Thank You BEVO et. al

[GiddyUp]

Um, Ponies first for me.

you going to stream the game ? i don't think it's on TV

[ThadFilms]

Um, Ponies first for me.

you going to stream the game ? i don't think it's on TV

It's not. We're streaming Jameson's right now. We'll be streaming the game, too. So Treadway no worries about the Marina Pub being fully stocked. We've got three bottles of Jame-o, plus fully stocked else wise.

And GiddyUp, to your first note -- Al Pacino once told me to never name drop, but THIS is the Scarface house, well the HB/LA version. "Say hello, to my lil' friend!!!!"

[smupony94]

I tell everyone I know the guy who did Pony Excess. Get moved to Champagne Room at the Landing Strip everytime

[HB Pony Dad]

The Saintly NCAA, an organization of "academic" institutions per Stallion, acting NOT in their own monetary self interests ...

If a significant band of football schools were to demonstrate that they could orchestrate a true national playoff, without the NCAA’s assistance, the association would be terrified—and with good reason. Because if the big sports colleges don’t need the NCAA to administer a national playoff in football, then they don’t need it to do so in basketball. In which case, they could cut out the middleman in March Madness and run the tournament themselves. Which would deprive the NCAA of close to $1 billion a year, more than 95 percent of its revenue. The organization would be reduced to a rule book without money—an organization aspiring to enforce its rules but without the financial authority to enforce anything.

Thus the playoff dreamed of and hankered for by millions of football fans haunts the NCAA. “There will be some kind of playoff in college football, and it will not be run by the NCAA,” says Todd Turner, a former athletic director in four conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, and Pac-10). “If I’m at the NCAA, I have to worry that the playoff group can get basketball to break away, too.”

This danger helps explain why the NCAA steps gingerly in enforcements against powerful colleges. To alienate member colleges would be to jeopardize its own existence. Long gone are television bans and the “death penalty” sentences (commanding season-long shutdowns of offending teams) once meted out to Kentucky (1952), Southwestern Louisiana (1973), and Southern Methodist University (1987). Institutions receive mostly symbolic slaps nowadays. Real punishments fall heavily on players and on scapegoats like literacy tutors.

A deeper reason explains why, in its predicament, the NCAA has no recourse to any principle or law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing. Scholars and sportswriters yearn for grand juries to ferret out every forbidden bauble that reaches a college athlete, but the NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else? No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature—a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.

Quoted from The Shame of College Sports

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[Treadway21]

Sounds like an interesting book. The NCAA has been AWOL on realignment, so the inmates are running the asylum. Too bad the NCAA could not have figured out a way (or had the balls) to manage and lead the transition in realignment.

[ponyte]

As long as the fans support this nonsense, then it will continue. Has UT, ND, OSU, NU or OU's attendance and TV appeal collapsed during all this? Is the SEC having trouble with making money with expansion every few years?

This is about entertainment (not academics or school spirit). And entertainment is about making money. Sure, the canard is that it supports the school and adds to the campus experience and molds young men and women into great leaders and all that other BS but the bottom line is to make one's product more profitable.

The NCAA isn't interested in anything but making money as well. Any real interest to forma well organized, well run and equitable system is not in the NCAA's interest. How would it make money if it actually investigated and punished the very teams that make it so much cash?

College football is about to expand to a new level of entertainment. It will not remain in its current form.

Our job is to be able to benefit as this new system emerges and that requires winning.