What an amazing game!!!
Fitting to end with another long official review.
Man. Still doesn’t feel real.
That was a championship game! Crazy!
That was a great game.
Insane 4th quarter. I am surprised Bama lost. Watson raised his draft stock a ton. I had seen mocks that showed him to be the 3rd QB drafted, I will be shocked if he isnt the first QB taken now.
Merry College Football Christmas everyone.
So I read that the rules are changing and this should be the last big time “signing day”?
Bob Stoops suddenly announced his retirement, effective immediately.
Wow.
Not sure what to make of this. Feels like there is a scandal incoming or else he is just scared to death of Herman at Texas.
Texas is going to take awhile to turn around. Stoops has been there a long time and Oklahoma is aalotmof pressure every year. That’s gonna grind on anyone and he’s just tired of it I’d bet. Also he has piles of money by now.
His dad died at 54 of a heart attack, coaching football.
Bob is now 56.
Probably wants to enjoy life.
Texas homer here. But I think Texas will challenge for the Big 12 title next year. Herman is the real deal.
I am HOPING that Stoops is leaving because he sees that the writing is on the wall for the Big 12/9/8/whatever the number is now, basically Big 2.5 plus the 7 dwarves.
That conference is dead men walking. It needs to break up and distribute its teams to other conferences. The fact that Texas fucked the rest of them over with the LongDick Network, and then the Oklahoma state legislature fucked OU and OSU over again by refusing to let them go to separate conferences, has left the entire thing as a mess with a soon to diminish revenue stream and no market share for television outside of the state of Texas, Norman and Stillwater Oklahoma, and maybe a few small populations scattered around half a dozen other states. It just needs to have a stake driven through its heart. I hope Stoops is smart enough to see that, and brave enough to say so now that he’s no longer the head coach.
Yea Texas ruined the Big 12 and then promptly fell apart. The Longhorn Network is a giant albatross around ESPN’s neck and might well contribute to killing off that as well. Losing A&M, dirty cultists that they are, kind of ruined Texas college football.
They need to scrap the Big 12 and remake the Southwest Conference to force Texas to negotiate from a position of weakness (which it deserves), but all the other teams are locked in a prisoners’ delimma. But there’s a wider problem of there being just too much money in college football in general and I’m reaching the point where I’m thinking supporting college football is now socially unhealthy (thinking Baylor). At the end of the day the tension between student athlete and athletic entertainer has fallen entirely on the side of entertainer and it won’t change until alums and fans start demanding better of their schools.
Based on several things I have heard on ESPN the last several days I think Stoops had planned on leaving for several years. His replacement was given an unprecedented three year big dollar contract to be an OC. While he is only 33 he is pretty much the same age Bud Wilkenson and Stoops were when they were hired. Add in Stoops father dying young on the football field I think Stoops had just decided it was time.
The network is turning out to be a poor idea, but its hardly an “albatross” for ESPN who has far bigger issues. The money they pay for it is a tiny fraction of their other college deals and their massive Pro league ones.
Big 12 is actually doing fine when it comes to money. Look up the payouts to each school. I think they are third behind Big 10 and SEC. I especially don’t know why OU or Texas would ever want to leave. When you consider the third tier media payouts, ie. Longhorn Network and whatever OU has, those two schools are right at the top of all schools.
Big 12 getting shut out of the CFP 3 of the first 4 years (making a fairly safe assumption that B12 won’t place a team in 2017) probably going to help perception though.
That said, Texas is doing a better job holding onto top Texas talent with Herman in charge, so maybe it’ll turn around in another few years.
CFP is only 3 years in. But yeah I personally think TCU got super fucked the first year because they lost to Baylor on the road by 3 points. Big 12 had no championship game and no tie breaker rules at the time so Baylor and TCU were co-champs. Neither got in. TCU was the better team and they fucking curb stomped Ole Miss in their bowl to prove a point.
That said, had TCU or Baylor been Texas or OU, and 100% convinced that the Big 12 gets a team in that first year of the CFP.
Going forward…Big 12 has a championship game next year, but I think that only hurts them. Big 12, being a 10 team league where each team plays everyone does not need a championship game. No other P5 conference does that because of too many teams and a not big enough conference schedule. Now with a championship game there can very easily be a situation where a Big 12 team undefeated in conference play loses in the championship game and then gets knocked out of CFP consideration. Big 12 should have just put in some good tie breaker rules instead of a championship game. But from a revenue perspective, the championship game probably makes sense. We’ll see. Again though, Big 12 is fine. If I am OU or Texas, no fucking way I leave the Big 12. Going to any other P5 means a tougher schedule and a less likely chance to get into the CFP. And if I am the other 8 schools in the Big 12? I am really happy to be making the money I am making.
edit: I see your 1 in 4 statement is based on this upcoming year as well, not just history. I think Bama and FSU are locks. So that leaves 2 spots open for Big 10/Big 12 and maybe Clemson.
A good step in the right direction (especially since as a College Football fan who prefers his players to at least have some semblance of being equal to other students/athletes at the school, I am 100% against paying players other than making sure scholarships cover cost of attendance and lost work opportunities).
The National College Players Association has set up a contract that it says could protect athletes beyond the standard National Letter of Intent and allow athletes to know what stipends and insurance protections they’d be getting from their schools…
…On the header of the contract, it says “you can request and secure legally binding protections/benefits worth over $100,000 dollars beyond a minimum scholarship without breaking NCAA rules. You need transparency on protections and benefits because coaches too often break verbal promises. Coaches themselves don’t rely on verbal promises from their college and neither should you. Use the CAP Guarantee to gain key physical, academic, and financial protections.”…
…It has a list of “possible protections” and benefits that include multi-year scholarships, stipend money, medical expenses and disability insurance along with freedom from transfer restrictions.
Further down after the list of protections, the school and athlete would agree to the details of them regarding the amount of the stipend, the years of the scholarship — many schools promise multi-year scholarships — and the percentage of medical expenses a school would be willing to pay.