Texas.” I guess Danny might still cover women’s Basketball.
  13. BTW, AAS’s Danny Davis will no longer be covering women’s volleyball. Thomas Jones now has those duties. Don’t know how anyone else feels about it, but it’s a huge personal disappointment to me. I loved the way Danny covered the team. I’m going to miss him being on the beat.
  14. Well, when we say a work in progress, it’s all relative. Texas is still going to be a consensus top 5 preseason pick. They’ll still be the overwhelming favorites to win another Big 12 titie. Anything less than one of the top 8 seeds will be a disappointment. I don’t foresee them being the top overall seed, but I do think they have an outside shot at hosting a regional depending on how the non conference season goes. It’s also going to be helpful adding BYU and UH as conference foes. Both of them are fielding Sweet 16 type squads this year, along with Baylor. But yeah, last year was a juggernaut. On the other hand, anything short of a national championship was going to be a disappointment last year, whereas this year an Elite Eight appearance would be good. I’m excited to see how the pieces come together. We still have Carissa Barnes reporting in the summer, and who knows what might happen during the May portal period. But yeah. This isn’t gojng to be another one loss season, that’s for sure.
  15. He's getting paid $3.2 million per year for a job I know they were willing to go as high as $6 million per year, and probably more if it was the wright person. There's no way they think Terry is the best coach available. But there's a feeling he earned his shot at the job, so now he has it. And it won't be a sad three years because I'll keep warm by remembering the Elite Eight run and the best parts of this season. It was a lot of fun.
  16. Again, you and I don't agree. You don't feel like he did anything wrong since the charges were dropped. I feel like he did a lot wrong simply to be in that situation in the first place. To repeat, we can agree to disagree. But you saying Texas did it for optics is simply your opinion. I feel like it was the right thing to do, and I don't give a rat's ass about the optics. But yes. Beard is the best coach we've hired in basketball, and in my opinion had the potential to be a watershed hire for the athletic department as a whole. Him getting arrested was a gut punch for me. But I'm still glad he was fired.
  17. I do not believe that. I believe there are a number of people who were disturbed at what happened. I know people on the staff were disturbed. And their wives. I don't know that people in the administration felt the same way, but I can imagine they did. It's unprecedented to have a college basketball head coach arrested for felony domestic violence. I'm not trying to convince you to feel differently. I couldn't if I tried. I understand what you're saying, and that it's your belief we should have kept Beard so we could continue to field a championship level basketball team. I feel like there's room here to agree to disagree. I don't believe you're espousing violence against women. I don't believe you should hand in your degree. I don't believe you're suddenly a bad person for having a difference of opinion. But we do have a difference of opinion. I don't believe this was about optics. I believe this was more about conviction that Beard was no longer suitable to be the head coach at Texas.
  18. All I'm saying is the guy can recruit. Can he recruit well enough to be successful at Texas? No. But he'll have issues on a number of fronts in that regard. You and I are simply in different places. You're in wait and see mode. I'm in I know who Terry is. I've known who Terry is for a couple of decades. This exercise isn't going to teach me anything new. Instead of thinking about it as a damned if you do and damned if you don't, I think about it as being grateful for a magical season, which earned him the right to fail over the next few years, then we'll move on to the next guy.
  19. 6 years of Shaka is waaaaaaay worse than 3 to 4 more years of Terry. Way worse. For me. We won't be doing breathing exercises at the under 4 minute timeout. That guy drives me bananas. Terry may not be a master class head coach, but I accept him for what he is. He's not going to make me pull my hair out. I'm beyond that. Now, if we extend his contract for results I find uninspiring the way we did with Shaka, I'm going to feel on the more ballistic side, but I don't believe that's going to happen. I realize you're a long ways off from acceptance, which is okay by me. You do your thing. I find you highly entertaining. I love your takes. I think you add a lot to the basketball board. But sometimes I feel like you're going to give yourself a heart attack by taking on anyone who is remotely positive about Terry, or fails to recognize the genius we lost in Chris Beard. But this place would be a lot more boring for me if you weren't around, so I'm glad you do your thing. I consider myself on Team Derka.
  20. It's a marketing tool, not a predictive indicator. Which is to say I'm in agreement. It's great for what it is, but people try to make it into something it isn't.
  21. I'm not quite clear about what you're saying. You're acting as if the guy just got into coaching. There is no question Terry can recruit. He can identify talent. He can help convince players to play for him. This offseason will not determine if Terry can recruit or not. He can. Even at Fresno State and UTEP he attracted talented players. He got Bryson Williams to come with him from Fresno State to UTEP. If/when he's let go at Texas and he gets another assistant job - possibly with Beard where ever Beard ends up - he's going to be a good recruiter there, too. Can he be a compelling figure as the head of the Texas basketball program? I mean, we'll see. I say no, but we all get to find out.
  22. I don't care about being crucified in the media, and I don't care about opposing coaches having ammo in recruiting. If you hire the right guy, he overcomes that. What I do care about is keeping a guy who has been arrested for felony domestic assault. I wouldn't have been able to follow Texas basketball any more if we'd done that. I don't care what happened or didn't happen. You can't be putting yourself in that situation as the head coach at Texas. You just can't. After that there was a certain amount of railroad tracks involved. When Terry was hired, I had a choice as a fan of either rooting for the team to fail so that we could go after another coach, or rooting for the team to succeed so that Terry would be given the job and the opportunity to succeed or fail as the head coach himself. I spent a lot of December with a lot of mixed feelings, but in the end the team was so easy to root for. And I am a Texas fan more than a fan of any specific player or coach. I'm glad I was able to make the switch. It was a really fun tournament run that I will treasure always. At the end of the day Terry deserves a lot of credit for that. The wheels easily could have come off for this past season. Easily. They didn't. I'm not saying he's the only one who was responsible. All the players get credit. All of the staff gets credit. Frankly, Beard gets credit. But Terry was the guy at the top of the pyramid, so to me I tip my hat to him that he kept things from falling apart. That's important to me. So we have a few down years. As long as it's not 6 years like with Shaka, I'm okay with that. Shaka didn't give us a magical Elite Eight run. Far from it. I can be grateful enough to Terry to watch us flounder over the next few years and then hire someone new. I'm not saying that should be anyone else's perspective. For some people they need to feel like Texas is going to compete at a high level under Terry, and that's okay, too. But I feel way more comfortable right now than I did halfway through Smart's second year where I felt like I'd seen enough to want to hit the eject button. I basically wanted to hit the eject button on Terry the moment he was named interim coach. Since that wasn't possible, I made peace with it. I'm good with how things went down. We'll see how it goes with the next guy. In the meantime I'll hope for some fun times in the few years Terry is our head coach.
  23. I didn't say that. I said it's a measurement. Not making the tournament is a measurement. I think it's highly likely Terry never makes the tournament at Texas. But I'm not certain about it. I just don't think he'll have enough to success to keep the job. That's the only thing I'm truly convicted on.
  24. We got an Elite Eight out of it. That's not a small thing. I'm grateful for the season. In my view there is zero chance Rodney Terry earns a contract extension. But for me that's not going to take away from what he did. I could foresee all this the moment Terry was named interim coach. Inherently that's a job interview. It just is. Some folks came at me for expressing mixed feelings about the appointment because it was felt I should be 100% supportive of coach, which is a reasonable take. My view is it simply prepared me for where we are today. Terry's biggest issue - among several - is that in sales parlance he's an order taker, not a closer. Some folks on here would suggest you can be an order taker at Texas, but that's not true. To lead a college sports program into prominence you have to have something about you that is compelling. Order takers have initial success and then they fail. Which is what is going to happen to Terry. And then we'll start over again and see how we do regarding the hiring cycle then. In the meantime he's going to have successes, just like he'll have failures. And the folks who are anti Terry will want to point at every failure as evidence he's not the guy, and claim Beard would have done better. While the pro Terry people (and that includes folks who don't necessarily think he's the right guy, but he's the guy we have, so - hey - why don't we support the guy? You know?) will point to his successes as evidence he's going to be okay, and dismiss all the Beard nonsense as unhelpful speculation that may or may not be true, but he's not here so what good does it do anyway? All I know is that the only measure for a college basketball coach is how they do in the tournament. That's not the greatest measurement, but it's the measurement we have. And Terry is a year off from having his next measurement in that regard. So let's see what happens. I mean, I'm convicted about what's going to happen over the next 3 or 4 years, but I have no idea what's going to happen from season to season. Let's see how it goes.
  25. People like Prigozhin and Girkin amaze me. How do they stay alive constantly tweaking the establishment the way they do when there are so many windows for others? I can’t even imagine navigating the labyrinth the corridors of power in Russia represents. I mean, it’s complicated everywhere throughout history, but for me Russia takes it up a notch by combining politics with an MBA from Organized Crime University.
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