Just because it’s June doesn’t mean I can’t fill a few chafing dishes for you.
- I’ll go into detail later this summer about it, but perhaps this is the best thing Georgia’s secondary has going for it this season.
- Bitcoin is going to sponsor a bowl game. Will it hand out a virtual trophy?
- The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Aereo case may impact how we watch the NFL, but keep in mind what’s written in this piece could also apply to CBS and its contract with the SEC.
- Here’s the Post and Courier’s preview of the Clemson-Georgia game. And here’s the preview of the South Carolina-Georgia game.
- One reason the schools fear Jeffrey Kessler’s lawsuit: one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys used to be an associate director of enforcement for the NCAA.
- Believe it or not, ESPN preseason rankings have Georgia’s secondary as seventh best in the conference.
- Gene Chizik predicts a 10-2 season for Auburn, with losses to South Carolina and Alabama.
- Vanderbilt checks in at #74 in Paul Myerberg’s preseason roundup.
- College coaches try to figure out the best way to utilize the new rules on summer supervision. (Brian Kelly knows what to do, but if he told you, then he’d have to kill you.)
- “We’re guessing that many people would agree that college president or medical school dean is slightly more beneficial to humanity than being a football coach.” Depends whom you ask, I suspect.
- Bill Connelly looks at this year’s Clemson Tigers team and comes away impressed, particularly with that defensive line.
Get The Picture 
I wonder why BitPay is using the currency name and not their own in the title sponsorship. It’s like McDonald’s calling a sponsorship the “Hamburger Bowl” or Starbucks calling theirs the “Coffee Bowl.”
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Good point but what good QB did we play in the SEC last year other than Mettenburger? Taj Boyd was probably the next best. We missed AJ Mccaron and Johnny Football. Murray played for us. Connor Shaw was good but other than scrambling ability, which was key for Connor, Dylan Thompson should be just as productive as a 5th year senior with a lot of game experience. (just like we are hoping with Hutson Mason). Every little bit helps though with this secondary.
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Franklin carved Georgia up before he got hurt. And with the swap of LSU for Arky this season, that’s a big drop off at the position.
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I thought Shaw was the 5th best passer in the SEC. Better than Marshal who also was a scrambler. Nick also had the worlds biggest rabbit foot.
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If only we lived in a world where people got paid based on their benefit to humanity and not the scarcity of their particular expertise… what a wonderful world that would be. But, who would feed the lawyers?
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I bet the CEOs of medical research and pharmaceutical (sp?) firms make far more than football coaches once they actually produce something of value, such as a medicine that cures disease. All medical school deans do is facilitate programs where students can learn how to effectively employ the treatments that other people have developed. It’s a bit of a false analogy 😉
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Millions more. Medical research is usually funded by Big Pharma so you’re talking about the same money.
But the idea that they contribute so much to society is, well, flawed. While some drugs help people, even save some lives, others do a lot of harm, and kill a lot of people. I’m a health professional and I’d say, based on the evidence I see, the equation is balanced, far too heavily, on the negative side.
We do some great things when it comes to some surgeries, trauma care, and certain procedures . But the health care system (which in reality is ‘sick care’) is a very sick and corrupt thing, especially when it comes to the treatment of chronic disease, which is where it hits most of us. It’s paradigm has been redesigned by the Big Money of industry to produce large profits, and the American people have paid, and continue to pay in larger and larger numbers, the price, both in their own personal health and cost.
Sorry about the off-topic diatribe, won’t happen again. It’s just that I deal with this issue every day.
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Ivey, you may not have meant to imply otherwise – when it comes to protected industries, cronyism, and lobbying the government for special favors, I am in full agreement with you – the health care industry and our supposedly free market system is sick.
But I think it’s important to place the blame in the correct place. The promise of profits is the mechanism that’s made the standard of living for the poorest among us skyrocket over the last 200 years.
Why is health care such a “special” commodity, even when it’s not a life and death situation? Why are gasoline and food – arguably both necessities in the modern world and more directly governed by the natural market pricing mechanism – so reasonably priced, yet we feel health care is expensive?
It’s because the government – not the “evil” profit motive – has intentionally (AHCA, Medicare, Prescription Drug Act) and unintentionally (wage controls during WW2 leading to employer-based health care) inserted itself between the consumer and the producer of the good…subsidizing the consumption of any good to the remarkable degree we have with health care, and in the ill-advised manner we have used with healthcare, will cause misallocation of services and price increases.
If we had a level playing field, an unobstructed market, and just gave cash money grants to the poor to spend on housing or education or health care or whatever else they wanted to spend on, we’d see their true preferences play out in the market, prices would fall, and people would be able to get the best care our society can reasonably afford at this point in our national progress.
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Reading this made me giddy. I’m glad other people are starting to realize how much big govt screws shit up
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I can’t speak to anything outside the medical/health care industry, but I suspect they are different. It’s massive problems cannot be solved by just a market free from government interference.
Government is a big part of the problem, primarily because they are in collusion with the medical industrial complex. I won’t use the word, but I can tell you know what that is called. Anyway, it’s bad news for the consumer, i.e., the American people. And many people die unnecessarily every year because of it.
Very complex subject, but thanks for your thoughts.
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Isn’t their “benefit to humanity” plus their scarcity actually what sets their price to begin with, at least in the private sector? There is a surplus of lawyers but they still seem to live well…for the most part…and there is probably a scarcity of professional pumpkin carvers but they probably get paid less well.
I guess you could argue that musicians, artists, football coaches, and video game developers do not further the longevity of life (although they may) but you’d agree they contribute to the quality of it, right?
And if we think there are too many lawyers, it’s our own fault for voting in the people writing lengthy, vague, and numerous laws, right? 🙂
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As far as Aereo goes, that link you posted is excluding one very important and significant fact: If a game is on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, etc. you can ALREADY buy a cheap antenna and watch it over the air for free in HD, and it’s completely legal and legit. I do it all of the time, and not just for sports. All Aereo does is allow you to stream those same channels over the internet if you happen to be in an area where it’s hard to pick up a good TV signal with your antenna.
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BD165..that’s exactly the kind of pointed and useful information I need about this kind of stuff. Thanks.
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The big thing which would affect the leagues is the implication the article discusses somewhat — cable companies could install mini antennas of their own and not have to pay the broadcaster retransmission fees. http://articles.philly.com/2014-01-06/business/45885511_1_retransmission-fees-tv-stations-similar-fees
MLB and NFL’s amicus excerpt in the article does not do much to pull on the legal heart strings — why should the law care that ruling in favor of Aero would erode the cable company’s customer base, especially when it is a consumer-friendly outcome?
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In The Columbian piece, “The fact that athletic programs are financially divorced from the university at large demonstrates the disconnect between education and big-time college athletics. At the most prominent programs, athletes are little more than mercenaries.”
Describing college athletes as “mercenaries” is absurdly over the top. They are not mercenaries nor warriors nor anything of the sort that implies real soldiering. They are young men who play sports at a high level. That’s it. They don’t make the rules, they don’t get paid handsomely, and many earn degrees. If you’re looking for mercenaries on college campuses, look at some of the professors who encourage students to shout down speakers of a particular political persuasion who visit the schools. Maybe that’s a better descriptive fit. And maybe there’s a disconnect there, huh? Not to mention an enormous level of cowardice.
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“Describing college athletes as ‘mercenaries’ is absurdly over the top.”
Agree. Try not paying a mercenary and see what happens.
“If you’re looking for mercenaries on college campuses, look at some of the professors who encourage students to shout down speakers of a particular political persuasion who visit the schools.”
Because how else would students ever come up with ideas were it not for wingnut BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program professors
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43481_Dave_Brats_Batshit_Wingnut_Twitter_Feed
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I pretty much agree with everything on his Twitter feed – it’s hardly the “Batshit Wingnut” ravings promised by the headline.
And just curious, re “Moral Foundations of Capitalism” – do you not agree that some social / economic systems are more moral than others, i.e. systems that encourage achievement, individual liberty, freedom of expression, etc?
By the way, BB&T’s former chairman Allison walks it like he talks it – he’s an intellectual who has a philosophical foundation for his free market views, and BB&T was one of the healthy, slow-growth conservative banks that tried to refuse TARP money but the govt forced them and similar banks to take it so as not to panic customers of the other banks. So that grant or chair or whatever is probably more than window dressing or a marketing spin for them.
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Coach chiz is wrong. I think we’re going to throttle auburn. After last year? On our turf for the first time in 3 years? Throttle them, I tells ya.
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I love the consistency of the Post and Courier’s two articles. One says we have 8 defensive starters returning and one says 10. One says Gurley had a lackluster season last year and the other says his numbers were down due to injury (which is obviously the real reason). Great job Posterior!
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To be fair, the number of returning defensive starters for Georgia changes week-to-week.
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Aaron Brenner would be wise to do more research and abandon his corny efforts at making cute comments. I don’t think he even knows Gurley missed three games last year and was half speed in the others. He’s a goofball.
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Some dessert to add to the Friday buffet:
Good article in the Athens paper on what the coaching staff is doing to change the culture..
http://onlineathens.com/sports/college-sports/2014-06-19/ugas-new-defensive-leaders-emerge-military-style-camp
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Thanks, Joe.
~~~
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QB play in the SEC and against Clemson is indeed a significant factor, but based on how wide open the opponents’ receivers were last season I still maintain that the “best” thing for UGA’s secondary this year had better be a talented, attacking front seven. It doesn’t require a great QB to hit a receiver when the DB isn’t within several yards of the target.
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Nice tidbit in the link at the top bullet (paraphrasing): ‘Nick Marshall has a nice flair for the dramatic, as evidenced by his TD pass to beat Georgia.’
No shit. It really said that.
I had almost as much to do with that TD as Nick Marshall, and I was on my screen porch in Pawleys polishing off a Stone IPA.
Oy. Talk about dramatic license.
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+1.
+100.
~~~
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+1 more.
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I see I’m not the first to weigh in on the subject of college football coaches making more money than college presidents and medical school deans, but hey, I’m gonna go ahead anyway.
I get wearier of the subject every time I read one on these columns. Each time one of these pieces is written, I’ll wager it was written by someone who didn’t just write a check out of his personal bank account to his local college president or medical school dean.
I’ll spare you the rant about how a medical school dean would make a seven figure salary if he could fill a 100K seat stadium eight times a year to watch him do his work. That rant would be true, but it’s been done a million times before. I would rather comment on the hypocrisy of those who lament how society doesn’t properly value the work of college presidents or (fill in the blank). It’s hypocritical because the person lamenting the lack of worth or value placed on these other supposedly morally superior vocations is almost always measuring that worth in other people’s dollars. It’s that simple. If you want to complain to me along these lines, you’ll have to show me your cancelled check you wrote to your local medical school dean. If you can’t do that, I’m going to just roll my eyes at you. Hard.
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Nicely put. Very nicely put.
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