no polo

Extremely important fainting goat update. The conversation did not quite go as asserted yesterday, but it's pretty great anyway:

“He told me the play of the week, the special teams funky deal, was a fake punt – the Fainting Goat,” Mays said. “In my mind, I was like, ‘What’s that?’”

Said Paschall: “Book, you’re going to be the goat.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ What is he saying?” Mays said.

Also:

“I was talking to the guy across from me, saying, ‘Wow, there is some thick air down here in Miami,” Mays said.

God bless Arkansas State.

BEAT THE DRUM EVERYBODY. Ineligible man downfield complainin' is welcome wherever I find it. Pete Roussel notes an egregious event in the Alabama-USM game:

yes the penalty is called when the ball is thrown but not caught; still geez

Remember last year when Taylor Lewan engaged a guy about three yards behind the line and drove him so far downfield he got a penalty and everyone clucked at him about how he had to know better? Why would he have to know better? I think he would not have to.

Offenses are brutally effective already without adding blocking linebackers ten yards downfield on pass plays to their docket.

BEAT THE DRUM PART 2. Yes, we are going to beat this dead horse until it sends seven guys downfield on the snap. "Shield" punting, which we've called "spread" around here because I'm sure you can figure it out*, has taken over college football. Michigan is an exception, and apparently so is Texas. They ate a 45-yard punt return before UCLA's winning drive after lining up like so:

This is actually a little more spread-ish than Michigan, but eight Longhorns are behind the LOS when the ball is kicked.

Like Michigan, the bad way stats are kept somewhat conceals the issue here. Not only does Texas give up a lot of yards per return, they give up a lot of returns, period:

UT’s 10.3-yard-per-punt-return average allowed isn’t miserable — although it ranks 88th out of 128 FBS teams — but the Longhorns are allowing a greater number of punt return chances under Vaughn, and as the UCLA punt shows, a reason could be because his players are late getting downfield. The nine punt returns against UT this year is tied for fourth-most nationally while the Longhorns’ 93 total punt return yards allowed puts them tied for 115th.

Strong used a spread punt at Louisville to good effect; no idea why he's not doing the same thing at Texas.

*[Bizarrely, coaches keep telling me that it is Michigan's NFL-style punt game that they know as "spread." I reject that lingo and all its works. You don't get to call it that. That makes no sense. Unlike coaches who don't want to use seven  gunners, I insist on making sense.]

Also in Texas but better? Four minutes left is a weird amount of time to have in a game. If you're leading and on offense, you need a first down at all costs. If you're leading and on defense you want to prevent the other team from scoring, but if they're going to score you want them to do it quickly, not after 3:58 has left the clock. The paramount thing is to get (or keep) the ball.

So a lot of offenses will grunt their way to a third and seven and then take their shot. Strong elected for a different path:

When Texas got the ball at 4:17 with a four point lead and chose to go "tempo", the ensuing three and out and minimal clock burn was widely panned on the web and in the traditional media.  Of course, it didn't matter.  UCLA scored in about nine seconds on a punt return followed by a good play call against tendency.

Texas had just scored to go ahead with the aid of a hurry-up no huddle; a UCLA player misaligned on a 30-yard run. They continued that with the lead and 4:17 left, and that's… odd. But if you think that's the best way to get a first down, that's at least defensible. Of course, when you lose five yards on a run up the gut you're not going to be bleeding much of anything.

Upshot: coaches don't place enough emphasis on having the ball last when they're in a one-possession game. They're willing to bleed down the field for an opposition four-minute drill instead of being aggressive, and they place minimally useful timeout-sapping over a greater chance of getting a first down.

A stupid reason but okay. We're now talking about revoking the NFL's non-profit status because of "Redskins"?

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) announced Tuesday that she will introduce legislation to eliminate the NFL’s tax-exempt status because of its refusal to address the name of the Washington Redskins.

While I also find the name distasteful, why don't we revoke the NFL's non-profit status because it in no way fits the definition of a nonprofit enterprise? The idea that the NFL can skate on millions of dollars in taxes because [no reason given] is equally offensive. Possibly more so, because one situation is a private enterprise being offensive and the other is the government being idiotic.

I mean, if there's one class of industries you can tax the living hell out of without seeing them move their labor force, it's pro sports.

(No polo.)

It's profile o-clock. Jeremy Clark:

"Of course everyone wants to play, but (last year) I was still learning the process and there were guys in front of me who knew the calls and everything, so you can't get mad if you don't know what you're supposed to be doing out there," Clark said. "This year, I feel like I'm learning it well."

Dueling Bryan Mone Piece #1:

“The thing you realize quickly about Bryan is the genuine concern he shows for everyone he comes in contact with,” said Benson, Mone's prep coach at Highland High School in Salt Lake City. "And it's genuine. He truly cares about everyone around him. I don't know if I've met a kid with a bigger heart.

"He's one of a kind. Truly one of a kind."

Dueling Bryan Mone Piece #2:

"My brother has always been my motivation, because growing up he couldn’t really feed himself or do all types of stuff, so I had to grow up soon enough to help out my mom and my sister,” said Mone, who had another older brother who died from leukemia.

Mone began caring for his brother in earnest in sixth grade, but didn’t feel comfortable with all his responsibilities until a few years later.

“I started getting used to it in junior high,” he said. “I knew what I had to do to take care of him.”

Designated official site softball-tosser on Jack Miller:

Jack Miller is many things.

He's best known as the starting center and anchor of the offensive line for the University of Michigan football team. But he's also a political science major, and thinks he might someday become a lawyer or run for public office.

He's a music lover -- especially Dave Matthews and jam bands -- and takes aim during deer and duck hunting seasons.

Miller also is the great-nephew of former Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland, who texts him after every game and remains a huge inspiration.

Spence suspended further. Noah Spence's ecstasy suspension was three games, and now it's at least four after he failed a test before Kent State. If Ohio State follows the usual policy here he would be out for the year, as most teams go 1) nothing, 2) one game, 3) quarter of a season, 4) whole season for failed drug tests. Spence has apparently entered rehab.

But you have a legitimate reason! I don't understand why Brady Hoke keeps saying things like "I don't feel like it" and this latest…

Brady Hoke: “You can say something about (injuries) and you’ll be wrong.” Hence his silence on them.

— Alejandro Zúñiga (@ByAZuniga) September 17, 2014

…when asked about injuries. He has a legit reason. He can just say "I don't want to help Utah prepare for our game by telling them which personnel we'll have available." This is 1) the truth and 2) not insulting to the intelligence of anyone coming across his answer.

It is not good when your contempt for the media gets in the way of obviously better and more honest answers. See: Gibbons, Brendan.

Etc.: Tip times set times set for a number of basketball games. Article on how Michigan sticking by Devin Gardner despite "fans' pleas" for Shane Morris cites no fans pleading for Shane Morris. In fact cites reporter's question about Shane Morris indirectly by including Nussmeier answer to it.

We've reached a crossroads. Northwestern has had just about their entire football program sign on to an attempt to get themselves recognized as a union by the National Labor Relations Board. This is a crossroads for the NCAA for obvious reasons.

It is also one for this here blog because it is explicitly a no-politics zone. Whenever the word "union" comes up your bitter uncle who watches Sean Hannity on a loop waddles in from [email protected] to talk about how unions are the doom of America and gets in an argument with your aunt with a dozen cats who sounds like that one lady on NPR. This argument is why the hopefully-soon-to-be-fired dude in charge of NCAA PR framed his response like so:

This union-backed attempt to turn student-athletes into employees undermines the purpose of college: an education.

The unions! They're destroying education.

I don't care about any of that; I only want to look at an interesting tactic to force schools to bargain with their athletes.

So.

Can this work?

Former UNC center John Henson

The NCAA says student-athletes are not employees, because student-athletes are student-athletes, who are not employees. This came about in the 1950s when the widow of a player who had died tried to get workmen's comp. The Colorado Supreme Court eventually found that Fort Lewis College was "not in the football business," which was probably accurate in that time and place.

More recently, a paralyzed TCU player had a long-running court battle that ended in 2000 with the NCAA winning on what seems like a hell of a technicality:

The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football.

Along with a weaving series of decisions by the NLRB that erratically but generally side with universities when students who happen to also be workers ask for bargaining rights, this is what the NCAA will hang its hat on.

On the other side, a 2006 paper by a couple of Michigan State law professors (one of whom is a Michigan law alum) entitled

THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT-ATHLETE: THE COLLEGE ATHLETE AS EMPLOYEE

The article is a lot more fun than it sounds.

Why, a half century after adopting this term, should the NCAA
unceasingly intone to millions of viewers that these young men and
women are “student-athletes”? The NCAA’s purpose in this message is
to shore up a crumbling façade, a myth in America, that these young
athletes in NCAA-member sports programs are properly characterized
only as “student-athletes.” This characterization—that athletes at
NCAA-member schools are student-athletes—is essential to the NCAA
because it obscures the legal reality that some of these athletes, in fact,
are also employees.

About halfway through the authors start using the term "employee-athletes" in a delightful fashion. And I'm pretty sure that this paper is the underpinning of the case Northwestern will take to the board, because it lays out its argument specifically for D-I football and basketball players. The new College Athletics Players Association is currently restricting itself to the same players:

Huma told Farrey that only NCAA Division I FBS football players and men’s basketball players will be eligible to join CAPA — not because non-revenue sports athletes don’t deserve a voice and workplace protections, but because revenue sports athletes are in the best position to make a legal case that they should be treated as employees.

The upshot of their argument is that the most recent edict set down by the NLRB declares that students working in some capacity for the university are not actually employees as long as their work is primarily educational (ie, research assistants getting credit for their work) and if their relationship with the university is "not an economic one."

Scholarship athletes are being compensated for activities that have nothing to do with their academic goals and if they're at a number of D-I basketball and football schools they are raking in millions of dollars for their university. Therefore, they are employees*. It's hard to envision a court claiming with a straight face that Michigan is "not in the football business" these days. That they are using their football business money in bizarre ways is not the NLRB's problem.

The weakest part of the argument here comes from the fact that employee-athletes are all given the same amount of compensation. The decision this paper is basing their argument off cited the uniformity of compensation of GAs at Brown, and the fact that some Brown students got the same compensation without having to do work-like activities. The paper convincingly argues that this fourth test is nonsensical in multiple ways, but that is still a sticking point upon which the whole enterprise might founder.

I'm no law-talking guy, but I'd say there's a decent chance Northwestern gets certified.

*[As long as you accept the premise that athletes submit to a high level of control of their activities in exchange for compensation, which is entirely obvious and will be fought against tooth and nail by the NCAA.]

Then what?

Well, then Northwestern and Northwestern only would have a player union. They would have the legal right to collectively bargain with Northwestern for impermissible benefits that would give the NCAA cause to annihilate Northwestern.

States across the country with laws on the books that are friendlier to student-employee rights would see local CAPA chapters mushroom. As anyone who's dealt with a GEO strike knows, Michigan is one of these.

At this point, the entire system has to either collapse or be forcibly restructured. What the NCAA looks like in the aftermath is completely unpredictable, at least for schools in major conferences. The one thing that is clear: the firmament will be shaken as employee/student/athletes go from people watching the NCAA to half of the decision-making process.

Go team.