Friday Skull Session

By D.J. Byrnes on October 9, 2015 at 4:59 am
202 Comments

ICYMI: 

This week's NSFW ANTI-WORK #BANGERS:

MEYER AND HARBAUGH: UNDERPAID? Jim Harbaugh and Urban Meyer will rake over $14,000,000 in 2015, and truth be told they're underpaid given the revenue they generate.

Some Big Ten brethren, however, are scoffing at the cash being rained down on coaches.

From USATODAY.com:

Jim Harbaugh is making $7 million at Michigan this season, including a $2 million one-time signing bonus, and Urban Meyer is making $5.86 million for defending national champion Ohio State. USA TODAY Sports asked Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank what she makes of Big Ten peers who are paying their coaches so much.

“Those are the choices they make,” she said in an interview for a story about coaching salaries. “That really begins to threaten the whole sense that we are not professional athletic teams. I’m not terribly happy about the fact that they made those choices. That’s my opinion.”

“I look at it as their business,” he says. “I do. I don’t concern myself. I don’t feel like we’re in competition with salaries at Ohio State or Michigan. … When you’re Ohio State and football is as important as it is in that state, and you have an opportunity to hire someone who has a couple of national championships in his hip pocket and is from that state, it makes sense to pay him. He’s that valuable. … And Harbaugh, I think it’s a coup for Michigan and our league. I think he is worthy of that salary. That’s what they can command. The market drives that.”

Ms. Blank isn't the first member of academia to take umbrage with the salaries (and attention) given to athletics. Big-time sports and academia have little in common, but this is the world in which we live.

Wisconsin will only pay its first-year coach Paul Chryst $160,000 more than Purdue will pay Darrell Hazell. Urban Meyer ($5,860,000) will make twice that of Chryst ($2,300,000).

Is a 59-0 taxing of Wisconsin and winning the first-ever College Football playoff worth that extra $3,560,000 to Ohio State? If I asked Gene Smith that very question, you could hear his laughter from the banks of Lake Erie.

Is the 2014 B1G title game an acceptable outcome for Wisconsin? Then it can feel free to keep this attitude. If it wasn't, well, its boosters better start passing the coffers.

Otherwise they'll continue to lose coaches to second-rate programs like Arkansas and Oregon State.

CLARETT ON FOURNETTE. Not many 20-year-olds could play in the NFL at the moment, but Leonard Fournette is one of them. To that end, he's generated the seemingly annual discussion of  "should [talented college star] sit out next season to preserve his body and NFL stock?"

Maurice Clarett was one in those very shoes, and he has some words of advice for the LSU sophomore.

From BleacherReport.com:

“I suggest he ignores it,” Clarett told Bleacher Report of Fournette and the NFL. “All the other stuff is just noise. Complete this season out and don’t put your energy into next season just yet. When it comes, you deal with it. Come back next year, put together a strong campaign and move forward.”

I was little more than a degenerate dickhead at 20, so touché to Fournette if he can turn that noise out. Obviously Clarett was unable to do so.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how much longer the NFL (the richest league in the world) gets away with not having a minor league system. Until then... nobody is sitting out a year. 

ANOTHER BRANCH ON THE MEYER TREE? I figured Larry Johnson Sr. would retire as an Ohio State assistant coach, but Rivals' Adam Friedman knows more about the East Coast than I.

I'm sure Johnson still wants his own gig, and it's a hire that would certainly make sense from a recruiting standpoint. Some other names being thrown out there:

Temple's Matt Rhule seems to be the "floor" of the search, which might be a great hire. True winners win wherever they go (see: Urban Meyer's Bowling Green). If you can win at Temple, you can win anywhere.

Michigan better not hope Rich Rodriguez comes storming through that door with two Budweisers in his fists and a glint in his eye. I'm not sure if Maryland could pry him from Arizona, but I'd love to see an old friend of Ohio State's come back this way.

Maryland sits in a recruiting hotbed and isn't an administrational train wreck like Rutgers. Couldn't the next coach maybe work some #marketing magic with UnderArmour?

The Terps should be better than they are, so let's hope Maryland gets this right. I have dream that one day the Big Ten East will be seen as the new SEC West.

As for Edsall, well, he's quoting stale beef jerky stick/bad rapper Wiz Khalifa:

Somebody should chisel that into the Edsall Experience's tombstone.

WHY YOU ALWAYS LYING? Rick Pitino's Louisville is in a bit of a hot mess. Pitino gave a self-pitying radio interview on Thursday where I almost felt empathy for him (it was that bad) before he reminded me that he's a sociopath:

Remember now: Pitino once fornicated on a restaurant floor. I don't care if it's a 4.5-star Yelp reviewed joint — that's unseemly. Yet he's up here pretending the ideas of strippers are somehow beneath his program? Please

Yet let Rick tell it and we're the dumb ones. Pitino didn't just shit on our rug and deny it. He shit on our rug in front of us — and then tried to tell us we we're the rug-shitters.

That padawan mind-trick might work within the cult of personalty in which Pitino swaddled himself down there at Papa John's University, but that's not how it works in reality.

Pitino won games and yadda yadda yadda, but that's not going to stop me from laughing as his trash-blimp plummets to Earth's crusts.

FRESHMEN ON EASY STREET. Ohio State opened up four new dorms. Unless you currently live in one of those four, they are nicer than your dorm was.

From BizJournals.com's gallery:

The Torres House, 187 W. Lane Ave., is a 532-person co-ed hall that’s home to a mix of students including the “women in engineering learning community.”

The Scott House, 160 W. Woodruff Ave., is a 390-person co-ed hall that’s home to a convenience store and the Connecting Grounds coffee shop.

The Raney House, 33 W. Lane Ave., houses 456 co-eds and, like the other halls, has both community and private baths.

The Bowen House, 2125 N. High St., is home to 380 co-eds and includes a community lounge and reading room.

wut
kids these days

Good to see that no matter how much money they pump into dorms, they still get stocked with bootleg IKEA furniture.

THOSE WMDs. Rescue dog's Central Park death saddens family and friends... Bangkok snake catcher looks like a wild gig... Moose fight in an Alaskan suburb... The Decline of Big Soda... The deafening silence surrounding Ole Miss' Laremy Tunsil... The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.

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