my guess is that the NCAA is weary of litigation at this point. The only information I’ve seen is from twitter personalities and Sac State, so it’s possible the NCAA has more compelling evidence not released. But if that’s not the case, they may settle the case for nuisance value. But let’s say they win the battle, have they won the war? Will their sponsors stand by them? Will they have as much media value as they think or is KCRA3 the ceiling? Will they be welcomed by the FBS or face a soft boycott by the conferences as a cautionary tale? I can’t think nationally who’s in their corner other than the crowd with a general disdain for the NCAA. The meaningful forces in FBS don’t want to water down their own drink and they’ve insulted everyone in FCS.

to be clear, I do not wish for Poly to drop football. My preference would have actually been for Sac, Poly, and Davis to all be relevant at the same time and force the Big Sky center of gravity south with EWU and UM watching from the simp seats. But that wasn’t meant to be. I very much enjoy the tradition of D2 and then FCS football but I do think it will become increasingly hard to sustain in the west, so schools and conferences doing some future proofing seems prudent.

agreed. The point I was trying to make was that Wood and Marion are upwardly mobile self-preservationists. I don’t think either will hesitate to deflect responsibility on each other if desired results are not achieved and they run out of third parties to blame.

Utah makes geographic and cultural sense for Big Sky. Not sure which is more likely first, though. Davis taking football to MWC or Poly folding football.

I recall one of the skeptical Hornet posters on the Sac board mentioning months ago “I hope we don’t pull a Suck State on this”. That comment has aged like fine wine.

Marion is probably gone by January one way or the other. If he’s good, he gets scooped. If it’s bad, he’s the scapegoat for busted dreams.

If Sac doesn’t get a legit invite, at some point Wood will get told to sit down and shut up if the governor decides to run for higher office. The last thing a politician needs is to discuss why a university with negative cashflow is trying to rattle the cage on FBS where there are already too many mouths to feed if you ask the big boys.

I guess Sac State is still in the BSC this season but does Orr get to remain the BSC representative on the FCS playoff committee? I think this is year 2 of a 4 year term but I can’t imagine the powers that be Missoula and Bozeman have much interest left in him.

Base pay
CAL 300k
UCD 278k

“Other” pay
CAL 1.03m
UCD 30k

I’m not sure exactly what “other” pay is or how it is paid for, performance bonuses? Funded by state or boosters? Guaranteed or discretionary? Idk.

I believe you are correct that the Wood brothers grew up in the foster system. Credit where it is due, most people do not become a university president by age 40 regardless of background. So he must be smart, which is perhaps why the obsession with this fools errand is so curious.

I once saw a dumpster on fire next to Fluffy Donuts at the U-Mall. A police cruiser and fire truck casually watching it burn itself out from a distance, apparently deciding there was no benefit to intervention. So basically this.

I haven’t found much “real”coverage of this but based on what I’m reading from online taking heads- next week there will be meetings to establish a new governance model followed by D1 council meetings. They can choose to take or leave the advice of the football committee that just said no thanks. The outside hope on J St is that the committee didn’t want to make any commitments right before a big governance reboot and the council may still say yes, or that a new governance model will include some new flexibility that doesn’t exist this week. So an unqualified answer might be next week they could get a more definitive yes/no, unless a new framework for a “maybe” presents itself. I guess “soon” is relative. If they get a hard no this year do they push another attempt next year or in 5 years, idk.

Not the news I was expecting. I would have thought Wood and Co had made their calls and catered their steak dinners with the relevant decision makers before putting it all on the line. Though I suppose there are still plenty of politics to play out the rest of June. Assuming things stay as is, the Hornets have the potential to still be very good FCS contenders. But if a sense of bait and switch takes root in the locker room this could get messy. Who knows what’s actually been said to these guys. If conditions on the ground deteriorate, I could see Marion finding a way to deuce out. The way he’s scrapping on the career ladder, no way would he want to preside over a stuck-in-FCS team if the stock starts slipping.

I’m not sure what the line is in Vegas but I heard at Folsom State Pen people are putting 3 soups on the Hornets.

I did a little reading about Grant House. Apparently the premise of what he said thought the suit was about was he and a buddy wrote a (bad) song and talked about how unfortunate it was they couldn’t monetize it if it became a next top 40 hit (it did not). A friend of a friend was a lawyer who convinced him to become the named plaintiff. He thought he was suing to allow athletes to monetize their social media accounts and maybe do a little swimsuit modeling. But he didn’t actually talk much to the lawyers or judge and really didn’t understand what the case actually was. As lead plaintiff, his payout is thought to be $125,000. Apparently he has faced threatening phone calls and bullying on the swim deck because the settlement is demolishing Olympic sport rosters. I certainly don’t condone that. But I also would never hire this guy. How irresponsible to lead the charge on something you don’t understand that appears so far to be a net negative for the majority of society. Major character flaw. So there you have it, college sports set on fire by an unreleased terrible music video.

I took some interesting classes through the education dept. SAT is reliable in that it produces repeatable results but harder to say if it is valid in terms of measuring what it claims to. A topic of much debate among educators.

you may be thinking of “eligibility in the local context”. The university accepts the top x % from each high school, the idea being the top students at a crap school might not outscore the medium students at an excellent school but perhaps they deserve a shot since it wasn’t their fault they lived in Barstow instead of Menlo Park. Not without controversy though, because many good students at top flight high schools get contextually overlooked. Tricky to figure out what’s fair for someone with potential who wasn’t afforded suitable preparation. Some rise to the occasion, others drown drinking from the fire hose their first quarter.

I appreciate dry humor and I’ll dump on Sac State any chance I get, but the reality is they have many legitimate programs and students. The blatant disregard for academic standards and intentionally recruiting transfers unlikely to complete anything academically I think is insulting to the real students paying for this and quite frankly I think spending enrollment spots this way amounts to grand theft from the people of California for what appears to be a vanity project for the university president. Even if this is the new world order for post settlement NCAA.

what I learned when I was going through admissions process 20+ years ago, is that not only are high schools chasing test scores, they are chasing a quota for number of seniors admitted to universities. So both sides of the equation, high schools and universities, have incentive to fudge things in the right circumstance. At this point, I don’t actually know how a university is supposed to pick the top applicants most likely to succeed. The grades are inflated against nonsense state K-12 standards that aren’t based on reality and I’m not sure that SAT, AP, GRE or any of those predict anything other than ability and willingness to spend money for access.

trying to hard may be an understatement. I guess I’m too traditional that I like the navy jerseys, gold pants, script Davis and block CA. I think all this alt uniform business got started when Nike turned Oregon into a full catalog demo and then everyone else decided they couldn’t be outdone by a duck.

Story of the tortoise and the hare we have here perhaps. @Sailorgabe makes a valid point that times are changing with the new world order of transfer portal and NIL. The “torch and transfer” approach may well yield a greatly talented Sac team this year. But even the honest Hornet faithful are wondering if that talent can get along, stay out of trouble, and if this is sustainable year over year. I would tend to think the Troy Taylor approach of doubling down on top local-ish HS talent was more organically sustainable (and was also successful), though we saw that without Taylor, it imploded, showing how important a leader is. @blueforce also makes a fair point that I don’t think torch and transfer would work as dramatically for us. I’m sure Mrak already does make admission exceptions to some degree for athletes and others, but going for felons not even close to legitimate academic transferability is probably a leap too far for us - and should be, for Sac too. I think our best path remains finding and developing athletes who can outwit an opponent and giving them enough reason to stay. Helpful to this is I think is Lan sticking his landing in the NFL to prove to future others that this path is viable too. If the premise of the modern non-SEC athletic program is “front porch of the university” marketing of the academics, you need to make sure winning doesn’t come at the cost of embarrassing the far more profitable parts of the university it is meant to market.

you know it’s kind of funny, I may well have learned more about life from working at Sodexo, taking Spiridakis’ ancient history classes, and playing in the Aggie Band than I did from my major classes. It’s part of what I fear may be lost in the world of online college. I ended up being at different times a project manager and operations manager in the hospitality/sports/entertainment space and I think those experiences helped guide how I (try to) approach people and situations.

One of my most amusing memories was that Chancellor Vanderhoef didn’t actually enjoy wine as much as politically he was supposed to. He used to have us hide a case of light beer and pour it in a white wine glass so nobody would be the wiser.

Mondavi doesn’t really have a ballroom suitable for banquets and I don’t think they were eager to have food inside. Did plenty of “light receptions” outside there though. Overall, big plated dinners were a minority of events. Much more common were meetings and receptions with things like cocktail weenies, sandwiches, chips/dips etc. I think some facilities are just old. Putah Creek Lodge only had 100 amp electrical service to the building so you had to be careful about not running the air conditioning and coffee pot at the same time.