Much as I wish people like Brooke would stay, I can't blame her for leaving for the opportunity to compete at that level. She has clearly shown she can do it. What few things are available to her in that sport (Olympics?) are more likely to happen from a Pac12 setting. Just think the Ducks could acknowledge her previous school.

Oregon athletics owes UCDavis too much to be slighted like this. Does the name Mike Belotti sound familiar? And of course many of Belotti's assistants....

I'm a Big 10 fan by genes and a midwest upbringing, but they need to limit their talk to wrestling this year.

(Though I never feel too bad if An Ohio State University or Meech-i-gan go down.)

And Iowa adds to the Big Ten woes...

Time for an upset in the Women’s NCAA. ALL of the top seeds won on Sunday.

Read a couple of predictions on ESPN.com saying Illinois was going to take it all. Oooops! Big 10 was playing some good ball in the middle of the season, given that this is a weird season and most games were in-conference, but they are not doing well in the NCAA tourney. Ohio State, Purdue and now Illinois upset and WIsconsin trailing Baylor late.

(But Iowa won the NCAA wrestling championship so order is restored in the world.)

How about former D-2 Abilene Christian knocking off Texas?

I try to blame such things on the computer too. My kids aren't having it.

Sorry, I got nothin'.

I think when I started the “student fees” were $68.50 per quarter and quickly jumped to a whopping $108.50. Probably in the $300.00 range by the time I graduated. No, we could not pay with a couple of chickens or a calf.

But by the time of the D2 Football.com boards the tales of tuition-free or outright free-free education for California residents was a thing of the past.

Of course someone can now do some research and prove just how much my memory is failing me.

Looks like they River Cats weren't going to Texas this year anyway, and with the delayed opening they won't even play the Skeeters this season.

When the PCL redoes its schedule...again...maybe you can get to Texas to see the River Cats play the Sugar Land Skeeters.

This really sounds like a Disney movie.

I love minor league nicknames.

It is a small positive that restaraunts are looking for help, though it is probably part time and can't match unemployment benefits, at least for a while. The entire hospitality industry has been hit pretty hard. And no, let's not go too far down this road here.

I have been a real fan of the cautious approach to this whole thing, including sports. Easy enough for me to do because I am retired, have a pension, and staying home is what I do best. Everytime I try to figure out a sports schedule, like everything else, it changes. We hope the cautious approach works, but I can sure understand COVID fatigue. Have received the shots, but feel like I am all dressed up with no place to go.

Try to follow sports and as soon as someone establishes a schedule, it gets changed because your team or the opponent has COVID issues. Just pulled the River Cats schedule last night only to find that as soon as I hit 'Print' MLB told the minor leagues to bump the start of their schedules another month down the road. Who knew, other than Goags20172 that the minor leagues have completely overhauled their leagues. Perhaps Nashville, Omaha and Iowa weren't meant to be in the Pacific Coast League after all. The lesser sports I try to follow, (water polo, swimming, rugby...) are not competing at all. Hard to follow something as elusive as sports...and the whole season will have a big asterisk in any event.

But the dog gets walked a lot.

And again, a hint of why I should not have gone down this path...

The big difference between someone like Sochor and the D2 website tales about someone coming in from outside of the UC system to be an AD for three years, (besides Sochor being a legend who can do no wrong and entitled to whatever he got,) is that an outsider under that example would have a whopping 3 years of service with the university whereas Sochor had all those earlier years of coaching in addition to whatever time he spent as AD. I believe he was an assistant coach from 1967-1969, head coach from 1970-1988 and AD from 1989-91. (Wikipedia...) That's roughly 24 years with Davis. Might even have more service from his 4 or 5 seasons at S.F. State if there is reciprocity between the CSU and UC systems. Assume 24 years...and retiring at 2.5% per year...he's at 60%. The outsider would be at 7.5%.

And yes there are arguments to be made about employees who finish strong for three years, set their three year look-back at that high level and then retire, allowing someone else to have their turn. Rumors, tales and stories abound about things like that....but we have gone too far from Aggie sports already.

Another anecdote about rumors...I recall a discussion on the D2 football site many, many years ago in which someone from, I believe NDSU, commented that UC was tuition free to California residents. If those days ever existed, they were long gone by the time the comment was made. I did a quick unscientific look and concluded that in-state tuition at UC was more expensive than out-of-state tuition at NDSU.

And this is why I hesitated, and probably should have resisted, getting into public employment retirement plans.

Like so much in life, particularly in the age of social media, there are a lot of rumors and stories out there. Years ago my wife and I sat at a dinner table with an elderly couple from a town in the Sierras. They ran a little B&B place, and were not big fans of local government, taxes, regulations, etc. as one might expect. That's fine. They said that in their county all of the jobs were given to friends and relatives of one family and that employees were able to retire after 5 years with a full pension. That is highly unlikely. I looked up the county later. The county's retirement plan is managed by CalPers. No one is getting a pension of 20% per year.

As Dr. Mike noted, most pensions involve three factors: salary, length of service and an age related multiplier. That was the same for the local government for which I worked for over 35 years. As you get older the multiplier increases, but 2.5% sounds about right for people in their 60s. Safety employees...think peace officers and firemen,...get a little better deal, with something like 3% at 50 (or 55?) years of age...and where I worked they maxed out at 90% of their highest salary, so there was no incentive to work beyond 30 years.

Also you probably don't get to start work in your 20s and retire in 5 years and collect a pension of any size. Usually you have to work a certain number of years, say 10, or be a relatively high age, like over 60, to collect retirement. Even in the former case you cannot collect the pension until you reach a certain age, say 50. You may start at 20 and "retire" from that job after 10 years at 30, but you cannot collect your pension until you are 50...and the multiplier for retiring at age 50 is pretty low.

3% per year, for employees other than safety personnel sounds very high. Even at that, coming to California to scoop up that enticing pension...3% for 5 years would give you a pension of 15% of your salary. Not the gold mine at the western end of the rainbow that people seem to think it is.

But, I digress.

I hesitate to get into the topic of public employment pensions....it's an emotionally charged issue and we have travelled down that path already in the last year. There are a lot of rumors out there on public employee pensions and to be sure there are a lot of ugly stories about pension abuses.

I have no idea what the formulae are for UC and CSU pensions, but I suspect that five years of even a high end job at a UC or CSU is not going to put anyone on Easy Street. I cannot imagine that there is a whole lot of reciprocity with out-of state private universities.

But I could be wrong. I often am.

In the spirit of disclosure I retired after over 35 years in a professional/management level job with a municipal public agency with its own pension system (not managed by Calpers.) Had I worked there for five years, even five years at the end of my career, you would see me at intersections with a crudely lettered cardboard sign asking for spare change.

(...or nobody had any confidence in the officials' ability to recognize a field goal when they saw one.....)

We are wandering farther astray from Big Sky football, but film locations have to do with a lot of things far removed from authenticity. The series Longmire, about a sherriff in a fictional county in Wyoming, (a good series for people who like Yellowstone,) was filmed in New Mexico.

The movie about a high school girl in Sacramento, Lady Bird, did a lot of filming in Sacramento, but also did a lot in the LA area. The writer, director, etc. for the movie grew up in Sacramento, and did the movie as sort of an homage to her childhood and her hometown, but in an interview said she filmed in LA because of economic reasons, including grants and other incentives that were better in Los Angeles.

"Watching the Yellowstone series on Peacock during Covid lockdown.

One of the story lines has a liberal female character teaching American & Native American history at either Montana or Montana State.

Beautiful country, if its Montana."

I googled something like where is "Yellowstone" filmed? Lot of entries, but a lot of it has been filmed in Utah. The fictitious "Dutton" Ranch is filmed at the "Chief Joseph Ranch" which is actually in Montana. Something I rolled by suggested that future filiming will concentrate in Montana itself.

It's all because of satellite based lasers controlled by students at Sac State's engineering school. Trust me on this.