WTKA Roundtable 5/9/2024: The Dayenu Roster
Things Discussed:
- LSU is out of NIL money? They got outbid for an MSU DT and Brian Kelly says "We don't buy players." That'll be news to Bryce Underwood; hope his checks clear.
- Spartans getting in their feelings about Jaden Mangham possibly transferring to Michigan (or Ohio State or Minnesota). Want to prevent him from graduating. There's an intrastate program that allows you to finish your MSU degree at Michigan. Why can't this work for other guys? It's a formal in-state program. The reason academic programs like this don't associate with athletic transfers that much is schools other than Michigan are good at making exceptions for athletes. Michigan should have done so for Terrence Shannon; they probably were right to turn down Caleb Love.
- Brian: Good time to be a Michigan fan; long-term prognoses for OSU and MSU not great.
- Dusty May's presser: Best first presser ever? He's a great communicator/teacher who gave us a lot of information, addressed exact questions. He was watching OSU games for fun? Seth: He was probably watching OSU games because he thought he'd be coaching them.
- Dusty's offense: two point guards, wants all of his players to be facilitators so the ball can't get stuck, can't get trapped. All of these guys have an out: good passers or at worst they can shoot it over anybody. Kinda like Beilein's where the PG with a 64-bit decision tree. Dusty May wants lots of guys with 16-bit decision trees. Tough part: lots of teaching to get it down.
- Rubin Jones perfect glue guy. I'm calling this now: I'm the #1 Rubin Jones fan around here. No takesies.
- Competition in the Big Ten? Oregon and UCLA will be decent, MSU standing pat with a bubble team, OSU is new coaching, Purdue graduated everybody. Michigan will probably be…top 4, 6-seed? Expect them to lose some games early as they learn to play with each other.
- Roster May built is ideal but for a star. I call it the Dayenu roster because everybody's one flaw from being in the NBA. Craig: May wants to be fun as well as good. Seth: Sounds like he's one of us.
- Football in the break: Texas CB Terrance Brooks?. Watched him vs Washington last year, when he was getting burned because he was in man all day. He's..Vincent Gray? Technically solid, smart, big, good ball skills, not a burner. Need to give him help; Michigan would be a good fit because they use so much poach coverage to take away the post. Texas was terrible because they were playing so much press quarters with no help on the double post and fade. Michigan takes that away.
- Schools cutting sports because of paying athletes? They'll say that, but they shouldn't. They're paying just 10% of their budget to players; pro leagues pay 55%. Will happen at the mid-major level because their conferences don't make sense and football is already a massive expenditure that they finance with student fees. Brian: that's a marketing fee; they can just cut back on marketing.
- What we want to see from Congress: your cap is based on how many scholarships you give out.
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You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
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We call that DeTaylorUpshawification.
There's an intrastate program that allows you to finish your MSU degree at Michigan. Why can't this work for other guys? It's a formal in-state program.
I'm curious what this is, and how it fits with the general transfer credit cap (i.e. no more than 60 transfer credits can go towards your degree here)?
In this case Jaden would earn his MSU credits at Michigan.
Here's the agreement. I said it's 10 years old on the show; it's actually now 12 but it took a couple of years for the policy to be in place.
That's interesting, I had never heard of that before. Though it only helps a very small subset of potential transfers (realistically pretty much only MSU and the directionals for most sports)...
Cue the jokes, and I'm going to rain on your parade, but the Michigan Transfer Agreement is for community college students so they know which credits will transfer to a four-year institution. It's a safeguard so they don't take a bunch of credits at a community college only for none of those credits to transfer to their next college.
No idea if it still applies, but it was called MACRO back in the early 90s, and given I only used it exactly as you described, JUCO to GVSU I only know it works for sure that way. I thought it applied for all degrees, but who knows.
Agreed I don't see anything in the MTA that would facilitate this type of transfer. In addition, I don't see how NCAA rules (which assess degree progress requirements based on the new school for transfers) would allow it either. They did update the rules a few weeks ago though, so maybe there was a buried change that applies here.
Maybe someone has an explanation for this situation. In general, the reverse transfer is a technique I have advocated for that would help Michigan onboard players who are close to graduating like Mangham or Shannon.
Seth also mentioned expanding ease of transfer at the department/school level to all AAU schools instead of just Michigan schools. This is a fantastic idea, and I think the AD can be the forcing function here. Students nowadays are applying to a broader set of schools and may be more willing to transfer across state lines. In addition, this seems like the perfect use case for AI Large Language Models to assist in grading syllabus similarity for a large number of courses.
Brian: that's a marketing fee; they can just cut back on marketing.
Entitled people give up nothing. Not a penny. It doesn't matter that they're sitting on billions; it's about principle to them. It's an insult to so much as impede their quest for more, let alone demand that anything go to anyone else.
Force athletic departments to choose between having all of the money and dying or taking part in a rising tide lifting all boats, and they will burn it all down out of pure spite. They'll cancel all sports except football and basketball and blame it all on everyone else, even with reams of studies published that it wouldn't have been difficult to make it work.
Bilbo "stole" a cup = Lake-town must burn.
They'll cancel all sports except football and basketball and blame it all on everyone else, even with reams of studies published that it wouldn't have been difficult to make it work.
The reams?
I offer instead many more Athletic Departments are in the same boat as Rutgers and Maryland instead of Michigan and Ohio State. Even if universities split evenly $ for television contracts designated for "student salaries" there is no way that a member of Lacrosse is getting the same pay out as a member of the football team where that model is sustainable.
Unless the sport is revenue generating the $ shared can't be proportionate to be sustainable. Even when you pay out the $ in the sports that are financially sustainable you are not paying the starting QB the same as an incoming Freshman guard.
Once you have employees you have a new can of worms to muck through.
Paying Denard Robinson his value back in the day sounds like a rallying cry until his scholarship and pay comes at the cost of some Title 19 sport. The only end to all this will come at the cost of that which is not self sustainable as the free market giveth and the free market taketh away.
Yeah, my guess is that the number of schools that could afford this without having to resort to cutting a bunch of sports is in the single digits...
The reams?
Sorry, misspoke a bit there. They don't exist yet because we're not there yet. I'm saying after everything's been burned to the ground, there will be studies, because there always are, and they will overwhelmingly show that any destruction was politically motivated, not pragmatically forced.
Fact is, the current situation is that most football programs vastly overspend to justify their own overspending. "We have to spend this much, or we'll cease to exist." But it's all bullshit. The sport can be as simple as getting a field, some pipe chairs, some pads, and a coach or two. Div III teams exist. Heck, high school teams exist. Small high schools in effin' Idaho have football teams. There is nothing inherently cost-prohibitive about football for an academy of any size. So it's all about managing expenses, and most programs (such as Rutgers and LSU) deliberately mismanage their expenses to scandalous, well-documented and well-publicized extremes for the malicious intent of crying poverty when the knives come out.
So there is financially absolutely no problem with paying players. No, they won't be all paid the same, but where does that ever happen? Does everyone get paid the same where you work? Oh, there'll be some shouting and fist-pounding, but inevitably the third-string lacrosse player will not make as much as the starting quarterback.
But a lot of places will cut their lacrosse programs not because they can't afford it, but to convince everyone that the big bad mean gummint forced them into financial ruin. But what's really happening is, they are sociopaths who will not hesitate to annihilate college lacrosse to fabricate a point about how sharing is evil. And I'm saying, don't fall for it. These people have less than zero credibility.
"Michigan should have done so for Terrence Shannon"
Michigan can't do that. It's the purview of each individual school/college.
You have to convince LSA/CoE/etc. to make an exception - and the AD and Santa Ono have no power to force them.
They will have to incentivize colleges that already turn away 80% of those that, and hope. They have no power to affect change.
Yes, by "Michigan" I meant LSA Admissions & Dean. This is standard behavior for every comparable university.
- Not all athletes are LSA.
- The university can't make LSA do it, so what is their incentive? They don't care whether sports teams are good.
- The transfer issues have all been with LSA
- They can't be forced but should be at least as reasonable as peer institutions.
There's no interest lately bc they have applicants coming out of their ears. But they race other schools for rankings and alumni satisfaction is a factor in those and also is tied to sports. M
So in other words... There is absolutely no reason for them to do it.
...and quite a few colleges have 1/2 your credit limits, and stringent credit review requirements.
OSU and MSU aren't peer institutions.
MSU and OSU are peer institutions, meaning the University of Michigan considers them so. It's not the policies but whether you're willing to bend them for athletes.
No, no one in academics at Michigan considers MSU and OSU peer institutions.
Fully expected the title of today's podcast to be "I have no ass"
is the basketball nutritionist planning on feeding the team bitter herbs and haroset?
I think UCLA is the team to beat in basketball this year. I also think there are a few other strong contenders and we won't really know who they all are given the massive turnover in rosters. IU and Purdue will both be solid. MSU will be their usual decent self.
Torvik has UCLA and Purdue neck and neck at the top of the B1G next year at the moment. Here are the current projections for next season per Torvik:
- #10 UCLA
- #11 Purdue
- #19 MSU
- #20 Indiana
- #23 USC
- #27 Michigan
- #31 Rutgers
- #32 Northwestern
- #33 Ohio St
- #36 Wisconsin
- #38 Nebraska
- #44 Oregon
- #45 Maryland
- #51 Iowa
- #56 Illinois
- #74 Washington
- #82 Minnesota
- #91 Penn St
Dusty May from 6 wins to top 25 (or 27th) and a 6-8 seed in the Tourney is coach of the year.
I think UCLA is the team to beat in basketball this year. I also think there are a few other strong contenders and we won't really know who they all are given the massive turnover in rosters. IU and Purdue will both be solid. MSU will be their usual decent self.
I wonder which of non-revenue sport is the biggest money loser?
I took my son who is a high school junior to visit some colleges last month, and some small NE liberal art colleges have more varsity teams than Michigan does. I think that is crazy and I am sure a lot of tuition money go there, they just don't have to disclose it.
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