The Great Hambino

Not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that I was offended by Notre Dame's opt out. I merely stated that tacking a one-season ban onto it would end it immediately. Which it would. Certainly not as offended as you are by a team being left out in favor of a team with the same record that beat them head to head. Don't want to be left out? Don't lose multiple games. You have only yourselves to blame. At no point did I say that bowl games are what drives interest in college football. I said that erosion of the bowl season would over time have the effect of eroding the interest in football's middle class - to clarify, lower-tier power 4 and upper-tier G6 schools - since there would effectively be nothing for them to play for. Which would push us toward the eventual Super League of Big Ten + SEC + whoever they deem worthy - whatever they deem to be dead weight, leaving everyone else a glorified FCS. Maybe we're headed there anyway, but the bowls becoming more of an afterthought doesn't help keep things from going down that road. I just don't think the Super League model is in the best interest of most schools, players, or fans. Of course a Notre Dame fan thinks they're meaningless exhibitions - for the majority of fans that haven't chosen to latch on to a blue blood, they're the best we can reasonably hope for. I don't think it's wise to add a round of games when you're already facing a calendar crunch, but overall I like your calendar proposal

To clarify off the top, I'm talking about teams opting out en masse because they didn't get their way, not individual players making a business decision (more on that later) Tell me who made the Sweet Sixteen of last year's March Madness without Googling. Surely you can tell me who those teams were, otherwise it must be utterly inconsequential. I can't imagine your conference mates being too thrilled when their bowl payout gets reduced because you decided to take your ball and go home (I know this doesn't apply specifically to Notre Dame, but it does to literally almost everyone else). The TV revenue generated from bowl games is part of the overall ecosystem of TV contracts that drives interest in the sport, gets those sweet facilities constructed, gets alumni stoked (and by extension, those NIL collective coffers filled). Long-term, the erosion of bowl season would lead to continuing erosion of college football's middle class, which is ultimately bad for the sport as well as the players at large. As far as individual players opting out, that is certainly their right to gauge all the factors at play and make the best decision for themselves.. Not trying to take that away from them. But every opt-out creates an opportunity for the next man on the depth chart. More and more, bowl season is becoming a sneak preview of the following season. The extra few weeks of practice teams get by being in a bowl are also very valuable in kicking off that process. I've talked a lot about the financial incentives for networks, conferences, and schools. In fairness, the rules preventing this from extending to the players (it's my understanding that pay-for-play NIL deals aren't allowed, which is dumb if true) need to be abolished. If it's worthwhile financially for all the other stakeholders, then surely the players can be incentivized with bonuses to play in these games. That's only fair and they've earned that right. If they still opt out, well, that's their business decision to make. But really team/player/coach opt outs are all symptoms of the same disease: football's jacked up calendar. Signing day and the transfer portal need to be pushed outside of the postseason as much as possible. It's tricky if they're going to be beholden to semesters, so the best I can come up with is this: 16-team playoff starting on championship game weekend (conference championship games have outlived their usefulness) so that the semifinals fall on Jan 1. Now only championship game participants have their seasons bleeding into potential recruiting windows. Coaches are subject to these transfer windows as well, meaning there are penalties if you sign a coach from another FBS school before then. I'm open to other ideas, sorta spitballing here. It's not an easy problem to fix. But it needs fixing. And for the record, it was Florida, Iowa State, and Toledo. Didn't even have to Google it. (I Bing'ed it)

Edwin Diaz is signing a nice 3-year deal for $69MM with Evil Empire West Now where do the Twins pivot to rebuild their bullpen? Too bad Terry Ryan isn't around to tell us how "in on" Diaz they were

Probably takes them out of the running for the #1 pick. But I'm a pessimist

Could make for a nice full-circle moment thinking back to when Eagles fans got all grumpy when they drafted Hurts even though Wentz's extension was just kicking in

Wanna put a stop to bowl opt-outs? If you voluntarily opt out, then you're out of the posteason the following year too. Solves that problem real quick

Odd, since the TV execs with playoff games are the ones conducting this dog and pony show ... As to why they'd pass on Notre Dame, you could look at the conferences with networks under the ESPN umbrella, then look at who benefited from Notre Dame's exclusion If you really wanted to wander off into conspiracy land, think about the implications of what Bama's exclusion would do to conference championship games. They lost their usefulness once the playoff expanded past 4, divisions were dropped, and conferences blew up to an unmanageable size within an 8 or 9 game schedule, but they're still putting them on because everyone makes money from them. Teams would start opting out of those games and they'd be dealing with an even bigger mess than they are now. This isn't to say that it was some conspiracy that Notre Dame was left out. The committee had boxed themselves into an impossible scenario. If you stay true to resumes, head-to-head, and don't punish teams for playing the extra game, then Notre Dame should be left out. If you truly look at just the current best teams for the at large spots, then Alabama should be left out. If they were to follow their own internal ranking logic, then Miami should be left out. No matter who they left out, they were going to cause a problem. But ultimately, if you don't want to be left out, don't lose multiple games.

To me, what this ultimately highlighted is the nonsensical approach of trying to use traditional tiebreakers to determine the conference championship game participants for a single-division 16-18 team conference. The ACC ended in a 5-way tie for second place, and head-to-head/common-opponent tiebreakers are essentially useless in a scenario like that. Duke and Miami only had two common opponents while playing in the same conference. As a result, the team with three nonconference losses (including to UCONN - in football!) wound up sneaking in and setting off the chain of events that made the committee render their previous rankings a farce in order to apply some logic to the final standings. Other conferences already have figured out a better method. The Mountain West and American (I believe) have tiebreakers that go to CFP rankings or composite computer rankings if ties aren't broken by direct head-to-head. They do this because they know it's in the entire conference's best interest to have their conference champion be as highly ranked as possible and have that conference championship game provide the champ with the best possible win. The whole point of ditching divisions was to try to get the best teams into the chamionship games, but the resulting schedules broke the old tiebreaking mechanisms. Let's say Miami plays Virginia instead of Duke in the ACC 'ship and wins. Now they're the #4 conference champ, Tulane is now the #5 conference champ, and Notre Dame becomes the final at-large. This is a good point and I hope people don't lose sight of this. Before the playoff was expanded to 12, there were teams prevented from competing for a national championship that had done nothing wrong besides not being ranked high enough in the preseason - think 2004 Auburn. But now? If you don't get into the playoff, it's because you have multiple losses. That used to be an automatic DQ for national championship consideration. Now? If you want find someone to blame, find a mirror

I meant auditioning in front of a specific potential future employer today Looks like he'll fit right in!

Mariota auditioning for a potential future employer?

The theme of this game is "Where the hell has this been all year?"

As pessimistic as I've become about McCarthy, I don't see that as waving the white flag on him at all. Mechanics are something better drilled in the offseason. During the season, correct decision-making within the speed of the game is much more important. Acknowledging that they were trying to have him think about too much at once. If you're making the correct decisions and making them on time, that gives you more margin for error to help cover for whatever inaccuracies might be resulting from faulty footwork. Having said that, "Then what the hell were you doing with his mechanics all last offseason?" is a very fair question. The way they behaved in player acquisition, they clearly thought they had that in a good place. My working theory is that something in his injury and recovery subtly threw his footwork off, and they weren't able to diagnose it until it was put to the test under game speed that you can't truly replicate on the practice field. That's the optimist in me, anyway. KOC has been too good with too many other QBs to suddenly forget how to develop a QB. Maybe he's better at refining a QB's rough edges than he is molding a raw lump of clay, so his success with veteran QBs hasn't translated to a young rookie? I dunno

This reminded me of the time I was hanging out in the Gray Duck bar in left field and looked down and saw a brave hero YOLO one of those enormous Boomstick chili dogs all by himself

To my knowledge, the teams that consistently have quality cheap bullpens have a couple things working for them that the Twins do not. One, they are replacing one or two each year, not trying to replace the entire thing all at once. Two, they develop a steady stream of these young quality arms so they're able to reliably make those replacements constantly. Even as injuries inevitably arise during the year, they have quality depth to fall back on. There's a reason they targeted a bunch of young AAA-ish arms with a lot of their trades last deadline - there was a hole in their org chart in that area in terms of healthy upside, especially looking ahead to a post Ryan/Lopez era. These projections are based on WAR, which is a context-neutral stat. If your bullpen's WPA is worse relative to its WAR, then that's an easy recipe for coming up short of your win totals. Unless you think Sands/Topa/Orze/etc are going to magically become reliable high-leverage weapons this year, or they're actually going to use some of their top young arms immediately in the bullpen instead of somehow finding a way to evaluate like 8 young guys as major league starters all at once, that seems like a fairly likely outcome for this bunch Gleeman recently noted that they've undershot their Fangraphs win projections in four of the last five years. And you can't really blame last year's underachievement on the trade deadline since they were already on pace to underachieve before the trades. That could just be statistical noise, or it could be some characteristics of the club that cause an inherent overestimation. Does fWAR for pitching (which I don't love) overrate their pitchers? Was Rocco really that bad? Who knows. But it doesn't exactly fill me with a ton of optimism

Sub-Zero was really intimidating? I dunno, I don't get the fashion of the youths. See also: zipped-up hoods on NBA warm-ups. I never understood any form of cloth under the helmet - it's just uncomfortable and slides around. I don't get it. But I had negative swag The mouthguards are surprisingly easy to forget about. I saw a CB last week playing with it stuck in one of those new-age slits in the crown of the helmet

I think a guy like Buxton breaks the BBTV algorithm. His talent and health make him super high-risk, high-reward, so his average outcome might fall in the Ober range, but his 90th percentile outcome blows Ober out of the water. The rich contenders that would be interested in Buxton can afford to make that bet, while the algorithm makes assumes the prospective buyer is as likely to be the Marlins as the Dodgers. At least that's how I make sense of it in my head

Nate Tice is a guy who has carved out a space for himself in the analytical football space. I liked him as Robert Mays's sidekick on The Ringer's football podcasts before he went off to do his own thing. He shows up every now and then on NFL Network. He's an Edina product and held clipboards at Wisconsin. You're probably more familiar with his dad, Mike

They have a high floor. It's hard to say exactly what an accurate percentage would be since it takes a doctorate in economics and possibly quantum physics to understand the NBA's collective bargaining agreement with all its second aprons and mid-level trade exceptions, but from what I find online, the floor is 90% of the base cap

Depending on what you're defining as locally-generated revenue, that would potentially decrease revenue sharing, not increase it. And even if you're limiting it to gameday revenues (tickets, concessions, parking), the cheapskate owners would just drop payroll even further and maintain their profits that way. There's a baseline for how low that can go with baseball die-hards, visiting team fans, and folks that just want to spend a nice summer evening at PNC Park. They will drive payrolls down as low as they are allowed as long as they get their cut of national broadcast, merchandise, and sponsorship revenues. There must be a mechanism that explicitly forces them to spend for increased revenue sharing to have a meaningful effect. Hence the floor, hence the cap

He might actively want to be traded. He also might just be testing the waters on what his options might be if he were to waive it. He's not making any firm commitments; he can at any time say "no thanks" to whatever's presented to him. Plus, the Twins likely aren't going to seriously entertain any offers if they don't think he'd be willing to waive it, so he would need to make his willingness known in order to know what those offers might be. So I don't think being willing to waive it makes him the Meesta Meesta lady from Happy Gilmore. It's just a way to make the most informed decision he can. I also don't think he'd be able to get bumped up to his free agent market price since that would remove any surplus value in obtaining him, unless the market for centerfielders really dries up and a free spender gets desperate. He would likely accept something below market since it would still represent an increase. Besides, the contract he signed was pretty unique in that its base value was well below market but still included a full no-trade. It might be hard to find a historical comp for that kind of a deal.

An increase in revenue sharing with no real mechanism to force teams to put that into payroll does nothing for the players. In fact, since you're taking funds away from teams willing to spend it and giving it to teams not willing to spend it, you're actually suppressing salary overall. The players fought against increased revenue sharing in the last CBA negotiations because they rightfully don't trust the Nuttings and Fishers of the world to meaningfully spend and not just pocket those funds. And whatever weak requirements that exist currently to force teams to spend those funds clearly aren't working, since the Pirates are able to turn a profit operating the way they do. Giving them even more money to pocket is not a solution, and trying to shame them into spending it by calling them evil on an online message board isn't going to get them to spend it either. I don't think either revenue sharing or a salary cap on their own solve anything. Similar to revenue sharing with no enforcement mechanism, a cap with no offsetting upward push on payroll levels of teams at the bottom also has the net effect of suppressing player salaries. They need to work in tandem (along with a high floor, which I don't understand why it keeps getting ignored in these discussions) to level the playing field without taking money out of player pockets and putting it into owner pockets. The way I see it, increased revenue sharing is toothless without a meaningful floor or some similar mechanism (loss of draft picks, loss of future revenue sharing, etc). Now getting that floor or floor-like mechanism in place in collective bargaining would be a huge concession from the owners that would require a similar major concession from players. I don't know what that would be other than a cap. Because this is all subject to negotiation, which is ultimately about compromise, I think an NBA-style soft cap is much more likely than an NFL-style hard cap. In a lot of ways, a soft cap is basically a luxury tax with actual enforcement mechanisms at both ends of the spectrum. It's also worth noting that in the NBA, there's currently more parity than there's ever been in the sport (7 champs in 7 years including Milwaukee, OKC, and Denver but not New York or Chicago in the easiest sport for the best player to take over a game), player salaries are higher than they've ever been in the sport, franchise valuations are exploding (the T-Wolves sale ish-show came about because of this, also because Glen Taylor is a total knob), and there's a potentially budding dynasty located in one of their smallest markets.

That's almost every position. That's why I'm on team BPA and team DTU (don't trade up). I would avoid drafting a QB (need a veteran + not terribly impressed with next year's prospects), but if they're picking in that 8-12 range the best player available almost certainly won't be a QB since teams are so QB-thirsty at the top of round 1, so that issue likely takes care of itself

A few possibilities rolling around in my head (maybe even a combination of the following): They're set up as preferred equity holders, meaning they're entitled to a fixed percentage return as opposed to a percentage of profits. So their return on investment is pretty much guaranteed assuming the business doesn't go under (it's not going under, MLB won't let it) Profits and losses don't have to be allocated proportionally to ownership in a partnership, so perhaps they're getting a better-than-proportional profit allocation or are shielded from being allocated losses as a trade-off for making the investment with no decision making power They don't have the funds to purchase an entire MLB franchise (their investment is more in line with something between a high end WNBA/low end MLS franchise valuation), so accepting a minority stake is their way of getting the asset appreciation that they're certainly betting on getting over time from MLB ownership. They're investment groups, so there's a decent chance they care about the product on the field as much (or as little) as someone investing in a manufacturing company cares about mufflers, or whatever.

McCombs also bought the team right as they were about to have their best season ever* and sold the team after they had fallen into relative disarray. The Wilfs had to spend some time undoing the mess left by Red. Also, if Red had owned the team much longer there's a decent chance they're the San Antonio Vikings now. I think that ought to be considered in the calculus. But that's a good point that the Wilfs' hit rate on the playoffs given their mandate to compete for that every year is a little more underwhelming than I realized * NFC Championship not included

Didn't realize that about Basallo. Good to know