Tag: ncaa

When it comes to college application time, my kids are now ‘white’

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Chinese-American kid with near-perfect credentials and worthiness rejected by 16 out of 18 schools; family pursuing legal action

Firstly, I’m astounded how this story managed slip by me considering it appears to have originated back in March.  I suppose my Google notification queries weren’t adequate enough to have found about this kid sooner.  Secondly, regardless of the fact that I closed the book on #TRYHARDSZN2025, when I found out about the general context of this story, it couldn’t help but fire up the powder keg of my brain into wanting to write about this, because it really is a pretty astounding story.

We have a student who scored a 1590 on the SAT* and has a 4.42 GPA; typically those things alone are enough to get kids accepted into a whole slew of high-tier colleges.  On top of it, it’s a computer science whiz, was offered a job at Google when he was 13 because his code was so clean, he was assumed to have been an adult, and he founded his own e-signature startup, which really should have had most schools with strong computer science and/or engineering programs salivating to bring in a talent like this into their folds.

*I can’t help but wonder what question he possibly could have gotten wrong on the SAT to dock those ten points, and also wonder if his dad beat the ever-living fuck out of him for failing to miss a perfecto by one question

The problem is that he happened to be Chinese-American, and suddenly he went from diamond in the rough to being a gold flake in the sluice, and was turned down from nearly every school he applied to.  There are so many Asian whiz kids out there every single college application season, that it’s probably more exceptional to be mediocre and full of character like me, instead of being a monster in the books.  Even doing shit like creating startups, developing apps or other exceptional-sounding achievements have begun to sound cookie cutter amongst Asians and guys like this are left to pay the price for everyone being so fucking over-the-top #TRYHARD.

As Syndrome said in The Incredibles, when everyone is super, nobody will be.

And the thing is, it’s not like he was one of those #TRYHARDs that applied to every Ivy League school, in fact the only one he did apply to was Cornell.  With the exceptions of MIT, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, the meat of his applications made it clear that he was favoring staying out on the west coast, with most of his applications staying in California primarily; they’re all good, noteworthy schools, but they’re not Ivies, and they still turned this poor kid down.

So despite my knee-jerk reaction being fuck this kid and his seemingly overzealous dad for going straight to threatening lawsuits, because frankly this happens every year, where a few wunderkind Asian kids get the shaft during college application time, because frankly Asians always get the shaft when it comes to succeeding in America, I’m actually rooting for them to hopefully make some noise and either get the college system in the country to change their racist acceptance policies, or flat out admit that they do discriminate against Asians for being too good at school.

It’s the Asian Curve at its best-worst, where Asian kids basically start the SAT with a score of -200, because without it, they’re completely annihilating the competition, but on a college-application level where Asians are getting rejected by schools because they’re unofficially trying to fill diversity quotas, as opposed to having their student bodies look like the Beijing Olympics.

The funny thing is though, in spite of the bullshit of getting completely owned by the college acceptance system, the kid in question is going to be just fine.  He’s already been hired by Google, and his story, as well as his previous rub with the company, you know he’s already pulling in serious coin, and the ironic best part is that he’ll be getting to do so without having a modicum of student debt to pay towards.

Granted, his parents will forever be denied the Asian honor dream of having a son that went to Harvard or Yale, much less any college at this point, but in a few years once he’s made some money, and has bought them some high-end cars and paid off their mortgage, I’m sure their songs will sound a lot less flat.

All the same, it was an interesting story that really puts the spotlight on how much bullshit #TRYHARDSZN is capable of being, especially for those of kids who are stalwart Asians, because they have to know that their plight to get into top schools is going to be thirty-times harder than those students of different colors of skin, regardless of if anyone will admit to it or not.

White Lotus S3 probably fucking with #TRYHARDSZN2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the thing, this article came up in my routine searches for #TRYHARDs to write about, about how Duke’s acceptance rate has hit an all-time low, where only 3.67% of applicants get accepted.  I mean, sports bias and perception bias on account of sports, aside, Duke is a fine educational institution, and the name holds a tremendous amount of weight in the world for those who have gone there, and graduated from the university.

But even outside of the world of sport, the Duke brand holds an abysmal reputation and is generally reviled by pretty much everyone except those people who have gone to Duke, graduated from Duke, or financially supported by someone who went to Duke.  There’s a general reputation that Duke is snooty, white-bred, arrogant, insufferable and all sorts of pejoratives meant to demean Duke, but it never really mattered, because all the people who are pro-Duke exist on some sort of weird island where nobody else seems to matter.

Which is why it seems so appropriate and fitting that Duke has seemingly decided to gatekeep to a new career high, accepting fewer students than they’ve ever done, and I have to feel that such is probably surprising to absolutely nobody at all, considering their general reputation and the political climate that’s emboldened racists to let their bigot flags fly high and proudly.

Why I decided to start a post about it is completely beyond me considering I don’t really have much else to say about the topic, but in all honesty the reason I wanted to, was so I could post a screen grab of White Lotus S3, where the character Timothy Ratliff, played by Jason Isaacs is basically losing his marbles, but every time he goes into one of his suicidal fantasies, he’s always wearing a t-shirt with a huge-ass DUKE wordmark on it.

After the last episode, I remarked to mythical wife that I’m sure Duke is (facetiously) thrilled to see their school’s name on the shirt of a criminal embezzler who is becoming suicidal, and as someone who enjoys seeing Duke fail in any capacity, it brings me great amusement to see it happening in the show.

And the funniest thing is that my hypothesis was proven correct when searching for an adequate screen grab to pair with this post, and Googling “Tim Ratliff White Lo-“ auto fills in the rest of “tim ratliff white lotus duke shirt” and all sorts of articles and spot-on screen caps of Tim Ratliff with a gun to his head with his DUKE shirt on are immediately returned, and there are numerous articles detailing the university’s general displeasure at the show that a Duke man is both a criminal and suicidal.

But yeah, I’m not surprised that Duke’s not happy about it, because the Ratliff family is proudly North Carolinian, and boasts how dad is Duke, mom is UNC, eldest son is Duke, I don’t remember which Piper went to, but how Lochte is still deciding between the two, but it’s clear that those who were Dookies are clearly vapid unhinged white people, with one of them becoming suicidal.  And I love the validation of my off-remark hypothesis.

So at this point, I have no choice but to continue on with making this post, because it succeeds at taking shots at Duke, as well as put over White Lotus as a show, because season 3 has been entertaining and has demonstrated HBO’s ability to get something that isn’t Game of Thrones or Games of Thrones-adjacent in order to anchor down that Sunday at 9 pm time slot.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Is this becoming a Georgia thing?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

11aliveOnMySide: Marietta teen accepted into 52 colleges, amassing at least $1.8M in cumulative scholarship offers

So I have a tab open with a generic Google query for “college accepted” with filters to show me the most recent news.  Location is not turned on.  Yet all the stories that I’ve come across in regards to #TRYHARDs have all been kids from various Georgia areas, and not just seemingly out of Westlake High like they were highly concentrated from last #SZN.  Which is leading me to believe that the whole practice of applying to every single school under the sun for probably free seems to presumably be a very Georgia thing to do, especially seeing as how I have yet to come across a single #TRYHARD story from anywhere outside the state of Georgia yet.

Anyway, we have a new #TRYHARD for the #SZN, and what stands out to me for this one is the fact that the chica isn’t from one of the more commonly found #TRYHARD regions, but is actually quite the opposite.  Wheeler High School in Marietta is a school that’s not on the south, west or southwestern part of the Metro area, and isn’t just in Marietta, but in East Cobb Marietta, where the snobbery is real, but the general performance scores of the schools in the district are above average, generally.

Frankly, it’s one of the first times I’ve heard of an actual #TRYHARD coming out of a more upscale location, and I’m curious to what the criteria for getting to apply to a gazillion colleges with presumably no concern over application fees is, because if they’re allowing kids from Wheeler to do it, then geographical location isn’t necessarily a deciding factor in this privilege to shoot as many shots as you want.

But unlike many of reported #TRYHARDs, this one was considerate, and clearly egotistical enough to have a straight up graphic made, because it gives us a little more insight to some of the 52 schools that she was accepted into, because so many of these #TRYHARDs don’t actually disclose it, because as much as they want to brag about getting into 52 schools, they don’t want to brag that 48 of them are like small commuter schools nobody outside of their general locations actually know of.

Anyway, among the schools that this particular #TRYHARD got into are basically the entire SEC, with Auburn, Florida, Alabama, LSU, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi State (but oddly no Georgia), and then randomly some other Power-5 schools like Clemson, NC State, Oklahoma, Michigan State and Ohio State.

What seems apparent to me is that with the exceptions of Oklahoma, Michigan State and Ohio State, this girl doesn’t really want to stray too far out of the Southeast in general, seeing as how just about every school she got into is at the very most, like an eight hour drive to, less if flown.  But also, of all the aforementioned schools, they’re all notable college football programs, so if I had to guess, this girl really wants to go somewhere with big football cultures, and probably end up becoming an alcoholic at some point in her college career.  Even many of the non-Power 5 schools she got into have football programs that some people may have actually heard about, feeding the hypothetical narrative of the importance of football to our subject #TRYHARD over here.

Anyway, in the grand spectrum of #TRYHARDSZN, this is a solid contender, but if I’m a betting man, no chance at being top #TRYHARD.  58 and $1.8M are decent numbers, but it’s still early and the Ivy Leagues haven’t released acceptances yet.  I’m sure the #SZN still has a lot of gas left in it, and hopefully we’ll start to see some #TRYHARDs emerge from places outside of the state of Georgia, because this can’t be the only state where they’re all going to be coming from.

Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An interesting thing happened this year’s college football bowl season; with the playoff expanded to 12 teams, it basically murdered any interest I could have in absolutely any other bowl game that wasn’t a CFB playoff game.  Even Virginia Tech being in the Belk Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which is maybe like a C-tier bowl, instead of the E-tier that shit like the TransPerfect Music City Bowl or ReliaQuest Bowl couldn’t interest me in the least bit.  And I don’t think such was the intention of the CFB committee, but at the same time I don’t think they should be surprised that fucks to give for any bowl that wasn’t a playoff game, actually ended up being quite minimal.

Anyway, the field is set for the National Championship, with it being The Ohio State University against Notre Dame, two schools I typically give no shits about beyond that I want to see them lose every time I hear their names in competition.  Not that I had any real horse in the race, but I obviously hoped for Georgia to win a third natty in recent years for the fact that they’re the hometown team for me, but their chances seemed like a wash when Carson Beck was ruled out after hurting himself in the SEC Championship.

Texas was my B-pick, because I proclaimed that the Natty really was theirs to lose; and it’s not because I like Texas by any stretch of the imagination, but if we really did end up with a Texas vs. UGA III, I didn’t think there was any chance that Georgia could upend them a third consecutive time in a single season.  And if there’s any consolation at all for me, there’s always some degree of satisfaction in being right.

However both schools shit the bed, and we’re stuck with TOSU and ND for the first-ever 12-team playoff version Natty, and I really couldn’t give a shit on who actually wins.  Honestly, I think TOSU is probably going to win, like a 38-17 contest because they look like world beaters right now, and they did win the first-ever 4-team playoff, so it just seems like one of those kismet things that they’d win the first-ever 12-team playoff, out of some weird tradition.

But for the sake of picking someone to root for, I think I’m going to be rooting for Notre Dame; not because I like them in the least bit*, but because Notre Dame winning a National Championship is basically the worst thing to happen for the CFB committee, who will undoubtedly be facing a lot of difficult questions should ND win the Natty, and I like the idea of chaos being brought to their doorstep instead of TOSU getting to be National Champions.

*especially since they no longer have a Korean kicker

Continue reading “Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos” →

Of course it’ll be Duke that kills a tradition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Source: #8 Duke loses to unranked Wake Forest, students storm the court; Duke center Kyle Filipowski allegedly injured by fan during the mob, coach Jon Scheyer calls for an end to storming

The low-hanging fruit is that if Duke could just stop sucking and getting upset by lesser-heralded opponents, they wouldn’t have to deal with other schools’ fans storming the court on them.  Furthermore, we’re long past Coach K’s retirement and it’s apparent that Jon Scheyerface isn’t helming a perpetual national champion anymore, so if the NCAA could stop overrating the fuck out of Duke and having them in the AP Top-10 all the time, then maybe opponents will stop thinking they’re upsetting Goliath every time they eat another L, and fans won’t feel the need to storm the court.

Put me in the segment of sports fans that is particularly enjoying the new reality that Duke is far from the automatic win they used to be, and regardless of the diminishing importance of beating Duke is becoming, it’s always a pleasure to see them take a loss.

But here’s the thing, I can see where Jon Scheyerface is coming from, as well as all those who are in support of his remarks to plead with an end to court storming.  Just because it’s a long-standing tradition across the college athletics landscape, most notably in football and basketball, and just because it’s something that’s “always been done,” it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t ever been a potential risk to tons of student athletes and team and venue personnel, and it doesn’t mean it’s really ever been right.

It’s just that this particular season, there have now been two noteworthy incidents where players have gotten bodied by jubilant fans storming the court, where Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was trucked by a fan, and now Dook’s Kyle Filipowki* took a tumble and had to be helped off the court.  If there’ve been any other incidents in the past in hoops or football, none have really made the media such as these.

*which sounds about like the whitest name in the world, even for a Dook player

As traditional and exciting it is to see a court storming, it really is a recipe for disaster where it’s a miracle that things haven’t gotten worse than these isolated incidents throughout the years.  Hundreds to thousands of people, swept up in emotion and excitement of being on the right side of a victory, rushing towards a central point where there might still be opposition present, trying to process an L while going against the flow of human traffic; suddenly accessible when they typically aren’t, because a venue’s security has long since been physically overwhelmed.

The reality is that a court storming can happen at any point of a game, not just the finish, and there is literally nothing a venue could do about it.  There is nothing short of employing the Justice League to guard the access points to the court or field from being swarmed by hundreds to thousands of rushing human beings, and even the most imposing of security will get overwhelmed by a mass of people eventually.  Unless there is a ratio of security that is closer to 1:1 and not 1:500, court storming is literally impossible to prevent from happening.

It’s just that traditionally, there is an understood agreement and civility that saves court storming for upsets of heralded opponents.  Dook has done a good job historically, be it through their students, alumni, PR and brand management, of becoming the school that everyone loves to hate, and seemingly regardless of their rank or position in the NCAA rankings, has probably been the school to have to deal with the most number of court stormings against over the last 25 years or so, so in spite of my general disdain for the school, I actually do understand where the concerns over court storming come from.

Like I said, it’s easy to make the joke that maybe if they just stop losing, they wouldn’t have to deal with it, but the concerns and potential dangers are no less real when it comes to when it actually happens.  Frankly, I don’t think Filipowski was actually hurt as much as he was more trying to cushion his bruised ego for taking an L against Wake Forest, much like any player who gets rocked in any sport suddenly having an spontaneous injury announced afterward to try and salvage their ego.

But if court storming actually does have action taken against it, regardless of the fact that nobody can really stop it from happening, all eyes are going to be on Duke as the party responsible for attempting to kill a tradition that has been a part of college sports almost as long as the existence of college sports.  And as much as people who didn’t go to Dook generally revile Dook, this outcome would probably, undoubtedly make things much worse for them, and probably set up a situation where even more schools will feel the compulsion to storm on them if they ever lose in their houses.

Would be pretty impressive to be Kyle Filipowski, because it would most definitely put him up in the upper echelon of Hated White Duke Player history, with Christian Laettner, JJ Redick and Grayson Allen, but unlike them, it’s not because he was so good at basketball as much as he was trying to kill off a timeless tradition and change the general landscape of college sports.

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.