steamboat_charlie

Are people available during the day on Sunday? Agree we definitely need @lu_alum If it's during the day I'll figure out a way to make it work.

Is there really more parity? That particular talking point picked up a lot of steam during the CFB season this year, but I think it was a reactionary take on the back of a few unexpected upsets. What was true before NIL remains true today--the only teams capable of winning a championship in football are the blue bloods. Now, power has balanced out much more nationally across said blue bloods as the "pay gap" between the SEC and other conferences was eliminated, but I wouldn't exactly call that parity. It's still the same teams at the top. What has definitely changed through NIL, and perhaps more importantly the transfer portal, is the speed with which a good coach and organized booster base can turn around a struggling program. See: Indiana, Colorado.

I'll save you the wait--zero additional dollars will be allocated to the OU wrestling program, whether we're in a new world "revenue share" regime, or the current NIL structure becomes status quo.

Leaving Thursday, back Monday, probably back home around 6:30p ET so I could do Monday evening or Tuesday evening. But truly, I do not want the whole show to be held up on my account. If Sunday works best for the majority you should go forward with it and let someone replace me.

I'm actually going to be in Mexico that weekend, so I think I have to bow out. Not sure about WiFi on the beach, unfortunately.

I will be back to defend my title.

I don't know that Angel has any personal biases or leans in terms of who receives the benefit of strange officiating. I do know that a match called by Angel will often feature strange officiating. How much more than average? Hard to say. 25%? 50%? I'm not keeping stats, but he presides over a lot of matches that end up with coaches gesticulating uncontrollably near the scorers' table.

I guess you could say they were ahead of the curve. Every major college football program in the country would be doing backflips if they could get the #1 recruit in the country on campus for just $1mm. There's nothing stopping these guys from transferring. We haven't seen that extreme of an example yet in wrestling. But sure enough, if things continue the way they are now, sometime in the next few years we will see a top recruit go to a program, get paid half a million or more to redshirt, and then transfer a year later if they don't fit the lineup.

It's not that Ohio State doesn't have any money. There are 74, maybe 75 teams out there that would trade places with them in an instant. But there are three teams out there that have more money, have more history, and have at minimum equivalent coaching staffs. NIL money isn't spent only on new recruits and transfers. You also have to utilize NIL to keep the guys you have. People mentioning Ohio State football--$16MM of that $20MM was spent on their own guys. ------- To the question at hand, I guess it depends. Is a top 5 team that occasionally takes home a trophy "cooked"? I think that's who they are in the current landscape, so if that qualifies then sure, they're cooked.

There's a lot that's up in the air right now for NCAA athletics as a whole. Until the settlement is finalized (scheduled for April 2025), I don't think you're going to see a lot of big programs making aggressive moves, unless they have a serious outside benefactor that can effect change (like in Stillwater). P5 Athletics budgets are about to be upended. If/once it's clear that D1 wrestling is going to continue in something close to its current format, you could see Bono get shown the door. Until then I wouldn't expect a single extra dollar to be spent on the program that they don't raise themselves.

He's a special talent. No doubt about that. From the outside looking in it's hard to determine the cause of his occasional lapses. At times I've thought recurring concussions, which is obviously scary and impossible to predict. At other times it's seemed like he's healthy but collapses mentally when things aren't going his way. Hard to say. He's a guy that could bonus his way through the NCAA tournament on the right weekend, and those don't come around too often.

Good on the athletes for getting paid, but this is all a side effect of the third party pay-for-play system we're operating in. Contracts and salaries could fix this particular phenomenon. Unfortunate reality of the new era that an athlete can effectively hold out at any time of their own choosing.

Still working that out but I think just doing B1Gs this year. Too many dads with newborns in our group to make the full NCAAs trip work.

Update--my apologies for the delay. I had some personal obligations pop up and trackwrestling wasn't available to expedite the results tallying process. But... better late than never. I have finally tallied the points, and the results are below: @MPhillips is our winner with 154 points. Shoot me a DM to claim your $20 prize. @nhs67 had the best darkhorse with Frost taking 5th place from an unseeded position, scoring 15 team points. Shoot me a DM to claim your $5 consolation... one beer on me. Apologies again for not updating the scoring in real time. Life got in the way.

Lots of hope on Geog across the board. I will update the standings by tomorrow morning.