A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

I am glad that the NFL has allowed Terrelle to pursue his career and wish him the best of luck. But man did the NFL and NCAA step in it big time as CBS blogger Mike Freeman notes. By enforcing these arbitrary NCAA rules, the NFL has made it clear that it is fully cooperating with the NCAA to establish and control the labor market for football players. These two organizations have always claimed in the past that they are separate, it is hard to maintain that fiction. There is clear collaboration to limit the opportunities for 18-21 year olds, and no representation of these players in the system at all.

Completely totally 100% agree with this gentleman.

I don’t understand how anyone with a straight face can propose to generate yet more incremental revenue off the revenue sport athletes, without proposing anything regarding greater compensation for the players. This proposal will generate more money for media companies, for entertainment companies, for advertisers, for the NCAA, for schools. And $0 for the athletes involved. The athletes don’t even get to have a say in the process.

Nuts.

BTW, al.com is running a nice series on the treatment of players in division 1 revenue sports. Worth a read. And nice pointes to oversigning.com and the related site Parents of Players.

ESPN’s tool is super easy to use. Can make picks first time right from the ESPN main page.

SI — where is your brain? Shoving me to Facebook and forcing me to let some other random Facebook app smash through my privacy wall? Wow this seems dumb dumb dumb. How can a sports media site let fantasy sports activity slip off their site??

CBS Sports also good, easy to enter, also a nice bracket manager for your own pool. They have a facebook thingy too but it is an optional side thing, much more rational.

Foxsports. Visually clumsy — orange, too much Hootersness, and the bracket layout is hard to parse. Not my fav. Oh and registration seemed more onerous.

Yahoosports seems good, nice bracket manager too.

Nice to see the Buckeyes wrap up the Big10 title in dominating fashion, onto the dance! And especially nice to wipe out Minnesota, too bad they weren’t knocked out of the tourney altogether. Why the hatred for the hapless Gophers? It all goes back to this incident, which pretty much flattened the OSU program for the next 10 years and ended Witte’s career. The Minnesota thugs got wrist slaps, Winfield went on to a successful baseball career which always galled me.

Here’s hoping the Gophers flame out in their first game.

NCAA Financial Reports Database | IndyStar.com. Great site that lets you slice and dice revenues and expenses for all division 1 teams. OSU is #1 in football ticket sales revenue, #2 overall athletic revenues behind Texas. Texas kicks OSU’s ass in football advertisements. LSU is #1 in concessions/parking. Fun stuff.

Countdown to camp: Big dates on USC’s schedule – USC - OCRegister.com. — SoCal papers are already highlighting the Sept 13 game against OSU.

FanDome – NCAA College Football – Ohio State Buckeyes Team Page — useful buckeye link page, lots o videos.

SportingNews.com – Your expert source for NCAA Football stats, scores, standings, and blogs from NCAA Football columnists

Rather than some sort of conspiracy, the APR and its sanctioned, slow strangulation of smaller schools unable to pay for massive academic support centers is the result of something even more unstoppable and faceless: bad policy.

Exactly. The big schools have the dollars to pay for staff and facilities to manage APR. Small schools do not. That is why 35 out of 37 schools punished this year come from non-BCS conferences. Just another face of the ridiculousness of the current “student-athlete” pretense.