No. False.
He’s the one who made the challenge, not her. It’s not like she took advantage of an old man, he did it to himself.
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“high school boys state championship team from a large state like New York, California or Florida”
In Michigan, every elite level player ( and there are only a few of them each year ) is recruited away from their high school by prep Academy teams. These prep Academies are basically college teams, players are recruited from all over the country, poached from their local HS team. These prep teams probably have 10 out of 15 kids go on to play D1 ( the other 5 are there to drive up the team GPA, gotta keep up appearances, lol ). The recruited Prep Academy teams would be able to go toe to toe with WNBA champs. A regular HS state champ team is not nearly as talented as these prep Academy teams, it’s not even close.
It’s all just an opinion, nobody knows what would happen until they actually play. I sure wouldn’t underestimate those WNBA players though.
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This is nothing new. The legendary Pat Summit (Tennessee for the uninitiated) started doing that about 50 years ago. A couple years ago we got to watch the UT women practice and Summit’s former player now head coach is following in her footsteps with male practice squad.
Surprisingly, it is not common knowledge even among those that are covering the sport.
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The point I have been barking about, for a long time: what happened to “education” being the mission of schools? Nope. Need circuses, to keep the proles diverted, so having the proles pay taxes to fund the NBA and NFL farm systems becomes the mission.
Steve
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UCONN women have often played the men’s team directly to improve their chops.
There is no high school boy’s team in the country that plays a decent fast break. High school students are not ready for that. Does not matter if every last one of them is playing just below the quality of MJ in the NBA five years later.
Not to worry. Get a job as coach at Texas A&M, get fired, get a $77,000,000 payout. This is how “education” can work for everyone, probably.
It’s working pretty good, don’t you think? At least if your name is Jimbo.
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You forgot the sarcasm tags.
Steve
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No, it is how big time athletic donors decide to spend their money. With the price of oil around $80/barrel an easy choice. If it was $30/barrel not so much. More often than not, the athletic department and the school act as two separate entities with the only thing in common is the name on the letter head.
However, Arizona currently has itself in a bind and is considering selling their athletic department. New one on me.
But back to the original subject. TX A&M has a 100,000 plus football stadium. Average ticket price is probably around $200 when considering club seating, premium seats, etc. So they gross $20 million per sell out. With 8 home games a year, more than enough to cover the buyout if you assumed all proceeds went to the athletic program.
It has been shown multiple times in the past, having a good football team increases student enrollment. It also increases donations to all parts of the school, not just athletics.
College sports are a multibillion dollar industry.
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Most college athletic programs are net money losers.
This is true. I recently posted a link to a table of athletic department profit/loss data. Of the 100+ largest universities, only 18 showed a net profit on athletics.
College sports are a taxpayer subsidy to the NBA and NFL, who have never invested in their own developmental leagues, like MLB and the NHL have.
If the athletic program is sold, how will they maintain the sham of “NCAA academic qualification” for the players? If it was a professionally run, for profit, basketball and football operation, how could it compete with colleges, who are “burdened” with maintaining the fraud of the NCAA?
Steve
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Anybody want to take a shot at a plan for divorcing the basketball and football farm system from college education?
I propose this as a crude rough beginning scheme for doing so:
- Create a way to calendar all that follows in a sensible way.
- Extract money from major league football and basketball to pay for the transition to a new system workable for the interests of the same.
- Sell relevant college sports teams to professional franchises as farm teams functioning in cities/towns near their “ancestral” colleges and fan bases, and figure out how to divvy up media rights during transition to make it safer for all concerned to stick their necks out.
- Have a program to re-establish actual amateur student football basketball at colleges universties who chose to continue.
- Take the NCAA out and shoot it with silver bullets; cut off its head and boil off the meat and hair and turn the skull into a drinking cup and sell the cup; put a big sharp splintery oak stake through its heart; bury the corpse under a dance palace.
david fb
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You don’t have a chance. Because it is more important to keep the proles diverted with circuses. A for profit, minor league, organization, can’t afford the spectacle that colleges put on.
Steve
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Steve
Thanks for the clear representation of reality.
I hate them.
david fb
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Lunch invigorated my “little grey cells”. You would have a better chance of enacting a “one size fits all, big gummit” national health plan, that would put the for-profit insurance industry out of business. than “privatizing” college athletics. Everyone, except it’s own management, hates the insurance industry. But look at the hype and hysteria over college athletics. Biggest laffer is the numbers of people who are college football fanatics, but never went to any college themselves.
No minor league for-profit team would be able to pay the coaches the multi-million dollar paychecks that state taxpayers subsidize for colleges either. In most states, the highest paid government employees are not the people who can really make a difference, like the Gov or Attorney General. It’s a taxpayer subsidized college football or basketball coach.
Steve
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You forgot Plan B - let the NCAA management keep doing what they are doing, i.e., being inept at any oversight and forethought.
Personally, I think at some point, the top 60 or so college football institutions will give the middle finger to the NCAA and form a collective of their own. The money is too big and the NCAA only gets in the way. The college administrations will go along because the money is too big.
Again, good football teams drive applications/enrollment and donations. Basketball does too but not to the same extent. As my college history teacher once said when discussing pre-civil war USA, cotton used to be king but it has now be supplanted by football.
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And because of the massive anti-competitive advantages, of course.
I don’t think the colleges would ever break away and form their own league…because then they’d have to pay the players. Without the history of the NCAA dating back to before college football and basketball were huge money sports, I don’t think do anywhere near as well as they did in the California NIL anti-trust litigation…and they lost that litigation. The NCAA at this point is the only thing standing between them and having to pay their players some megabucks.
They’d never get away with forming a new “collective” with an explicit rule that says “We all agree not to pay these kids anything, right?”
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Thing is, the big revenue top line, does not translate to the bottom line. The data shows that, outside of a handful, most colleges lose money on athletics, losses in the millions per year. What would their business plan be, when they have been losing millions per year, for years?
Steve
You just jack-up the annual “Student Activity Fee” that every student is required to pay. James Madison University in Virginia has a “Student Activity Fee” of $2,340/yr solely to finance the school’s sports teams.
I’ve never had a job interview where they asked me how many games the college football team won.
intercst
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Thanks for the link. From the article:
“For someone who doesn’t care a whole lot about athletics, it seems a bit much for me to have to contribute,” said Waltemyer. “I have two jobs. I’m a full-time student. And I’m paying for athletes’ scholarships? To me, that hurt.”
As offered on this board before, this is more evidence that Shiny-land is prioritizing athletics above education. And more evidence that the universities, in general, are not making a profit on it, as proponents insist they are, as they are putting the bite directly on the students, as well as spending state education funding, ie taxpayer money, on sports, rather than academics.
And yet, the proles, certainly most of my former coworkers, most of whom never went to college, are either ignorant of, or OK with their circuses being paid for in this manner.
Steve
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Bread and circuses
20 elaphants