Damn, I’m jealous.

A Shakespearean tribute to Stanford’s offensive line — as a Georgia fan, aren’t you jealous, too?

Coach knows best.

The Pac-12 announced its concerns about time demands on student-athletes yesterday, and while the cynic in me was ready to brush those aside as same old, same old (and even so, let’s not forget it’s just talk at this point), I was genuinely surprised to see the conference make this admission:

In that same vein, based on the conversations that Scott and his staff had with athletes, the Pac-12 report included a set of “important learnings applicable to future development of rules and policies on time demands.” Some of those are unsparing.

The conference acknowledges: “Academic sacrifices are being made. It is not uncommon for student-athletes to be forced to change their majors due to practice and competition schedules, either because they cannot schedule the classes and other requirements they need, or they cannot keep up with their academic demands due to their sport’s time demands. Student-athletes are also discouraged from taking certain majors from the outset due to their athletic demands. …”

“Many athletes told stories of changing majors, sometimes well into their academic careers, and not being able to graduate on time due to their sport’s time demands.”

Boy, I bet there are some irritated coaches this morning.  Doesn’t Larry Scott understand the way the real world works?

Getting what you paid for

Today, in fun with numbers:

• The Pac-12 distributed an average of $25.1 million to each school in 2014-15.  Larry Scott, its commissioner, earned almost $4.05 million in total compensation for the same fiscal year.
• During that same period, the Big Ten paid its eleven longstanding members around $32.4 million.  Jim Delany’s compensation for that time was $2.6 million.

I never thought I’d live in a world where Jim Delany was a relative bargain.

The Pac-12’s got bigger problems than Larry Scott’s genius.

The West Coast comes up a little bit short in the fan enthusiasm department this spring.

But let’s be fair: The Pac-12 will never be on equal footing when it comes to Tier 1 money … assuming all three conferences are in the same contract cycle … because of the difference in fan passion and market penetration for advertisers, and there is a very clear and recent example to illustrate this situation:

Spring game attendance.

It’s not the only measure of passion — and passion means ratings and market penetration and advertising dollars for the networks — but it’s a pretty darn good one.

Nobody should expect the Pac-12 to draw at SEC and B1G levels, but the difference is more striking than you might think…

Oregon scrimmages this weekend and should have the largest crowd in the conference, by a significant margin. I’ve included the Ducks below, even though it’s a projection, because it paints a more complete picture of the Pac-12’s spring attendance relative to the other conferences.

It would have been unfair to exclude the biggest crowd just because of timing.

But even with the Ducks, the Pac-12 has just two of the top-25 crowds … and seven of the bottom 10.

If the fans don’t care, the cable service providers won’t either.

Those were the days, my friend.

Hey, remember when everyone hailed Larry Scott as a genius?  Good times.

Maybe money really can’t buy you happiness.

“They want to do all their stuff in the dark.”

According to Mike Leach, there isn’t a coach in the Pac-12 who is in favor of shutting down satellite camps.  And yet, the Pac-12 representative, UCLA athletic Dan Guerrero, voted to do just that.  Why?  Let the Pirate explain:

“The committee. Well who did it? Them. Well, who’s them? We can’t tell you who them is. They want it shrouded by secrecy. I think we need as much exposure to this as possible…”

The truth is out there.  Yar!

Best ring, or best ring ever?

Stanford’s ring commemorating its seal-clubbing of Iowa in the Rose Bowl is the shiznit.

If I ever start another blog, I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist using Intellectual Brutality as the name for it.