It’s hard for an average high school student who lives in the state of Ohio to get into Ohio State University. Heck, it’s tough for an above-average kid to get in. But if you’re from California, or Texas, or Delaware, or any other state, and you can throw/catch/run with a pigskin, not only will they roll out the red scarlet carpet for you and offer you a full ride, but you’ll also get paid six, maybe even seven figures, every year, to be there. What a country!
It’s not just Ohio State. Every “power conference” school across the nation is shelling out big bucks for big ballers, in hoops as well as football, thanks to the NIL (name, image, and likeness) ruling and the transfer portal that’s busier than the Atlanta airport on Thanksgiving Eve.
If you can’t make ends meet as a teenage millionaire at one school, or you don’t like the new coach, or the cafeteria food, you can leave at the end of the school year season for greener pastures. Four (or five) schools in as many years is becoming commonplace. A degree? Who needs that? It’s all about grabbing that cash.
It’s not just the players… er, excuse me “student athletes” either. Lane Kiffin just left Ole Miss to become the head football coach at LSU. He owes Ole Miss $4 million for breaking his contract. That’s chump change – his new LSU deal pays him $13 million a year for seven years. (LSU fired their former coach, Brian Kelly, midway through his fourth season, sending him on his merry way with a parting gift of $53 million.) Kiffin’s $13 mill a year makes him only the second highest paid coach in that conference.
At Indiana, where our youngest goes to school, three sports coaches and one former coach make more than the Dean of the med school and the school president.
The full list is here. IU head football coach Curt Cignetti makes $6.5 million and typically looks like he’s having about as much fun as a guy who has been stuck in a dentist’s lobby for two hours while awaiting his root canal. Having to coddle 18-year-olds who can jilt you at the end of the year will do that to you.
Indiana and Ohio State play each other this Saturday in the Big 10 conference championship. The game means nothing. Both teams are a lock to make the 12-team tourney in the College Football Playoff. There’s a chance the national champ will wind up playing 16 games. For Ohio State and Indiana, these playoff games come at the end of a 12-game regular season that involved at least one road trip to a West Coast campus.
(The Big 10 has 18 schools… maybe they need to spend more on their math departments.)
How much studying do you think these student-athletes manage to squeeze into their busy spring practice/regular season/postseason schedule? They’re not getting paid for their grades – their YAC (yards after catch) matters a lot more than their GPA.
Yes, it’s capitalism. Get while the getting is good. But maybe it’s time to unmoor the sports teams from the universities. Because the players are pros, pure and simple. And perennial free agent pros at that. They have about as much in common with the regular students as Jeff Bezos has with the average Amazon shopper.
I hope they DO get while the getting is good – and save their NIL windfall. Because when their eligibility is up (or when they blow out their knee), so is the gravy train for 99% of them. If they can’t go pro (and statistically, they’re more likely to get hit by lightning), where can they get paid $1 million to be an offensive lineman? I don’t see too many of those roles listed on LinkedIn.
What Nevada head basketball coach Steve Alford said nearly a year ago still holds true. “The NCAA and college athletics should be about teaching life lessons. Period.”
This past weekend, my wife and my son Peter flew to Hilton Head, SC to run a half-marathon.
Meanwhile, I drove 278 miles to Nashville on Saturday to see The Beths in concert.
Oh, and then I drove another 88 miles to Lexington, KY on Sunday to see Kathleen Edwards in concert.
The thought of running around the block, much less 13.1 miles, doesn’t appeal to me at all. Yet I’m fine standing for two hours at a show. I don’t know about a “runner’s high” but I do know that hearing a great song live sends my spirits soaring.
Tina and Peter got a finisher’s medal after the race.
I got a setlist after Kathleen Edwards’ show.
My wife’s trying to run a race in every state. I think South Carolina was #26 or #27.
I don’t have a goal to see a concert in every state. But maybe I should.
They’re different kinds of miles, but they’re totally worth it if they bring you joy, and you’re making memories in the process.
Live music is my marathon. I’ll never stop running.
Our second oldest kid turned 24 on Derby Day. The next day he ran the Cincinnati Flying Pig half-marathon.
I went to three different spots along the route to cheer him on.
At Mile 3, when the runners come back into Ohio from Kentucky… didn’t see him.
At Mile 4, when the route takes them back into downtown… couldn’t spot him there either.
Finally, at Mile 8, I caught sight of him as he was rounding a turn past Eden Park. A quick shout-out from me, a brief smile and nod of acknowledgement from him, and then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
He’s 24. He’s off and running. All of our kids are. Our oldest will be moving out soon. Our daughter is renting an apartment in Clifton, near school, while she takes summer classes. Our youngest will be home from Indiana U. soon, but he’ll be off with his friends most of the summer.
Our son’s pace quickened in the second half of the race.
I know the feeling. Ferris Bueller taught me well.
It’s their race now. I’m just a spectator. Hoping to catch an occasional glimpse, a brief smile, a nod of acknowledgement.
Before they’re gone. Before I’m gone.
Seems like I was just a kid not so long ago
There were so many arrivals, so many hellos
Now my time behind is greater than my time ahead
Save up the minutes like flowers before all they’re dead and gone…
I played pickleball yesterday. As is the custom of the elders.
Some of my friends think I play too much.
(It IS a lie. I played this morning too!) But the reality is I only play on days ending with a “y.”
Yesterday afternoon, I played at a place called PickleBarn. Not to be confused with Pickle Lodge. (I’ve played there before too!) It’s called PickleBarn because:
a. All of the good names were taken
b. It’s two courts inside a pole barn structure.
(The two women who own Pickle Barn had originally intended to renovate the old house on the property and turn it into a rental. But after they bought it, they discovered the land was zoned commercial. Life handed them lemons, and they turned it into a business with lemon-colored plastic balls.)
PickleBarn has a Bluetooth speaker on site so you can connect your phone and listen to some music while you’re playing. One of the dudes I was playing with yesterday hooked up his phone and started playing a bunch of tunes that were… how can I say this diplomatically… boring as heck!
Sorry, but it’s tough to get hyped for some intense pickleball action (perhaps an oxymoron) when you’re listening to Sweet Baby James Taylor and John Denver and Jim Croce.
The songs on his playlist were the polar opposite of “Jock Jams.”
It got me to thinking about what songs I’d want on my own jock jams playlist. Those songs that, when I hear them, get me hyped.
This one is probably my favorite. It’s a bit of a leftfield choice, but that’s how I’m wired.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” would be on there too. Some Ramones. Definitely Superchunk’s “Digging for Something.” “Makes No Sense at All” by Hüsker Dü. “Max, Jill Called” by The Bicycle Thief.. OK, these are all leftfield picks. So be it.
I think I should put all MY jock jams into a playlist and play it the next time I’m at PickleBarn… my opponents will be so busy wondering “what sort of weird music is this?” that they won’t be able to concentrate on the game.
Pickleball is my jam. With my jams going, it’ll be even more of a jam!
The Final Four of NCAA Division I basketball tips off this evening. The tourney’s top four seeds (Auburn, Duke, Florida and Houston) all advanced to San Antonio. They’re all from “power” conferences. Cinderella doesn’t live here anymore.
The very first game of the tournament was a “First Four” matchup between Alabama State and St. Francis University (PA). The game was at the University of Dayton’s arena, and I was there. Fun game! It came down to a last-second shot by Alabama State after a full-court pass.
That game probably marks the last time we’ll see St. Francis in “March Madness.” Because the school’s board of trustees voted to move their athletics from D-I to D-III. The university president, The Very Rev. Malachi Van Tassell, explained the logic behind that move in this Op-Ed in the Washington Post:
Father Malachi is a Franciscan priest. But prior to joining the order, he was a Certified Public Accountant (bio is here). He knows the math doesn’t work anymore for small schools, especially if they want to be known for schooling instead of for the semi-pro folks on the b-ball team.
Intercollegiate athletics is growing in complexity, based on realities such as the transfer portal, pay for play and other shifts that move sports away from a campus-based love of the game to one that resembles a business… Most Division I schools are forced to squeeze more money from student fees and fundraising to pay for their athletic programs and stay competitive, and often reallocate current and future operating dollars away from salaries and classrooms.
Players are transferring out of schools like ours to play for money and fame at schools with bigger name recognition and budgets. The fact that, for the first time, there isn’t a single program from outside the four major conferences in the tournament’s second weekend bears this out.
Father Malachi wants his student-athletes to be students first, and enjoy campus life. That’s not realistic in the power conferences. There, the “student-athletes” are mainly athletes, and grist for the money-making mill. Don’t get me wrong – I’m fine with the players cashing in. But how can they feel much attachment to a school when they’re likely to leave a year later for greener pastures?
the reality is that big-brand programs are farm teams for the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, and small universities have become farm teams for the big-brand programs.
As a proud alum of Xavier University, another small Catholic school, I really understand what the Padre is laying down. Nearly as soon as my Muskies lost in the tourney, our men’s b-ball head coach departed for the deeper pockets — for him and the players he recruits — at the University of Texas. Nearly every player on the team with eligibility left entered the transfer portal — with the best returning player joining his old coach at Texas (“Hook ’em” indeed… with dollars.) Xavier’s new coach, Richard Pitino, inherited a roster consisting of… one redshirt player. There’s no continuity for fans anymore. We’re not rooting for the student-athletes at our alma mater, we’re rooting for laundry, basically.
If you like the David vs. Goliath story, you’re out of luck. Unless changes are made to NIL and transfer rules, we’ll be watching the same big-money schools duke (ha!) it out every year, while Cinderella is forced to scour the country for new players every year.
I do think other schools should follow the lead of St. Francis, and put the emphasis back on the student experience, and invest more in the school, instead of funneling all that cash into being a feeder system for bigger schools and the pros. It just makes (dollars and) sense.
I’m lying. I don’t love a parade. They seem sorta silly to me. Way too much forced waving – the folks on the floats have to do it, or else they’d feel really self-conscious… and then the spectators feel like they have to wave back, just to be polite. (At least that’s how I feel.)
But I do like the Cincinnati Reds Opening Day Parade.
Because it’s organized by Findlay Market – Ohio’s oldest continuously operating public market. (And also the place that has always felt like the most welcoming and egalitarian spot in the city to a non-Cincinnati-native like me.)
Because the parade has been going on for 106 years.
Because it celebrates the first game of the Cincinnati Reds, the oldest professional franchise in MLB.
Because the parade’s grand marshal is usually a Reds old-timer, which means he’s usually a hero of mine from my younger days. This year, Chris Sabo had the honors. You gotta love a parade that has “Spuds” as the grand marshal!
Because it marks an unofficial civic holiday. This year’s event coincided with the spring break for Cincinnati Public Schools, but rest assured that if it didn’t there would be tons of kids who couldn’t make it to school due to “Reds fever.” Taking your kids out of school to go to the Opening Day parade is a rite of passage.
[photo credit for shot above, the Sabo parade photo, and the two below: Liz Dufour, The Cincinnati Enquirer – full gallery is here]
Because it brings out thousands of spectators, from all walks of life.
Because pretty much anyone can get into the parade. There are the requisite parade entries: high school and college bands, politicians in convertibles, Shriners in tiny cars…
But you also get a lot of randos. There were a whopping 159 entries in this year’s parade. Including the Wapakoneta Optimists Lawnmower Drill Team, and entries called “Opening Day Gang” and “Groove Crew of Greater Cincinnati.”
It’s a weird excuse for a party, but it’s unique to Cincinnati. It’s ours. That’s what makes it special. Chicago has their green river on St. Paddy’s. Philly has the Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day. NYC has the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving. And we celebrate the start of baseball season… and spring… and hope for better days ahead. Play ball!
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