Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-12-19 8:15PM Cleveland Browns @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sat 2024-12-21 1:00PM Houston Texans @ Kansas City Chiefs
Sat 2024-12-21 4:30PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Baltimore Ravens
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Arizona Cardinals @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Detroit Lions @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM New England Patriots @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM New York Giants @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-12-22 4:05PM Denver Broncos @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-12-22 4:05PM Minnesota Vikings @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-12-22 4:25PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-12-22 4:25PM San Francisco 49ers @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-12-22 8:20PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ Dallas Cowboys
Mon 2024-12-23 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Green Bay Packers
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Notes -
Update to Diego Pavia situation from https://www.themotte.org/post/1250/weekly-nfl-thread-week-11/267828?context=8#context
"A federal judge in Tennessee granted an injunction Wednesday that allows Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia to pursue another year of eligibility and could represent another significant blow to the NCAA's ability to enforce its own rules.
Pavia sued the NCAA in November, claiming the organization's rule that counts a player's time in junior college toward his overall years of NCAA eligibility is a violation of antitrust law that was unfairly limiting his ability to make money from his name, image and likeness.
Judge William Campbell's decision Wednesday is not a final ruling on the case, but it prevents the NCAA from keeping Pavia out of college football until the case is resolved."
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/43048561/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-granted-injunction-allowing-extra-year-eligibility
Was listening to a podcast between Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman yesterday - https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2024/11/27/a-holiday-check-in-on-anything-and-everything-with-chuck-klosterman
Kosterman remarked that despite all the structural changes to college sports over the last couple of years, as best he could tell, it hadn't affected the popularity of college sports as he could see it.
His thesis was that college sports fans ultimately don't care about the meta structure of the sport.
I'm not totally sure those guys have their pulse on the exact nature of college sports fandom.
That said, I probably typify their point, I'm mostly neutral to negative on most of the changes that have happened over the past 10-20 years. I'm not especially negative towards players getting paid (although I don't feel like it's a matter of basic justice the way some people seem to feel), I am quite negative towards the conference realignment, playoffs, unlimited transferring, and a number of other changes.
Yet, I still follow it pretty closely, none of those changes have affected that.
I think this might be a thing where its hard to see the damage these changes do. You have a bunch of fans who are just in the habit of consuming your product, you can make a bunch of changes without effecting those habits.
I do wonder if those changes effect the habit formation of new consumers those. I got into it when my dad took me to a bunch of college games when I was a kid. As it turns out, I only have daughters, for the most part, I don't feel especially motivated to turn them into football fans. Occasionally we'll watch a game together, my younger daughter isn't interested at all, my older daughter will occasionally humor me be acting interested. But I would say that sports fandom is a decidedly non-central part of our relationship, somewhat different from me and my dad in the way that it was a big part of our relationship.
I'm glad this is in the news again because it dovetails nicely with something semi-related: James Franklin's complaining about how the transfer portal closes in the middle of the playoffs, meaning his good backups are all out. There was some discussion of this on local sports talk radio where everyone seemed to be in agreement that it was ridiculous that the portal closed on December 28 and shouldn't even open until after the championship game. There was a brief mention that it might be some kind of transfer credit thing that keeps them from moving the dates back, but this was quickly dismissed since everyone seems to understand that the idea of these kids being students is a myth anyway.
But I don't think they really gave the issue proper treatment. The National Championship game is on January 20. The portal, as it is now, is open for almost 3 weeks, so if it opened on January 21 it wouldn't close until sometime around February 7. In the middle of the spring semester. If schools want to maintain the ever-fading illusion that these are student-athletes at all, they can't start accepting mid-semester transfers purely for athletic reasons. If they do, they open themselves up to further lawsuits challenging the entire idea of academic eligibility, or even that a player has to actually be enrolled in the school. After all, if you're regularly allowing athletes to drop out of classes a few weeks in before transferring just in time to be hopelessly behind any classes they can manage to get into (people out of college a while tend to forget how quickly classes fill up), it's going to be hard for the NCAA to make the argument that they even pretend to care about academics.
One possible solution is to delay the effective date of the transfer until the summer semester. This creates an additional problem, though, in that the player wouldn't be able to participate in spring practices, and any coach looking at transfers would like to know what he has as quickly as possible and get the new guy integrated with the team. It's hard to imagine that this policy would lead to any less bitching on the part of people like Franklin than the current system.
Here's where I think this all ties into Klosterman's point: None of this has affected fandom because most of the concerns are academic for the time being. We can bitch about players being paid or entering the transfer portal, but it hasn't really affected the on-field product that much. Middle and lower tier schools aren't able to pay big NIL money like the big schools, but they weren't able to recruit like the big schools, either, and the effect of the portal so far seems to be a wash. If nothing else, I don't see Colorado or Indiana or even Pitt (despite the massive choke job) having the seasons they've had without the recent rule changes. Coach Prime might be a doofus who gets criticized for his way of doing business, but that program was circling the drain before he came, and he single-handedly revived it.
The problems will start to creep in when the economics of the game start to have an adverse impact on the top schools. Take Penn State, for instance. In a normal year, if Drew Allar got injured and they lost a playoff game because of it, it would suck for them but be an accepted part of the game. If Allar gets injured this year and they're forced to start a freshman who has never played in an NCAA game, it will be a disaster. The consensus among Penn State fans will be that the normal backup would have at least given them a shot, while losing him on short notice completely wrecked their season. As a Pitt fan, I would absolutely love to see this happen if only for the number of central Pennsylvanian heads that would explode.
The starters aren't immune to this either. In recent years, there's been a trend of NFL-bound players sitting out bowl games to avoid injury. After Matt Corral got injured in his bowl game, it became common wisdom among commentators that sitting out is the smart move and it's just not worth it to play. How long before this logic starts creeping into the playoff? If you're going to the NFL the next season, the downside of playing greatly outweighs the upside, especially if you've already indicated that you're only chasing money. One or two games might not be a tough sell, but three or four? What happens when starters start hitting the portal before the playoffs when offered more money? Fans begged for a playoff for years and now they've got one. If the whole thing ends up determining not who has the better team but who has the most seniors not heading to the NFL, or the fewest guys entering the portal, or any number of ancillary factors, then it will turn into a farce that even hardcore fans will find hard to accept.
Yeah, it seems if anything so far the NIL has increased the parity in the sport, which has been nice, parity is one thing college football hasn't historically always done all that well.
As to the academic logistics of being a student athlete, I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd be curious to know what ratio of online classes athletes sign up for these days.
That was barely a thing when I went to school, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the flexibility some online classes provide are fairly essential lynchpins of making the logistics of being a student athlete these days work. I suspect there are a fair number of athletes who are almost never in physical classes. Especially sports like basketball with middle of the week travel (especially in conferences with across the country schedules).
Bit of googling came up with this article about athletes and online classes - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/23/online-classes-keep-football-players-out-of-academic-fray/40878105/
"Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow is a hero on LSU's Baton Rouge campus, but he hasn't seen much of it because he took graduate courses online. Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.
...
Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn't offer online learning."
(Article is pre-Covid)
I suspect they still spend a lot of time with the academic support tutors, especially the younger athletes.
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