[StanUSwagU]

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. 

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.

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.

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,

(1). Extremely well articulated points, you beat me to the punch on much of what I was going to say, darn-it !

(2). On this notion of 'oh if we change a little bit to be more like Duke, NotreDame, or GaTech', that that means 'the athletes will become different than the rest of the student body', or that 'at some point in the recent past the athletes slept in the same dorms & ate the same crappy-food that the rest of us (regular schmuck students) ate ...I think this was mostly some halcyonic fiction borne out of some 'professional nerds abstractions' rather than the reality on the ground.

Not withstanding the reality & fact that many Athletes at Stanford have (for a very long time) eaten at 'training tables', had nutritionists, and PTs & physios ...that I dont think the run of the mill regular Stanford students have ....there are many 'affluent Non-athlete Stanford Students' who have chosen from their 2nd undergraduate year on 'not to live on campus dormitories & who live in posh apartments in Menlo Park/PaloAlto/Atherton/SharonPark etc, and whose affluent-parents have hired chefs & house-help to cook very good food for them & keep their accommodations clean & tidy. I knew 2 such students when I was an undergrad at Stanford. These students did not live in the same dorms & eat the same food as the rest of us students, and they were not Athletes.

Then (leaving athletes out of the equation) there was the big disparity & the vastly different 'requirements/burdens/experiences' of modest Stanford students who had to work 15-20hrs a week (albeit in campus jobs) as part of their financial-tuition requirements, and students who came from more financially affluent backgrounds, who didn't have to do this. So its not like Athletes would be 'privileged' in any way that other affluent students are not normally already privileged.

(3). I only say this to illustrate that we sometimes have an 'abstract view of Stanford' thinking it is somehow 'better or higher' than NotreDame, Duke, or GaTech ...but I think this is fallacy.

(4) BC makes some very valid points, and I am not advocating for us to turn into 'Oklahoma of the 1980s' or 'the U of Miami of the 1990s', or Jim or Larry from the 'Paul Finebaum Show' ...all I am saying is lets look at NotreDame for a model for Football & Duke for a model for Mens Basketball, and adopt as much as we can of what they do, so that when the musical-chairs of Conference Realignment happen again, we dont have the Big10 & other conferences & their MediaPartners saying 'Stanford Football & Mens Basketball, bring little to no value to us' and then we become like WSU or OSU, and the other Stanford olympic sports dont have any High Power D1 conference to compete in, which almost just happened.

(5). By the way I loved watching BobbyCremins GaTech teams of the 1990s (e.g DrewBarry, KennyAnderson, etc ) & I love watching the 'Ramblin Wreck' come Falls on the Gridiron, and Whisenhunt was a Great OC for the PittsburghSteelers, who Tomlin should re-hire now. I think our Stanford leadership could learn a lot from GaTechs leadership !

[StanUSwagU]

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. 

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.

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.

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,

(1). Extremely well articulated points, you beat me to the punch on much of what I was going to say, darn-it !

(2). On this notion of 'oh if we change a little bit to be more like Duke, NotreDame, or GaTech', that that means 'the athletes will become different than the rest of the student body', or that 'at some point in the recent past the athletes slept in the same dorms & ate the same crappy-food that the rest of us (regular schmuck students) ate ...I think this was mostly some halcyonic fiction borne out of some 'professional nerds abstractions' rather than the reality on the ground.

Not withstanding the reality & fact that many Athletes at Stanford have (for a very long time) eaten at 'training tables', had nutritionists, and PTs & physios ...that I dont think the run of the mill regular Stanford students have ....there are many 'affluent Non-athlete Stanford Students' who have chosen from their 2nd undergraduate year on 'not to live on campus dormitories & who live in posh apartments in Menlo Park/PaloAlto/Atherton/SharonPark etc, and whose affluent-parents have hired chefs & house-help to cook very good food for them & keep their accommodations clean & tidy. I knew 2 such students when I was an undergrad at Stanford. These students did not live in the same dorms & eat the same food as the rest of us students, and they were not Athletes.

Then (leaving athletes out of the equation) there was the big disparity & the vastly different 'requirements/burdens/experiences' of modest Stanford students who had to work 15-20hrs a week (albeit in campus jobs) as part of their financial-tuition requirements, and students who came from more financially affluent backgrounds, who didn't have to do this. So its not like Athletes would be 'privileged' in any way that other affluent students are not normally already privileged.

(3). I only say this to illustrate that we sometimes have an 'abstract view of Stanford' thinking it is somehow 'better or higher' than NotreDame, Duke, or GaTech ...but I think this is fallacy.

(4) BC makes some very valid points, and I am not advocating for us to turn into 'Oklahoma of the 1980s' or 'the U of Miami of the 1990s', or Jim or Larry from the 'Paul Finebaum Show' ...all I am saying is lets look at NotreDame for a model for Football & Duke for a model for Mens Basketball, and adopt as much as we can of what they do, so that when the musical-chairs of Conference Realignment happen again, we dont have the Big10 & other conferences & their MediaPartners saying 'Stanford Football & Mens Basketball, bring little to no value to us' and then we become like WSU or OSU, and the other Stanford olympic sports dont have any High Power D1 conference to compete in, which almost just happened.

(5). By the way I loved watching BobbyCremins GaTech teams of the 1990s (e.g DrewBarry, KennyAnderson, etc ) & I love watching the 'Ramblin Wreck' come Falls on the Gridiron, and Whisenhunt was a Great OC for the PittsburghSteelers, who Tomlin should re-hire now. I think our Stanford leadership could learn a lot from GaTechs leadership !