The Commerce Clause would be used as the justification for why the law could be enacted by Congress under its constitutionally enumerated powers, but there are other negative restrictions on Congress’s ability to act (obviously there are individual rights under the Constitution, for example, that Congress can’t violate even if it’s acting under an enumerated power). Non-commandeering is a constitutional doctrine that the federal government can’t force state government to take any action, which I suspect might come into play if Congress tried to say “you can’t condition your own state organs’ ability to play football on their doing X, Y, and Z”. There are counter arguments to be made, I think, but I would imagine Congress would be more reluctant to attempt to override state laws if it’s getting close to the line.
Regarding the “patchwork” question, I think there are probably good arguments that the federal government can’t preempt state laws like California’s that apply only to state schools. State schools are created by the state, so if the state wants to say that those schools can’t have a football program without giving certain rights to players it would likely have anti-commandeering, 11th Amendment and other federalism implications for the federal government to try to prohibit the state from imposing those rules.
You could try marrying the daughter of a Ford executive. It worked for me. I don't think the dealership in Texas had ever seen anyone get Z plan pricing before.
If so, it's purely a factor of the size of the armies involved. As I understand it, casualty rates in warfare have dropped pretty steadily over time. Looking at Wikipedia statistics, the casualty rates on Omaha Beach are estimated, on the high side, to be about 10% for the Americans and 20% for the Germans. Casualty rates like that would have been pretty routine during World War I, and don't even come close to the 25%-35% casualty rates in many battles of the American Civil War.
If so, it's purely a factor of the size of the armies involved. As I understand it, casualty rates in warfare have dropped pretty steadily over time. Looking at Wikipedia statistics, the casualty rates on Omaha Beach are estimated, on the high side, to be about 10% for the Americans and 20% for the Germans. Casualty rates like that would have been pretty routine during World War I, and don't even come close to the 25%-35% casualty rates in many battles of the American Civil War.
De gustibus cerevesiae non disputandum est. I like Two Hearted--it's a solid example of its kind, and I'm pleased they've started distributing in Texas, though I recently did a side-by-side comparison with my default IPA, Odell, and found I preferred the Odell by a noticeable margin. My current opinion is that, with most beer, freshness matters a great deal, so it makes sense that people are enthusiastic about their local breweries.
The Australian company that makes A2 ostensibly owns a patent on the genetic test used to determine which cows have the A1 mutation, although I've heard it's either unlikely to hold up in US court or would be easy to circumvent. One other way you can get milk that's less likely to have A1 is to buy from (usually small) dairies that have cattle breeds other than Holstien. The rates of A1 mutation in, for example, Jersey and Guernsey cattle are much lower.
"Contempt" ("le Mepris"). I swear it's because of the interesting explorations of the Odysseus mythos and the beautiful cinematography, not because it opens with a shot of Brigitte Bardot's nude derrière.
Being There is a splendid movie. Supposedly it was one of the things that drew my parents closer when they first started dating. They were watching it in Albuquerque, and were both rolling in the aisles while the humor was obviously going over the heads of everybody else in the theatre.
To be fair, it seems like very few people put in the effort to decipher the Boss's lyrics, even in relatively well-enunciated songs like Born in the USA. I, like many casual listeners apparently, assumed from the title that it expressed some kind of patriotic sentiment, until I actually listened to the verses.
It does occasionally seem to happen (especially in the SEC) that a coach will come into a bottom-feeder program, turn it into a contender and then get fired for failing to live up to the standard he created. Houston Nutt at Arkansas comes to mind. The Brady Hoke example is ridiculously inapposite, though; the standards he was fired for failing to live up to were created before he was born, not in his flukey first season. If he'd managed to turn in Michigan's version of mediocrity--nine-win seasons and new-year's day bowls like Lloyd in his latter years--he'd probably still be pottering around Michigan's sideline.
The work he's done, while sometimes impressive, was helped along by Michigan's being in a protracted funk for most of his tenure. If Michigan does to Michigan State what they did to Northwestern this Saturday, I think it will go a long way to drive home the fact that Michigan State has never been a terminal job for good football coaches. All that being said, I get the impression Dantonio has personal oddities that may make him less appealing to most programs than his success might otherways dictate. If he wanted a shot at moving to a better program (which I don't know South Carolina necessarily is) he should probably have put himself on the market last year or in 2013.
I keep expecting to see this exchange:
Reporter: "How do you stay humble when you keep getting all the clippings?"
Football player born in the late '90s: "What the hell is a clipping?"
The resentment State fans feel toward Michigan has its origins in the disparity between the academic institutions, not sports. It's a cold, hard fact, not a rivalry joke, that people who went to State were probably rejected by Michigan, if they even bothered to apply. State fans comprise a higher percentage of alumni than Michigan fans do, and those alumni become obsessed with beating Michigan in sports because, academically, the difference between the two institutions is so vast the whole notion of a contest is risible.
The NLRB's Northwestern decision is a little muddled, but I don't see anything in it that is obviously concerned with competitive parity. Its conclusion that asserting jurisdiction wouldn't effectuate statutory policy because it wouldn't promote "stability" in the relevant labor market is, as mentioned in this post, based on the fact that the NLRB has no jurisdiction over a large majority of the employers in the industry. Why the board finds that fact relevant is only discussed in vague terms of the "symbiotic" relationship between teams in a sports league. One could interpret that discussion as being motivated by a desire to keep games interesting, but it seems to me that the board is just observing that the nature of sports leagues requires that they have rules that apply to all members, and the board won't have the ability to change those rules by certifying a single-employer bargaining unit. The disruption the board seems to be worried about isn't that a unionized Northwestern would be at a competitive disadvantage, but that it would be easy for the NCAA or the Big Ten to exclude Northwestern if a players' union negotiated something that would violate their rules.
Here's another vote for the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. You should probably pick one or the other if you're only going to spend one day--there's enough in each to fill a strenuous day of touring easily. If anyone in your family is interested in old cars or industrial history the Henry Ford should be something of a Mecca, and Greenfield Village is widely regarded as one of the best interpretive history museums in the country, comparable to places like Colonial Williamsburg and Plimoth Plantation.
Edit: If you want to eat lunch at Greenfield Village, your handle compels me to point out that Eagle Tavern serves good locally brewed beer, some of which I believe is created specially for the museum.
Another way the subject may have come up is that one of the coaches, in an effort to show how interested they were, mentioned how hard they worked convincing the admissions office to sign off on offering Neal, without realizing how self-deluded he and his father are about his academic credentials. It wouldn't surprise me if he were pretty borderline to meet Michigan's admissions requirements for scholarship athletes; the fact that he apparently couldn't make a three-word announcement of his Michigan offer without a subliterate verb conjugation may be telling.
Exactly. To take an example from the rankings in the state where I live, Southlake and Highland Park are both districts that teach the test heavily, and that also have the advantage of being socioeconomically very uniform. The quality of instruction is OK, but hampered by the fact that everyone has to teach the same unimaginative dreck that the state prescribes. In addition, the wealth of the students masks a pretty shady social scene that I would never want to subject my children to: Highland Park high school is well known for students' doing casual lines in the bathrooms, so I can only imagine what the nouveau riche kids in Southlake are up to. Plano was kind of the equivalent fifteen years ago, and they had a big scandal involving a heroin epidemic.
These rankings are based on methodology that is probably a pretty dubious criterion for the kinds of things a parent with the ability to choose a nice school district should care about. Average math and English scores on the statewide standardized tests may be a reasonable way of determining whether a school is a den of vice and iniquity, but don't really illuminate much about the quality of instruction or students in better schools. At the high end, state test scores tend to indicate either that the school district is uniformly very affluent (with no poor kids to drag down their averages) or that the school focuses its curriculum on teaching the standardized tests, usually in hopes of improving its ranking on sites like these. If I were looking for a school district, its having an extremely high standardized test ranking would probably be a strike against it, because of the curriculum issue. If you're looking for genuine academic excellence you'd be better off looking at things like AP test scores.
Wait--are you suggesting we use the wolverine as a tight end in some kind of tackle-over formation? I figured we'd stop running those when we fired Borges, and besides a wolverine is a little low to the ground to be a very good receiving target.
The problem with over-signing is that it creates a situation in which the program has to cut players regardless of whether they are, in fact, "hacking it." The analogy of players who fail to see significant playing time with academic scholarship recipients whose grades are slipping is pretty silly; there are plenty of requirements established for football players to maintain their scholarships, and players get cut for them often. The practice that is objectionable is cutting players merely because the coaches want to free up scholarship space for someone they think would be better. Not only does it leave players who were fulfilling the conditions of their scholarships out in the cold, but it undercuts the whole purpose of the scholarship cap by allowing teams to recruit above the caps and take only the best players after they've had time to assess their performance.
If you read the details of the investigation, it's very difficult to come away with any impression but that Paterno knew exactly what was going on and actively participated in sweeping the matter under the rug, either out of loyalty to Sandusky or to protect his own reputation. Even if he had some reason to doubt the account of the player who gave him a firsthand report of Sandusky raping a kid in the shower, his reaction to the situation (to disassociate Sandusky from the football program) indicated that he knew something was up, and that his primary concern was for his and Penn State's reputation, not Sandusky's victims. The most charitable interpretation would be that Paterno was old and apathetic and wanted to avoid doing anything that would tarnish the program's reputation unless he was certain Sandusky was guilty. Given that there were apparently multiple incidents over the years, though, I've come to believe that Paterno knew of Sandusky's predelictions from at least the time of his retirement, and excused them for some reason.
I'm actually rather pleased to see that sort of thing, since it is evidence of the reason that Michigan can afford to pay NFL money to coaches without resorting to tacky corporate sponsorship deals that have a larger impact on fans' sensibilities:
Hackett: "Ira! We want to hire Jim Harbaugh, but we don't want to ask him to take a pay cut. Do you think you could spot us about ten million bucks?"
Ira: "Sure, Jim. Would you mind mentioning my family's name in connection with Harbaugh in a few official press releases?"
Hackett: "Ira, you drive a hard bargain, but I think we can swing that."
This is thoroughgoing nonsense based on a misconception of the nature of intellectual property. It is not possible to patent or copyright a color. It is possible to claim trademark rights (or, to use the more common term for this kind of thing, trade-dress rights) in a color, but as with any other trademark right it entails creating an association between that color and a product or service. For example, arbitrarily coloring fiberglass insulation pink or painting parcel delivery trucks brown could create a trade-dress right to the extent that those colors became associated with specific providers of insulation or parcel delivery. Those rights, however, would not apply to prevent anyone else from doing anything with those colors in themselves, only if the manner of use would create confusion as to whether the person using them was associated with DuPont or UPS.
In theory it might be possible for the University of Texas to claim some kind of trade-dress right in burnt orange (though trade-dress rights in a color usually revolve around the use of a color in a very specific context, and I'm not sure what that context would be with UT) but nobody associates burnt orange with Nike. The common misconception people have about trademarks is that they merely entail calling "dibs", when in fact that is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain trademark rights.
I should also point out that, if one has trade-dress rights in a certain color, someone seeking to avoid an infringement claim would have to do more than change the Pantone shade a little bit. The relevant question in a claim would not be "is this exactly the same color as the one associated with the trademark owner?", but rather "is there a likelihood that consumers would be led to believe that the defendant's product or service is affiliated with the trademark owner?" If you wanted to manufacture pink fiberglass, it would do you no good to argue that yours is a slightly different shade from Dupont's.
In order to trademark some version of maize, Nike would need to create an association of the color with goods or services Nike provides, and even if they did it wouldn't prevent Michigan from using it on uniforms, because Michigan doesn't provide the same goods or services as Nike does.
I submit that "Urban is coach" is a legit answer. Also the fact that he only schedules fifteen minutes of recruiting visits for "academic presentations", which is probably a euphemism for something involving nubile coeds anyhow.
Good Lord, these are some insightful and unbiased observations. You should submit a dissertation proposal to Ohio State, although it might get rejected for being too similar to a dozen other current students' projects.
In that context it is, since it's intended to be the subject of the sentence. There isn't anything wrong with the phrase "us and Notre Dame" in itself; it would be entirely correct to say "all college football teams have advertising in their stadiums except us and Notre Dame."
So you're arguing that taking a historically bad program and making it mediocre-to-good in five years is less impressive than taking a historically good program and making it mediocre in two? However short a timeline you use in assessing the state of a program, Arkansas was not a big reclamation project; they had one lousy season under John L. Smith and another under Bielma himself, before Bielma put up a season with two wins less than the season that got Nutt fired, presumably using players recruited around the time of Petrino's beating Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl. There may be reasons to dislike Mullen, but underachieving in comparison to Bret Bielma isn't one of them.
I'm not sure how the comparison to Bielma is relevant. Arkansas has been a pretty good team for decades; Nutt was fired because he failed to live up to the expectations he'd created, and Petrino had two ten-win seasons and would probably be there still if he weren't a philanderer. Bielma's second season mostly looks good in comparison to his terrible first season, not the recent history of Arkansas football.
If our coach wants to leave the stage at Michigan with deep and admiring recognition, he's pretty much S.O.L.; that ship sailed a long time ago.
Also, I suspect the players have at least a vague idea of what it takes to win in Columbus; it generally entails being a good football team, and there's the rub.
Isn't the record against both 1-6 since 2008? Maybe it's time to scale back our ambitions even further--Penn State or maybe Illinois could be our new rival. Northwestern's been a pretty even match.
Correction: They have Michigan in the Cactus bowl, and Western in the Armed Forces bowl. It's a sorry reflection on the season that that could even be a point of confusion.
This is an example of one of the strangest aspects of sports fandom: the notion that fans' "support", in the sense of having positive feelings or optimism about a player or a team, has any impact on that player or team. I suppose there are minor ways in which the behavior of fans is noticeable to players; attendance and crowd noise at games seem to matter somewhat. I suppose some players even make the mistake of reading commentary about themselves, although I'd hope that after five years of playing college ball Devin Gardner isn't crying in his cheerios every morning because yahoos are saying mean things about him on the Internet. But the underlying conceit of this post seems to be that, if enough Michigan fans believe hard enough, the team can beat Ohio and we'll all live happily ever after. I suspect this phaenomenon is similar to how people come to be so wrapped up in television shows that they lose the ability to distinguish between actors and the characters they play; the emotional connection is so strong that they lose sight of the fact that the relationship they have with the performance is strictly passive, and the world in which they're so invested is not one in which they can participate.
For my part, I haven't even bothered to turn on most Michigan games this year, since the prospect of watching three hours of lousy football isn't tantalizing enough to schedule my Saturday around it. I am rooting for Michigan to make the Heart of Dallas bowl this year, because the Cotton Bowl is only a few miles from my house, which may make it worth buying a ticket.
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Burqueños(as) represent!
Wow, where is this from? It’s like Harbaugh on a Nietzsche bender.
The Commerce Clause would be used as the justification for why the law could be enacted by Congress under its constitutionally enumerated powers, but there are other negative restrictions on Congress’s ability to act (obviously there are individual rights under the Constitution, for example, that Congress can’t violate even if it’s acting under an enumerated power). Non-commandeering is a constitutional doctrine that the federal government can’t force state government to take any action, which I suspect might come into play if Congress tried to say “you can’t condition your own state organs’ ability to play football on their doing X, Y, and Z”. There are counter arguments to be made, I think, but I would imagine Congress would be more reluctant to attempt to override state laws if it’s getting close to the line.
Regarding the “patchwork” question, I think there are probably good arguments that the federal government can’t preempt state laws like California’s that apply only to state schools. State schools are created by the state, so if the state wants to say that those schools can’t have a football program without giving certain rights to players it would likely have anti-commandeering, 11th Amendment and other federalism implications for the federal government to try to prohibit the state from imposing those rules.