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SL Xpress

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Everything posted by SL Xpress

  1. Yes. I always thought of it as GoBig12.com, but yes. It was affiliated with the AAS. Cox Communications had no idea what to do with it. It was a redheaded step child. It was driving all kinds of traffic but they didn't know how to monetize it. The people who built it had aspirations of it being the official Big 12 forums. TexAgs came from there. As already noted, Hornfans came from there. It's where Geoff Ketchum first started posting as an intern for KEYE. The first big Nebraska board came from there. I'm sure a couple of other schools, too, but I didn't pay much attention to them. Nobody else did, either. What changed message board wise was the world wide web. I accessed the internet prior to then as well, but it required a knowledge of esoteric commands, and search functions were rudimentary or nonexistent. Folks just put up information on college computers and you had to know how to find it. Usenet was the big message board type feature. GoBig12.com was built on the WWW protocol, then Netscape quickly came out allowing us to see the internet graphically. Sure, the internet existed, but there wasn't any kind of heavy usage among us Longhorn fanatics until GoBig12.
  2. I think I'd be keeping an eye open for other opportunities. Use KU as a stepping stone for a better gig. He's still pretty young. But if Oregon isn't going to do what is required to compete at the highest level - and they've made that plain - no reason to stick around. You simply can't win at the highest levels in volleyball without some NIL and portal contributions. That has become obvious. And not just the NIL. You need to be able to provide chartered flights out of Eugene to compete in the Big 10, and Oregon has decided they can't afford that across the board under the terms of their Big 10 admittance. Commercial flights just completely suck out of the Eugene airport, especially to some of the locations in the Big 10 like Happy Valley.
  3. And then changes will happen to the changes. College athletics is about to be has been and will continue to be whipsawed by court rulings until Congress steps in with some sort of legislation.
  4. They've spent money on men's basketball, and this past year they made a couple of big splashes in the portal in women's basketball. Apparently it was all about NIL. I guess volleyball drew the short straw. When you say they let Mike White go, I feel like it's akin to saying North Carolina let Mack Brown go back in the 90s. They weren't willing to match UT's offer, but it's not like they wanted him to leave. Oregon simply doesn't have the resources that big football schools have, and they never will. Smaller enrollment, smaller alumni base, smaller regional population. The football stadium only seats like 54,000. A lack of luxury suites. No luxury suites in their multipurpose arena that hosts basketball/volleyball. They're on half shares of the Big 10 TV contract until the next one is negotiated. If it weren't for Phil Knight evening the playing field they'd have no chance to compete.
  5. This isn't about lawsuits, but internal strife surrounding NIL. While we were exchanging posts I realized volleyball coach Matt Ulmer left Oregon for KU, a seeming downgrade in terms of volleyball programs and resources. Apparently this was all about Oregon not supporting women's volleyball NIL at a level Ulmer found acceptable. It's shocking to me that KU might be willing to do more, but there it is. Their star player immediately transferred to Wisconsin, which does have a good NIL program for volleyball. In an industry with no guardrails regarding labor costs and a lot of irrational emotion dictating market value, the rapid rise in costs to field a roster across a lot of different sports is going to continue to create fractures in programs around the country, regardless of Title IX considerations, and those are at least looming, even if we don't know how the Supreme court will rule on these things, nor how the current legislation/administration will intervene, or if they will. I know Oregon spends money on their men's basketball NIL, and they forked over a bunch for a couple of players this past year for women's basketball. Many of their track and field athletes have robust NIL deals with Downing Street. And of course football is at the top of the class in terms of NIL resources. I guess volleyball drew the short straw.
  6. I don't understand that move even a little bit. I can make some guesses, but Kansas seems like a step down in many ways. I will say having to share the volleyball court/arena with so many other sports is a real bummer. The travel is a nightmare, and because of the half revenue portion Oregon is getting, there's a lot of commercial flights for sports not football or men's basketball, and Eugene isn't exactly the friendliest airport to fly in and out of in terms of flight selection. Portland is better, but it's a 2 hour drive, and still not exactly ideal. And then the Big 10 is obviously a gauntlet compared to the Big 12. But volleyball is one of those sports where that's not necessarily a bad thing. I wonder if he has promises regarding NIL at Kansas while Oregon is focused on NIL for football? I don't actually know the answer. I went up there for the Nebraska match when they set an attendance record (primarily because of all the Nebraska fans that traveled there). I'm stunned by this, really.
  7. He was an outstanding defensive back, and an even better high jumper. Yeah, he high jumped for Texas, to the tune of winning three NCAA national championships in the event, two in indoor and one in outdoor.
  8. Thank you for the link. The information I obtained was from an assistant athletic director at Oregon this past fall based on an answer to a direct question. Their answer was obviously more wishcasting or even obfuscation than fact. There was no reason for them to be completely honest with me. I shouldn't have taken it at face value. That's on me. Thank you for the correction. Edit: I will say I did a browser search on the ongoing case before responding, but obviously not a thorough enough one, or even, I'd say, a competent one.
  9. There is no lawsuit ongoing with female athletes at Oregon. The beach volleyball team sued the university under Title IX but that's been settled.
  10. It is a thing. Not sure what to tell you. I'm not saying it's happening at Texas, but it is definitely happening. I know of specific examples where it absolutely happened.
  11. Right now it's kind of questionable what restrictions they can put on student athletes and then defend it in a court of law. I guess they can maintain you have to be enrolled as a student in order to play sports. But there are plenty of players paying people to take their classes for them. When you're getting paid 6 and 7 figures to play football, it's pretty easy to afford to pay someone to take your classes for you. Then it's up to the integrity of each school whether they're going to turn a blind eye to it or not.
  12. I don't think the original Aggie poster was saying they used to not be gay and now they are. I believe he's saying they used to be tops and now they're bottoms.
  13. I appreciate the other Aggies maintaining the cult when a couple of posters try to make a modicum of sense.
  14. The presidency of the university is open. Eltife should bring in a massive billionaire (because apparently a regular ole billionaire won't cut it any more) with an intense interest in football. The talk about Elon Musk both for and against is beyond asinine, but I see the same talk on message boards around the country. It's pretty much inherent we're posting on message boards because we're mildly mentally unstable about our favorite team, we're helpless to do anything about it, and so we rail into the ether among our fellow mentally unstable cohorts creating arguments and also echo chambers regarding how to solve things upon which most of us will never have an actual impact. The call for some kind of wealthy benefactor to be the savior of the program in the same way Phil Knight is for Oregon is ubiquitous across college football message boards. The idea some folks landed on Elon Musk is a bit absurd, but no more absurd than the violent reaction it precipitated. I'd still take our position over Oregon's. They have revenue generation limitations that aren't going away. They don't have a deep bench of wealthy benefactors, even if their one big whale is emotionally invested in the program's success that's probably unparalleled anywhere else. When he's dead - and he's 86 right now - what was somewhat limitless will become an annual fixed figure. The key thing to understand is that market prices are going to continue to experience massive inflation, especially for players who appear to be can't miss difference makers. So the ability to continue to stay in the game is critical to future success, regardless of whether Texas is number one in NIL funding or not.
  15. Penn State's offseason doesn't seem to be going so well. Lose both top WRs, a former 4 star backup WR, the DC, plus a few bits and bobs. Maybe James Franklin thinks the transfer portal is a top 5 college football team.
  16. Where is the ability to step into the tackle of opponents even though the protection otherwise is pretty good? Which category does that fall under?
  17. I understand that. I was simply rebutting that the PFF narrative was fact. It was speculation. Could be it went down exactly how they speculated. I don't know. But they were very forthright in saying it was no kind of inside information. They simply looked at org charts and that's what they came up with.
  18. People think it started with Switzer. The whole program's success was built on buying veterans returning from WWII. Wilkinson's 47 game winning streak over the course of 5 seasons was a semi pro team. Then regional programs started emulating their success, including Oklahoma State under Jimmy Johnson and Pat Jones, TCU with F.A. Dryer, we know about SMU and A&M. At some point if you weren't willing to go balls deep in this region it was challenging to compete for talent. And all of it stemmed from trying to recruit against Texas, which had every natural recruiting advantage known to man. Bryant was a known bag man aficionado. When Mike Dubose was hired the wealthy alums got together with him, threw a satchel of cash on a table, and announced to Dubose, "This is how we recruit at Alabama." Saban transformed college football recruiting in all kinds of ways, paying agents to bring players to campus. Throwing out uncommittable offers left and right. You had to get to campus for summer camps in order to make it a committable offer, which was often rescinded even if it had been accepted if Saban could upgrade the roster with someone else. Saban was the first to develop the official unofficial visit, which ended up being copied throughout college football, and still exists today. Players and their families are paid for their flights and accommodations to increase the amount of times they visit campus to create an edge in recruiting. Everyone does it now for junior days, camps, barbeques, pool parties, what have you. But Alabama started it. The most hilarious thing during this era was to see fans on message boards talk about players "getting to campus on their own dime." Rrrrrrrrright. As far as enforcement, I find it laughable people think there's some way to enforce pay for play. If I want to pay a college player to endorse my product, who are you to tell me I'm paying outside market prices for them to do so? How is that supposed to get enforced? If they set up a youtube site and I donate money to their channel, is that pay for play or do I just really enjoy their content and want them to continue to put more out there? There is only one body who can make some kind of rules for college football at this point that has any chance of surviving the court system, and that's Congress. And I don't think we're anywhere close to that happening. College sports is going to have to collapse in some major way before congress is going to get involved. Instead, it's printing money hand over fist. Sure, the money isn't being fairly distributed and there's less parity now than there ever has been, but revenues overall continue to increase. But it's like Hemingway's character Mike Campbell says in The Sun Also Rises. "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly." Like any number of industries with unsustainable business models, the collapse of college football's economics is going to be gradual and then sudden. We're in the gradual part right now, where many have nots are going to have to either drop their program or simply admit they're never going to actually be competitive. Thankfully, Texas will always be one of the last ones standing, but just because Texas athletic can survive pretty much any financial crisis this model might throw at them, not everyone will, and eventually it's going to be so bad outside forces are going to step in. But when you have a labor force whose pay rate is governed by an emotional investment in the success of the organization, with no external guardrails in terms of how much compensation can be provided, disaster is inevitable.
  19. You mean the Vince Young that Greg Davis insisted take snaps under center and be a drop back passer while trying to change his throwing motion? That Vince Young?
  20. I'd be okay with taking a step back from making the semifinals as long as we don't fall into the purgatory of irrelevance like from 1984-1997 and then again from 2010 to 2022. Since I don't foresee that happening, especially in this NIL/portal era, I'm not terrible concerned about it. My key thing regarding OL is bringing in enough quality bodies. That has been our issue for decades prior to Flood/Sarkisian. We simply didn't recruit enough OL. Many of them aren't going to pan out, but it's difficult to know until they're on campus for a couple of years. If you're only fielding 12 or so on the roster, that's simply not enough to field high end OLs year after year. I don't see the same issue with our current roster and talent acquisition strategies. The current coaching staff developed the current offensive line after years of it being dogshit. I have confidence they can do it again. Maybe next year is a bit of a downturn, but that's okay.
  21. Allegedly. It's not actually clear what the impetus was for running so many counter running plays. The speculation from PFF was that it was the running backs coach, Carlos Locklyn, because of his association with Florida State head coach Mike Norvell. However, that association consisted of being a weight room assistant, an analyst, and the director of high school relations - one year at Memphis and then another year at Florida State. He was the running backs coach at Oregon for two years, and Oregon also runs a relatively high percentage of counter plays, and HC Dan Lanning is also part of the Mike Norvell coaching tree from his two years at Memphis, but I don't know of any commentary from Buckeye sources, and certainly nothing official, as to what the source was for the change in the running game, or who was responsible for the change or implementation. Not that it's wrong. But I don't think we're being accurate to just throw it out there as factual, when PFF themselves said it was pure speculation on their part. It should be stated within that context.
  22. I don't understand the wringing of hands over some kind of mythical "win now" mentality. I feel like people think this is professional sports, with either some kind of salary cap/luxury tax, or the need for an owner who is so wealthy and so driven to win that they don't care what it costs. There is no salary cap. We'll have to see how it looks after the settlement, but anyone who thinks that will be the final rule set college sports plays with for the next few years is kidding themselves. And until some capable enforcement body is set up that can actually investigate where the money is going and who it's coming from with a high degree of accuracy and can defend their actions successfully in a court of law - both factors whose chances I find negligible in terms of actually becoming reality - we're going to continue to have the wild wild west in terms of compensation for college athletes. The limiting factor really is how many deep pockets see an emotional return on investment from contributing to talent acquisition, specifically on an ad hoc basis. General NIL can be used to budget and provide minimum levels of compensation. But the kind of talent acquisition some of you are so worried about - "have to take advantage of Arch!" can only be provided by whales. I can't speak to each whale's ego, how it's fed, what makes it compelling for them to grant large dispensations to individual players. What I can say is that creating a sense of urgency with "have to take advantage of Arch!" or whatever other artificial sense of urgency that can be created, is effective. If someone is constrained with limited personal wealth to where they can't afford to invest in a college player one year without bankrupting themselves in investing in a college player the next year, they're probably not a good candidate to be approaching in the first place. I know that everyone has a limit. Phil Knight has a limit, and I doubt there's anyone spending as much on a single athletic program than he is at Oregon at every level. If he didn't have a limit Oregon would sign everyone they go after, but that's not what happens. They manage the team budget. They have a very sophisticated operation going on with a list of donors to approach. They make sure if a potential player is throwing off the budget for the entire team they can justify internally, both to the people putting up the cash, and the players already on the roster. Someone like Dillon Gabriel gets a premium, but it's easily explained to the players why that's the case. Someone asking for an absurd amount of NIL money to sign isn't automatically signed. They have to make sense to the roster, both in terms of contributing and in terms of what the overall payment structure is. Same thing with Texas, except Texas has a much deeper bench of donors. But even then, when someone is ponying up the money to grab a special talent, it's an emotional appeal that secures the deal. Not some kind of rational NFL GM approach. Honestly, that's why NIL isn't sustainable as a college football model. There's no guardrails. There's always going to be a Phil Knight type whose emotional fulfillment regarding his alma mater winning a national championship supersedes whatever financial sense it makes to compensate the players. It's still the market driving prices, but it's a market of 17th century tulips. In the meantime, I'm all in favor of going as all in as the big donors are willing to from one year to the next. Next year will take care of itself. And let's face it, the rules are highly likely to radically change from one year to the next, with no effective overseer trying to enforce them. For the foreseeable future, really.
  23. If the screen pass doesn't go for a touchdown we kick a field goal there. And yes, the toss sweep was retarded.
  24. I'm not holding the defense to a higher standard. They played awesome. So did Ohio State's. But it wasn't just a boneheaded play. Allowing Ohio State to score on a screen pass right after the kickoff from the 25 yard line with 20 seconds until half goes a little beyond a boneheaded play. Because it was such a low scoring game, that made a huge difference in the outcome. Ohio State had two touchdown scoring drives. Texas had two touchdown scoring drives. So the difference in the score was the screen pass and the fumble recovery for a touchdown. You don't have the screen pass, you don't have the fumble recovery for a touchdown because we're attempting a field goal there. That's just the facts. It doesn't take away from how awesome the defense played all year long. They especially put on a showcase in short yardage situations, including this game. I'm not willing to dismiss it as "a boneheaded play. Oh well. They're allowed one of those." It changed the entire complexion of the game. It was arguably the key play of the entire ball game. You could see four players take bad angles trying to tackle Henderson around the 50, instead of simply trying to keep him from scoring. That's because they're aggressive and they thought they could cut him off, but it meant that no one tackled him and they get 7 points out of the deal. To me it feels like a "other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" sort of moment.
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