texas

pay that man his money [Bryan Fuller]

SPONSOR NOTE: Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Adam W maintains his #1 ranking with NeelV, mdmelvin, and jmer120 one point back. Round 4 is here and there are only 53 fans who've competed in all of them so don't be scared off if you haven't played yet. Complete by 5 PM Friday.

The State of our NIL. Deeply ironic that Michael Rosenberg is the one to write a story on Michigan's NIL program after the whole Freep investigation thing—which portrayed a series of minor envelope-pushes from Rodriguez as a program that was violating NCAA regulations on countable hours by a factor of three—but since he did and it has some insight into the murkiest thing in college football, link grudgingly deployed. Sounds like whatever deficiencies led Hunter Dickinson to Kansas don't apply to football:

[Corum] bought two rental properties in his home state of Virginia and invested in an apartment complex in Michigan to “make sure I have that cash flow coming in on a regular basis.” As he points out: “A lot of kids leave college, and they don’t have any money. They just have debt.”

Corum did not give out an exact number but asserted he is "in the 1%." And since NIL cannot be used as a recruiting inducement you get a lot of up front promises that are not backed by binding contracts. The result:

“I have a lot of friends from different schools and different programs where they’re getting promised money up front, whether it’s the [transfer] portal or in recruiting, and when they get to the program, they’re just not getting what they were told,” Keegan says. “That’s causing a lot of problems in other locker rooms.”

Corum says he has friends at other schools who tell similar stories: “They’d never signed anything, so therefore, they didn’t get it.”

Keegan says he made 50-70k between the Big Ten championship game and TCU and expects to bring in low to mid six figures this year. As a guard! Who is the second best guard on the team!

Also in the Blake Corum, perfect human files:

[Edwards and Corum] have done joint autograph signings and have talked about building low-income housing together someday.

Blake Corum may have opinions about downtown FAR premiums.

[After THE JUMP: Mel Tucker items.]

The last GLI: 2019. [James Coller]

28 HOURS TO GO: If you haven’t gotten in on the Kickstarter for HTTV 2021 do so now! Friday night it ends. One guy said he’s buying it just for my writing (which, there’s a lot of it), so whatever excuse you come up with for why you want to have this, it’s definitely not the worst one.

image

I am printing only a limited amount this year and expect to sell out before they get to any shelves. Yes, I’ll have a Kindle version but that won’t be ready until mid-August. I wrote my piece this morning, not counting the Table of Contents and the title page. The covers have already been printed. Buy ‘em up!

RELEASE THE SPREADSHEETS: Texas got sick of carrying the league they thought they would dominate and Oklahoma did until Iowa State upset everybody. The wheels are now set in motion for the Sooners and Longhorns to join the SEC when the Big 12’s TV deal expires in 2025. At that point the Longhorn Network will become part of the Mouse, Texas A&M goes back to being the Michigan State of a larger state, and the SEC will become the super-conference (more of a league) that will finally be as strong as they incessantly tell people they are.

Here is the best take:

The Big Ten is preparing its borders by letting it be known that only refugees with valid AAU membership cards will even be considered.

…unless, of course, you’re rich.

It’s also set the college football anthill into a frenzy. The people who like neat and same-sized columns are busy working on their justifications why jamming regionally and culturally affiliated institutions into their specific 16-team boxes is right and good. The guy who’s got a source willing to admit that Michigan and Ohio State once got asked out by someone who knows Alabama is going to have his day circulated among pretend media until a critical mass of brains have rejected it as goofy.

The Big 12 has more existential concerns, like do they exist? Commissioner Bob Bowlsby sent ESPN a cease and desist letter accusing the network of trying lure 3-5 members to the AAC to get the Big 12 to dissolve. Why?

"It's not so much about the taking of the members, what it does — and what it's intended to do — is destabilize the Big 12 so that it implodes, thus absolving OU and Texas of their grant of rights obligations and their exit fee obligations. If the Big 12 fails to exist as an entity, they can move quicker and they can do so for less money.”

That’s fair, but as Mathlete recently pointed out, the Big 12 has some Monty Python vibes right now.

[After THE JUMP: What do we do?]

blast from the very recent past [Bryan Fuller]

You're gonna stay for the fourth quarter of our game against Chattanooga. This is actually not as bad as it sounds at first blush:

Saban, the Alabama football coach, has long been peeved that the student section at Bryant-Denny Stadium empties early. So this season, the university is rewarding students who attend games — and stay until the fourth quarter — with an alluring prize: improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and to the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game, which Alabama is trying to reach for the fifth consecutive season.

But to do this, Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step: using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.

This doesn't impact anyone's ability to get student tickets for the regular season, it just sets up some bonus goals for diehards who want post-season tickets and opt-in to this program. Now, a bunch of people have pointed out the obvious flaw in which people just leave their phones with freshman pledges or whoever, but at least the idea is to prioritize attendance and dedication.

Michigan does nothing along these lines and really dumped on the idea of dedication mattering when they re-seated Crisler the instant the program got good. Michigan should have programs that reward attendance—not necessarily for students who leave early, but for people who buy tickets and don't use them.

Michigan has the power to change their relationship with ticket-holders by 1) allowing people to return tickets to the AD and 2) downgrading Victors Club points for people whose tickets don't scan. The AD can then try to sell those tickets with some sort of rush program. This would be particularly good for Crisler, which often has big swathes of empty seats even for reasonably important games.

The AD continues to focus exclusively on a bottom line that is mostly about how much money they can funnel to the water polo coach and platinum-plate their silver-plated facilities while ignoring the idea that a full, raucous stadium will probably do more for Michigan's wins and losses than the next increment of opulence.

[After THE JUMP: stay tuned for quality Illinois content! Seriously!]