Robert C

It’s not even a head start - it’s really an attempt to not put themselves completely behind the eight ball. Early signing day is two weeks away. You’re watching the new normal take shape.

I’m interested to see how close to $250 million Kelly’s fairy godmother got him. Halfway maybe? I’m also really curious to to see which coordinators get insane raises this year.

I already wanted a 30 for 30 of this coaching carousel. Now I want a whole series. Start it off with Fisher’s ridiculous extension. End it with a bunch of guys eclipsing him.

No matter how crappy your team’s weekend was, at least you’re not an Oklahoma fan.

This made me laugh a bit too much

I think you meant to say hilarious. Or maybe beautiful.

Watching my first ever ESPN+ game, and its amazing how bad the production is. Its Southpaw level bad. And since there may not be 100 yards passing in this game when it ends, it’s got a very middle school feel to it.

Well, Texas is having a nice Friday night https://www.hookem.com/story/sports/football/2021/11/19/texas-football-brian-jones-donors-pressuring-seve-sarkisian-race/8687690002/

Apparently it's funded by two boosters, but you're not wrong there. My father was a professor at Texas for about 40 years. I'm trying to imagine his response if he was told to "volunteer" to work in the dining halls. I'd pay good money to watch somebody make that suggestion to him.

You're absolutely right there, especially if it's fully guaranteed, but I'm guessing that contract won't look so outlandish for long. It's setting a new bar for that level of coach, but other schools are gonna jump right on over that bar. I figure it could get passed up a couple times by January. No idea how valid the rumors are, but supposedly LSU offered Lincoln Riley $12 million per year. Riley's a step above Tucker, but he ain't Saban either. LSU is gonna pay somebody more than Michigan State will be paying Tucker by January. USC might too. Florida could as well, either this year or next. And Texas might next year. That's a lot of big time money teams looking for at a very limited number of candidates. Of course none of that is gonna make things look better for Michigan State if they're going 7-5 three years from now, looking at seven more years at $9.5m per year with no way out. Glad coaches' contracts weren't this crazy when Sumlin won 11 games and beat Bama his first year at A&M. Imagine how badly that contract would've aged.

Weird. I never had a single conversation with them during my visit. Maybe it just depended on who was running it that day.

All these openings are gonna make a bunch of coaches a bunch of money. Like 10 years @ 9.5M money. Remember when 10 years @ 7.5M for Fisher seemed insane? At this point, I'm half expecting A&M to tell him "did we say $9 million per year? We meant $12 million. Do you want a pony too?"

A large percentage of them do go directly from school to the military - the ones that do are committed by their junior year if I remember correctly. Last game I went to, they had the leader of the band from a couple years earlier (that's a really big deal at A&M) on the field at halftime. His face was essentially gone. He wasn't playing army. The ones that don't commit, well there's a reason why the term "boot chasers" was created, referring to girls being attracted to the seniors in their high top leather boots. I never thought about joining the corps. Probably a good thing, since I was engineering major. Freshman year classes were full of guys in corps uniforms. By the time I got to upper level engineering classes, there wasn't a corps uniform to be found. I probably shared as many upper level classes with football players as I did corps members.

The administration's approach to that thing is beyond gutless. They've announced the Texas legislature, which sure as shit ain't gonna do anything, is the only body that can remove it. I'm an Aggie, and I'd gladly push the button to blow the damn thing up.

I can certainly understand avoiding a school due to racism. I'm a white guy with an over the top southern accent. I fit right in with the good ol' boys. My wife isn't. She turned down a full ride at Notre Dame, which her family was pushing hard, after visiting their campus. Her direct quote was something like "it was the first time I felt like I didn't belong somewhere because I was Mexican". And I'm definitely not defending Texas. If it was up to me, they'd never win a game ever again. If playing that awful song every time they gain four yards keeps the recruits headed to A&M, more power to em, I guess.

Oddly enough, I think making that exact assumption is a large part of Texas' problem. They assume that the place (both school and city) will recruit itself. I'm sure that works in some cases, but they've got decades of evidence that it doesn't work in general staring them in the face. 18 year old kids make decisions for a lot of different reasons, and those reasons aren't necessarily the ones think they are. Football specific reasons just make those decisions more complicated. Even when they're good, a lot of Texas kids don't want to go to school in Austin. A lot of Dallas kids' first choice has always been OU. Same with Houston and all of east Texas with A&M and LSU. Then there are some who just want to go further abroad. Used to be those guys ended up at Florida schools. Now it's Alabama/OSU/Clemson. I have a good friend from high school who was a multi year starter at Texas in the early 90s, and I spent a fair amount of time around some of his teammates while I was in school. Another guy I graduated with was a multi year starter at A&M. My wife, and several friends, worked for Texas' football team while we were in grad school there in the late 90s/early 2000s. I got to know a bunch of the players then, and became friends with a few of them. Periodically, recruitment stories would come up - usually the crazy stuff they saw in the process, but occasionally the reasons why they went where they went. Not once did any of them mention the city in their reasons. Oddly enough, the only constant that all of the guys that went to Texas mentioned was their reason NOT to go to A&M, which was that RC Slocum was the worst negative recruiter they ever encountered. I grew up in Austin and have lived here almost my entire life. The start of my awareness of college football pretty much coincides with the end of Darrell Royal's career and the beginning of Fred Akers' tenure here, in the mid to late 70s. So I've been here for seven Texas coaches, covering a span of 45 years Fred Akers (10 years) - had a couple of really good teams - having Earl Campbell didn't hurt - but never could win the big one. Only won two bowl games in 11 years. Was guilty of not being Darrell Royal. Pretty mediocre the last few years. I was there for his last game. The "Fire Fred!" chants were amazing. David McWilliams (5 years)- Was a good ol' boy, but not much else. Will say his players loved him, but I don't think anybody else did. Lost to a terrible Baylor team by 40+ points. Had that one good year. Dolfan can tell you how THAT worked out in the end. I was there for his last game too. John Mackovic (6 years) - Amazed he lasted six freaking years. Texas fans HATED this guy, because he wasn't a good ol' boy raised from birth by Darrell Royal. Had one good year, mainly because he had Ricky Williams at RB. Mack Brown (15 years) - This is where Texas fans got confused, or maybe spoiled. They thought of this guy's success as the baseline, when post Royal it's really the anomaly. Ran him out of town when his last few teams didn't match his earlier success. Thought they were gonna get Saban to replace him. Oops. Charlie Strong (3 years) - Yeah, they got this guy instead. Didn't bring Teddy Bridgewater with him. Never had a winning record in any season. Lost to Kansas. Made Bret Bielema aroused. Tom Herman (4 years) - Better than Strong, at least. Insisted on losing to Maryland, for some reason. Somehow got a Sugar Bowl win with a four loss team, which I guess was the highlight of his time. Thought they were gonna get Urban Meyer to replace him. Oops again. Steve Sarkisian (I guess he'll make it through the year?) - Looked good at the start. Stumbled into two absolute stars at offensive skill positions. Had his team at 4-1, and had a 21 point first quarter lead on OU. Now he's 4-6, he lost to Kansas, his best player is out for the year, and his best recruiter's stripper wife's emotional support monkey bit a kid on Halloween. Two of those guys were successful, in general (yeah, I'm counting Akers here). One of those two won a national championship by the skin of his teeth with the best college football player I've ever seen. The other missed winning one just as narrowly. The rest are somewhere between decent and awful, and have about win percentage that works out to just about exactly a 6-5 record between em. Texas will probably be a top team at some point. But it's not as simple as just getting a guy who doesn't suck. They're gonna have to find a special coach to get them back there, just like they did with Brown. He may not have been the greatest coach, but he instantly took their recruiting to a place it hadn't been in at least 15 years, and where it hasn't been since he left.

Both of the schools I went to average about $140 million in football revenue per year (granted, they're the highest two). Major professional sports typically spend about 45-50% of their revenue in salaries. That'd be a bunch of money going to the players if the schools paid out even half that. Also, don't think I saw this here. Kinda interesting (by ESPN standards anyway) read on paying off fired coaches https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/32355679/dead-money

Finished up our fall baseball season. Unsurprisingly, we finished 0-10. The kids did get better, though 3 of the 12 never hit a ball all year. Low point was the game where we played five innings and only hit two balls. My son grounded out for one of them, then the kid who knew the least of all of them going in (first time he tried to hit, he faced directly away from the pitcher) not only hit a ball, but actually got a base hit. I don't know which of us had a bigger shit eating grin when he got down to first. The last game of the year we were actually tied as late as the third inning, which was a huge improvement from where we'd been.

Neighbor six houses down shot and killed his wife Friday afternoon, then tried to kill himself. Not a lot of info coming out, but he seems to be alive still. It's an awful tragedy, but should've been a preventable one. He's been suffering from dementia. Never should've been a gun in the house. Folks in that condition are just too unpredictable. Between this and the guy who decided to get in a gunfight with SWAT (who turned out to share some some patents with one of my professors from grad school) shits hitting a little close to home.

Saw this somewhere. Going into yesterday, Kansas had multiple wins against exactly one team - Central Michigan. So Texas joins an exclusive club. Guess that’s nice for them.

There’s the cheering up I needed after the Ags got their butts whipped. Gonna get me a recording of that game and a stupidly powerful outdoor sound system. Then I’m gonna set it to max volume the next time my shitty Texas fan neighbors decide the whole neighborhood need to listen to Neil diamond at 2:30 AM. Let em enjoy it till the sun comes up.

Mississippi is beating the crap out of A&M at the half. 15-0, but that score is grossly misleading. Could easily be 35-0, or worse.

Amateurs. Everybody knows you go to Cayo Perico to make money. That’s what the cool kids tell me online anyway im still playing on and off. I’ve shot a total of one dot since the last update. It’s a weird time in Los Santos.

It won't happen, of course, but in a perfect world Love Wally Pipp's the hell out of Rodgers.

That looks eerily similar to the Oilers/Bucs game I watched at the Astrodome back in 1995. Went with a friend because his employer couldn't find any clients who actually wanted to watch the game.