Pagoda

Turbo is a great name for a RB. Welcome Turbo.

Yea, I’d like to see pro (NFL, NBA) style multi-year contracts. Would cut down on the transfers, which are especially bad in CBB. Transfers aren’t as bad in CFB, but real contracts would be good there too. Need a CBA for this I’d assume. I don’t know.

Official Rose Bowl Q&A (background noise is what it is...) I liked this: Q. You know about the Bama mystique. How do you convince the players that you're playing this team, not that tradition? CURT CIGNETTI: You probably know more about the mystique than they do. Our guys just know what they see on tape.

I definitely get people missing the pre-NIL days, even though many players were getting paid under the table. Especially pre-2000 before the media deals got really big. As Home Jersey said pre-NIL wasn't the worst travesty ever, there are much bigger problems in the world. I guess I just can't expect players to forgo making money so CFB feels extra pure to the fans. A tough part of this is there isn't an alternative to CFB. No foreign league can support thousands of graduating high school football players, plus that's an unreasonable ask for high school players to leave the US. High school grads are too young and not ready for the NFL, and only a small percentage (~2%) of CFB players go pro. For many, CFB is the pinnacle of their football career. With P4 athletic depts generating $120-300M of revenue and ~75-80% of that coming from football, it's just very hard to justify telling anyone who wants to play in the only football league available to players three years post-high school you cannot make money or else you're ineligible. Maybe it would work if the whole thing were really amateur. That would be volunteer coaching staffs, $5 ticket prices to just cover stadium costs, and small media deals only for distribution with games also streamed for free on YouTube. But in reality everything is highly professional already and asking only the players to be amateurs is inconsistent. I'm not even sure players getting paid is much of a problem. The bigger issue is the lack of strong and logical governance around the game. That's wreaking havoc on CBB now, but the cause of that is the NCAA and its member institutions.

On a semi-related note I recall when they beat us in bball a couple years ago we had a deluge of Auburn fans going wild in the comments under every post from the IUBB Official Account. Like hundreds of comments talking about how they were the real blue bloods and we sucked etc etc. I can't recall any other fanbase doing that. So I would concur. They're a nasty bunch. Maybe their biggest rival doing so well has affected them.

No, as much as the don't pay players crowd wants to put huge values on full rides and merch, the fact is that's worth ~$25-75K per year. We can argue the exact number, but it ain't much, especially when one considers the lower marginal cost to the university to provide it. And it's way, way less than what P4 football players are worth. That's why we've seen P4 CFB rosters get paid $15-40M plus full rides and merch after the House Settlement -- that's their market value. These aren't children. They're adults. Adults with very rare, unique, and valuable skills. And in the United States of America people are allowed to negotiate employment terms, compensation, and get paid if people what to pay them. I don't like the opt-outs, but I recognize the economic incentive and rationale that leads to it. A player is not going to risk playing a game with little meaning and put their athletic earnings potential of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars at risk. Some of these games are so meaningless the program itself opts out. This year 10 teams did, some examples are Notre Dame, Kansas State, and Iowa State. Agreed to employment terms includes opt-outs. If schools don't like the opt-outs, they have to negotiate with the players. Just like in every other employment scenario. I've read some rev share deals have an opt-out penalty. One thing I won't do is demand players risk their careers to play in the Nobody Cares Bowl so I can have a sliver of extra entertainment during the holidays.

Perhaps the weirdest hire of the cycle.

It’ll be mildly interesting to see if the crowd bothers to give Bryson much of a cheer or a jeer. It feels like he was barely here. Regardless, he’ll always be part of the IU family. <3

On the NIL part of his deal, while as we know in reality it's pay for play, NIL cannot technically be tied to playing or anything performance related. So he gets all the NIL. As a bonus for him they probably front loaded his NIL this season to avoid the Clearinghouse launch. For the rev share part of his deal, I have no idea what's market, but this is the component that probably could be a little more variable. However I'd guess he still gets a decent chunk of it, all these deals seem player friendly in this very competitive market. Of course the other question is what is the mix between rev share and NIL. I don't know how that's usually handled. Overall -- if I had to guess he's probably $1.5M+ down the drain for TAMU.

lol -- Credit to this Minny fan for posting this and getting CFB twitter and LSU fans all fired up. Ragebait as the kids call it!

A game of this stature got us some rare Haines and Shanny pressers:

If you did that programs would just spend the same money for the top D2/D3 players. You’re missing that college fans root for good college teams, and to be a good team you need good players, and those good players are rare and worth a lot of $, to the tune of $15-40M for a football roster. We can trot out walk-ons for IUFB and IUBB, we will stink, and no one will go to games despite the name on the front of the jersey.

In whatever landscape there is going forward, I think even some B1G and SEC schools may be in a precarious position. For example, there are a few (but I've got one in mind) bad football programs in the B1G/SEC that are showing little sign of investing more in their FB program. Schools are very competitive for revenue right now, and I've got to think conferences are going to look at schools that aren't investing in football and add very little to the next media rights deal and ask themselves if they want send those schools $100M+ per year in media rights, which of course adds up to $1B+ over ten years. Why not cut their share or boot them? Let the contributing schools keep that money. Right or wrong, it wouldn't be surprising if that happened in my opinion... Thankfully, our guy Scott gets this, he said, "In the Big Ten, you need to be relevant in football to be a relevant member in your conference. We want to pay our fair share and be a valued member in football." Some people get upset with Scott over CDD/IUBB not going great, regardless of it that's true or not, they're missing the big picture. Scott's #1 priority is making IUFB an appealing media property. Not an easy task at all, but he's doing it, and hopefully he keeps it up. If IUFB stinks and no one wants to watch us, all of IU athletics has an uncertain future.

I'm not expert, but the key is the CBA. Get one of those in place and everything works much better because the agreed to rules can be enforced. Just for discussions sake, I think the challenges to a CBA are two things: - The transient nature of the large college player population. It's a huge number of players and they're generally only around a few years. How does this large and disconnected group select someone to negotiate on their behalf and on what terms? I don't know, but it appears very complex. - I suspect a CBA process would result in schools having to pay players even more. Other pro leagues pay a larger % of revenue to players. I'd guess schools are very afraid of this, and the current messy rev share/NIL thing is ultimately better for them because it's less money. Like you I'd love a CBA and more professionalized college sports in terms of player contracts and rules. I'm not disagreeing with your point that one is needed, just speculating for fun on why it's tricky to do.

IU doesn't have a rich football history because we've had overall bad players for 125 years. 2009 was a good showing by IUBB fans, but that was heavily driven by fans supporting a temporary rebuild process with the expectation of improvement. Attendance was down 15% from the previous year and if we measured people through the turnstiles, it was likely quite a bit more of a decline than that. IU has juiced bball attendance numbers for a long time -- for example this season they have claimed six sellouts which is not even close to true. I don't think college sports is all players, I agree the University plays a big role, but the players matter a lot. They have to be good for people to watch. And does the college sports landscape really suck? I'll agree CBB is struggling. But as for the big sport, the only one that really matters -- CFB interest, attendance, and TV ratings are quite high. CFB teams still retain a large portion of their rosters despite "one year rentals." The NIL/transfer portal era has given more teams and chance to compete if they hire a good coach and invest. Teams cannot hoard talent anymore. The new rules helped IUFB turn things around quickly and go undefeated and win the B1G. And now we've got the best stretch of IU athletics since the 1980's. I'm struggling to see what really sucks right now.

I don't know. If we changed out IU's team to all walk-ons, we'd be 0-12 this season. What do you think attendance and program revenue would be? The team would have Indiana University on their jerseys, but ain't nobody watching that. NIL looks like a good thing overall. It's basically just really rich people paying players who are generally run of the mill middle class people. And in some cases players from tough backgrounds get lifechanging money for themselves and their families (of course they have to use it right, and while some don't, most probably do). This looks good to me.

Let's assume a very expensive large football program cuts their $50M spend on staff and players down to $10M. A $40M savings. For a typical state school student population of 40K, that's about $1K per student per year. It's not going to make a dent. And of course to do this, you'd be screwing players and even coaches out of what they're worth. And in reality, today football programs still turn a profit or at worst produce a small, de minimis loss.

It absolutely stinks for the college game, but unfortunately IUBB is going to have to play the game. This means considering if these guys are any good and worth the money. I don't know if this player is. As Coach Cig once said: "You tell me what the rules are, and I'll thrive within the rules." Just eyeballing this, two-way players make around ~$650K, and if they have no hope to get called up from the G League to the NBA I can see why they might want to get switch to college and use up any eligibility they have left to get ~$1M+ per season. And the guys who are just on G-League contracts don't make much at all and I'd think all of them would prefer college ball. But yea, I'll say it again, it stinks for the college game.

The value of the players isn’t an opinion. In a free market P4 football rosters are being paid $15-40M on top of scholarships. That’s what they’re worth because programs are willing to pay that. Before NIL and rev share rosters were being shorted by about $15-40M. I’ll stop. This is off topic for the thread.

Pre-NIL/rev share players were paid much less than they were worth, which is by definition taking advantage of them.

Funny thing is if any of these don’t pay the players people were faced with a situation where they were the ones getting paid 10-20% of their value, they would be screaming bloody murder.

Coach Sitake has a good attitude. I wish I could have seen Marcus Freeman deal with all this Pop Tarts stuff lol. Update: and we have the morbid remains

Tom Allen gives up a TD in the Tom Allen Bowl. The Pinstripe (Tom Allen) Bowl is so depressing: cold, snowy, gray, brownish field, and two teams that barely want to be there. I need to Pop-Tarts Bowl to liven up my afternoon.

It’s not direct intel, but he grew up in Alabama. Moved to Indiana a few years ago. So, his original connection is actually to Bama.