Arkstfan

They go in the meeting supposedly with enough 6+6 votes to make it a nasty fight and come out with 5+7 and completely out of the blue are talking about adding two or four teams to the field for 2026.

So we went from G5 and P2 fighting to preserve 6+6 to approving 5+7 for 2024 and 2025 and talk of going to 14 or 16 for 2026 the contract that will be bid on by multiple companies. Think you can expect 6+8 or less likely 7+7 for a 14 team playoff and 7+9 or less likely 8+8 for a 16 team format. In a nutshell, SEC and B1G are selling to the rest that the contract for 2026 and future will have real bidding and will be a blockbuster and they can “afford” to invite more conference champions but they need at-large slots so a couple teams don’t suck the spots up every year increasing disparity in their own ranks

Congress or the IRS via letter ruling need to do the obvious. Donations to support professional sports or athletic organizations offering a mixture professional and amateur athletics are not charitable and should not be tax deductible. The Federal government shouldn’t forego $37,000 in revenue because the owner of a chain of cannabis dispensaries and used car lots loves the Sooners and gave them $100,000. Between 2005 and 2022 Oregon pulled in $969 million with taxpayers subsidizing at least $230 million of that via deductions. If they are separating and going pro much harder to keep a straight face arguing it should be deducted

I doubt it. The schools who give up will go the way of the Canton Bulldogs and Duluth Eskimos. They either give up and leave for something affordable or give up on football completely. If they think they need a replacement team then expect to pay a few hundred million to buy in.

If pay to play becomes the norm and is truly free market, there are no more 28-35 schools who can truly compete. Anyone else is hoping to be a successful MLB small market team. Problem is there are another 30 or so who will feel obligated to try to keep up and all or close to it will fail because they will overspend vs their capacity, or they overspend for a few critical players, they make the playoff as champions and get blasted by the second place Big 10 or third place SEC in the first round. The big investment in Joe Stud comes to an end because he can get same money or close to it from a team that can make it to the finals or semis. Basically until the 1950's a scholarship was whatever the school or conference said it was. The NCAA's only input for decades was that players had to be enrolled. Eventually NCAA was drug into the mess and a scholarship was capped at tuition, books, fees, housing, and meals with a small cash stipend called "laundry money" that was capped at $15 a month. Until 1973 football scholarships had no cap, some top programs awarded as many as 150 just to warehouse talent. 1973 brought the 105 limit which became 95 then 85. Until around 2005 or so there was no minimum number of scholarships. 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and not long after the University Division schools opened fall camp for the centennial season of college football. Schools had anywhere from 150 to zero on scholarship. You had conferences with no limit, 105 limit, 85, 75, 70 limits. Conferences generally didn't even make out the conference schedule, the ADs did it. In the SEC team with the best winning percentage was the champion as long as you played at least five conference games. That year you had SEC teams playing 5, 6, or 7 league games. Tennessee went 5-1 winning the championship over LSU who went 4-1. We CAN survive and thrive in a college football universe where the starting QB at Ohio State makes a million a year and the starting QB at San Jose State makes $40,000 over the scholarship, a universe where the 85th guy on scholarship at Georgia makes $30,000 and the 85th guy at FAU gets a scholarship and glad to have it. What we can't survive is if Memphis starts roster spending like Iowa State or Colorado State spends like Kansas or Oklahoma State tries to keep pace with OU. Everyone has been spending like crazy to get facilities to keep up with the P5 boys, that's possible. It's a capital expense with a long life and debt can finance it. Annual spending is a whole nuther beast and keeping pace will be out of reach. Collective bargaining can keep things in check. SEC might negotiate a five million cap with a $20,000 minimum. Big 12 might negotiate a $3 million cap and $6000 minimum per player and AAC might go with $1 million and no player minimum but have to spend at least 75% of the cap. Personally I think best outcome is SEC and Big Ten pick off what they want from ACC, likely some mix of Virginia Tech, UVA, UNC, maybe Duke or NC State to plug a couple holes and Florida State and Clemson based on TV value. They secede and to maximize TV money go to a 10 or even 12 game conference schedule. Sun comes up and suddenly the Big 12 and ACC remnant understand they are out of the club and they can dial back the spending. Now the folks like San Diego State and Memphis are no longer looking for that last golden ticket they thought was out there. If you look at where Big 10 and SEC are now they just don't need much to become untouchable, not saying all their current members can keep up but they could be a real beast and I'm not sure its a bad thing if they leave. It's if the Houston's and SMU's and Memphis' are in some semblance of the club that the fecal matter is randomly distributed by the air movement device.

If the 6+6 had been in place in 2020 Pac-12 would have been out. The champions of AAC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Sun Belt were the six highest rated champions. I want 6+6 to remain but Pac-12 getting a Power 5 share would be a disaster because that fat cut of money increases the odds they can pick off schools from the G5 and create another round of instability. As it stands there's a good chance MWC tells them join or be independent and that's the only options they have.

At this point unions are the absolute best thing that could happen. If you have a collective bargaining agreement you can set salary caps, you can limit transfers, you can set compensation agreements to release a player to another school.

If Florida State can go to a private equity group with an offer in hand from SEC or B1G and is willing to give up a high enough percentage of revenue, sure someone will make them a deal. Question is whether the leaks indicating that they will join Big 12 if neither invites is serious. We've had SEC connected reporters saying the votes aren't there to add Florida State or Clemson. At one time B1G was supposedly very interested in possibly adding some mix of UVA, UNC, Florida State, and Georgia Tech. Having just added four from Pac-12 the appetite to grow any time soon may not be there and taking a non-AAU even harder to push through. The Big XII boasts of its stability via grant of rights, do you really invite a school that busted or bought its way out of a GOR? Florida State has toyed with arguing sovereign immunity because Florida has a very strong set of statutes and case law. Supposedly stronger than Texas, ask Mike Leach's family how much Tech ended up paying out after being found to have breached his contract. If you put yourself in the shoe of a university president considering the application of Florida State, how willing are you to vote yes if they used state law to declare they aren't bound by agreements they signed? Again if they bust or buy out of a massive grant of rights, do you view them as someone you want to make an equity partnership with?

Spelling, punctuation, grammar gets highlighted when you are trying to sort out the meaning of a contract or statute. Pleadings, it is rarely relevant. In Maine the lack of a comma in the state's overtime statute led to milk drivers getting overtime. Exempted was The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: The lawsuit came down to whether the legislature meant to exempt "packing for shipping or distribution" which would be packing goods for either shipping or distribution or they meant that as two independent items "packing for shipping" being one item and "distribution" an independent item. Dairy believed they were separate items so milk delivery drivers were exempt from overtime because they work in distribution. Court held that since there was no Oxford comma or serial comma after distribution to clearly indicate that the intent was to make those two independent activities that it should be read as one activity. $5 million in back pay was ordered.

Happens all the time and you don't want it to happen before certain judges who are really good at such because they will embarrass you which is worse than losing. The late Arkansas Supreme Court Justice George Rose Smith was a beast. In 1947 he wrote a law review article just tearing the state Supreme Court up for shoddy writing and logic. Ended up running for Supreme Court and served from 1948 to 1986. A few people called him out for that law review article from 1947 and he offered a $100 ($1200 in today dollars) reward to anyone who ever found a grammatical mistake in any opinion he authored and it was never claimed. His idea of a hobby was creating crossword puzzles selling them to numerous publishers including the New York Times. Most of his NY Times rejections were for making puzzles that were too hard. But most judges aren't going to catch anything beyond the most jarring errors because they are skimming a lot to keep caught up.

Likewise it was becoming clear that there was an incredibly serious risk that we could not feed ourself as a nation. There were no chemical fertilizers that were cost effective until the Harber-Bosch process was developed. Until then there were only organic fertilizers that were cost effective and mining of guano was a major industry. Fun trivia. During WWII the US laid claim to a number of small islands in the Pacific as potential bases. Several of them it turned out that US had actually claimed as territory in the 19th century because there were deep layers of hardened bird crap that were mined to use as fertilizer. Soil exhaustion was a critical issue. Erosion was a major crisis that finally came to a head during the severe drought that clobbered the Plains states and much of the south during the 1930's with some areas being in a drought for 8 years which led to the dust bowl. Norman Borlaug gave us the third key to food security (along with proper land management and chemical fertilizers) by developing the better strands of wheat that produced more grain per stalk and were more resistant to adverse weather. In span of basically 30-40 years the US went from struggling to feed itself to being a huge exporter of food. Along with teachers colleges and agriculture colleges, mechanical arts or engineering became a major function as the Industrial Revolution evolved into the modern assembly line and rapid product development especially consumer goods. It is really amazing that in the span less than forty years the US survived two major wars, three periods of food shortages, a deadly flu epidemic, an economic disaster that had as much as 25% unemployment and rode through most of it with a sense of optimism and community.

Teacher college or agriculture

That's about it.

It's FSU. I think about the great deal Chicago did with parking revenue. Did a 75 year lease and it took the equity group 13 or 14 years to make back the lump sum. I can just see Florida State doing a 50 year deal and within 10 realizing the investors have made their money back and the next 40 years is pure profit.

It took Utah 6 years to be competitive in the Pac-12, TCU needed three years in Big XII. In the G5 it's all over the place. Schools that left Sun Belt for CUSA as a group won more first two years in CUSA than in Sun Belt. UTSA was immediately competitive. JMU, Georgia Southern, Jacksonville, Liberty all immediately competitive. Georgia State and WKU moving up got blasted. It will be interesting to see how the new SEC and Big Ten teams do. TAMU did well, not win their division well but better than in Big XII well. Mizzou won the east in second and third years.

Go to the game next year. You can do all the fun stuff, stop at the Blind Tiger in Shreveport my favorite lunch spot when I worked down there, Flip off the Louisiana Tech this exit sign, say what's up to ULM, check out the battlefield at Vicksburg, throw out another what's up to USM. Best crab soup I've had in my entire life at Felix's Fish camp out by the battleship, eat char-grilled oysters at Wintzell's, snack on fresh roasted (roasted not boiled blech) peanuts at A&M Peanut House downtown and get some candy to snack on at your hotel. Grab breakfast downtown at Spot O Tea, the eggs cathedral get all the noise but the seafood eggs Benedict are banging. You've got Orange Beach nearby and Dauphin Island. Can do a quick in and out at the Mardi Gras Museum, Mobile will insist you not leave without knowing Mardi Gras in the US started there. Oh and some of you old heads might remember a poster from our board called FaninLa who was on the Independence Bowl board. He was at the museum out by the USS Alabama for one of the bowl games, discovered the F16 he flew when he switched from flying the F4 is in the museum and he mostly enjoyed the jokes about the museum trying to make him part of the display. He quit posting when he switched to a wife that liked him. I love Mobile. They have a great situation down there, LSU is actually the closest P5 program to the city. Means local TV guys can't personally cover Bama and Auburn except in rare situations because their stations won't pay the travel.

Texas State has a president who is very supportive of athletics. He was faculty athletic rep at OU for years, then chancellor (Campus CEO) at Arkansas State. That said, made an absolutely awful AD hire who "retired for health reasons" after a year and supported renewing an embarrassingly dreadful men's basketball coach, I think solely because his best player, a potential NBA caliber player had tweeted he was returning for another year. Coach gets a new two year deal instead of contract lapsing. Ink's barely dry and Da U's Lifelock funded NIL bought the kid on spring break when he went to Miami on spring break to visit his high school coach and he reportedly shopped the kid to Miami, FIU, FAU, UF, FSU, and GT. Not sure how the kid is able to sign an NIL deal on a student visa but immigration law ain't my bag. So they've got leadership that will back athletics but doesn't have best record of making good choices. If President Selfie has a good AD they'll do well.

They may be opposed but the city put together a fat package to get the Grizzlies. When they started shopping St Louis, Las Vegas, Anaheim, San Diego, New Orleans, Kansas City, Louisville, and Memphis were all in though Anaheim was supposedly the leader until the other show dropped. Anaheim wanted the owner to buy the then Mighty Ducks who were struggling to find a buyer. In the end came down to Memphis and Louisville and Memphis won out because FedEx promised more than Yum! Brands was willing to commit.

One thing I like about bowls is lead time. Now I missed the Camellia because I'd booked three nights at the lodge at Mt Magazine State Park (it's awesome, every room has a balcony overlooking the valley) so wife and I didn't get home until Thursday, game was Saturday. Just didn't have the energy to drive 6 1/2 hours. But it beat the playoff days in I-AA when you found out Sunday where you were on Saturday from a fan standpoint. Writer for the Athletic had a nice piece talking about how the "throwaway" G5 bowls are better than the P5 also ran games because so many in the P5 are conditioned to think season is failure without a playoff or NY6 bid.

OH one more thing. I do expect things to change up with the playoff. Next year what would normally be the first Saturday of the bowl season will have three playoff games. The following Saturday has four playoff games. I expect our usuals like Frisco, First Responder, Camellia, Mobile, NOLA will become midweek games if they make it long term. Wouldn't be surprised to see some bowls played between January 2nd and January 18 next year to keep the hype up for the playoff.

Not much love for free market capitalism here. The NCAA used to keep the number of bowl games under a tight cap and it wasn't unusual for some teams with a lot of wins to miss out. 1975 11-0 Arkansas State, as well as runner up 8-2 La Tech. MVC Champ 7-4 Tulsa, MAC had champ in bowl but not 9-2 Ball State, 8-2-1 Central Michigan, and 8-3 Bowling Green. The PCAC (Big West) had champ SJSU out at 9-2, nor Long Beach at 9-2, nor 8-3 SDSU. in the Pac-8 8-3 and ranked Cal missed a bowl but 7-4 USC made one. 8-3 ECU and App State in the Southern missed bowls. 9-2 Arizona missed a bowl game. 9-2 Rutgers, 8-3 Notre Dame, and 8-3 Virginia Tech left out. Imagine what happened in recruiting afterward, left out of a bowl then you bump up against a 7 win South Carolina, NC State or USC that made a bowl. No shot at winning what was already a tough recruiting battle. Go up against a school that was in a league with a bowl tie and you didn't have one? Good luck again. Fast forward to 1985. Left out was 8-2-1 Miami (OH) and 8-4 Utah (played at Hawaii). Few extra bowls helped out. 1995 Well Miami (OH) misses at 8-2-1 despite beating Big Ten champion Northwestern on the road. No one else with 8 misses but it didn't hurt that Alabama and Miami (FL) were under bowl bans. People interested in hosting bowl games had finally said the magic words. Antitrust violation and the NCAA rolled over. In my perfect world, bowl eligibility comes down to this. No team with 6 wins can be invited until every team with 7 or more is placed and no team with less than six until every team with 6 or more is placed. After that let the markets determine if we have too many bowl games. Haven't been many games fold in recent years. I do expect some to close up thanks to the playoff but if someone is willing to pay to show the game who really cares? If you have an antenna you've seen some of the junk channels like Grit and Cozi that sometimes show up in the basic satellite, cable, streaming packages. They run long annoying ads for stuff you'd probably never buy but someone obviously does buy or the commercials would go away. I'll watch 5th place CUSA vs 6th place MAC if I'm in the mood to watch football and that's the best game available.

I say Memphis State because I grew up with it being Memphis State. Never understood the passion to drop state off a name, in my experience I think it adds flair. I understand wanting to change SW Texas State to Texas State. One time in a shop in Little Rock was looking at all the sports stuff, clerk asked if he could help. Said I'm looking for something more than just Arkansas. Oh like what? Arkansas State. Three schools were on our hate list. Memphis State, Loser Tech, and SW Louisiana. Utterly indifferent to La Tech now but I might just take a 2-10 season if the wins were over Louisiana and Memphis. I'd call em West Tennessee Teachers but too long to be fun.

Word has been that a private equity firm is standing by to hand them the money in exchange for a percentage of revenue.

And reality is in 2024 for a married couple filing jointly the standard deduction is $29,200 not a lot of people hit that. I owe $50,000 on a 2.125% mortgage. Median household income in Texas was $102,500. Unless that median household has 29% of their income tied up in deductions itemizing makes no sense. Hell 2019 I had $13,000 in out-of-pocket medical when I was in cancer treatment (quit counting Blue Cross's outlay when it topped $100,000) and I still couldn't itemize. Person with real money wanting to fund players is going to work through a collective or other entity to hire the player to do some insta or TikTok posts for an inflated price to promote their business and have a shot at deducting as a business expense. Of course a publicly trader won't go above real value and closely held won't unless they feel certain no shareholder will challenge. I'm not a fan of the NIL collective tip jar system, I mean I contribute to A-State's collective, I just don't like the system. Really needs to be paid via the school and have a collective bargaining agreement.

They swung and missed trying to land the Grizzlies from Vancouver. Birmingham bought thousands of tickets from UAB for years and years. UNLV pays something like a million a year to rent Raiders stadium but the stadium pays UNLV like two million to keep Sam Boyd Stadium closed (why merged USFL/XFL won't have a team in Las Vegas, there is no acceptable venue. USC has a 99 year lease on LA Coliseum and the land the LAFC soccer stadium is on. LAFC owns the stadium but leases the land and parking lots from USC so USC's $1.3 million a year lease isn't a bad deal at all.