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This is good.

The court is being assembled for tonight. I don't know how this event goes, but it will be something different and interesting. Looking at where the court is, there are probably some prime viewing spots at Upstairs... Update: more pics in the link https://x.com/catdadwithcheez/status/1973793506071359755?s=46 Update 2: The final product (credit Daniel Flick on X)

If I had a guess on why this investment is being considered, as I am sure many people noticed, athletic depts are struggling with the introduction of rev share, in addition to athletic dept donors needing to focus on paying players NIL over the past few years, which to some extent reduces their athletic dept donations. Or put differently, athletic depts one way or another now have to, depending on the school, fund $25-50M per year in player comp costs they didn't have four years ago. That is a lot! Plus think about how much coaches cost nowadays -- for example the IU football staff now costs $12M+ more per year than it did under Allen. Some examples of financial pressures at ADs: IU AD took a $30M loan from IU to help with the football staff investment (note we have donations secured to pay that back). Last year the Ohio State AD recorded a $38M loss. Michigan is projecting a $27M loss this year. The Washington AD is broke because they spent too much on their stadium reno and they won't have a full media rights share for awhile. There are stories like this at many schools. Athletic depts are often not very financially disciplined... Media rights have a lot of room to increase, so most schools will be fine as media rights revenue goes up over the next few years, including in my view IU. But, this $2B would help fix a lot of the near term financial pressure a lot of schools have. I don't really care if this $2B deal happens or not. Private equity is not necessarily bad. Some firms are very good, some are mediocre, some are bad. You only hear about the bad. Petetti isn't dumb and they have three competing investors with no need to do a deal, so I'd be optimistic the terms are favorable to the B1G, but I can only guess. One positive of this deal happening is it would probably cause SEC-land to panic, which would be funny: $2B to the B1G and $0 to the SEC?! The SEC is broke!

I'd guess it works like this: B1G gets $2B now (~$110M per school). In exchange the investor gets some portion of future B1G media rights, sponsorships, licensing, etc. such that they get a return on their investment. Basically, more money for the conference now and less later. Is that a good deal? I have no idea, would depend on the all the deal specifics and what the next media deal looks like blah blah blah. One part of this I definitely like is this would extend the B1G grant of rights through 2046, which keeps the conference together for a long time and reduces the chances of the big football schools forming some "super league." Though personally I never thought that was likely. Whatever happens, the B1G is a good place to be. Fire up that stadium renovation Scott!

Dittos, these guys are are better than 95% of CFB pods. They know ball, they know how to podcast, and they don't get emotional and biased. Two other things were nice to hear: 1) They said that was about as good as Kinnick gets in terms of atmosphere. There aren't many places harder to go than Kinnick. Great experience for our team. 2) They were more or less claiming a few moral victories: played us close, made Cig sweat, got Mendoza a bit uncomfortable. That put a big smile on my face -- it's been a very long time since someone took some moral victories in a loss against us.

One thing that I've read needs some fixing for this game is our gosh darn dagnabbit silent count. I guess Iowa figured it out to some extent (we use a hand motion), which was a pretty big problem. I love this staff, but we've had this issue before, it shouldn't be an issue, and I never want to hear about silent count issues again. Also, per the presser Cig said they didn't let Fernando audible at Iowa due to crowd noise. I'm sure he knows best, it's just a little odd to me since Fernando is a very capable QB. Anyways, I'm not trying to second guess this fantastic coaching staff, I know 0.001% about football compared to them, I just find this stuff surprising. I'm sure the silent count issues are known and will be fixed going into Autzen.

I get the sentiment, but we don’t need two QB coaches nor can we afford it. Whitmer makes $800K plus bonuses so he can handle all the QB duties. I’d guess Tino will find an OC or QB coach co-OC job somewhere else. He’ll be fine, I’d guess most of his ~$1M/yr two year deal with UCLA will be paid out.

I have not seen anything yet. Only things I have observed on Ponds is he did warm ups at Iowa and his Dad is in a good mood on Twitter/X lol.

He and the staff got big new contracts last year (November 2024). Cig up to $9M/yr base plus bonuses. Almost top-10 $. IU has allocated top-10 money for the staff. Beyond the first round of raises in November, Haines got two more (PSU and others poking around) and Owings got one more (USC poking around). IU really ponied up to keep everyone, which is amazing. Hard to pay them much more than what they’re making now.

Ha, yea, that is possible. Our athletic dept has improved, but they still do some odd things and have some blind spots. There is a bit of trend here. I also think we priced our cupcake home football games too high ($62/ticket to the gen public), which resulted in suboptimal crowds. Our peer programs were selling cupcake game tickets at like $20 each or two for ones, etc., and they sold a lot more tickets than we did. Sometimes we've got to think bigger about the long-term value of engaging our existing fans and converting folks into new fans.

That could certainly be the reason. Though I don't think IU is using the optimal prices to maximize revenue -- I'd guess lower prices would move more tickets such that total revenue would end up higher. In reality, whatever cash flow that comes from this exhibition won't be much. Fundamentally, I'd guess IU is playing this exhibition in Indy for two reasons: (1) get experience in an NBA arena, and (2) put on an event for our central Indiana fans. For (2), beyond the game's gate, there is longer term value to IU in getting as many fans as they can at the game and watching this team and hopefully getting them interested in CDD's "new" IUBB. Getting them interested will result in more fans attending regular season games, buying merch, donating, etc. This is not a big deal, I just find it puzzling to price tickets such that there will be a tiny crowd in a large arena.

I don’t get what we are doing with this Baylor game ticket pricing. - It's an exhibition - Baylor will bring like 100 fans, so that's 17K seats left to sell - We aren't going to move tickets with lower sidelines at $160 (lmao), lower corners $125 (lol), lower baseline $65, cheapest in the upper deck at $45. And that's before a 20%+ Ticketmaster fees. And parking, which will be extra costly because the Colts are playing later the same day. - I'm looking at the seat map, and only 2/3 of the seats are available for sale and maybe a few thousand are sold or blocked for IU/VC folks. The way this is priced, the crowd is going to be tiny and sparse. Why not price tickets to get fans, especially families, in to see the IUBB team? Get people hooked again. It should be something like $20 lower bowl and $10 for club and upper deck. Kids under 12 free. It's an exhibition for crying out loud. I'm not impressed with the athletic dept here. Oh well, is what it is.

It’s confusing — it seems so out of character for Cig and Shanahan. Hopefully they’ve learned and figure something out for this one so we can be in the game in the second half. They’re excellent coaches and smart, so I’ve got some hope for some fixes…

On the note of not liking Pawwwwl, some of you may have noticed this on McShay’s show. He doesn’t like Paul and it appears once something from his ESPN separation agreement expires he’s gonna let loose. Transcript: “But anyway, it's it's really good to see this. I'm not pulling for either side, but it's really good to see this for DeBoer because it feels like if Alabama had lost this game after losing to Florida State and Florida State just lost to Virginia and and all like that place is vicious. Watch that trash, Paul Finebaum. Just see how vicious and like just uninvited, like just it's not it's it's just not good. It's just not good humanity. Right. Um, get my little shot in it, Paul. One of the all time cowards. Is it October 1st yet? Let's see. 27th. Next week. Next week, I can let it all unleash. We'll explain it all while later. Good to have everyone here, by the way.” Could be entertaining…

Oregon game will be 3:30PM ET on CBS. Another big time network TV slot! Cue the intro music in your mind.

Pre-Cig we were. FY23 MBB was $12.2M and FB was $10.2M. I don’t have last year’s ticket sales numbers, but I’m pretty sure FB overtook MBB. This year the gap should been even larger, obviously, with more tix sold at higher prices.

I think our QB is having a decent time in Bloomington lol.

Yea, absolutely 1,000%. I just don't want to make excuses. It's kinda interesting, for money most big programs have huge fanbases to tap into, but Oregon is the original mega-sugar daddy program. I guess it could be argued the originals were T Boone or some car dealers in the SEC or the Sam Gilberts of the world, but whatever, they were not funding the levels of NIL Phil does. Now we see TTU following the Oregon model. A risk Oregon has is when Phil passes, if he doesn't setup something in his will or his family is less interested in Oregon (pretty likely given how much Phil loves Oregon), their money could fall off pretty hard. Funding a football program is a lot even for very rich people, it's money out the door with no return except whatever the team does. But, Phil could easily be around another 10 or 20 years, so I doubt Oregon is worried about that now.

I post this stuff a lot, but I think it's underappreciated. So we're 8th in the AP, and looking at the top 13 teams, I'm quite sure they all have 50-100% more player payroll (rev share and NIL) that we do. And in the top-20, only ISU, Vandy, Ga Tech, and Mizzou are in our realm of resources, everyone else is much more. The season is young and who knows how it ends, I know we may fall from the top-10 (or not!), but the way Cig has got us in the mix with the big boys continues to amaze me.

Yea. I saw IU open up at +10.5. I thought it may be a little more, but we'll see how the line evolves over the next two weeks. Last year our losses were one the road at #1 and #2 and we didn't play well. Almost no teams do well on the road against the top few teams, but we unfairly get extra sh1t for it. Now we're on the road at #2 again and have a big chance to prove we can hang with them. Honestly, it doesn't get any harder than this. Oregon has the great coaching and culture we have, along with elite talent/size/speed (their roster cost about 2x our roster -- as in they spend $15-20M more than we do). That's not an excuse, it's just the reality, Oregon has built a great program. But, I can only hope we've learned from our past struggles and can find a way to better compete in this sort of game. It's a very tall order, but if we want to make the playoff and be competitive when we get there, we've got to hang with the best and find a way to give ourselves a punchers chance in the second half. I'd say most of our issues in these sort of games have been on the offensive side (OL, getting WRs open/scheme). A lot of us being competitive will fall on Fernando -- he needs to have a great game. To be clear, I'm not being critical of IUFB. IUFB is the best and most exciting thing in IU sports in 25 years. These are just random thoughts about the huge challenge we've got coming up. At the end of the day it's awesome we're in a top-10 match-up again.

Back in the saddle as [interim] head coach at Arkansas.

You called it. Darn! Also Herbie should still send UVA a gift basket.

We are now +132 to make the playoff, which equates to a 43% chance. Started the season +610, a 14% chance. Good progress.

For the past nine months we've been eyeing the Illinois and Iowa games. Well, week five is in the books, we won both games, and IUFB is 5-0. Not bad! We also had a little more red in Kinnick than usual. And when the game ended and our President and AD are the first to greet our coach. I just love seeing the top to bottom commitment at IU that it takes to be competitive in football. And of course, as we all saw we can be better. This team has upside. Onwards and upwards. I'm sure we'll have ups and downs from here on out, our next game is one of the two hardest in all of CFB, but this is pretty exciting stuff.

Buyout is $48M or so at the end of this season. Good luck with that PSU.