I don't know when CR was founded but the Band-uh was moved under it 2007-ish when Student Programs & Activites department was axed without warning. I think Stanford more tolerates than embraces their band. There's a fine line between colorful and poor taste.

It's been a few years since I've been to Portland State, but I remember there being a few old guys seriously into it with Viking hats and a bunch of ambivalent locals who came just because it was someplace to be, but almost no students. I remember it being a pleasant crowd. Not like going to Montana.

I was on the tail end of when the Band-uh went to every single game. We used to drive ourselves everywhere in rented Ford Econoline vans or even personal cars and everyone pitched in to a gas fund. We would play impromptu rallies in exchange for sleeping on high school gym floors along the way. We'd periodically tick off fleet management by abandoning a broken down van in the middle of the Nevada desert, but made for great stories. All that changed around 2011 when the university decided all trips outside of Davis were to be by "professional transportation" only for liability reasons and that sleeping arrangements were to be in hotels with the proper number of people per room. Costs went through the roof. Many members were still willing to pay their own way but the lawyers were concerned this was discriminatory against students without personally deep pockets. Campus Rec was difficult to deal with and the relationship with Athletics was lukewarm during the late Greg W years - some of the big shots with delusions of grandeur didn't think the Band-uh was "TV suitable" and objected to the block CA logo. Maybe Blue will see it differently.

Yup

in all fairness the TuneIn stream so far is much better quality than trying to listen in the KHTK site in previous years. Except for the ref's mic...

I'm listening to the separate audio stream via TuneIn. It is about a minute ahead of the video. But I just got kicked out of the video stream. Now says it will start at 6:15 ?? But then again from where I'm listening I've got Hurricane Irma looking straight at me, so my internet may be iffy.

I have seen other schools start to separate their athletic and academic branding in terms of appearance. Maybe that is what they are doing here, since they are using that "clipped corner" font all over the athletics site. I feel like if the University as a whole was updating branding, there would have been a committee and announcements.

In the last few years a lot of organizations have updated the logos to be more optimized for new media. Nowadays logos and wordmarks are used as profile pictures and most social media is viewed on mobile devices. So it has become more important that the logo is identifiable when it is the size of your fingernail on your phone. Fonts with thick and thin strokes (like the "UC" in UC Davis) are hard to read at small size. The issue of screen size is why the opening title sequence of new Disney movies just says "Disney" and not "Walt Disney Pictures" anymore. Just a hypothesis on this new athletic font.

Kind of related, I noticed that the Athletics site has a trademark symbol next to the phrase "#GoAgs". A year ago, that hashtag would yield results for several schools including NM State and Texas A&M, but now it seems to mostly refer to UC Davis. You can't really control what users do with a hashtag, but perhaps we have prevented other schools from officially promoting the phrase. If so, that is a slick move.

@69aggie I am going to choose to respectfully agree to disagree with you on LK's performance as Chancellor. Moving on...

I am not certain the Bee has an agenda other than to sell newspapers and get clicks so they can sell more advertising. Some of the dirt they uncovered on LK just lent itself to selling news, like "Get me off the Google." Outside of this controversy, the Bee tends to under-report on UCD news, but I don't think it's personal. It is likely just that UCD news doesn't drive revenue for their business.

I don't personally know enough about the proposed railyard satellite campus to have an opinion, but you've got a state legislature that has determined it is more cost effective to grow existing universities than to plant new ones, combined with the City of Davis trying everything to stall the supply of new housing, so something has got to give. Is there strong public support for this in Sacramento that the Bee's editorial board would be catering to?

As far as Chancellor May goes, I think the best advice is to avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety and you won't give the media negative fodder to work with.

In all honesty, Katehi was just not a good chancellor... mired in controversy from Illinois from the beginning, sat on boards that were in direct conflict with the interests of students and the university's mission, presided over the pepper spray debacle, directed a botched PR cover-up, had some hand in hiring/promotion oddities, and repeatedly failed to make timely decisions. Any one item may not have been enough to can her, it was her ongoing habit of bad judgement. Many of her cohorts have committed one or two of the sins mentioned and they still have their jobs. Most have not committed all in rapid succession. I know many insiders liked her because she checked multiple boxes on diversity. If anything, they gave her a pass longer than they would have if she weren't in a protected class. The Bee did not go after her unfairly. She was just straight up incompetent and unethical in most regards. Gould was incompetent as a head coach, but he was ethical and a nice guy. Can't say that for Linda.

I object to the amount of moonlighting that has worked its way into academia. Professors do it when the do paid "consulting" on the side and administrators do it when the participate in extraneous executive boards. Being chancellor isn't a 40-hour a week job. Done properly, it is probably 60-80 hour a week job, always on call. So I question the same things the Bee does -- how does one have time to do extra work, and if they are not doing much extra work, why are they being paid so much? The key differences here are:
1. This guy was honest about these board positions upfront. Shame on universities everywhere for making this the norm, but it does not appear any rules were broken.
2. These boards do not appear to be entangled in the University's day-to-day operation the way a textbook supplier is, nor do they appear to be in direct odds with the University's mission the way a fraudulent diploma-mill is. I do, however, think the alleged "benefits" to the University are probably overstated. The main benefit is to the person receiving the paycheck.

Nonetheless, I think it is worth giving this Chancellor a chance. Even though I disagree with his moonlighting, I do not see a pattern of poor judgement at this time.

The current wordmark, athletic logos, and Gunrock incarnation were developed in 1999 as a committee project between athletics, students, bookstore, etc. Before that departments and teams could use a lot of different logos and fonts, including the Block CA (with and without the mustang and wheat showing next to the "A"), the horseshoe CA, water towers, cows, script Davis, among others. I think the catalyst for the branding effort was when a "Cal-Davis" banner was raised at the 1998 men's basketball national championship. I know the Band-uh continues to use some of the old Block CA logos, although there was a crackdown starting along about 2008 where the administration tried to restrict its use. The explanation at the time was that the public wouldn't know who we were without the C-horse logo. I don't think the Band-uh has ever walked into a room without it being clear who they were, but that is beside the point. Interestingly a lot of the old logos have popped back up on merchandise and teamwear the last couple of years as "vintage" has become a hot marketing item in the retail world.

The logos are now 18 years old, so they may be due for a modernization/update in the next couple of years. But at the same time, when I think about the number of signs, vehicles, business cards, websites, uniforms, etc that would need to be updated, it seems cost prohibitive to change things broadly. I mean, they are only half done changing the signs in front of buildings to the *current* typeface.

I was a teaching assistant at a major ACC university for a year and it was a markedly different experience than Davis. There were a number of male athletes in one of lectures and each was provided a (gorgeous) female "tutor" that accompanied them to each class. For the most part the homework was all done correctly (in seemingly feminine handwriting) and then they all laid an egg on the tests. But in the end it didn't matter because the lead professor was notified by the president of the university that said students would be assigned B's and to make it look justifiable by any means necessary. Maybe isolated to that school, but I highly doubt it.

Keep in mind that in a lot of markets, the big time NCAA teams are in essence the local professional team of choice as far as fans are concerned because there are either a lack of true professional teams in the market or they are irrelevant. Many SEC and ACC teams have huge fan bases of people with really no affiliation to the university and sometimes no college degree at all. But even among alumni, the "good ol' boy network" runs much deeper than we see at Davis, with Ole Miss guys only hiring other Ole Miss guys and the like. These groups don't care about the academic integrity of the athletes as much as they care about the win column because they either have no personal investment or they are so plugged into their respective bro network that they don't care what the outside world thinks of their school. These groups buy the season tickets and merchandise, so university presidents are willing to overlook things.

Here's a visualization of what $30M buys you in construction these days:

1. Let's say for example's sake we are talking an athletic training facility, for which the ARC might be a good point of reference. The ARC is 155,850 square feet and cost $46.5M in 2004 dollars. In 2016 dollars this works out to about $58.8M or $377 per SF.

2. Assuming $377 per SF, you could be talking maybe an 80,000 SF facility of comparable build. Obviously you can push the price per SF down if you just want a metal frame field house for indoor practice or you can push it up if you are redeveloping an existing area with god-knows-what surprises underground.

3. In my area (which is not Davis, but is a place with a very strict building department) here's kind of an idea of what price per square foot gets you.

• $275/sf - basic but functional. Think painted concrete block walls, open ceilings, polished concrete floors, moderate connectivity/technology/equipment
• $375/sf - moderately upgraded. Think finished drywall, suspended ceilings in offices but open ceilings in clearspan areas, stained concrete floors or basic carpet tile
• $475+/sf - nicely equipped. Think finished walls, probably with added architectural cookies. Upgraded ceilings with acoustical treatments, terrazzo floors

4. I've built projects with and without union labor and it usually washes in the end. The union guys tend have fewer accidents/mistakes resulting in fewer redos and injuries. The things that really drive costs are A. if you have an unrealisitic lowball estimate from the beginning, B. the local construction climate (you pay more for materials and labor in a building boom), C. change orders resulting from lack of planning or a change in leadership (executives all come in with their own "vision"), D. if you have somebody in the jobsite trailer with a "construction science" degree but no real experience.

Here are my thoughts

• Blue seems to have been planning to fire Gould for quite a while. I don't think it would have mattered even if we won the close games this season.
• I think Gould has known --or should have known-- for a while that he was going to be fired. He seems to have a new job lined up pretty quickly if he was truly blindsided. Blue and Gould may not have talked about it beforehand, but there's a fair chance it was "double secret".
• $117k is a lower number than I would have expected. I know buyout terms typically decrease in the later years of a contract, but it seems like a good deal if it is a clean break. At least compared to George O'Leary (University of Central Florida) who was fired mid-season last year and then rehired as a 12-hour per year "consultant" fetching $200k annually through 2020.
• In Bruce's article, it mentioned that the $117k buyout would be "mitigated" if Gould found new employment in the next 13 months. If his Fresno State job holds true (not sure what the official start date would be), it sounds like we could get a discount on the buyout. Curious what happens to the balance of the donor money in that case... return to donors or used for other football purposes?