[jacket3ree]

This is very interesting discussion. I suspect once House is fully implemented, Stanford's ego (in my experience their prime concerns are money and image) will not allow it to prostrate itself before the ACC and not even two years later, just fold up the tent and crater the revenue program because keeping bigtime sports somehow sully academic standards, whatever those are. I could of course be wrong, but doing that isn't going to help Stanford's brand.

As to brand, I'm still miffed that Stanford no longer runs the shopping center, because my trusty fallback was always 'if Stanford can run a Bloomingdale's it can run a fricken football program.' Stanford still does all sorts of things and owns all sorts of things that have nothing to do with a core academic mission. Remember the yacht? And let's not pretend she is pure as driven snow.  (NB: where can you even go these days to have pure snow sans road sludge and other detritus driven in your face?)

The unfortunate answer is that Stanford will keep a football program but out of misplaced pretense (or more likely pure incompetence) let it continue to flounder into irrelevant oblivion.  I don't think they will base their decision on how many students, alumni, or locals are into watching football on the Farm.  Without football revenue, they need a massive paradigm shift to keep the rest of the program afloat.

Just anecdotally, but when have football players been just like the rest of us?  Growing up and until my housemates dragged me to Gold's Gym in Mountain View, I had the Adonis-like body of a cross country runner. Yet my best mile time was only 4:53, leading a certain HS track coach to suggest that unless I could shave a minute off that time, I should find a better use for my time and more importantly, his time. So I was into music, skiing, mountaineering and kind of oddly depraved survivalist stuff.  Oh, and unsuccessfully pining for girls. But I liked basketball and football well enough to throw my body around on the actual sandlot in our gentrifying rural-ish neighborhood, even in a non-walking cast after a depraved survivalist incident that kept me and my trumpet off the field my sophomore year for half the season. 

My first football game as a spectator was in 1973 to watch Wheat Ridge Senior High School (home of the Fightin' Farmers) win a mythical national HS championship. Those guys were big! (I was 10.) Then when Dad was pursuing that perpetual doctorate he never got, this time at Colorado Mines, we went to a game in Golden. Division way down there. Stadium worse than Jeffco where Wheat Ridge played. Those guys were bigger! Then he moved on to CU Boulder (never got that degree there either) and had student section tickets. Right before high school I sat and watched the Buffs under Chuck Fairbanks lose for the millionth time against the Huskers.  The football? Whatever. The coeds all around us?  Holy smokes. I like football games. Right as I started high school, he and I drove down to the Springs to watch his beloved Jackets take on Air Force in a blizzard. Eddie Lee Ivory set the then NCAA record for rushing yards, and I got to sit next to some college women from Georgia. With honey-dripped accents. Oh my gosh, football is it. (Also a little kernal of maybe the coeds in Georgia are as good as the coeds in Boulder.)  Well, and who is fooling whom? I grew up outside Denver with Bronco helmets for Christmas and there was always a neighborhood pickup game.

School choices: Mines, Ft. Collins, Boulder, and Atlanta, GA. They all played football at some level and presumably coeds would be at the games. Frankly I chose Tech to run away from some stuff until I told my chemistry, physics, and calculus teachers of my plans. And the father of one of the objects of (came dang close to success) pining. They informed me that, no, I was running toward something good. (They were all Southern.) Tech was at its absolute athletic nadir. (Joe Pettit openly considered dropping down or shuttering the program.) My dad and I visited Atlanta to be sure....there were coeds? School scouting trip. Tech played Clemson in hoops one night we were on campus and we checked it out. That year the team won 4 games (none D1) and there might have been 400 people in Alexander Memorial Coliseum, half of whom wore bags over their heads. They almost all uniformly wore untucked flannel shirts. Just like me! I'm going here. First football game was in Birmingham. A riveting 24-21 last minute upset of top ranked Alabama and Bear Bryant. Wow, this is easy and fun!  Next ten games were progressively worse losses culminating in an absolute beat down by Georgia on national TV.  But I am HOOKED. Road trips to B'ham and Knoxville, booze galore, and....coeds. The deal was football tickets were free to students and for $10 when you had your student ID picture taken, you would be in front of a gold background, which meant a "Date ID" that means you would hook up with random or non-random coeds or just a female person and she would get in free with you. (Or dudes could go in with coeds.) Women were not subject to full body searches, so your impromptu (or otherwise) date would hide the flask, you'd buy the cokes inside the stadium, and: instant party!  My junior (?) year they started selling 7-Up inside which opened a pandora's box of alternative flask contents beyond So Co or Jack.

Alright, I completely got sidetracked there. The point is that it was social and while Tech defined mediocre Southern football, it was Southern football and during my four years, Tech managed to beat Alabama twice, Tennessee, Clemson, and Georgia when those names meant as much as they do now. Plus epic roadsters to Auburn, New Orleans, Chapel Thrill, and other places on a whim. More coeds! Part of our fabric of life.  And Tech basketball? Some guy named Bobby Cremins had dinner at our house (that took courage) my freshman year begging us to come to games. By the time I left, Tech had gone from 4 wins to 4 points away from the Final Four against Patrick Ewing's Georgetown. So exciting; that ACC title became the defining thing of my graduating class, even at the 25th reunion. (Add: We played #1 UVA with Ralph Sampson my freshman year, with a team full of misfits. They lead at halftime. I thought the arena was going to collapse from the shear noise and all the jumping up and down. They lead going into the last minute. Bogus charge! Bogus charge! Lost by a point or something. Half the team was over at Chollies' after the game and we all drowned our sorrows in quarter beers. So, yeah, they were us.)

Were these guys students? Sure. Some were smart, some were not. Some worked hard, some did not. Did I care? Only to the extent that Ken Whisenhunt (career in NFL culminating in a Super Bowl appearance as a head coach) was my lab partner in a reinforced concrete class and I'll be pissed if he doesn't hold up his end. He did, even if he was there to play football over becoming a civil engineer. Did it bother me when half the football and basketball teams received preferential scheduling into Drownproofing while I never got that graduation requirement out of the way until my graduating quarter because I receive no preferential scheduling? Nope. I need this to graduate. I was a good swimmer and remember that depraved survivalist instinct? Loved that class. The athletes waded in the shallow end for credit while we practiced survival techniques hogtied in Salvation Army suits. ('Your plane might go down in shark infested waters on the way to that big business meeting.' 'Wait, there are sharks?') Why should I care? Should have shaved that minute off the mile time and I'd be wading.... No, I would not. I could swim and do the ridiculous stuff. Swim the length of the pool underwater with no air as part of the midterm? I saw that and raised it to two full lengths of the pool. The guy was actually impressed. Where did you learn to swim? In cold mountain lakes and uncomfortably warm reservoirs.

I had buddies who were managers for football and basketball. Lots of perks with those relationships including a few shootarounds at 2 a.m. and an invitation or three to the dining hall. Yeah, these guys aren't subsisting on Pop Tarts, Cap'n Crunch, Top Ramen, and fried bologna. Why the heck should they? That was freaking spectacular, but they are destroying their bodies for my Jack and Coke fueled boozy Saturdays with flask partner Kate who drove a stick (and I can drive stick) who needed help getting back to Emory and that was a good night and that doesn't happen without the guys who need the training table.

Stanford can do what it wants for whom it wants to please. In our most honest moments we know that keeping high level athletes on campus won't shred whatever an academic standard is. Does the fact that highly desired athletes have essays written for them (first hand account from recruited athlete) diminish anything anyone else is doing on campus? Did the fact I went through grad school with a faculty brat with no business having a seat in that program bother me in the least? No, even if he duped me into breaking and entering a place in Tahoe. (Good story though.) Worry about what your own person is doing, I say. 

The only coed that matters these days is over on the couch 20 feet away and she is a rabid football fan. Do not interrupt while Cal or the Niners are on. Football was a thing for our family and our son played and coached collegiately. He let me know today that he just signed an NDA to pour over the finances of UVA's AD as part of his graduate education. He is stoked beyond words. I hope football stays and I hope it returns to something better than what it's been these past four years, even at the expense of Calfanwife's temporal happiness. If not, I'll deal.

[jacket3ree]

This is very interesting discussion. I suspect once House is fully implemented, Stanford's ego (in my experience their prime concerns are money and image) will not allow it to prostrate itself before the ACC and not even two years later, just fold up the tent and crater the revenue program because keeping bigtime sports somehow sully academic standards, whatever those are. I could of course be wrong, but doing that isn't going to help Stanford's brand.

As to brand, I'm still miffed that Stanford no longer runs the shopping center, because my trusty fallback was always 'if Stanford can run a Bloomingdale's it can run a fricken football program.' Stanford still does all sorts of things and owns all sorts of things that have nothing to do with a core academic mission. Remember the yacht? And let's not pretend she is pure as driven snow.  (NB: where can you even go these days to have pure snow sans road sludge and other detritus driven in your face?)

The unfortunate answer is that Stanford will keep a football program but out of misplaced pretense (or more likely pure incompetence) let it continue to flounder into irrelevant oblivion.  I don't think they will base their decision on how many students, alumni, or locals are into watching football on the Farm.  Without football revenue, they need a massive paradigm shift to keep the rest of the program afloat.

Just anecdotally, but when have football players been just like the rest of us?  Growing up and until my housemates dragged me to Gold's Gym in Mountain View, I had the Adonis-like body of a cross country runner. Yet my best mile time was only 4:53, leading a certain HS track coach to suggest that unless I could shave a minute off that time, I should find a better use for my time and more importantly, his time. So I was into music, skiing, mountaineering and kind of oddly depraved survivalist stuff.  Oh, and unsuccessfully pining for girls. But I liked basketball and football well enough to throw my body around on the actual sandlot in our gentrifying rural-ish neighborhood, even in a non-walking cast after a depraved survivalist incident that kept me and my trumpet off the field my sophomore year for half the season. 

My first football game as a spectator was in 1973 to watch Wheat Ridge Senior High School (home of the Fightin' Farmers) win a mythical national HS championship. Those guys were big! (I was 10.) Then when Dad was pursuing that perpetual doctorate he never got, this time at Colorado Mines, we went to a game in Golden. Division way down there. Stadium worse than Jeffco where Wheat Ridge played. Those guys were bigger! Then he moved on to CU Boulder (never got that degree there either) and had student section tickets. Right before high school I sat and watched the Buffs under Chuck Fairbanks lose for the millionth time against the Huskers.  The football? Whatever. The coeds all around us?  Holy smokes. I like football games. Right as I started high school, he and I drove down to the Springs to watch his beloved Jackets take on Air Force in a blizzard. Eddie Lee Ivory set the then NCAA record for rushing yards, and I got to sit next to some college women from Georgia. With honey-dripped accents. Oh my gosh, football is it. (Also a little kernal of maybe the coeds in Georgia are as good as the coeds in Boulder.)  Well, and who is fooling whom? I grew up outside Denver with Bronco helmets for Christmas and there was always a neighborhood pickup game.

School choices: Mines, Ft. Collins, Boulder, and Atlanta, GA. They all played football at some level and presumably coeds would be at the games. Frankly I chose Tech to run away from some stuff until I told my chemistry, physics, and calculus teachers of my plans. And the father of one of the objects of (came dang close to success) pining. They informed me that, no, I was running toward something good. (They were all Southern.) Tech was at its absolute athletic nadir. (Joe Pettit openly considered dropping down or shuttering the program.) My dad and I visited Atlanta to be sure....there were coeds? School scouting trip. Tech played Clemson in hoops one night we were on campus and we checked it out. That year the team won 4 games (none D1) and there might have been 400 people in Alexander Memorial Coliseum, half of whom wore bags over their heads. They almost all uniformly wore untucked flannel shirts. Just like me! I'm going here. First football game was in Birmingham. A riveting 24-21 last minute upset of top ranked Alabama and Bear Bryant. Wow, this is easy and fun!  Next ten games were progressively worse losses culminating in an absolute beat down by Georgia on national TV.  But I am HOOKED. Road trips to B'ham and Knoxville, booze galore, and....coeds. The deal was football tickets were free to students and for $10 when you had your student ID picture taken, you would be in front of a gold background, which meant a "Date ID" that means you would hook up with random or non-random coeds or just a female person and she would get in free with you. (Or dudes could go in with coeds.) Women were not subject to full body searches, so your impromptu (or otherwise) date would hide the flask, you'd buy the cokes inside the stadium, and: instant party!  My junior (?) year they started selling 7-Up inside which opened a pandora's box of alternative flask contents beyond So Co or Jack.

Alright, I completely got sidetracked there. The point is that it was social and while Tech defined mediocre Southern football, it was Southern football and during my four years, Tech managed to beat Alabama twice, Tennessee, Clemson, and Georgia when those names meant as much as they do now. Plus epic roadsters to Auburn, New Orleans, Chapel Thrill, and other places on a whim. More coeds! Part of our fabric of life.  And Tech basketball? Some guy named Bobby Cremins had dinner at our house (that took courage) my freshman year begging us to come to games. By the time I left, Tech had gone from 4 wins to 4 points away from the Final Four against Patrick Ewing's Georgetown. So exciting; that ACC title became the defining thing of my graduating class, even at the 25th reunion. (Add: We played #1 UVA with Ralph Sampson my freshman year, with a team full of misfits. They lead at halftime. I thought the arena was going to collapse from the shear noise and all the jumping up and down. They lead going into the last minute. Bogus charge! Bogus charge! Lost by a point or something. Half the team was over at Chollies' after the game and we all drowned our sorrows in quarter beers. So, yeah, they were us.)

Were these guys students? Sure. Some were smart, some were not. Some worked hard, some did not. Did I care? Only to the extent that Ken Whisenhunt (career in NFL culminating in a Super Bowl appearance as a head coach) was my lab partner in a reinforced concrete class and I'll be pissed if he doesn't hold up his end. He did, even if he was there to play football over becoming a civil engineer. Did it bother me when half the football and basketball teams received preferential scheduling into Drownproofing while I never got that graduation requirement out of the way until my graduating quarter because I receive no preferential scheduling? Nope. I need this to graduate. I was a good swimmer and remember that depraved survivalist instinct? Loved that class. The athletes waded in the shallow end for credit while we practiced survival techniques hogtied in Salvation Army suits. ('Your plane might go down in shark infested waters on the way to that big business meeting.' 'Wait, there are sharks?') Why should I care? Should have shaved that minute off the mile time and I'd be wading.... No, I would not. I could swim and do the ridiculous stuff. Swim the length of the pool underwater with no air as part of the midterm? I saw that and raised it to two full lengths of the pool. The guy was actually impressed. Where did you learn to swim? In cold mountain lakes and uncomfortably warm reservoirs.

I had buddies who were managers for football and basketball. Lots of perks with those relationships including a few shootarounds at 2 a.m. and an invitation or three to the dining hall. Yeah, these guys aren't subsisting on Pop Tarts, Cap'n Crunch, Top Ramen, and fried bologna. Why the heck should they? That was freaking spectacular, but they are destroying their bodies for my Jack and Coke fueled boozy Saturdays with flask partner Kate who drove a stick (and I can drive stick) who needed help getting back to Emory and that was a good night and that doesn't happen without the guys who need the training table.

Stanford can do what it wants for whom it wants to please. In our most honest moments we know that keeping high level athletes on campus won't shred whatever an academic standard is. Does the fact that highly desired athletes have essays written for them (first hand account from recruited athlete) diminish anything anyone else is doing on campus? Did the fact I went through grad school with a faculty brat with no business having a seat in that program bother me in the least? No, even if he duped me into breaking and entering a place in Tahoe. (Good story though.) Worry about what your own person is doing, I say. 

The only coed that matters these days is over on the couch 20 feet away and she is a rabid football fan. Do not interrupt while Cal or the Niners are on. Football was a thing for our family and our son played and coached collegiately. He let me know today that he just signed an NDA to pour over the finances of UVA's AD as part of his graduate education. He is stoked beyond words. I hope football stays and I hope it returns to something better than what it's been these past four years, even at the expense of Calfanwife's temporal happiness. If not, I'll deal.