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.

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.