F the NCAA

[pdub]

After so many years of talking about this, you still don't quite grasp it.
I want college basketball to be less like pro basketball.
That's pretty much it.

Contracts in college basketball?
That is more like pro basketball.
Thus:

[jfish26]

After so many years of talking about this, you still don't quite grasp it.
I want college basketball to be less like pro basketball.
That's pretty much it.

Contracts in college basketball?
That is more like pro basketball.
Thus:

I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm just guessing that if the cat's not being put back into the bag, from a money standpoint, isn't it less bad if the money at least keeps people in place? And calms down the churn?

Not intended to be a gotcha or antagonistic at all.

[pdub]

I guess?
My favorite pub has basically already become a 'cocktail speakeasy' with artisanal buffalo sliders.
Keeping the 'new and improved' menu consistent doesn't mean much to me if it's already shitty.

I can't help but see Hunter Dickinson and think 18 dollar double infused cherry blossom gin with homemade bitters and fresh squeezed locally grown fig juice called something ridiculous like Blushing Dogma.

[Back2Lawrence]

Pineapple wedge and umbrella garnish?

[pdub]

“The people hating on me would squeeze fig juice for a $10,000 [a year] increase.”

[TDub]

diverging from the current mess of a discussion for a quick second. I've noticed this trend of hip new bars calling themselves "speakeasys" Doesn't advertising and promoting yourself as a speakeasy immediately disqualify you from actually being a speakeasy? I mean the entire point was that it was a secret bar to drink at yea? So, if everyone knows.......you aren't one?

Kinda like how if you have to tell people how funny or cool or tough or awesome you are the less probability that you are actually funny,cool, tough or awesome?

[pdub]

Yea.
They generally suck.

PDT ( Please Dont Tell ) was a legit secret bar for a while behind Crif Dogs in NYC.
That was kinda cool.

There was a 'speak easy' in Portland called Lincolns where at first they wouldn't tell you how to get in. It spread on social media very quickly though...but before that I remember going downstairs to where it was and having to figure out how to get in ( ATM on the wall had a hidden lever ).

[ousdahl]

My brother made me go to one of them in Denver last summer.

Had to go like knock on the door of what looked like a walk-in freezer at an ice cream joint.

Then this surly hipster dood opens and asks what the hell you want.

Umm..drinks?

He says he’ll check if there’s room for you and come back.

Like 10 minutes later he comes back. Says he has a table for us. We go in. The place is dark, cramped, and otherwise like half full.

The cocktail list is extensive, all in the $20 range, mostly with ingredients I’ve never heard of.

My brother goes straight for the sweetest fruitiest most over the top expensive drink on the menu. I ask if any are less sweet, maybe just more liquor forward. No, not really. I ask if I can just get like a dry gin martini, or maybe an old fashioned. He acts like that’s literally too old fashioned for this place. Okay, how about an old fashioned but with no sugar. He’s not amused.

I end up settling on some kinda craft lager. For $16. But at least it came in a fancy glass?

[Overlander]

diverging from the current mess of a discussion for a quick second. I've noticed this trend of hip new bars calling themselves "speakeasys" Doesn't advertising and promoting yourself as a speakeasy immediately disqualify you from actually being a speakeasy? I mean the entire point was that it was a secret bar to drink at yea? So, if everyone knows.......you aren't one?

Kinda like how if you have to tell people how funny or cool or tough or awesome you are the less probability that you are actually funny,cool, tough or awesome?

The Owl Lounge in Tucson is the coolest and closest I have come to an actual speakeasy.

It is in an 1800s Spanish Colonial neighborhood, in an old mortuary.
My buddy from HS and KU took my wife and I there.

It was a blast, and the drinks were a steal at $25/per

No way I could have found it with 4 Indian scouts and a GPS without my friend

[jfish26]

Yea.
They generally suck.

PDT ( Please Dont Tell ) was a legit secret bar for a while behind Crif Dogs in NYC.
That was kinda cool.

There was a 'speak easy' in Portland called Lincolns where at first they wouldn't tell you how to get in. It spread on social media very quickly though...but before that I remember going downstairs to where it was and having to figure out how to get in ( ATM on the wall had a hidden lever ).

There was a brief moment in the late 2000s where some places pulled it off without it being over kitschy or Disnified. But then phone internet grew up to the point where you could figure all of this out right away, and the whole thing also got waaaaaaay too hokey and themed.

[pdub]

It was a blast, and the drinks were a steal at $25/per

wut
With tip I can buy a bottle of Espolon for that.

[TDub]

$25 a drink? that's a case of coors.

[jfish26]

Christ almighty Dana.

https://theathletic.com/5118467/2023/12 ... r-schools/

I generally like her stuff, but every now and then her access-merchant loyalty to sources is over the top.

She essentially says in this column that programs cannot afford to set aside $8mm/year to fund their end of player compensation.

One - we're talking about the amount of money that one (1) high-end football or basketball coach costs.

Two - she points to collateral damage in non-revenue sports. I'm sorry, I'm just not wasting any tears on country club sport kids not getting scholarships that are funded off the backs of artificially undercompensated basketball and football players.

(Three - don't even pretend to tell me schools should cry poor, when the schools eagerly do bizarre shit like send kids from Los Angeles to Maryland and Pennsylvania and New Jersey, or kids from Orlando to Tucson and Provo and Boulder, for Tuesday afternoon field hockey games or whatever.)

There is PLENTY of money to make all of this work without catastrophe.

To illustrate the most obvious part of the "how" to that, let me do some amateur cryptography on the column:

Where is the extra money coming from, and better yet where is it going? Title IX will require that some of the funding goes to women’s sports, but it’s still going to feel like an episode of Oprah’s Favorite Things; only in this one, she skips every other audience member. Now you get a car. But not you. Fund this sport but not that one, or this athlete but not that one. The left tackle, not the right. The goalkeeper, not the striker.

Coaches have lamented that NIL would be the downfall of locker-room chemistry and honestly, it largely sounded ridiculous. Capitalism allows some people to make more than others. But it is one thing for an outside entity — or even a collective — to determine a player’s value; it is another altogether for a school and/or coach to assign a dollar figure athlete by athlete or sport by sport. (The school might have to tapdance around that, anyway, lest it look like it is directly paying athletes, which would make athletes employees.)

ALSO, to the "another thing altogether" - this happens ALL OF THE FUCKING TIME in non-revenue sports. The vast majority of athletic scholarships are partial. Absolutely, coaches are already, all of the fucking time, telling one soccer player that she gets a 50% scholarship, and another soccer player that she gets 10%. And yet, the world has spun.

There are problems with player compensation. But, you get VERY far down the list before you get to "there isn't enough money."

[pdub]

To think that these changes won't be major advantages for larger schools over smaller ones ( yes they already had an advantage but this will just super size it ) would, in my opinion, be naive.

[jfish26]

To think that these changes won't be major advantages for larger schools over smaller ones ( yes they already had an advantage but this will just super size it ) would, in my opinion, be naive.

I think that's absolutely true in football. I would not be so sure in basketball.

[pdub]

I would be on a high level basis.
Fordham isn't getting 15 million dollars a year from Adidas.

There of course will be blips where say a small school has a wealthy alum or set of boosters ready to splurge on a dude.

[jfish26]

I would be on a high level basis.
There of course will be blips where say a small school has a wealthy alum or set of boosters ready to splurge on a dude.

Which might have just happened at Rutgers.

I've been approaching this from a perspective that what is mostly happening here is a reallocation of existing money that is already in the system.

From that perspective, I would think that the changes here will be, especially in basketball, democratizing. I would think that moving spend away from chunky, institutional things (like coaches and administrators and locker rooms with motion simulators and dorms with bowling alleys) should really diminish the institutional-level advantages historically enjoyed by the entrenched powers.

From that perspective also, you can easily see why the coaches and administrators would be leaning on their media friends to help launder this crying-poor thing. It's essentially - take it to the Politics board - the same discussion we have about CEO pay and the hazy line between profiteering and inflation. Those who have most directly benefited financially from the "old" approach to college sports are of course reacting negatively to the gravy train getting derailed.

(And it's here again that I point to the profound strategic idiocy in coaches and administrators letting all of this simply break rather than managing toward a soft landing.)

[Overlander]

It was a blast, and the drinks were a steal at $25/per

wut
With tip I can buy a bottle of Espolon for that.

Part of the experience, and the bartender was freaking amazing.

[pdub]

https://www.espn.com/college-football/s ... oregon-usc

Many of the top quarterbacks linked to seven-figure price tags are eager to exploit the circumstances, especially the ones without strong NFL outlooks who realize this could be their biggest sporting payday.

But can a school sit it out? That's a big risk, too, if you remember the lack of viable arms available after spring ball last year.

As a result, there's a cutthroat market for blue bloods, so it's not a surprise that some with the biggest known NIL purses have been linked to the top players.

[jfish26]

https://www.espn.com/college-football/s ... oregon-usc

Many of the top quarterbacks linked to seven-figure price tags are eager to exploit the circumstances, especially the ones without strong NFL outlooks who realize this could be their biggest sporting payday.

But can a school sit it out? That's a big risk, too, if you remember the lack of viable arms available after spring ball last year.

As a result, there's a cutthroat market for blue bloods, so it's not a surprise that some with the biggest known NIL purses have been linked to the top players.

I would say that anyone who suffered through the last 15 years of KU football would agree that a QB is worth it!