Comments

  • COVID-19
    A friend of mine often says, “Nothing goes unanswered in the age of smart phones and google,” however googling the quote leaves the answer clear as mud:

    Often attributed to 20th century motivational writer and speaker Dale Carnegie, it has also been linked to Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century British writer and the mother of Mary Shelley who in turn wrote Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft possibly took the line from 17th century poet Samuel Butler. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/cliffsnotes/subjects/history/who-wrot-a-man-convinced-against-his-will-is-of-the-same-opinion-still

    Of course the quote wouldn’t be worth a darn if someone didn’t credit it to Ben Franklin; https://medium.com/@viktorbezic/ben-franklin-quote-applies-here-a-man-convinced-against-his-will-is-of-the-same-opinion-still-aa3d71e38f35
    and
    https://agents2change.typepad.com/blog4/2013/10/a-man-convinced-against-his-will-is-of-the-same-opinion-still-or-the-art-of-persuasion.html

    So I’m going to say it must be by Mark Twain.
  • COVID-19
    Any news like this is good news and offers some hope, but the Detroit study, like all emerging studies in any scientific field, is not without its critics:
    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-detroit-study/index.html
  • Street & Smith's Football Guides are on the stands
    To be fair, it's not just the magazines. I recall years ago reading the baseball preview feature in a local newspaper. It was something the paper obtained through a wire service and was published as spring practice was coming to an end and the regular season was about to begin. The article listed the manager of a team who actually had been replaced sometime in the fall or early winter.
  • COVID-19
    If you have access to the Times, there are some photos of the campus and downtown Davis.

    There's also a photo of a lone deer crossing a deserted street in Athens, OH. We get a bear, Ohio gets a deer.
  • COVID-19


    ‘We Could Be Feeling This for the Next Decade’: Virus Hits College Towns
    Opening bars and bringing back football teams have led to new outbreaks. Communities that evolved around campuses face potentially existential losses in population, jobs and revenue.
    By Shawn Hubler
    June 28, 2020
Updated 6:18 p.m. ET
    DAVIS, Calif. — The community around the University of California, Davis, used to have a population of 70,000 and a thriving economy. Rentals were tight. Downtown was jammed. Hotels were booked months in advance for commencement. Students swarmed to the town’s bar crawl, sampling the trio of signature cocktails known on campus as “the Davis Trinity.”
    Then came the coronavirus. When the campus closed in March, an estimated 20,000 students and faculty left town.
    With them went about a third of the demand for goods and services, from books to bikes to brunches. City officials are expecting most of that demand to stay gone even as the economy reopens.
    Fall classes will be mostly remote, the university announced last week, with “reduced density” in dorms. Davis’s incoming vice mayor, Lucas Frerichs, said the city was anticipating “a huge impact” with a majority of the university’s 39,000-plus students still dispersed in September.
    For “townies,” rules require congregation to remain limited, too, as confirmed coronavirus cases continue to climb in California. One of the Davis Trinity bars has closed, with no plan to reopen. On a recent Sunday, downtown was filled with “takeout only” signs and half-empty, far-flung cafe tables. Outside the closed theater, a lone busker stood on a corner playing “Swan Lake” on a violin to virtually no one.
    Efforts to stem the pandemic have squeezed local economies across the nation, but the threat is starting to look existential in college towns.
    Reliant on institutions that once seemed impervious to recession, “town and gown” communities that have evolved around rural campuses — Cornell, Amherst College, Penn State — are confronting not only Covid-19 but also major losses in population, revenue and jobs.
    Where business as usual has been tried, punishment has followed: This week, Iowa health authorities reported case spikes among young adults in its two largest college towns, Ames and Iowa City, after the governor allowed bars to reopen. And on campuses across the country, attempts to bring back football teams for preseason practice have resulted in outbreaks.
    More than 130 coronavirus cases have been linked to athletic departments at 28 Division 1 universities. At Clemson, at least 23 football players and two coaches have been infected. At Arkansas State University, seven athletes across three teams tested positive. And at the University of Houston, the athletic department stopped off-season workouts after an outbreak was discovered.
    Sports are not the only source of outbreaks in college towns. Mississippi officials tied several cases to fraternity rush parties that apparently flouted social distancing rules. In Baton Rouge, La., at least 100 cases were linked to bars in the Tigerland nightlife district near Louisiana State’s campus. And in Manhattan, Kan., home to Kansas State, officials said Wednesday that there had been two recent outbreaks: one on the football team, and another in the Aggieville entertainment district just off campus.
    For the cities involved, the prognosis is also daunting. In most college towns, university students, faculty and staff are a primary market. Local economies depend on their numbers and dollars, from sales taxes to football weekends to federal funds determined by the U.S. census.
    Students at Ohio University represent three-quarters of the usual population of Athens, Ohio. In Ithaca, N.Y., every other person in town is — or used to be — connected to Cornell or Ithaca College.
    The local economy in Ann Arbor, Mich., takes in nearly $95 million a year in discretionary spending from the University of Michigan’s 45,000-plus students. Ari Weinzweig, cofounding partner of Zingerman’s, a landmark bakery and deli, said sales have been down 50 percent, and the company has had to furlough nearly 300 of its 700 employees since the pandemic.
    The town’s Literati Bookstore launched a GoFundMe campaign to keep from going out of business, and created a virtual site for its famed “public typewriter” so customers could keep leaving anonymous typed messages, a company tradition. (“Oh how I wish for a coffee not made by my own hands,” someone typed online in May.)
    In State College, Pa., an estimated 65 percent of the community is made up of students at Penn State’s main campus, a local juggernaut that enrolls 46,000 students, employs more than 17,000 nonstudents and injects about $128 million a year into rural Centre County.
    The university has announced plans to reopen with double-occupancy dorm rooms and at least half of its classes in person, but it is still not known how many students will return. Also in question is the future of Penn State football, a local economic linchpin that generated $100 million in 2018-19 for the university alone.
    Local governments are bracing, too. Amherst, Mass., is scheduled to vote this week on a proposal to increase annual water and sewer fees by an average of $100 per household, a result of a precipitous drop in water use as students have abandoned Hampshire College, Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts in that New England college town.
    Ithaca’s mayor, Svante Myrick, said his city was preparing to cut its $70 million budget by about $14 million, and has furloughed a quarter of its employees, including his assistant. He personally has taken a 10 percent pay cut. A resolution passed earlier this month asked the state to let him authorize blanket rent forgiveness for three months.
    Unemployment in the Ithaca metropolitan area has soared to 10 percent from 3 percent before the pandemic. Sales tax receipts have tanked as about $4 million per week in student spending has disappeared along with Cornell’s students, Mr. Myrick said. About two-thirds of the land in his jurisdiction is university-owned, he said, and therefore exempt from property tax.
    “We’re going to be looking at Hoovervilles — or maybe Trump Towns — all over the country,” said the mayor, a Democrat who clashes frequently with his upstate area’s Republican congressional delegation. “It’s bad. It’s really bad.”
    Compounding the concern is the 2020 census. Conducted every 10 years, the national head count determines the distribution of federal funding for a vast number of local and state programs, including transit, public safety and Medicaid.
    Because the window for responses has coincided with campus shutdowns, college towns are reporting significant undercounts of students living off-campus, with dire financial implications.
    A census without Ohio University students could knock the official population of Athens from 24,000 down to as few as 6,000 people. With an Oct. 31 deadline approaching, responses in student neighborhoods are currently running some 20 percentage points lower than in 2010, with response rates in some tracts of less than 31 percent.
    Mayor Steve Patterson of Athens estimates an undercount could cost his small city up to $40 million over the next 10 years “for things like community development block grants, jobs and family services and senior services that rely on a strong census count to get a full funding.”
    “We could be feeling this for the next decade,” Mr. Patterson said.
    In California, where Democrats have prioritized the census, the city of Davis and its surrounding county partnered long before the pandemic with the university to maximize its response rate, which is now higher than the state average. But the exodus of students has cut sales tax revenues by 50 percent, Mr. Frerichs said.
    lashed hotel occupancy from 90 percent to 10 percent during the local hospitality industry’s usual peak season. Bookings have since rebounded slightly, Mr. Frerichs said, but only to about 25 percent, substantially denting hotel occupancy tax revenues.
    Transit ridership has dropped so precipitously, he said, that local authorities have been using the buses to transport supplies to and from food banks. The city has begun reaching out to unions and identifying budget cuts in case the economy does not quickly bounce back.
    Already, Mr. Frerichs said, the council has opted to leave three open positions for police officers vacant. “That’s three sets of eyes and ears on the street,” he said, “but this is a legitimate concern. Long term, this could be on par with the great recession for us.”
    Or maybe worse than the recession, he added, because in 2008 at least the town could still gather.
    Now the bike traffic is scant, the farmers market socially distanced, and the baristas working reduced hours at coffee shops ask customers to alert them when they leave so maintenance can disinfect their tables. The virus even canceled Davis’s annual town-and-gown party, Picnic Day.
    “Part of me is enjoying reclaiming the community,” said Mr. Frerichs, who attended the university and has lived for 24 years in Davis. “But one of the things that makes a college town so wonderful is the vibrant young population.”
    “They’re the lifeblood, and without them — well, the squirrels are having a field day,” he said. “But for the rest of us, it’s just so quiet.”

    Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Chicago, and Lauryn Higgins from Lincoln, Neb.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/coronavirus-college-towns.html
    © 2020 The New York Times Company
  • COVID-19
    I am trying to remain politically neutral, at least on this site, but I think it's ironic that some of those who downplay the COVID-19 virus and want to accelerate the return to those halcyon days of yesteryear by opening up the economy, opening up schools, etc., want to have indemnity laws and personal waivers. Why would anyone need to waive the effects of a mild flu-like illness, or why would governments and businesses need to be indemnified against litigation over the same?
  • UCLA to focus on online classes, limit in person classes in fall
    UC Davis plans to open up, at least a bit. Still focus on online classes. Dorms will have fewer students per room. In person classes will be in larger class rooms. KCRA is running the story, but the best information I can find on the web at the moment is a UCD release:
    https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/uc-davis-plans-welcome-students-back-campus-fall/

    Post-script: Here's a link to the KCRA story:
    https://www.kcra.com/article/uc-davis-plans-welcome-students-back-to-campus-in-the-fall/32897954

    And from the Bee:
    https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article243631187.html
  • Sac’s Thomson to transfer?
    A couple of threads on the Slack State site:

    On Thomson rumors:
    https://www.bigskyfans.com/hornets/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3705

    On Taylor and Thomson rumors:
    https://www.bigskyfans.com/hornets/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3525
  • News Regarding Race and Athletics from UCD and NCAA

    PSU? North?
    SUU? South?

    Couple of small kinks to iron out. Post season bids? What does the conference do for basketball when UCD and Poly aren't around? The 14 teams in the Big 10 have scheduling problems. Up until recently a team played the 6 teams in their division and two in the opposite division. To keep a rivalry alive Indiana and Purdue play each year though they are in opposite divisions. When you played two teams in the opposite division you might be a team in the West and play Ohio State and Michigan, while another team in the West plays Indiana and Rugers. Now you might get Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State while someone else gets Indiana, Rutgers and Maryland.
  • News Regarding Race and Athletics from UCD and NCAA
    UCSD "joins" for scheduling purposes July 1, 2020. They have to make the transition from D-2 to D-1 and won't be a full-on member until July 1, 2024.

    CSU-Bakersfield joins as a full member July 1, 2020.

    https://bigwest.org/news/2017/11/27/IMPORTED_STORY_20127_20127.aspx

    This doesn't seem to resolve scheduling issues as there will still be an odd number of teams.

    Dixie State would get the Big Sky back to an even number of teams which is nice for scheduling, and is a better geographical fit than was UND, but 12 teams is kind of unwieldy for BCS football.

    (And we have wandered astray from the focus of the lead to this topic.)
  • Forum Cost
    Looking back it looks like the last pledge drive was in December of 2019.

    (I think I ended up with a couple of Doo-Wop videos and my wife signed up for some Downton Abbey deal, or maybe a Rick Steves travel special.)
  • Grant Napear Placed on Leave After Controversial Comment
    I heard the same, but by the time I got around to posting I could not remember which was which, and which came first....As Marcos Breton suggests, whatever you call it, he was released by the powers that be.

    https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article243215331.html

    (On a bit of a sidenote, I will admit I had no idea that "All Lives Matter" had such a perjorative connotation within the context of the "Black Lives Matter" discussion. The words themselves would seem innocent enough, and really something positive. I can see now where they aren't, at least for now and in the current context. Learned something. Old dog, new tricks.)
  • Grant Napear Placed on Leave After Controversial Comment
    He has since either resigned or been terminated from his positions with the Kings and with the radio station.
  • COVID-19
    CSU campuses to remain "on-line only" for fall term.
    https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article242668291.html
  • Jake Maier signs with the Calgary Stampeders
    ...and as one of the articles I read pointed out, the CFL doesn't have much of a TV contract. Teams rely heavily on ticket sales, and presumably related things like concessions. That's going to plummet with social distancing or games without spectators.
  • COVID-19
    I'm all for putting my kids in a nursing home now, so that they will have a little better understanding of them when they decide it's time to put me in one.
  • Scary News if Real
    He came here from a Pac-12 school. Not surprised to see Pac-12 schools looking at him, and expect he will check it all out. The coronavirus situation might make larger schools more attractive because they have a better chance of getting through this with less damage and their programs still intact.

    I recall when the Ags won the D-II basketball title and Williams left that someone, probably the then A.D., said something like 'we knew we couldn't keep him here forever.'

    Hope Blue stays, but wish him well wherever he ends up. Makes us realize what great things we had with Sochor, Foster, Biggs....who preferred the situation at bucolic lil ol' UCD.

    I say having gone to a small high school, attending UCD, and getting a professional degree from a smaller school.

    Go Ags!

    OK, now I've read it and we cn breathe a short sigh of relief...for now.

    "Three candidates who were at one time among the front runners for the job -- Fresno State AD Terry Tumey, UC Davis AD Dr. Kevin Blue and UCLA senior associate athletic director Josh Rebholz -- have been told they are no longer being considered.

    Tumey was never even interviewed for the position, according to sources."

    Won't comment on the Tumey references. Nothing to be said.