(03-20-2024, 12:41 PM)BillBradley Wrote: +1 to SkiBum's post.
This is the best line in the thread:
"...as a fan, I've never been less interested in Stanford sports, and for that matter the University itself (though I won't be able to help myself in rooting for the women's basketball team in the next few weeks)."
Not trying to pick on a single poster, just making a broader point: this is the way it is in sports for fans. Everything is great when your team is winning. Stanford is so pure. We do it right. Should we go back and review all those threads during the Luck/McAffrey years and see how many people were complaining about Stanford taking its $25M from the P12 TV contract? Apparently that level of money and all the politics that came with it didn't "dirty it up" enough. Soooo many people complaining about Stanford winning the Rose Bowl and so much praise for those Ivy League teams for not playing in bowl games. And how about all the travel hardship on the "student athletes" and not having enough time to study that still existed back then? Now all of a sudden that's a hot button because of a few extra road trips to the east. I could go on and on.
Our football and mens basketball programs were stinking it up long before NIL and the transfer portal came along. All that's happening is that it's no fun to watch us go from national powerhouses to the bottom of the barrel. People are just blaming it on all the things that are wrong in the world of college sports. I would bet my last dollar that if our football team made it to the national championship this past season and our basketball team was a #1 seed in this March Madness, no one would be "soured on college sports". Instead, it would probably go the other way - how Stanford is able to compete in high level sports without somehow selling its soul.
My opinion is more like this: Our football team sucks, our basketball team sucks, and it's going to be that way until Stanford pulls its head out, hires a better AD, and embraces the new world of sports. Super conferences, NIL, etc are here to stay. Football is not going to implode. But in the meantime, I'll still continue to root for the womens basketball team, womens golf, all our Olympic athletes, etc. etc. Hopefully in 10 years we'll be back competing on the gridiron and the hardwood again.
You can't compare the Luck/McCaffery years with now. What would Luck have been worth in the NIL market, or McCaffery? There is no certainty that they would not have hopped in the portal and taken the 10,000,000 dollars they could have commanded. The apparent failure of the AD to see this coming and not to have had some sort of plan in place is the biggest crime in this as far as Stanford is concerned. What the NCAA, Congress, and the others do is not something we can control. Muir should have been in touch enough with his fellow AD's to have a good idea of what was coming and have done some planning. Of course, the top two administrators in the University were also going through their issues. I think that much of what is going on runs contrary to what Stanford feels is its primary mission. I think it is likely that the situation will have to get completely out of hand before anything happens to change it. The big football schools are not immune to potential disaster. There isn't anything that now prevents some schools with good programs and very well heeled alumni from simply going out and buying the best players from the top teams. t If you have enough money you can buy yourself the best team you can get, particularly if academics play no role in the decision. What prevents an NFL team from simply turning one schools team into a farm team and stocking it with the best players through the NIL.
Common sense seems to have disappeared from lots of things in today's world.