Harbaugh to LAC

luckiestman

luckiestman

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Why are there Brian Kelly Michigan rumors? Is that all BS? I thought Michigan had someone in house they liked but I don’t know much about this.
 
nattysez

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I am curious to see how round 2 works out for Harbaugh in the NFL. If they can sort out their cap issues, I bet the Chargers will be formidable for the next few years, and then everyone will get tired of his shtick and he'll go back to college.
 
tims4wins

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nattysez said:
I am curious to see how round 2 works out for Harbaugh in the NFL. If they can sort out their cap issues, I bet the Chargers will be formidable for the next few years, and then everyone will get tired of his shtick and he'll go back to college.
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Yeah I think it's a home run hire for them and I expect to see him playing on Wild Card weekend in January 2025.
 
kenneycb

kenneycb

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Grain of salt and all but my friend worked on Baker's campaign and at an event earlier this year Baker more or less said Harbaugh was fucked from the NCAA's perspective. No idea what that means but it was going to be more than a couple game suspension.
 
SoxinSeattle

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Ale Xander said:
This sucks. There is no pure team to root for now in that division.
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I'll still root for them. He's a weirdo but I don't loathe him like I do some coaches. He's 60 year old Pete Carroll. His players will do anything for him. Now, how long can he get along with the other grownups in the building?
 
Marciano490

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AB in DC said:
And he was fucking awesome for the 1995 Colts, who are still one of my favorite Cinderella teams of all time. That AFCC game against the Steeler was epic.
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Is that the one with the crazy last minute end zone pass?
 
InstaFace

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canderson said:
He was going to get a show cause imo so no choice
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And if Michigan actually went to the mat to fight it, the legality of whether an organization like the NCAA can actually impose such extrajudicial punishment and make it stick, or whether it's illegal restraint of trade by a monopolist, would get tested in a way that it hasn't been since the SMU death penalty. Absolutely nobody at the NCAA wants to open that pandora's box. Heck, they should be paying half of Harbaugh's salary just to get the issue fully into the past.

Consider these couple of snippets from Taylor Branch's famous piece on college sports from a decade ago:

The Big Bluff

In 1951, the NCAA seized upon a serendipitous set of events to gain control of intercollegiate sports. First, the organization hired a young college dropout named Walter Byers as executive director. A journalist who was not yet 30 years old, he was an appropriately inauspicious choice for the vaguely defined new post. He wore cowboy boots and a toupee. He shunned personal contact, obsessed over details, and proved himself a bureaucratic master of pervasive, anonymous intimidation. Although discharged from the Army during World War II for defective vision, Byers was able to see an opportunity in two contemporaneous scandals. In one, the tiny College of William and Mary, aspiring to challenge football powers Oklahoma and Ohio State, was found to be counterfeiting grades to keep conspicuously pampered players eligible. In the other, a basketball point-shaving conspiracy (in which gamblers paid players to perform poorly) had spread from five New York colleges to the University of Kentucky, the reigning national champion, generating tabloid “perp” photos of gangsters and handcuffed basketball players. The scandals posed a crisis of credibility for collegiate athletics, and nothing in the NCAA’s feeble record would have led anyone to expect real reform.

But Byers managed to impanel a small infractions board to set penalties without waiting for a full convention of NCAA schools, which would have been inclined toward forgiveness. Then he lobbied a University of Kentucky dean—A. D. Kirwan, a former football coach and future university president—not to contest the NCAA’s dubious legal position (the association had no actual authority to penalize the university), pleading that college sports must do something to restore public support. His gambit succeeded when Kirwan reluctantly accepted a landmark precedent: the Kentucky basketball team would be suspended for the entire 1952–53 season. Its legendary coach, Adolph Rupp, fumed for a year in limbo.

The Kentucky case created an aura of centralized command for an NCAA office that barely existed. At the same time, a colossal misperception gave Byers leverage to mine gold. Amazingly in retrospect, most colleges and marketing experts considered the advent of television a dire threat to sports.

<goes on to relate how Byers forced schools to allow him to negotiate TV deals for college football, and then how the big football schools won a famous antitrust suit against the NCAA to get to do their own contracts in 1984's NCAA v Board of Regents, which ruled that the NCAA mandating control of those deals was an illegal restraint of trade>

...

In theory, the NCAA’s passion to protect the noble amateurism of college athletes should prompt it to focus on head coaches in the high-revenue sports—basketball and football—since holding the top official accountable should most efficiently discourage corruption. The problem is that the coaches’ growing power has rendered them, unlike their players, ever more immune to oversight. According to research by Charles Clotfelter, an economist at Duke, the average compensation for head football coaches at public universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since the Regents decision in 1984; that’s more than 20 times the cumulative 32 percent raise for college professors. For top basketball coaches, annual contracts now exceed $4 million, augmented by assorted bonuses, endorsements, country-club memberships, the occasional private plane, and in some cases a negotiated percentage of ticket receipts. (Oregon’s ticket concessions netted former football coach Mike Bellotti an additional $631,000 in 2005.)

The NCAA rarely tangles with such people, who are apt to fight back and win. When Rick Neuheisel, the head football coach of the Washington Huskies, was punished for petty gambling (in a March Madness pool, as it happened), he sued the NCAA and the university for wrongful termination, collected $4.5 million, and later moved on to UCLA. When the NCAA tried to cap assistant coaches’ entering salary at a mere $16,000, nearly 2,000 of them brought an antitrust suit, Law v. NCAA, and in 1999 settled for $54.5 million. Since then, salaries for assistant coaches have commonly exceeded $200,000, with the top assistants in the SEC averaging $700,000. In 2009, Monte Kiffin, then at the University of Tennessee, became the first assistant coach to reach $1 million, plus benefits.

...

The greatest threat to the viability of the NCAA may come from its member universities. Many experts believe that the churning instability within college football will drive the next major change. President Obama himself has endorsed the drumbeat cry for a national playoff in college football. This past spring, the Justice Department questioned the BCS about its adherence to antitrust standards. Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten, has estimated that a national playoff system could produce three or four times as much money as the existing bowl system does. If a significant band of football schools were to demonstrate that they could orchestrate a true national playoff, without the NCAA’s assistance, the association would be terrified—and with good reason. Because if the big sports colleges don’t need the NCAA to administer a national playoff in football, then they don’t need it to do so in basketball. In which case, they could cut out the middleman in March Madness and run the tournament themselves. Which would deprive the NCAA of close to $1 billion a year, more than 95 percent of its revenue. The organization would be reduced to a rule book without money—an organization aspiring to enforce its rules but without the financial authority to enforce anything.

Thus the playoff dreamed of and hankered for by millions of football fans haunts the NCAA. “There will be some kind of playoff in college football, and it will not be run by the NCAA,” says Todd Turner, a former athletic director in four conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, and Pac-10). “If I’m at the NCAA, I have to worry that the playoff group can get basketball to break away, too.”

This danger helps explain why the NCAA steps gingerly in enforcements against powerful colleges. To alienate member colleges would be to jeopardize its own existence. Long gone are television bans and the “death penalty” sentences (commanding season-long shutdowns of offending teams) once meted out to Kentucky (1952), Southwestern Louisiana (1973), and Southern Methodist University (1987). Institutions receive mostly symbolic slaps nowadays. Real punishments fall heavily on players and on scapegoats like literacy tutors.

A deeper reason explains why, in its predicament, the NCAA has no recourse to any principle or law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing. Scholars and sportswriters yearn for grand juries to ferret out every forbidden bauble that reaches a college athlete, but the NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else? No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature—a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.
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Whatever remains of the NCAA's facade would be under threat by going after someone with actual power and money in Harbaugh. The NCAA has no appetite for that. They only humiliate and scapegoat the powerless. He could've remained, and it would've been tense and there would've been jokes and signs at stadiums, but eventually it would end up as a slap on the wrist. It always has.
 
deanx0

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InstaFace said:
And if Michigan actually went to the mat to fight it, the legality of whether an organization like the NCAA can actually impose such extrajudicial punishment and make it stick, or whether it's illegal restraint of trade by a monopolist, would get tested in a way that it hasn't been since the SMU death penalty. Absolutely nobody at the NCAA wants to open that pandora's box. Heck, they should be paying half of Harbaugh's salary just to get the issue fully into the past.

Consider these couple of snippets from Taylor Branch's famous piece on college sports from a decade ago:



Whatever remains of the NCAA's facade would be under threat by going after someone with actual power and money in Harbaugh. The NCAA has no appetite for that. They only humiliate and scapegoat the powerless. He could've remained, and it would've been tense and there would've been jokes and signs at stadiums, but eventually it would end up as a slap on the wrist. It always has.
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Yep, it's like the old Jerry Tarkanian quote "The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky they're going to give Cleveland State another year of probation"
 
joe dokes

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I lump Spanos in with the other owners whose ownering seems forever destined to prevent his team from winning it all. Interesting to see if Harbaugh can clear the Spanos hurdle.
 
Bergs

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AB in DC said:
And he was fucking awesome for the 1995 Colts, who are still one of my favorite Cinderella teams of all time. That AFCC game against the Steeler was epic.
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+1. One of my best friend's whole family were Colts nuts and hosted a lot of Sunday Fun-Days back then. The Colts got fucked in that game, although I think it was Rosey Colvin that dropped an INT in the numbers that might've won it for them.
 
CFB_Rules

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InstaFace said:
Whatever remains of the NCAA's facade would be under threat by going after someone with actual power and money in Harbaugh. The NCAA has no appetite for that. They only humiliate and scapegoat the powerless. He could've remained, and it would've been tense and there would've been jokes and signs at stadiums, but eventually it would end up as a slap on the wrist. It always has.
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Well yeah but now they can absolutely hammer Harbaugh himself without repercussions since he wasn't going to coach anyways. If they imposed a 2-year ban for Harbaugh does he still fight it?
 
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tims4wins

tims4wins

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Bergs said:
+1. One of my best friend's whole family were Colts nuts and hosted a lot of Sunday Fun-Days back then. The Colts got fucked in that game, although I think it was Rosey Colvin that dropped an INT in the numbers that might've won it for them.
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It definitely was not Rosie Colvin. Unless there was another Rosie Colvin.
 
Auger34

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Bergs said:
+1. One of my best friend's whole family were Colts nuts and hosted a lot of Sunday Fun-Days back then. The Colts got fucked in that game, although I think it was Rosey Colvin that dropped an INT in the numbers that might've won it for them.
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If it's the Rosey Colvin that played for the Patriots, he'd have to be a Highlander or Tom fucking Brady to have that long of a career
 
Red Averages

Red Averages

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Apr 20, 2003
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So the SoSH secret intelligence about BB going to the Chargers as a lock was…. Wrong?!
 
Auger34

Auger34

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Red Averages said:
So the SoSH secret intelligence about BB going to the Chargers as a lock was…. Wrong?!
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Was he seen at a Baskin Robbins in LA when the intelligence was shared? If so, something drastic must have happened behind the scenes becuase it was a lock at that point
 
NickEsasky

NickEsasky

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Auger34 said:
Was he seen at a Baskin Robbins in LA when the intelligence was shared? If so, something drastic must have happened behind the scenes becuase it was a lock at that point
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There was a material change.
 
Eric1984

Eric1984

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Jun 14, 2001
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Cope had Gottfried's nasal inflection, but Gottfried didn't have the yinzer accent.
 
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