GRAPHICS!!Happy Tuesday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session. Today's Skull Session is brought to you by Netflix.
Right now I'm watching The Sting on Netflix; not a movie that I thought I would ever willingly set out to watch, mostly because I think I somehow mixed it up in my brain with The Big Chill. Which is also supposed a very good movie, but as a kid I saw the movie poster for it, immediately assumed it had something to do with Phil Collins due to the fact it was from the 80s and everyone in it looked like dorks, and made a conscious decision to never watch it under any circumstances. That is really unfair to The Sting, since so far it's pretty great. But this Skull Session intro isn't about yours truly.
As Luke pointed out to me, Netflix has firmly sunk its neon claws into the backs of the Ohio State football team. Players, once devoted to a simple life of scholarly pursuits, football, and Lawrence Welk are now beholden to the constant stream of mass entertainment from their video game console devices. It is a sad, sad commentary on the state of the modern collegiate athlete that they cannot pry themselves away from their television for more than a few hours at a time, before ultimately coming back to their precious moving pictures.
Still... the complete X-Files series... nnngghhh... can't... resist... Oh who am I kidding?
Netflix number one movie service in the land/ TV shows and movies, right at your hand/ Netflix on your console or on the Roku box/ Your family will all say, "NETFLIX ROCKS"
Netflix, you're the service for me/ You're the only one/ I'll ever need/ Netflix/ You're prodigious/ Got 60% more stuff/ Than Hulu does/ (TM)
Just In Case You Didn't Already Know January 1st is usually one of the best days of the year for Big Ten fans (at least in theory). The Notorious B1G participated, in a loose definition of the word, in five bowl games on New Year's Day this year, thus creating a perfect 24 hour excuse to nurse an epic hangover while lying face down on a tattered couch in your basement. Unfortunately, 2012 will not start out the same way: since January 1st falls on a Sunday, you will not be watching college football all day. Instead you will be watching professional football, which is such a horrifying proposition that it makes me want to vomit. Your normal slate of Jan. 1st bowl games will be moved a day later, and you can enjoy the sublime intricacies of the TicketCity Bowl via ESPN's gamecast or something while you sit angrily in your chair at work.
CFB Programs, Makin' Bank USA Today has a pretty interesting breakdown of the kind of revenues that some of the big time Athletic Departments in the US are bringing in, and in 2009-2010 there were 22 schools that had a "self-sufficient" athletics department; that is to say, there were 22 schools that managed to turn a profit. Ohio State was #3 in revenue generated, after Alabama and Texas, but #21 profit, ahead of only Washington.
Looking at the chart, you might be a little ticked that a school like Penn State can rank #3 in profits while OSU barely breaks even, but it's no coincidence that PSU sponsors 29 varsity sports and has roughly 88 million dollars in expenses, whereas OSU sponsors 39 and has close to 123 million dollars in expenses. Outside of the Big Ten, Oregon managed to post a nearly 42 million dollar profit. I wonder what they decided to do with all that money...
Well, Here's Where 25k Of It Went The name Willie Lyes has been connected to Oregon for a while now, as a middleman who has supposedly been steering recruits to the Ducks for a fee. Recently, some Oregon newspapers have gotten documents that have detailed the university's involvement in the world of shifty recruiting, and, well, I'll let NBC's College Football Talk's blog lay it out:
In late February of 2010, Oregon purchased for $25,000 from Lyles’ Complete Scouting Services what was described as a “2011 National Package” that detailed recruits from several states. The only problem? According to Schroeder, that package for 2011 contained zero recruits that would make up the following year’s recruiting class. Instead, the vast majority of players highlighted in the 143-page book UO received from Lyles contained data on members of the 2009 recruiting class.
Our own Kenny Guiton was included in this package, which was more or less useless. It also had a dead guy. But hey, when you're just accrued 42 mil, I guess you can afford to make it rain on a shady recruiter every once in a while. Keep in mind, while hilariously stupid, this is not a violation of NCAA rules, per se. Could it lead to something more? Possibly. But like Dr. Saturday says, that's just how Oregon rolls.
It's About Time When you've got a sport where the majority of players are an ethnic minority and only 15% of the coaches at the FBS level are minorities, you should at least talk about the issue. And luckily that's what the NCAA has decided to do.
I don't view this as any sort of political, Affirmative Action-type thing. The reality of the situation is that for whatever reason, minorities have never been hired on a consistent basis for head coaching positions in college football, and it is something that needs to be addressed. Head coaching positions are difficult enough to attain; tearing down the additional hurdles that minorities face in obtaining jobs that they're qualified for, by encouraging schools to expand the scope of their search, is a goal worth achieving.
#showerbeer Til The Water Runs Out Yuengling's coming to Ohio, y'all!!! YUENGLING'S COMING TO OHIO! ...I've never had Yuengling.
