Solar

Pate says we will know the fate of the ACC before the season starts...not too long of a wait.

I wonder what the #1 is ...shocking! Not. Here us what they said about UW VS UM: Both teams will look significantly different since the last meeting in January, including two new head coaches and several new starters on both two-deeps. I didn't know 20-30ish = several. UM put almost 20 kids in the draft. UW has only one returning starter. And that is before getting into the two deeps. Sounds like an order of magnitude level of denial or incompetence on the part of the writer.

If Jedd Fisch wasn't on a layover before, he is now.

The cleanest answer in all this is FSU & Clemson pay the exit fee and cancel existing media rights, then ESPN uses that as grounds to renegotiate the contract with the ACC. The exit fees mask the pain in the short term from the renegotiated contract for those in the ACC that chose to stay. If the rats start to scatter during contract renegotiation it may very well be a pac 2 redo as Fox and ESPN feed on the carcass with scraps going to G5 B12 will be the last one to go. Then the tough work starts of making a new division where the questionable value teams of the legacy B1G and SEC get the boot.

Competition comes in many forms. Let's face it. OSU and WSU finally won something. And if Pac 12 leadership supported by outgoing school presidents was dumb enough to set a bad legal precedent, then they deserve to lose....and by logic, OSU and WSU deserve to win. Let's tip the cap to them and move on like everything else. Judging by the new CFP contract arrangement, ex p12 schools beat them this time. and the pac 2 may never win this type of competition again.

Penn St. put higher than Texas too. This writer is a major LEGACY B1G homer. The tune will change once once we start beating down the B1G teams. Not only will they need to pay attention to us for real, they will want to say how awesome we are to maximize the value of their losses as "good losses." I mean you can't ignore or claim a team sucks if they beat you down.

Noah Whittington is practicing doing kick return drills which is a great sign. He should be fully ready to go by the season.

NCAA has been begging Congress for an exception to the anti-trust laws and never sniffed the inside of a committee chamber, so St. Nicks is having more success. But yeah, I'm not sure Congress is the answer, and I think Congress themselves shares that same skepticism. Anything they do pass is likely to be stuck as the law of the land for a VERY long time with no opportunities to tweak it significantly outside of courts ruling portions of it as unconstitutional and unenforceable.

ESPN nailed it with James. He arguably was better than Bucky this last year given his efficiency as a runner getting play calls that shouldn't necessarily be explosive but still getting 7 yards a carry! If he stays healthy he's going to shine as one of the best backs in the country.

Lanning doesn't tell us jack about what happens in practice. We just have to trust his process to give us results. Besides that, football just means more in the SEC. We love it here but it's more of a hobby than an identity or lifestyle, so in the off-season it's time to pay more attention to other things. We do get excited for the spring game though.

If the 2 minute warning is equal to a 30 second timeout, I'm fine with it, but I'm sure they will make it a full blown media timeout in length which is a bait and switch of the changes last year to shorten the game with more running clock.

I think Michigan has a dropoff. The entire staff was virtually turned over and they lost a ton of production to the draft. Being able to reload enough to stay a top 10 team is questionable. Alabama is wierd. If DeBoer is to have success it is now with the current talent on the roster, not later. But I do wonder if he loses to somebody he shouldn't, dropping them down a few notches. He's a great coach but the polar opposite of Saban's most trademark attributes: recruiting great and destroying teams they are supposed to beat. DeBoer can't recruit his way out of a paper bag and the guy loves to play with his food, always playing to the level of his opponent.

Will it lead to more huddling like the nfl? Interesting it only turns off at 15 seconds left on the play clock. If you hustle a bit, the coaches can audible for the QB if the see something once everyone is lined up. They can also tell them to be careful about certain defensive looks the QB might miss. I imagine that will put all the OCs up in the box from now on. Will also diminish the advantage of a Bo Nix type that can see an understand all the looks and options at the line. The OC can now do that for them.

The real question is if one or both of the conference champ teams sit their starters for the game, would the playoffs committee punish them for it with worse seeding and state that was the reason, or would they disregard the outcome of the game due to the started sitting?

The big hard to answer question is who will be on the other side of the table. Will it be multiple entities (NCAA, CFP, Conferences, and Schools)or a single entity tasked with negating on behalf of them?

Again, 115 years of an illegal mandate the NCAA has been carrying around, and finally enough money to call it out legally. If fairness restricts earnings of players on the whole, the NCAA has to butt out. They can't regulate NIL, salaries and benefits in any way going forward. The conferences are engaged in business and the players are the employees. Any hope of the NCAA wielding a determination of the path forward from here is a pipe dream. If you don't like it, then harass you US congressperson to put into law an exception to the Sherman Anti Trust act for college athletics. NCAA has been trying to get that done, but getting no traction whatsoever.

"NCAA recruiting pay-for-play is here, and the only surprise is how fast it happened." Stewart Mandel of The Athletic." With all due respect to Stewart and his perspective, the NCAA has been violating the Sherman Anti-Trust act for 115 YEARS! It's taken way to freaking long.

The NCAA clearly only retains lawyers that are willing to tell them what they want to hear. The amount of money is irrelevant. They've screwed themselves and will lose virtually any challenges to enforcement of rules that are directly or indirectly tied to the compensation a player can get outside of a scholarship.

The NCAA is really an interesting story. The Sherman Anti Trust act was passed in 1890 The NCAA was founded 16 years later when President Roosevelt was concerned with 18 players dying the year before and got the Ivy League to form a regulatory body, but they also opportunistically required student athletes to be uncompensated as part of the governing rules. 115 years later the Supreme Court finally realized that it is a big racket violating the Sherman Anti Trust act in 2021's Alston vs. NCAA. IT TOOK 115 YEARS TO FIGURE THAT OUT!? Here is the final paragraph of the ruling (including a shout-out to Eugene!): To be sure, the NCAA and its member colleges maintain important traditions that have become part of the fabric of America—game days in Tuscaloosa and South Bend; the packed gyms in Storrs and Durham; the women’s and men’s lacrosse championships on Memorial Day weekend; track and field meets in Eugene; the spring softball and baseball World Series in Oklahoma City and Omaha; the list goes on. But those traditions alone cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated. Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law. Here we are 3 years later and the NCAA suffering from memory loss despite a precedence setting ruling by the Supreme Court is at it again.

Does anybody in the two deep play in the SEC and B1G championship games in this new envisioned format where the conference championship teams get an autobid? I don't think they do. Heck, the coaches themselves won't let them on the field. Need them fresh for the playoffs. Worthless game=worthless effort. I don't think Petit thought this one through, or maybe he is just trying to keep his media overlords happy. "See I tried!" Or may e this is the whole point. Contractual requirements to play the conference championships are met, but the games impact is neutralized. Still not good for any sport to play exhibition games during the season and act like they matter.

I sure hope B1G and SEC's guidance includes recognition that there is more value in the top two teams playing separate playoff games than having a conference championship. It's in the SEC and B1G's interest to have the teams in their conference do the least damage to themselves prior to playoff seeding. The only thing a conference championship does for them is lower the quality of opponent for the loser of the conference championship game. And audience fatigue has to be a thing. Who wants to see the same teams play each other 3 times, especially if one team won the first two?

Mario's fatal flaw has always been his inability to constructively process constructive criticism. He preaches tough love. He can dish it out, but can't take it himself. In addition to his lack of change over the years in coaching approach, he also doesn't have an inner circle (He admitted when he left he doesn't have one which made the decision to leave Oregon for Miami tougher). Those things are proof he just can't see any way that is not his way and anyone that doesn't see it his way will be pushed away. It brings up a saying I have. "If someone really wanted to change, then they would already have done it." Mario is the ultimate example.

I think the order of the top few teams in the B1G is: OSU UO USC Penn State Michigan That does not take into account strength of schedule though which is what hurts USC and to a lesser extent UO. But Michigan is a rebuild on the coaching side and with the loss of 17 starters to the draft at combine level ability. USC will be much improved, but are still a great OL and DL away from being a team nobody wants to play. Penn State always seems to lack the baller mentality and don't have the talent to overcome that against really good teams. I do see the B12 taking the baton from the PAC12 as the conference of parity going forward. Any given Saturday half the teams can beat the other half.

I was wondering how they would try balance fairness since women's ball's are smaller/lighter and their three point line is closer to the basket. But then I dug around for stats. NBA average 3pt % is currently 36.7 for the league. There was no equivalent roll up for the WNBA, but the average seemed to be in the low 30's with the New York Liberty being a massive outlier at 42%. Not coincidentally, that is Sabrina's team. So even though the ball is smaller and the 3 point line is closer the women do shoot worse than the men from their respective 3 point range. So statistically Sabrina was actually at a disadvantage to Steph if she shot the women's ball from the women's line. BUT she decided to shoot the women's ball from the men's distance! That's not something she has repped in practice for a decade like Steph, yet she barely lost! I'm going to go out on a strong limb here and say Sabrina's shooting accuracy is the best in the history of the sport, mens or women's. She is a way bigger statistical outlier than Steph who is a shooting legends in his own right. The respect she is getting from Steph and the NBA players is real. They know greatness when they see it.

I'll be happy to move on from the Mario Cristobal era block font. It's tough to make a uni pop without getting too busy. I wonder if going to the B1G will make them try to look more conservative/historical, or just focus on us and do something innovative? I hope it is the latter.. That being said, Im all for throwback uniforms we wore when we beat Ohio State and Michigan in the past, hehe. Just a friendly reminder to the B1G, "We're here to destroy you."