Tag: ncaa

Every sports journalist’s worst nightmare

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

😬 – high school football prospect sets the internet ablaze by just his name alone: Noah Knigga

This right here, is every sports journalist’s worst nightmare.  Already, the biggest questions are on the correct pronunciation of his name, if the K is silent, and other low-hanging fruit remarks, but the harsh reality is that his mere existence, is going to inadvertently make life really hard for people who do not have bad intentions and merely want to report on sports.

Honestly, looking at his general junior year stats, 7.8 tackles per game and 3 sacks in just six games is pretty impressive, and supposedly Knigga is on some top-22 best underclassmen list, so it doesn’t sound like he’s a slouch.  He’s also rocking a 4.0 GPA, which leads to believe his character has some class and he respects academics enough, which makes it all the worse that he’s a kid that really deserves to advance his career, and make life difficult for all the people merely scared of his name, from a PR standpoint.

The funny thing is that despite his general paper-test shine, he seems to only have the attention of:

Knigga with a ‘K’ has piqued the interest of several top programs, which include West Virginia, Miami (Ohio), and James Madison

Now WVU is a decent program that often lives in or near the top-25 every year, and JMU is the pride of my hometown that I always have a soft spot for, but it’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to be attracting the attention of anyone, well, better.

I mean, if Arkansas is willing to recruit some kid named Bumper Pool, and Oklahoma is fine going after some guy named General Booty, it’s surprising how many power-5 programs are afraid to go after a guy who’s name sounds like the N-word.  Especially when you consider how most of their predominantly white student bases and boosters probably already use the word liberally behind closed doors, you’d think they wouldn’t bat an eye at a kid who’s name sounds like it in the first place.

But it feels like Knigga is going to be a kid who’s going to unfortunately suffer for what his name looks like it sounds like, mostly because teams don’t want to deal with the hot potato his name will create for their general PR.  You’d think, especially in like an SEC school, where most of the students are a bunch of racists to begin with, Knigga would be capable of moving a fuck-ton of merch from bros and troll bros who basically want to have an excuse to use the name that sounds like the word.

However, make no mistake, by the time the dust all settles, I agree with a lot of sentiment, that there will probably be a lot of sports journalists over the next few years, who will face some scrutiny, if not actual backlash, for them using Noah Knigga’s name.  And by no fault of his own, the poor guy will basically be, the living nightmare of sports journalists all over, and especially the ones local to where he ultimately ends up.

College Football presents: Van Wilder

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This shouldn’t be legal: NCAA grants Oklahoma State quarterback, Alan Bowman, waiver to play in his seventh college football season

This is funny to me in so many ways.  In an age of CFB where there are 18-year old true freshmen who bounce after one, softly-mandatory year of college, here we have a 24-year old man-child who is seemingly determined to stay in college, and has been granted a waiver to play for a seventh year.

Traditionally, kids enter college at around age 18, if they do everything by the book, they’re usually out in four years, by age 22, and then they’re unleashed upon the real world with as much earthly idea of what to do after college as they did before it but that’s another story for another day.  But Alan Bowman, will be 24 years old when he suits up for his seventh season of college football, and we basically have a real-life Van Wilder, as in a grown-ass man who seemingly is entirely against leaving college.

I love the explanation of how he was redshirted in his freshman year a decade ago was the justification for allowing him to play a seventh year in college ball, because typically redshirting is a cheap tactic employed by schools who are glorified sports franchises, to immerse a kid in the team culture, practice with the squad, train with the squad, learn with the squad, and occasionally get into a very small number of games.  It does not go against their finite number of eligible years, and it’s basically a way to get a bonus year from a kid before really actually using them.

But typically a redshirt year adds just a single year to a guy’s college career, but in the case of Alan Bowman, it’s being the rationale of why he’s going to get a seventh year.  This isn’t like the case of the 34-year old kicker for UVA, because that dude at least served his country forever ago and held off on college until he basically got the GI Bill to pick it all up for him and then decided to play ball.  It’s just a guy that just flat-out refuses to leave college for whatever reason.

Frankly, aside from it being hilarious, it really shouldn’t be legal in the holistic sense that a grown-ass man will be taking the field against squads that will have literal teenagers still playing against him.  There are probably freshman players who are still learning how to live on their own, while Bowman is probably throwing away AARP applications from his mail.

I mean I have to assume that Bowman is sticking around as long as he can because he’s probably not good enough to play professionally, and he’s trying to milk an NIL train or some sort of under-the-table benefits as long as humanly possible, because when his lengthy college career is over, his playing days probably are too.

Either way, it’s just hilarious that there will be a guy playing in his seventh college season, taking the field for a fairly adequate football program.  He’s literally nearly done with his second tour of college if he’s been taking school by the books, which he probably isn’t in all fairness but still, damn boy; get the fuck out of there, and let actual college players have an actual college career.

Rarely are there ever winners in college football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay, so I’ve been marinating over this topic over the last few days.  The 2023-2024 college football playoff field is set, and unsurprisingly there exists a ton of salt from various fanbases, just as much pointless analysis to simulate a bunch of hypotheticals, and then a whole lot more salt from the results of such hypothetical matchups.  Honestly, this isn’t something that I was really intending on writing about, but it’s getting a little slow at the office as we’ve entered the tail end of the year and the holiday season, and I’ve found a little bit of time here and there to help kill time by writing, win-win.

Honestly, I think the committee did an okay job with the four teams that are slated to play for the National Championship.  The only one I really don’t agree with is Texas, but I’m completely okay with Michigan, Washington and Alabama being in the playoff.  I wholeheartedly agree that Florida State, in spite of their 13-0 record and ACC championship aren’t a top-4 team, because the ACC has been more or less anything but a Power-5 conference since well, Trevor Lawrence left Clemson.

Trying to not sound like such a Georgia homer, but despite the fact that they did lose the SEC to Alabama, I still feel that they should’ve been in the playoff, especially instead of Texas.  CFB is always about recency bias above all else, and Georgia did finally lose, at the worst possible time ever, but nobody’s going to convince me that the two-time defending National Champions who hadn’t lost in two years doesn’t deserve to be in the CFB playoff.

An even harder sell is convincing me, as well as millions of other CFB fans, that a Michigan/Washington/Georgia/Alabama field wouldn’t be absolute money for all parties involved, because it’s no secret that the SEC has flexed on the entire sport for decades at this point, and what better way for other conferences to try to overcome the mountain than by having two SEC powerhouses in the field?

If anything, the one flexible school that is in the field in my opinion is Washington, because they’re always a strong regular season school, but have done jack shit come postseason, with them getting trounced by Alabama just a few years ago the time they did make it in.  Plus they have a far smaller fanbase that isn’t nearly as willing to spend money, travel, spend money or spend money than programs such as FSU, Texas or Ohio State, and as long as the CFB playoff remains a biased invitational, there will always remain arguments of keeping certain programs out for the pursuit of money.

Regardless of my armchair analysis, the one thing that most everyone can agree upon at this juncture is that the CFB playoff field desperately, desperately needs expansion.  Fortunately, this is something that is mutually agreed upon by the CFB committee, but unfortunately this is not the year in which it rolls out, otherwise we’d have a pretty lit playoff field set.

But the word is that starting next season, the playoff will become a 12-team field with the top four seeds all getting bye weeks, and then 5-12 playing games to reduce to eight, then to four, before setting up the game for the Natty.  And although this system is probably more than sufficient to get a lot of CFB fans wet, sure there is a lot for me to like as well, but I just think that it isn’t a particularly good idea as well.

Continue reading “Rarely are there ever winners in college football” →

I didn’t realize we were witnessing some sort of history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay then: South Carolina’s women’s basketball team defeats Mississippi Valley, 101-19

A year or two ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a stream of a high school girls basketball game, that a guy we went to high school with was coaching.  I clicked it out of curiosity, since this guy in question was one of those guys where nothing in the world ever seems to treat him particularly well, and my friend isn’t one to steer me to dud content, and when the stream began for me, I noticed that the score was like 31-3. 

I texted my friend and said that I thought that maybe the stream was broken or something, because the score seemed to be stuck at 31-3, but then I noticed in actual manual scoreboard in the video itself, which was still live and moving, and I had one of those ohhhhhh moments, because it turns out that the score was actually, 31-3.  Naturally, my friend’s boy was the coach of the team that had only put up three points, and we laughed heartily over the ownage we were witnessing, because we do love some good old fashioned ownage.

I don’t remember what the final score was, but I don’t think my friend’s boy’s team surpassed ten points.  I do remember watching on the stream that after the clock mercifully ended, he stormed immediately off the court; no handshaking the opposing coach, no handshake line between the two teams.

My in-laws are both sports fans as well as supporters of South Carolina sports, so when they were over during the holiday weekend, and while the girls were down for a nap/quiet time, we turned on the Lady Gamecocks since they were playing live at the time.  It was the third quarter, and the score was like 62-12, and I immediately had flashbacks to the high school game that my friend and I watched, and my first thought was that the ESPN feed was fucked up or something, and that the score was not refreshing maybe.

But it turned out that South Carolina really was wrecking Mississippi Valley that badly, and mythical wife, who is neither a fan of basketball or women’s hoops, began complaining of why we were watching at all, considering the game was long past over at this juncture.  I mean, I like a good blowout every now and then, but there’s no denying that it does get kind of boring after a while and both teams begin just going through the motions to get debacle over with.  I was more surprised that there was no running clock or something to speed things up, and prevent MSV from getting throttled even more than they were.

We turned the game off in after the third, because the margin was only getting worse, but then I would discover later on that South Carolina passed the 100-point mark which is very impressive at the college level, men or women, and that they blew out MSV by 82 points.

Now it’s not as easy as it should be, so I can’t figure out where in history that an 82-point blowout stands in rank.  I did find out that at one point, UConn reamed St. Francis in the Women’s tournament by a margin of 88 points, but beneath that was a whole lot sub-70 point blowouts, so South Carolina’s 82-point margin definitely is up there in the history books somewhere.

For context, the biggest ass-whooping in NBA history was 73 points, and in the NFL, a 59-0 blowout has occurred twice, so an 82-point beatdown is definitely noteworthy and worth some mention on the brog.  Regardless of where the margin lands in history, it’s still historic in the sense that 19 points allowed is a new school record, and is definitively the largest blowout in the Dawn Staley coaching era for the school, so it’s not inaccurate to say that we were witnessing a little bit of history after all.

Jimbo Fisher: The Bobby Bonilla of College Football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard the rumblings that Texas A&M was planning to axe Jimbo Fisher, I didn’t think much of it.  Just that it must really suck to be Jimbo Fisher and having to hear through the grapevine that your termination was basically coming, and that you just have to sit there waiting for the shoe to drop.  Even more so than the fact that at the time, Texas A&M, while not having a great season, were still 6-4, bowl eligible and in the grand spectrum of the sport, at least more than likely going to have yet another winning season.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Texas A&M is doing such, because Jimbo, in spite of not having won a National Championship for the school, is still a rare breed of good coach, who has been to the top of the mountain before, when he won a natty with Florida State, and for all intents and purposes knows what he’s doing.  The interesting thing is that ATM* hasn’t exactly been a cellar dweller under Jimbo Fisher, which is usually one of the first pre-requisites for firing a coach; under Jimbo, ATM has gone 45-25, and won 9, 8, 9, 8 games before a five-win season a year ago, and as it stands right now, the Aggies probably will finish with seven this year.  But two unsatisfactory years is basically bad luck, injuries, a miss on a recruit or two, but really nothing a fairly successful football program like ATM should worry about.

*what I like to call Texas A&M because their logo’s letter order is literally, “ATM” and it’s also a metaphor to the cash cow that college football is

What it really boils down to is the fact that ATM has higher expectations than much of the rest of CFB, and are tired of hanging out in the middle of the pack and want to make a change for the sake of making change.  The thing is, there’s a vastly higher chance that ATM is going to go through some really dismal years over the next few, possibly miss some bowls (and the payouts that come with participation), and probably would have been better off in terms of wins and losses if they stuck with Jimbo.

But the bigger story is the fact that in firing Jimbo Fisher, ATM is still on the hook for around $77 million dollars of contracted salary, and despite the fact that he won’t be driving the reigns for the program, are very much responsible for paying every single cent.  Unsurprisingly, this is the highest payout in CFB history, and if there’s one thing that never seems to change with my interests, is stories about sports having too much fucking money and doing a whole lot of dumb shit with it.

Long story short, from what I’ve seen, it appears that ATM is taking a page out of MLB and going on an installment plan in order to help spread out the money they owe Jimbo, instead of just plunking down $77M, slapping him on the ass and bidding him adieu.  So until 2031, it looks like ATM will be paying $7.27M every single year to not be coaching ATM.  He gets a lump sum of $19.4 immediately for some reason, I don’t care to know the granular details, but basically starting in 2024 and over the next eight years, he’ll be getting a cool $7.27M for doing absolutely nothing,

This is of course, a similar situation to Bobby Bonilla, the baseball player whose agent somehow transformed $5.9M into nearly $30M, spread out over 25 years, except the fact that it doesn’t appear that Jimbo’s agent negotiated any variables for inflation or interest.  But who’s to say that within the next eight years, ATM gets sick of how much cash they’re literally throwing away, and renegotiate something that does encroach more similarly to Bobby Bo territory, but that’ll be another post for if it ever occurs.

But given the sheer dollar amount and the breakdown of daily intake, Jimbo Fisher is not only the Bobby Bonilla of CFB, he’s actually making out way bigger than Bobby Bonilla ever did.  $77M is greater than $30M, and whereas Bobby Bo is basically making $3k a day for existing, Jimbo Fisher will be making roughly $28k every single day until the end of 2031, merely for existing.

Chalk this up as another reason why sports are so (ironically) great, and just how much needless money is dumped into these industries to where programs can literally set millions and millions of dollars on fire and suffer absolutely no consequences in the process.  Whereas I couldn’t have given any lesser number of shits about Texas A&M in the past, just due to this failure of a scenario, I kind of feel like I need to root against them, and whomever is Jimbo’s successor, just so I can imagine a guy I gave no turds about in the past, laughing in front of a television while the Aggies get rolled around in the basement of the SEC for years to come.

God Bless Rednecks, Sometimes part 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Nope, the following picture is not a photoshop or a sports meme gone awry.  General Booty’s legal name is actually, General Booty.  There is a man living in the United States who’s birth certificate is legitimately General Booty.  General Axel Booty, and not an actual military rank.

I really hope this becomes more of a thing in coming years, because fewer things are more smugly amusing than hearing about rednecks from Texas who have ridiculous names like General Booty or Bumper Pool, whom to their credit of overcoming the criticism that silly names tend to degrade at, manage to get good enough at football to where they can actually try to make a future out of it.

Because I was quite tickled pink six years ago when I found out about Bumper Pool, and I’m quite amused to find out that there’s an actual possible starting quarterback for fucking Oklahoma, named General Booty.  I mean we’re talking about possibly being a successor to guys like Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts and Spencer Rattler.  General Booty has the opportunity to get his name into the annals of Oklahoma football, and not just because his name is General Booty, although I think he’s already on his way there, regardless of if he ends up as QB1, 2 or even 3.

Regardless of his chances, let’s just do a little mini-dive into this guy named General Booty, and how the hell he came to fruition:

To no surprise, his father is a former player himself, having played at LSU as a wide receiver.  I say no surprise, because it’s the meathead jock type like a guy who played at LSU whom would be so fixated on the military rank of General to where he vowed to name his son by a rank should he have one, and by god did he ever, and therefore we have a legitimate person named General Booty.

Aside from his dumbass dad, it turns out that General Booty is actually related to former USC quarterback John David Booty, who actually made it to the NFL, even if he didn’t last that long in the show, but it goes to show that there’s clearly football in the genetics of the ol’ Booty lineage.

If I’m a betting man, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to be QB1 for the Sooners, seeing as how fifth-year senior Dillon Gabriel seems to be the more likely candidate to start, but stranger things have happened in sport.  I imagine that with the awareness of General Booty spreads, he’ll have a Brian Scalabrine-like cult following in the world of sports fandom, and any time he steps onto the field, people will be snickering and chuckling over his name, and by proxy, probably cheer everything he does, just so that they can talk about and spread the word about a guy named General Booty.

The ownage just never seems to end for Patrick Ewing

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Oof: after a 75-109 record over the last six years, Patrick Ewing will not be returning to coach the Georgetown Hoyas

You know, back when the news broke that Patrick Ewing was going to become the new head coach for Georgetown, I actually thought hmm, this might actually lead to something interesting with the Hoyas.  After all, Ewing had spent the better part of the last 10+ years as an assistant coach in the NBA, even if Michael Jordan was cockblocking him repeatedly from getting a head coach position, surely he would have some experience and merit now and have something to contribute to someone.

And being the Georgetown legend he is, who better else to make a union with than his alma mater that he led to a National Championship back in 1984?  He’s still an NBA legend, and often times, young, impressionable prospects tend to look up to former players, especially with the pedigree of a Patrick Ewing.  I thought that maybe Ewing could usher in a new generation to Georgetown, where his name could easily boost recruiting, and maybe we’d see a new era of college hoops where the big man reigned supreme once again.

Well, we certainly did see a different era of Georgetown basketball over the last years, under the tutelage of Patrick Ewing; one of colossal failure, unfulfilled expectations, and save for one freakish Big East championship run out of nowhere, just a whole lot of what Patrick Ewing has been best known for: getting owned.

How naïve of me, or blindly optimistic I was to think that Patrick Ewing would deliver anything else.

Seriously, Georgetown was always one of those teams where their name alone could draw some recognition.  John Thompson, Jr. built a program whose reputation alone probably won more games than they should have, where the reputation alone boosted performance long after the level of talent probably existed there.  Thompson III continued a fairly consistently good program when he took the reigns in 2004.  They were pretty much always a lock to be in the NCAA tournament, and just about every time I saw their name in the bracket, I’d at least give them a win in the first round, because usually they were reliable for at least that much.

I can’t say I blame the Hoyas for going in the direction of Patrick Ewing, being an NBA legend as well as a John Thompson product, but man did they ever whiff on colossal proportions with that choice.  75-109 is pretty horrendous, and that doesn’t illustrate some of his more punctuated lowlights, like where there was a stretch where he went 0-29 in conference play.  I mean really, Villanova, Xavier and St. John’s were some tough draws over that stretch, but Ewing was also losing to schools like DePaul, Providence and Butler, school most people probably don’t even know are even in the Big East.

His tenure was so bad, Ewing was trying to get the tradition of the post-game handshake line abolished, because after 29 straight conference losses, I think I’d be sick of having to congratulate the winners during all those losses too.

Anyway because this doesn’t need to be a novel like I so often try to remind myself when it comes to my brogging habits, yet another chapter in the book of Patrick Ewing comes to an end, with failure, unfulfilled expectations and just plain getting owned.  Seems like all those times MJ refused to promote him to a head coaching position are validated, considering Pat couldn’t even shape young, moldable talents into winners, so god forbid he have any better luck with a bunch of boneheaded knuckleheads like the vast majority of the NBA is today.