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.

attached to the ARC ballroom is a “catering kitchen” with a refrigerator, ice machine, and sink but no cooking or raw prep capacity. Typically everything was made at Silo or Tercero and on site we did an assembly line to slice bread, meat, cake, etc. and plate everything up in the moment before service. ARC had the most complete catering area. Older venues like Putah Creek Lodge, Rec Pool Lodge, Buehler Center you basically work out of the truck and whatever back hallway or vacant room you can because there is no F&B infrastructure.

the loading dock for the pavilion is in the northwest corner. Following construction of the ARC it is a series of switchback ramps to back down but you can deliver to any level. The trick I learned is face dead forward, trust your mirrors and rear wheel pivot point and manage the nose of the truck on the switchbacks. If you need to do dinner for 1000+ upper and lower or you want to do happy hour and silent auction on upper level and move to the floor for dinner and program, pavilion is the big house. ARC ballroom and AGR room at Beuhler aren’t that big. Freeborn used to be perfect for those 500 seat gigs but it’s been closed for a long time.

I personally like tri-tip but from a logistics perspective it is also a great beef entree because of its hot life. Maybe some changes in the last 20 years but here’s how we used to do it. Prep work done in Segundo commissary kitchen, cook and final prep at Silo catering kitchen, baked goods from Tercero, china and dry goods in MU basement. It was like Amazing Race to get everything where it needs to go on time. Once a hot item is cooked you have 120 minutes you can hot hold above 140 degrees before you must discard. Tri-tip you can cook a lot of portions at once and it maintains quality if you wait until right before service to carve. For that quantity of cooking, most proteins are going to get a quick sear and then into the combi-oven. Actually the chicken breasts came frozen with “pre-printed” grill marks and went straight away into the oven. When you talk about NY strips, people want that cooked to order and the practicality of cooking hundreds of steaks to perfection, transporting from Silo to Pavilion and getting 600 portions plated and down in a 15 minute window with any sort quality is not practical at least at a price point that works.

so the thing about hospitality is we aren’t really selling a chicken breast or a hotel bed, we are selling an experience and the product is actually the customer’s feelings. A hotel housekeeper cleans 16-20 rooms a day. They aren’t clean in that time. We are selling the perception of clean hitting the things you are likely to notice. If the room smells good when you open the door, the bed sheets are pulled tight, and the toilet is spotless, most people relax into that feeling of cleanliness and safety, none the wiser to nasty underwear jammed between the mattress and the wall mere inches from their face. Banquets are tricky because the experience being purchased is really a non-distracting meal delivered on time so that the keynote speaker, wedding, etc. can be what you remember. The challenge comes when a guest doesn’t give a hoot about the event and is just there for the food. They will be disappointed every time about Golden Corral level food prepared en masse, kept in a hotbox for 2 hours and served at steakhouse prices with hurried service.

back in the day one of my campus jobs was working in catering so I saw a lot of these events in a little different way. The food is forgettable. I looked up the current menu and they have certainly renamed everything with farm-to-table sounding names but it is the same basic items - choice of airline chicken breast, beef tri-tip, salmon, or vegan mushroom/tofu grey matter served with a variety of salads/cooked vegetables and rice/pasta. A plated meal starts at $40 per plate but easily much more than that with linen, china, dessert, coffee, wine, etc.

I will say though, it was a job where I learned a lot about people, processes, and the science of getting passable meals to hundreds of people in a compressed time. And I learned how to back a box truck down the serpentine loading dock ramp at the Pavilion with just mirrors!

I’m glad to see a studious approach to this. Sometimes one architect firm will own a gig from blue sky to completion but it is also pretty common for one firm to propose a master plan and conceptual design with different firms chosen for actual schematic designs. I’m not familiar with this firm but looks like they have a portfolio of several aquatic and mixed use projects. It would seem like football and basketball venues have to be part of this conversation but I could also theoretically see something mixed use to include retail, dining, entertainment, office, hotel, or housing elements as a part of an athletic village.

University of Kentucky is the first to spin off their actual athletics department as a limited liability corporation (as opposed to the current model of booster corporations distinct from the department). The operationalization of this is yet to be seen, but it sounds a lot like a “public-private partnership” and may open the flood gates of private equity getting involved. While private equity can create a cash boom, it is not without consequences. Sometimes it’s hard to know whose money it actually is. And frequently the business model of private equity is that parts of the business are worth more than the sum, so they have no issue squeezing the valuable parts dry and leaving someone else to cleanup the bankrupt mess. See Sears, Red Lobster, and current efforts to burn down Southwest Airlines.

Unless players like Fresno can also find operational efficiency, I don’t know jacking the price of hotdogs and getting a 20 yard line sponsor will close the gap. By operational efficiency maybe there’s some overhead to cut, but ultimately I think the House settlement athletic model is in financial trouble at the mid-majors unless congress finds a way to rethink football’s relationship to T-IX (and for sure T-IX does need reform because it has been “interpreted” over the years probably in a more extreme way than the writers intended).

Student fees commensurate to value provided are reasonable, for example to contribute to operating costs of recreation activities, student union, student seating at games. But there is a moral issue with pushing 1000s of students into more debt in order to pay six figure “salaries” to athletes already getting a free ride.

“hard commits” - these days it’s often more committing to a coach than a school. If Marion pulls up stakes and leaves town, I bet the wagon train follows. There doesn’t seem to be too much hard or committed about a hard commit anymore if money talks louder elsewhere.

I meant interesting for us that with common opponents we can possibly have some observations as to how the last game will go. As interesting as all the Sac drama is, really what I care about is the impact on us. Hard to say if we will be up or down this year. The causeway could end up meaningless for both teams if we’re 0.5 at that point. Or it could be a very important game for us. I wonder if Mark Orr has to give up his seat as the playoff committee member from Big Sky, since he’s no longer concerned with Big Sky playoffs.

We have several common opponents - Weber, Poly, Northern Colorado, Idaho. Will be interesting to see how we stack up. To some degree, I wonder if the Causeway will be different. With basically a whole new team and staff, I’m not sure how much institutional memory remains. For many of them it may just be another game rather than any particular rivalry.

if this was an episode of Storage Wars, it would be like Sac just bought every unit at auction based on what they could see peering in the door. Statistically some or even most are going to be junk but there’s also going to be some pay dirt. And we should not discount that raw talent in a go-go offense scheme has the potential to find itself in the end zone a lot - if they can play together. From what I understand, go-go doesn’t always favor a star player but does require everyone to protect whoever does end up with the ball.

In a 4-year recruiting cycle, people know there is competition and not everybody will start as a freshman. People transfer or find joy in ways other than starting. In this scenario of a whole team of 1-season guys, all of them must think they can be the guy this season, though this is numerically impossible. Can teamwork and discipline be maintained once people start realizing they transferred to keep another bench warm? Or will there be midseason desertions?

Wood didn’t deliver the PAC12, he hasn’t delivered on the promised stadium. They have to deliver a season that is both winning and entertaining to keep momentum alive.

I don’t think the players or the coach particularly care about playoffs or championships. They are assembling 100 guys looking for a last best stop to build or rehab their personal brand and highlight reel to hopefully get noticed by a pro league or P4 school that may be a better ticket to a pro career. In essence they are playing for themselves, not Sac State. The upside for Marion is to demonstrate ability to engineer an immediate turnaround because he is already auditioning for his next gig. Assuming he doesn’t flame out, he’s one or two year max at Sac. When a P4 school next fires a coach, immediate turnaround at any cost is the service they will be looking to buy. What Wood is betting the farm on, is can all of these mercenaries with their own motivations be leveraged as a coherent team long enough to make Sac look like a viable FBS contender. My guess is that everyone involved has a max 1-2 year horizon. And perhaps Marion is just an early adopter of the new world order. It’s kind of a Silicon Valley approach - move fast, break things, ignore messes and consider humans as commodity resources instead of individuals.

Troy Taylor’s sudden infusion of success and legitimacy into the program was like a bump of cocaine for the Hornet faithful after basically being mediocre for a generation. They are chasing that high now. Fans for sure want the return of Taylor-style winning, but Marion and Wood have bet their personal reputations on it, so the opportunity cost has gone up. Potential for high reward (I guess?), to the extent that blowing out Northern Colorado makes a case. But also potential for disastrous embarrassment. But here’s another dimension- it’s still mostly a Big Sky schedule. They have kind of insulted the conference and “Montucky”. It’s not supposed to matter, but I would tend to think the officiating squad is not going to be inclined to cut them any favors this year.

well I think their president will try to spin any outcome positive because on a fundamental level “success” is making donors and sponsors for the FBS push more willing to open their wallets on Nov 22 than Aug 30. My guess is that they seek to prove they belong with the big boys and I think their make or break test comes early - at South Dakota State, last year one of the best teams in FCS. And at Nevada, last year a not-that-good FBS team that boat-raced the Eastern Washington team that beat Sac State. If they make their statement in those games I think they have to win out against the peasants. If they poop the bed week 1 and 2, idk the case gets harder to make, I think, that they are ready to play with the big dogs. I think they are going to want attendance 15k or better and demonstrate they can take a strong showing on the road to Reno.

What Marion has put together is the team equivalent of a North Korean rocket - nobody knows if it will work because it’s made of parts not meant to go together that came from all over the place. There will be a big parade and then a test. Which might explode on the pad and set off an internal crisis. Or it might work and get people talking until they realize they only had the parts to do it once.