The Drought is Over
Caleb Downs scores Ohio State’s first punt return touchdown since 2014.
Welcome to another week of social isolation. I greet you with a reminder that sports may be canceled, but talking about sports online absolutely is not.
Song of the Day: "Never Going Back Again" by Fleetwood Mac
Word of the Day: Repose.
ONE SHINING MOMENT. We're not going to get an official One Shining Moment this year, but some patriot made sure we got something. And I'll tell you what, it sure ain't bad.
It's kind of funny how Ohio State's lone highlight is from a player who wasn't with the team for half the season. But on the flip side, it made me realize that DJ Carton picked one hell of a season to miss. He played in exactly as many postseason games as the rest of the team. And you and me, for that matter.
FORCING THEIR HAND. The NCAA's deadline to get its shit together about image and likeness is about to get pushed up 18 months, courtesy of the state of Florida.
The Florida House of Representatives on Friday night gave the final legislative approval of a bill that would help college athletes in the state make money from their name, image and likeness, beginning July 1, 2021.
The House’s action — by a 98-14 vote — sends the measure to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced in October that he supports such a proposal. The Senate approved the bill earlier this week by a 37-2 margin.
If DeSantis signs the bill, Florida will join California in having this type of a law — but Florida’s would take effect 18 months before California’s. That could prompt lawmakers in California to revisit their measure, and it puts further pressure on the NCAA as its executives, school presidents and athletics administrators consider the issue.
This probably isn't priority 1 at the moment, given that the NCAA was just forced to ax its biggest event of the year and will be swimming in the fallout for a few months, but July 2021 is gonna come quickly.
And for consumers of a very specific video, July is an extremely convenient deadline...
OOPS! The good news is, the NCAA set aside about 1,000 times more money than I will ever have at one time just in case their precious tournament was ever threatened.
The bad news is, they spent every cent of it six years ago.
But the NCAA did have the foresight to begin planning for an unknown catastrophic event that would threaten its biggest and most lucrative event.
By 2014, the association had accumulated a nearly $400 million cushion as a hedge against a massive loss of revenue from the tournament. However, at the direction of its governing board of college presidents, the NCAA distributed that money to schools to help them with increasing costs and spent it on their behalf in other ways, including a $208.7 million legal settlement.
...
“The NCAA will be fine,” said Barbara Osborne, a sports administration professor at the University of North Carolina. “It is the membership. It will have future tournaments. It has sponsorships. But all schools will be having huge belt tightening because of this. This is going to affect higher education as a whole and school budgets overall. That’s going to impact the institutional subsidy for athletic programs. …
“Athletic department budgets will be smaller because conference payouts will be smaller. A lot of mid-majors desperately rely on these dollars (from the NCAA, the conferences and the institutions). It’s not a pretty picture.”
The general health and wellbeing of the NCAA is certainly not my chief concern at the moment, but it's tough to imagine there won't be a trickle-down effect felt by the actual student-athletes here, and that's not fair to them.
But the virus doesn't give a damn about what's fair, so we'll just have to roll with the punches for a while and make sure come out on top in the long run. And we will. We will.
OHIO STATE RETURNS MONEY. In an extreme role-reversal scenario, on-campus residents are about to get a fairly sizable check from Ohio State in the coming weeks. I know – thousands of dollars flowing into your pockets courtesy of the university, not the other way around.
But it's because you paid for services you're not longer getting, so it's not like it's just bonus money.
I am writing today to share that the university will provide an appropriate prorated refund of housing and dining to those of you departing the residence halls by Sunday, March 22. Details will follow next week
There are 1,000 responsible things you could (and should!) do with that money, but I know if I were an 18-year-old that got handed a $3,000+ check of money I'd already planned to spend elsewhere, let's just say it's good news that sports are canceled and Vegas is closed.
OHIO STATE BASKETBALL ON TV! Last night's episode of Curb included an extremely short snippet of an Ohio State basketball game from six years ago that the Buckeyes lost and I'm sad because it's as close as we're gonna get to watching the Buckeyes play March Madness this year.
This is the Penn State-Ohio State game from January 29, 2014 on tonight's Curb pic.twitter.com/0XQAO14wZS
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 16, 2020
I've never been happier to see a pixilated Aaron Craft on my television screen.
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