COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

Mike Sherman and Texas A&M in 2009

 

From the Coaches Hot Seat analysis:

 

“After 11 years away from the college game, Mike Sherman found himself last fall as the head football coach at Texas A&M and in the far different world that is now the Big 12 conference and the college football game of the 21st century.  No longer can Texas A&M just line-up and beat anyone, even Baylor, and now Sherman has a 4-8 record in 2008 up on the board and whether he knows it or not, he MUST get his Aggie football team to a bowl game in 2009.  Of course, Mike Sherman putting up a 4-8 record last season should be “old hat” to Aggie fans, because over the past 7 seasons the mighty Texas A&M football program is:

 

2002-2008:  39 – 45  (.464)

 

 39-45 over the past 7 seasons in AggieLand?  Say it isn’t so?  Yes, it be so, and the Texas A&M fans, and the big boosters that pay big bucks to make the A&M program….”

 

Will Mike Sherman be back for the 2010 season?  Good question!

 

Should be an interesting year in AggieLand!

Mike Sherman and Texas A&M in 2009

 

 

Just when you thought that the BCS couldn’t possibly become any more of a sham, the American Football Coaches Association decided to make their USA Today Coaches Poll secret again.  AFCA executive director Grant Teaff when told that the coaches have opted for “reverse transparency” responded:

 

“That’s your opinion.”

 

Teaff was then told to expect a lot of blowback, to which Teaff responded:

 

“Let ‘er rip.”

 

How nice.  Here is the problem with the Grant Teaff’s and BCS Boys of this world, they really don’t give two rips if the there is any integrity or common sense attached to the college football postseason and national championship or in fact about the people that pay all of their salaries, the fans.  No, nothing matters to these Boys except keeping in place the most fraudulent and bogus system to determine a champion in World sport.  As we have all seen in recent years, the coaches can vote in some very odd and in our minds unethical ways to favor both their team, their conference, and even BCS schools, and now the AFCA wants to make all that chicanery private.  How nice, but then again, we all know the BCS is a fraud, and Grant Teaff with his arrogance and his organization’s incredible foolishness has made the BCS an even bigger joke. 

 

Let’s face it, Grant Teaff and anyone else that supports the BCS doesn’t have the guts to decide the national championship on the field of play, so it makes sense that these “Pretty Boys” want to keep a bunch of meaningless exhibition games on the docket each year.  Way to go Grant Teaff, you are part of a conspiracy that cannot even match what 10-year old girls soccer do all across the United States to decide the champion in their leagues, decide their champion on the field of play.  Teaff should be very proud of himself, but since Teaff is a former coach and has grown up in a bogus system, why should we be surprised that he is afraid that the “precious coaches” might get their feelings hurt if their poll votes are released to the public…  Cry, cry, precious little Grant Teaff (someone get him a white hanky…) has got to protect these “white glove wearing and hot tea (two lumps of sugar please!) drinking coaches (please pass me a lemon cookie!) that don’t have that guts to settle this the way real men do, out in the open and on the field of play.  Please, someone send Graft Teaff a nice little tea set to play with, because he will need one after this gutless decision.  A pink, frilly little dress, would also be appropriate for Teaff and any other coach that doesn’t have the guts to let the public know how they voted.  Can you say that the coaches deciding to make their votes secret may be the most gutless decision in the history of American sport?  Well, since many of these Boys are already afraid to settle the championship in college football on the field, should we really be surprised?  The real problem is that far too many college head coaches just dream of chanting:

 

“We’re 6-6 and bowl eligible!  We’re bowl eligible!”

 

What a sick system and un-American system these Boys have created that does nothing but promote mediocrity and have a bogus way to supposedly determine a champion.  Champion?  Please, these Boys are afraid the let the public know how they vote, does anyone really think they would have the guts of the average women in America?  No, not even close…

 

Hell, even college golfers decided their National Champion on the field of play (Take a look at these brackets in college golf!  Now that is how real men decide championships!).  The golfers can decide their champion on the field, but college football cannot?  Yes, there is a word for the Grant Teaff’s of the world, but it not appropriate to use that word in a family-friendly blog, but we all know what Grant Teaff really is… A gutless……

 

Even BCS Boy, SEC commish Mike Slive knows that making the coaches poll secret is a terrible idea:

 

“I think it’s healthier for the system if there’s transparency,” Slive said from the SEC spring meetings. “We’ve urged transparency. We’ve developed it in the other polls. I don’t view that as a positive step.”

 

Of course, that the AFCA would move to make the coaches poll secret is not a surprise, because it has been made abundantly clear to us at Coaches Hot Seat, by their actions and words that the BCS Boys rather get a thrill out of “shooting a bird” at college football fans and to that we say the following:

 

Read this very carefully BCS Boys….

 

The bogus, disgusting, un-American, and in our minds illegal BCS will be removed from the game of college football and will be replaced by a postseason that includes “at least” an 8-team playoff.  This playoff may use the current bowl games, or it may not, but a playoff we will have.  Pay very close attention here BCS Boys.  We can either do this the easy way, with the BCS Boys actually coming to their senses and giving a damn about the players, the coaches, the fans and yes, even the game of college football, or we can do this the hard way and have our elected representatives, and most dangerous for the BCS Boys and the athletic departments they represent, have a court weigh-in on this issue.  If a court has to weigh-in on the BCS, then expect a massive multi-million dollar judgment in favor of the non-BCS schools that will be paid for by the BCS schools athletic departments.

 

It is your choice BCS Boys, so you can either stand in the school house door like George Wallace for what is clearly one of the most un-American things we have ever seen and experienced in our Republic’s history, the bogus BCS, or you will be removed from that door by our elected representatives or the judicial branch.  It is your choice, but the time for choosing is coming soon, so choose very wisely…

 

 

Speaking of the bogus BCS, Dan Wetzel and Josh Peter of Yahoo! Sports have again been up to their always terrific work this week where their research has showed that the BCS Boys have now apparently lied, while under oath, to Congress.  Both Alamo Bowl executive director Derrick Fox and ACC commissioner John Swofford testified before Congress on May 1, under oath mind you, that the bowls are put on by “charitable groups” and “local charities receive tens of millions of dollars every year.”  No, not quite Boys… 

 

Wetzel and Peter go on in the article, Congress seeks bowls truth, to basically destroy all of the garbage that is put out by bowl games and don’t think that both the US House and Senate will be looking into Fox and Swofford’s statements, that were under oath mind you, and also into just what the Hell the college football bowls are really about.  Hint:  It has nothing to do with what is best for the game of college football. 

 

Wetzel appeared on the Paul Finebaum Radio Show earlier this week and expanded on his article on the bowls and again punched holes in all the arguments the bowls make about why they even exist:

 

Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel on BCS and NCAA investigations (audio) - Finebaum Radio Network

 

Again, what Wetzel and Peter dug up on the bowls and at what lengths the BCS Boys will go to prop up one of the most un-American things in the history of our Republic, the BCS, may be new to the general public, but it is not new to us.  There are a lot of questions that the BCS Boys will be answering in the very near future, and rest assured all of those answers will be under oath, either before Congress or in a courtroom. 

 

It is your choice BCS Boys, so choose VERY well……

 

 

On this past Memorial Day as those of us here at Coaches Hot Seat reflected upon the great sacrifices made by our forefathers so that all of us may live in freedom and we could not help but wonder what some of our fellow citizens are thinking.  The San Francisco Bay area is a wonderful place to live, the beauty of Bay area is stunning, the brainpower in San Francisco and in the surrounding suburbs is probably not surpassed on the globe, the ability to be on the shores of the Pacific and in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains in a period of 3 hours or less is unbeatable, but sometimes we cannot help but wonder if all Americans understand the complete nature of the threat that our country faces today.  There is nothing wrong with being liberal politically, even very liberal, but far too often with people of a liberal-bent that we run into in the Bay area we find an incredible naïveté about the world that all of us live in.  Frontline/World recently aired a piece on the Taliban in Pakistan and it is too bad that so few Americans take the time to understand the Middle East and Southwest Asia, because make no mistake about it, there are people in this world that not only want to kill as many Americans as possible, they would like nothing better than to bring down our country and even Western Civilization. 

 

Here is a promo on the Frontline/World piece on Pakistan

 

 

 

And a link to the Frontline/World website where you can watch the entire documentary.

 

If that piece on the Taliban in Pakistan doesn’t get your attention and give everyone a better understanding of what Western Civilization is really up against, nothing will.  There is a very good reason that the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, and that reason is that there are a lot of people in that area of the world that want to kill and would kill a lot of Americans if given the opportunity.  It is rather sad that there are a lot of people in the San Francisco Bay area that if Al Qaeda landed at Ocean Beach, would be out there welcoming them with open arms.  That the Al Qaeda would kill the San Francisco “welcoming party” instantly would be lost on many of these nuts until it was too late, and that lack of awareness of the threat we are facing in the world is something that many of us here at Coaches Hot Seat will never understand.

 

Yes, the United States of America should have a very simple policy.  We want to live at peace with everyone on the planet, but we will not stand aside and allow you to slaughter Americans or the citizens of our allies.  World Peace is indeed our goal, but dammit if you want to force your religion or other perverse views of the world on us or others then a real shooting war is what you will have.  We just hope you can live with the consequences of your actions, because the United States of America is not going anywhere, anytime soon and you can either join the US and the rest of the civilized world or take your chances with what will be a certain outcome.  Yes, a very certain outcome. 

 

If the Al Qaeda does ever land at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, rest assured once they have killed the fruitcake “welcoming party” Coaches Hot Seat and many others will be on the scene to make sure their landing on our shores is very short indeed! 

 

The new Secretary of Education for the US was in San Francisco last week and the following was in a San Francisco Chronicle story on his visit:

 

“A handful of states will soon be chosen to take part in an intense $5 billion experiment to improve schools that the federal government is calling the “Race to the Top” – but California will be lucky if it gets to participate, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday on a swing through San Francisco

 

“Honestly, California has lost its way,” Duncan told dozens of the state’s mayors and education officials who packed into San Francisco City Hall on Friday morning.

 

He was even more blunt in admonishing a lunch crowd of educators and executives at the Palace Hotel on Market Street:

 

“Your state once had the best education system in the country. From cradle to career, you took care of your children. You made sure they were ready to enter your universities or be productive participants in the workforce.

 

“I ask you, is California going to lead the race to the top, or are you going to lead the retreat?”

 

Later, in a wide-ranging interview with The Chronicle, the nation’s top educator also talked about changes he’s expecting in the federal No Child Left Behind Education Act – including changing its Bush-era name, which he called “toxic.””

 

“Honestly, California has lost it’s way.”  A truer statement has never been uttered, about California K-12 schools or even the state itself.  Schools in California are no longer about educating anyone, especially the students, but rather little more than a day care with very little real educating go on, which allows both parents can go to work and not have to be at home educating and watching their kids.  Most parents could do much better educating their kids than the schools and strength of the teacher unions, the politically-correctness that permeates everywhere and everything, and the unmitigated disaster that lower-middle and poor kids have to deal with in their schools adds up to nothing short of catastrophe for the state of California, just when it needs to be turning out well-educated and motivated high school graduates that are ready to take on the world.  The exact opposite is now happening in most schools in California and the high school dropout rates in the state only prove that point even more:

 

State of California Dropout Rates – 2007-08 School Year

 

State Dropout Percentage for all students:  20.1%

 

American Indian – 25.4%

Asian – 8.4%

Pacific Islander – 22.2%

Filipino – 9.4%

Hispanic or Latino – 25.5%

African-American – 34.7%

White – 12.2%

Multiple/No Response – 25.3.%

 

The above dropout numbers are outrageous, but if one wants to really understand the disaster that is headed for California’s future, one must realize that Hispanic & Latinos make up around 50 percent of all current K-12 students.  Now combine the fact that Hispanic & Latino kids make up half of students in the California K-12 school system and then realize they are dropping out of high school at a 25.5% level.  Just a stunning number!  That above combination and the fact that California needs not only the vast majority of its students advancing at least through the high school level, and a big portion graduating from college, really brings home the huge problems that will face California for years to come.  If California is to have a bright future it must through public policy and some kind of community outreach get into the homes of Hispanics and Latinos and make it very clear that education is vitally important to their children’s future as it was to recent Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s mother.  The New York Daily News did some incredible reporting this past week on the sacrifices that were made by Sotomayor’s mother to make sure her children got a good education while the entire time Mother Sotomayor was getting an education of her own.  Just an amazing story and one that should be told over and over to the parents of Hispanic and Latino children across the United States, but especially here in California. 

 

If there is not a dramatic change in both the approach taken by California schools and inside the homes of Californians of all races, this state is going to have a Hell of a mess on its hands, even worse than the one the state is now facing.

 

Of course, combine a dysfunctional California school system with the state’s hostile and downright “let’s get those sob’s” approach to businesses and the businessmen/women of the state and one can start to really understand why California is headed for insolvency.  By the time that Schwarzenegger and the state bureaucracy figure out that going to war with business in the state is dooming California to failure, many of the businesses will be gone and the political elite will look around one day and wonder and realize they have sown the seeds of the state’s destruction. 

 

 

The local CBS television station in its daily show Eye on the Bay recently did a piece of Bay area people that have been in the movie and music business and they devoted a section of a show to a neighbor of a couple of us here at Coaches Hot Seat, Sammy Hagar.  No, we cannot hear Hagar’s new band, Chicken Foot, rocking out nor has Sammy been by lately to drop off some of his CaboWabo Tequila, but we do see Sammy from time-to-time tooling about town and in the neighborhood in one of his many “badass” cars (You can see Hagar’s cars and his garage in the below video piece). 

 

You can see the TV piece that includes a section on Sammy Hagar at this link.   The Hagar section starts at the 8:05 mark into the piece.

 

Here is also a Q&A piece with Sammy Hagar in Marin Magazine.

 

Yes, there only is one Sammy Hagar!

 

 

 

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We are rarely surprised about what comes out of the mouth of Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney, but at the Big Ten meetings this week in Chicago, Delaney really outdid himself this time (as reported by Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune, who in our opinion is a founding and continuing member of the “If the BCS Boys tell us the sky is green, Well Dammit, the sky is green!” club.  Sadly, there are a couple of dozen media members in this special club, but we can report their membership is declining, because how many shrimp cocktails can one eat and how much bullshit can be blown up one’s ass before a reporter will ask the most important question all reporters should ask:  “Why?”  Why indeed….).  Jim Delaney answering a question about President’s Obama desire to see a playoff in college football instead of the BCS, Delaney said:

 

“He’s a scholar and a lawyer and a great politician, but I don’t think he understands the complexity of the issue.”

 

(And Tribune reporter Teddy Greenstein calls that answer politically astute?  Obviously, Teddy Greenstein has never worked in politics!)

 

Did we actually read that right?  Jim Delaney believes that Barack Obama, a man with an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard cannot understand the “complexity” of the BCS?  We wonder just what Jim Delaney is trying to say here, because it is very clear to the vast majority of college football fans in the United States that the BCS is a fraud, so the President of the United States, with 2 Ivy League degrees, certainly should understand that as well.  In fact, we are very confident that Barack Obama understands very well that the BCS is the same thing we understand it to be:

 

A fraudulent national title game that is preceded by a series of 4 meaningless exhibition games.

 

Yes, that is the way the vast majority of college football fans view the BCS, as does Barack Obama.  Don’t believe that?  Let’s go to the tape….

 

 

 

So now that everyone is clear that President Obama does indeed understand that the BCS is a joke and that a postseason playoff tournament should be put in its place so that a champion can be determined on the field of play, the same way the national title in every other sport in collegiate athletics is determined, and every other sport in the United States for that matter, we must go back to the question:

 

What the hell did Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney really mean when speaking on the BCS said that President Obama does not “…understand the complexity of the issue.”

 

Is Jim Delaney trying to say something about President Obama’s intelligence, because it certainly seems clear to us that in the many comments that President Obama has made about the BCS in the last 6 months that he knows exactly what he is talking about, so just what is Jim Delaney really trying to say here?

 

That is an impossible question for us to answer, but we do have an opinion on Jim Delaney, and we believe our opinion is shared widely throughout the game of college football and that is that Delaney has the same problem Al Gore has…

 

Jim Delaney is a pompous ass

 

That Delaney is a pompous ass is the real reason why he believes he can say that a man with 2 Ivy League degrees cannot understand the “complexity” of something that is nothing more than a bogus national title game and a series of 4 meaningless exhibition games.  Yes, even the Rose Bowl is a meaningless exhibition game that is preceded by the crowning of a queen and a parade and ends up with a meaningless game that means nothing.  That means nothing at all.  Nothing complex about that and yes Jimmy Delaney, we understand and President Obama understand the BCS very well.

 

How proud Jim Delaney must be about him defending the bogus BCS, but we remind Delaney and the rest of the BCS Boys that whether you have TV contracts or not, the days of the BCS are numbered.  We sure hope that the athletic departments of all of the “BCS conference” schools have set aside millions of dollars to be paid to the “non-BCS” schools that have been laboring under what we believe to be an illegal cartel that will not be able to stand up in the court of law.  If the BCS Boys want to roll the dice, fine, roll them, but don’t come crying to us when (and it is “when”) the BCS is ruled as an illegal trust that does not provide a level playing field for all of the student-athletes to play for a national title in Division I-A football.  It is more than just not being fair to the “non-BCS” teams, as Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson has pointed out, but the BCS in our opinion is breaking federal law by creating two separate classes of schools and thus football teams in Division I-A football.  If you believe the BCS is an appropriate way for an organization in the United States, especially an organization that operates with federally funded schools, then you have very good company in US history, starting with former Alabama governor George Wallace.  Yes, how proud all of you BCS lovers must be….

 

While we ponder just what Jim “Let’s keep playing these meaningless exhibition games” Delaney was really trying to say when he said that President Obama could not understand the “complexity” of the BCS, we encourage the rest of the BCS Boys to keep your attorneys handy, because even forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars to JC Watts is not going to postpone the eventual and certain day of reckoning of the BCS.  We only hope that the BCS Boys in their blind pursuit of money and power and their strange desire to listen to pompous asses like Jim Delaney, do not end up in a position where the athletic departments they represent have to go out and borrow millions of dollars to pay of a court settlement.

 

Of course, we could just settle the college football national championship the American Way, on the field of play, using a postseason playoff system, and avoid the mess that is just over the horizon, but alas, when you have a pompous ass leading a group of greedy men around by the nose, I think we all know where this is going to end…..

 

Say what you will Jim Delaney, but count on your comment on President Obama not being able to understand the “complexity” of the BCS to make it to the Oval Office.  Yes, you can count on that Jimmy and not only can we guarantee that your comment will make it to the Oval Office, we can assure you that it will make it there, “complexity” or not!

 

Jimmy, we can understand that your ego forces you to keep crawling out on the limb, but must you saw the limb at the same time?  Jimmy Delaney, again pay very close attention….

 

 

 

President Obama doesn’t understand the “complexity” of the BCS?  Oh, Obama knows exactly what the BCS is about and so do the American people.  In this case in fact, it is Jim Delaney who doesn’t understand what the United States of American stands for.  Maybe that the idea that “All men are created equal” is too “complex” for Jim Delaney to understand, because he sure goes out of his way to defense a bogus system that runs counter to the fundamental principles of our Republic….

 

 

Another very strange and trouble occurrence this week with this “secret” agreement between former Kansas State AD Robert Krause and former KSU head football coach Ron Prince.  In this “secret” agreement, Krause agreed to pay Ron Prince payments of $800,000 in 2015, $800,000 in 2016 and $1.6 million in 2020.

 

Tim Griffin of ESPN has a great write-up of this debacle, but there are so many questions here that we don’t quite know where to start…

 

The first thing that comes to mind is that we really could not understand last year why Ron Prince was able to renegotiate his contract in the first place after putting up records in his first two years of 7-6 and 5-7.  Yes, that was very strange, that Ron Prince got a new contract before the 2008 season that raised his salary and buyout, but now we know that Prince and Kansas State AD Krause had a “secret” agreement on top of that new contract that would pay him an additional $3.2 million dollars.

 

As Tim Griffin wrote in his ESPN column on this Kansas State scandal:

 

“The school alleges that Prince’s agent, Neil Cornrich, impermissibly negotiated the contract extension directly with Krause. KSU’s nine-page suit alleges that under ethics rules Cornrich was required to obtain information from KSU lawyers before the negotiations could take place.”

 

and that….

 

“According to a release issued by the school, Epps informed Wefald of the secret agreement as soon as he learned of it.

 

“I was shocked and saddened to find out about this agreement,” Wefald said. “No one in central administration or athletics knew about this agreement. We all thought that the August 2008 press release accurately described Ron Prince’s one-year contract extension and his salary increase from $750,000 to $1.1 million. We thought that any compensation he was owed was in that contract.”

 

What?  This has got to be the damndest thing we have ever read in relation to contracts for college football coaches and this makes the “off the books deal” that Greg Schiano negotiated with the Rutgers AD look meaningless.  Either we are completely missing why this “secret” agreement was negotiated and hidden from everyone else at Kansas State or former KSU AD Robert Krause is a complete moron.

 

Yes, something very fishy is going on or Robert Krause is a complete moron.

 

Which it is we would love to know, and it looks like we will find out which one it is, because Kansas State seems determined to get to the bottom of this unacceptable mess….

 

Jeffrey Martin of the Kansas City Star is out with a story this morning on the “secret” agreement and he quotes Ron Prince’s attorney Neil Cornrich as saying:

 

“Coach Ron Prince entered into a legally binding contract with Kansas State University and the Intercollegiate Athletic Council of Kansas State University Inc.,” he said in a statement. “… Not only it is inaccurate to claim that this was a secret agreement, but also it makes no sense since the contract was mutually agreed upon, signed and legally binding.”

 

If the above is true, then Robert Krause is very simply, A MORON.

 

We will be following this mess at Kansas State very closely and we hope this turns out to be a great lesson for ADs and college presidents everywhere, that everything you do relative to your job will eventually be scrutinized, and thus one should always act as if the alumni, fans, NCAA and public are looking over your shoulder…

 

 

As we predicted on Monday, Arnold Schwarzenegger and his buddies in the California legislature got their asses handed to them by the people of the state of California after they tried to levy a massive tax increase and also thought they could get the public to do the job that they were hired to do, namely govern the state.  The people of California are too busy working and taking care of their families to also have the time to make key decisions and run the state of and either these legislators of both political parties will get busy bringing the spending in state government in-line with revenue or a Pandora’s Box may open that could not only change politics in California, but also the nation.

 

In 1978, the people of California passed Proposition 13 which capped property taxes and kicked of a tax-revolt in the country that many believe led to the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980.  The vote in California yesterday on several propositions that called for a massive tax increase and set up a virtual “Ponzi” scheme that raided trust funds to prop up the state budget and borrowed money against the state lottery, may also end up having a dramatic affect on the country.  Last night at a casual dinner of grilled ribs and chicken of several Coaches Hot Seat members and the main issues in the state of California were front and center.  A few of the older and quieter CHS members were theorizing that it might be time again for some Californians to cross the country and go to work in the political life of our country.  These few older CHS members took time off from college in 1979-80 and went to snowy New Hampshire and other states to go to work for a private citizen named:  Ronald Wilson Reagan.  Their efforts and the efforts of many others led to the election of President Reagan in 1980 during a time of great strife in our country and it is interesting to hear that some of the 40-somethings that thought it was important to make an effort almost 30 years ago, are now starting to talk about taking some time off from work to help change the country again.  The only problem is, the Republican Party is in total disarray today and none of us here at CHS see anyone in the Republican Party on the national or state level, like a Ronald Reagan, that would be worth working our asses off for.  President Obama is off to a very good start and if he can get this country moving again and fundamentally change in a positive way the 3 most important issues now facing our country. 1. national security, 2. real health care reform, 3. energy independence in a rational way (not this bogus cap and trade proposal now being debated in the US House), there may not be a need for a Ronald Reagan type character to show up on the American scene. 

 

2012 is a million years away in politics, but we here at Coaches Hot Seat are convinced that the American people are looking for people to represent them that can solve problems and get things done.  If 3 years from now President Obama has moved the United States forward and our economy is recovering, he will beat any Republican (or third party candidate?), but if Obama stumbles, all bets are off and some of us at Coaches Hot Seat may find ourselves in New Hampshire working again for…..who the hell knows?

 

Getting back to the vote on Tuesday, very simply, the people of California are tired of paying billions of dollars for a government that delivers only mediocre or below average services.  California spends over $50 billion dollars a year on K-12 and college education and the state educational system not only has some of the highest high school drop-out rates in the country, the young folks in the state that do earn high school and college degrees don’t seem to us to be all that well educated.  The top high school and college students in California are brilliant and we get a kick out of seeing how hard they work and how happily and aggressively they embrace their jobs and life for that matter, but the top level of students is a very small pool and the millions of kids behind them just don’t seem prepared to take on the challenges of the Twenty-First century.

 

One huge issue that is causing all kinds of havoc with the California state budget and the budgets of states and municipalities across the United States is the large amount of public employees that are receiving ever higher salaries and benefits and are often retiring at very young ages with very large pensions.  There is a great article in today’s Los Angeles Times about former Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks who is receiving a pension of $265,090 and is also now working as the LA City Council’s budget chief, collecting a $178,789 salary for a total of $443,875 per year, all on the public payroll.  Bernard Parks is not doing anything illegal, but the large amount of people that have gone on the public payroll in California and elsewhere in the country with many of them having been promised both guaranteed increasing salaries in the coming years and very generous pensions compared to the private sector.  Many of these public employees are in unions and these public sector unions have garnered lots of power in Washington DC, but President Obama and other elected officials should be mindful that unless something changes like a slow down in the benefits to these public employees and a movement from guaranteed pensions to 401k plans, the state of California and the country will end up in bankruptcy.  Our country cannot sustain the current level of benefits for the number of people that are the public payroll and as the public sector unions gain more power in the country, they will be asking for more money, benefits and retirement pensions and if those unions are allowed to get what they want, there will be no United States of America or California to pay all of these people, because there will be no country. 

 

Yes, not only will health care will bankrupt the country, and many states and companies, unless our country does something to slow down the growth of health care costs, public employees and the billions we are currently obligated to pay them (California state pension funds are currently more than $200 billion underfunded) is also something that will bankrupt the United States of America.  Let’s just hope that President Obama and our elected officials realize the real danger that lurks just over the horizon if we don’t get control of the reality that we have hundreds of thousands of public employees that are now retiring and will be retiring in the future in their early 50s with very large pensions, and the fact that our country really does not have the capacity to meet those pension obligations.

 

The Bottom-Line:  The people of California pay some of the highest income taxes in the country, we do pay the highest sales and gas taxes, and for those of us that bought homes in the last 15 years, we pay the highest property taxes in the nation.  We voted down these propositions on Tuesday because we are tired of sending billions of dollars Sacramento and getting very little back in return, and state government in California must change and change drastically, starting with drawing up a budget that balances spending with revenues.  If Schwarzenegger and his buddies cannot do that, then it is time to replace all of them, maybe with some folks that are not members of either the Democrat or Republican parties.  Open that door, and it will be very hard to shut, so the political class in the state of California and in the Republic better get busy and start doing the job we hired them for and they are obligated by law to perform or they may find a new force and political party on the scene that garners the support of the American people.

 

The political class in our state has through their bumbling and mismanagement gotten the Californian’s backs-up again and the last time that happened we changed the world.  Do your jobs and do them well, or we may just have to take back the country again…..and you know we can do it…..Of course, we would need a candidate….

 

 

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When riding the ferry to and from San Francisco from Marin County, California one can look off to the East and see Sather Tower rising over the Cal-Berkeley campus, but if one looks close enough and the light is just right, the West rim of California’s Memorial Stadium can be picked out.

 

 

 

For those that have been paying attention, in the decrepit athletic facilities and Cal head coach Jeff Tedford’s offices around Memorial Stadium, Jeff Tedford has very quietly pulled off one of the great turnarounds in college football history. 

 

From the Coaches Hot Seat analysis for Jeff Tedford and Cal in 2009:

 

“To completely understand how far Jeff Tedford has brought the Cal football program in the last 7 years by putting up a 59-30 (.663), realize that in the previous 13 seasons at Cal under 4 different head coaches, Cal was 59-68 (and one of those 13 seasons included a 10 win year by Bruce Snyder in 1991).  If you factor in the athletic facilities at Cal, which are below what several thousand high schools in the United States have available to them, then one realizes that Jeff Tedford has pulled off something that has probably not been equaled in college football in the last 7  years, save Pete Carroll at USC and Jim Tressel at Ohio State.  Of course, both of those men, Carroll and Tressel, are coaching at perennial college football powers and they have whatever they can possibly dream of at their disposal, which just proves again the incredible job Tedford has done at Cal.

 

The Cal alumni at Coaches Hot Seat understand what it was like before Tedford showed up in Berkeley, but even they have grumbled a bit as Cal has struggled in the past 2 seasons, including a loss to the suddenly surging Stanford team….”

 

To see our entire analysis for Jeff Tedford and Cal in 2009 go to:

 

Jeff Tedford and Cal in 2009

 

 

We have been following the struggles of college athletic departments closely here at Coaches Hot Seat and it looks to us that the current economic downturn will only extenuate the differences between the have and have-nots in the college athletic world.  The strong college football programs will probably only see a small downturn in their ticket and branded apparel sales, but the medium to smaller programs will more than likely struggle, especially if they have a tough time on the field of play.  We at Coaches Hot Seat get to meet lots of interesting people here in the San Francisco Bay area and to see a number of different ways that companies are running their businesses and an article recently on Chris Hughes, a guy that helped get Barack Obama elected President caught our eye.  Chris Hughes is one of the co-founders of Facebook and he has a very unique understanding of how communities can be used to galvanize and bring together a group of people, i.e., fans and alumni that follow a particular college football team. 

 

Fast Money magazine did a very interesting profile of Chris Hughes and his activities with the Barack Obama campaign and we thought that athletic directors might have an interest in some of Chris Hughes’ approaches to putting together groups of people which led to the creation of one of the great money raising political campaigns of all-time.

 

Fast Money magazine article:

 

How Chris Hughes helped launch Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign

 

Very few of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have been in the position of having to raise money for a non-profit organization like an athletic department, but it does strike us that athletic directors might give some thought to how they could use the resources (students/faculty and computer technology) on their college campuses to not only to raise more money from the fans and alumni of their institution, but also to closer tie those same fans and alumni to the school.  College head coaches having Facebook and Twitter accounts is a way for them to reach out to their fans base, and especially to potential recruits, but we believe there are many other technological tools that can be used to both bring in more dollars and to build strong fans bases, which can only make athletic departments that much stronger.  These young people can do incredible things with computers and the social networking craze that is driving the Twitter’s of the world could be a very effective way for athletic departments to reach out to their fans and alumni to bring them closer to their school’s athletic teams and to show how their dollars, even in small but regular contributions, can have a big impact on the bottom-line and ultimate success of the athletic department.  If there was one secret of the Obama campaign in 2007-08, it was the large donor base that contributed regularly to the candidate, often in small amounts.  It was that large donor base that made Barack Obama a very strong candidate because he could both stay in regular communication with his donors, volunteers, campaign worker, etc., but also he could relay the importance of the role they played in driving the campaign forward towards ultimate success.  ADs should certainly give some thought to Chris Hughes approach to bring together communities and if a similar approach could help them raise more dollars in the current economic downturn, but also to come out of the recession with a much stronger, and broader donor and supporter base.

 

 

The voters in the state of California go to the polls today (Tuesday, May 19, 2009) to vote on 6 propositions put forward and pushed heavily by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislators and there is little doubt that Arnold and his companions in deceit at the state Capitol in Sacramento will get their asses handed to them by the people of California.  The Wall Street Journal, California Reckoning, and the Orange County Register, Vote “No” on all six state propositions, pretty much sum up the propositions and the mess that the state of California is now in and that anyone stupid enough to be voting “Yes” on any of these propositions would only be doing the equivalent of giving more drugs to a drug addict.  California has been mismanaged for so long and is now filled throughout its state governmental bureaucracy in Sacramento with people that not only have an intense hatred of business, that they actually cheer loudly and celebrate (champagne and all!) when they come up with another asinine way to stick it to the people and the companies that actually create 95% of the jobs in the state.  Yes, these bureaucrats really hate business and would like nothing better than if everyone that actually worked hard to make their company profitable and to become a strong contributor to the local community, if we all just got up and left the state.  Yes, it has gotten that perverse here in California and judging from the polls on these propositions it looks like the people of California are fed up and are in the words of Howard Beale in the movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

 

 

 

There was a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger actually gave a damn about the people of California and cared about the companies that create good-paying jobs and make large investments into local communities.  Schwarzenegger running for Governor in 2003 said:

 

“From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they’re taxed. When they go get a coffee, they’re taxed. When they get in their car, they’re taxed. When they go to the gas station, they’re taxed. When they go to lunch, they’re taxed. This goes on all day long. Tax. Tax. Tax. Tax. Tax.”

 

Arnold also said in 2003:

 

“I campaigned that I will not raise taxes and I say this again: I will not raise taxes.”

 

And then after many good Californians worked liked hell to both recall Gray Davis and put Arnold in as Governor he said in his 2005 State of the State Address:

 

“A lot of people say, ‘Arnold, why don’t you just raise taxes and be done with it?’ Well, as I said earlier, we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. We could raise taxes by billions but that would only further drive up spending by billions of dollars. California would never come out ahead. Our economy would suffer, jobs would be lost and the people would be punished. Unless we go to the root of the problem and reform the system, the budget will continue to be one big fight, year after year after year.”

 

What the hell happened to you Arnold?  Yes, that is a hellava question, and now that it looks like all of the propositions that Arnold and his partners in crime in Sacramento are headed for defeat and where will Arnold be?  In California, convening the state legislature to go back to work to start pairing back the out-of-control spending in California?  No, Arnold is flying cross country to stand by President Obama to trumpet a worthy, but totally useless to the state of California for the next several years (these new MPG standards will not be in effect until 2016), decision to increase the MPG on all cars manufactured in the United States.  Of course, that Arnold would flee from the state of California is no surprise to anyone that knows the man, because Arnold is deep down one of the “girlie-men” he made fun of at the Republican Convention a few years ago. 

 

 

 

Yes, Arnold you are an “Economic Girlie-Man” and you along with the help of many other California politicians have brought to the brink of insolvency the richest state in the Republic.  How proud all of you must be, but the story on the disaster that is the state of California is really just beginning and when the real budget numbers come out in the next few weeks, not the one’s they have been lying about for 2 years now, the proverbial crap is really going to hit the fan.

 

At the bottom of the entire mess in the state of California is the belief that state government can spend any amount of money regardless of economic conditions or the kind of affects increased taxes to support that spending will have on future economics of the state.  The state of California legislators, almost to a person, have no concept of how the massive amount of taxes that they have approved in recent years, coupled with even more regulations targeting the businesses that create all the jobs in the state, directly impact economic decisions and if a company will first of all set-up a business in the state and the amount of hiring and eventually the way things have been going, firing that a company will do.  Right now, with current state of California taxes and regulations it makes no sense at all for any large company or even medium sized company to open up in the state. 

 

Several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have good friends that have tried to open up even small retail businesses, one or two locations of restaurants or what would be new stores to the state, only to find that months and months would drag by just to get a permit to open the doors.  Many of those efforts to open those businesses were abandoned because of the long permitting process and the never-ending questions on any number of asinine items.  Of course, the jobs that would have come along with those businesses were never created, but the bureaucracy that has been set-up across California on the state, county and city level takes great pride in giving business a hard time and for making it very hard for new businesses to even get through the basic permitting process.  For companies already in the state, expansion, and the hiring that would come with it, must be weighed against not only the difficulty in even getting the permitting to expand one’s business (which can take months or even years), but also how hard it is to even break-even with everyone from the local city government, the county, state bureaucracies, to the folks in Sacramento taking their cut along the way.  Very simply, many people simply do not try to open new businesses and the one’s that are already in business just don’t do a whole lot of new hiring, and why would they when the state of California views all businesses as part of the problem, not as what they really are, the real economic engine of the state.  For those of us that weigh the possibility of expanding or starting a new business, we make a very simple calculation that comes down to:  “Is it worth my time and effort?”  Often it is not, because even if you ended up creating a company that generated an additional $100,000 in take home income for yourself, after the federal, state and local tax bite, which is somewhere in the 55 percent tax range in California, one must ask:  “Is all that work worth it when they will take a majority of the money I help create?”  Very often it is not, and that is when it makes a lot more sense to go play golf, go fishing, go snow or water skiing, or do something like Coaches Hot Seat that is great entertainment, but has very little chance of ever generating lots of wealth or creating lots of good-paying jobs.  When the entrepreneur goes skiing or goes out to play a round of golf instead of sticking around to generate more business or to work on a new business venture, many people are much worse off, but especially the government which depends on businesses to create new jobs that can generate more tax revenue.

 

Yes, the folks in Sacramento are the great destroyers of what should be the state with the best of everything, because certainly the residents of California do their part by carrying the burden of very high taxes, but end up getting only mediocre to very bad (especially in the poorest cities) services from the government in return.  Teachers in California are paid 35 percent above the national average, but the state has one of the highest high school drop-out rates.  Public employees enjoy salaries and benefits that most companies would struggle to pay, but often just the most basic services, like getting a driver’s license or renewing one’s car tag can be an onerous process.  To top it all off, public employees enjoy incredible retirement benefits where not only do they receive full health care benefits, they can also retire at the age of 50 with a pension that pays upwards to 95 percent of their last few year’s salary.  Don’t believe that, take a look at this database that lists 5,115 retired California government workers that receive pensions in excess of $100,000!

 

http://californiapensionreform.com/calpers/

 

Stunning?  Surprising?  Can’t understand it?  Neither can the people of California, and besides that, these kinds of generous pensions are unsustainable, especially with the thousands of California government workers that are slated to retire in the coming years.  Yes, the state of California train is heading in one direction and instead of the Governor being in the state to monitor the results of the election today and to get the state legislature back to work to solving the state’s problems Schwarzenegger is across the country involved in something that will have no impact on California for 7 years!  Not a surprise, not a surprise at all…..

 

No, Arnold Schwarzenegger should not alone take blame for the current mess in California, but he should be blamed for not having the guts to stand up and fight for what he said he believed in when he ran for Governor in 2003.  Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is an “Economic Girlie-Man,” but he is much worse than that…Arnold is a coward and he snuck out of the state last night because he is not man enough to step before the cameras when he and compatriots get their asses handed to them today and admit that they have run the state in a ditch and that it is time for some common sense in Sacramento. 

 

There was a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger actually had a good understanding of how the world works.  The Arnold that a couple of us here at Coaches Hot Seat knew when we lived in Santa Monica and would see out early in the morning in his Hummer checking out some of his vast real-estate holdings, seems to no longer exist.  Yes, Arnold at one time had a clue, but now he has become lost along with the Chicken Little’s of the world that believe the future lies in the punishment of the American people and the eventual roll-back of our standard of living.  Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger used to have the courage of his convictions and was confident that if the people were given the opportunity to chase their dreams, the entire country and world would be better off.  We know that, because it is on tape:

 

 

 

Arnold, what the hell happened?  By the way, when you finish rubbing shoulders with the Chicken Little crowd, how about coming back to California and doing the job that you said you were going to do when we elected you Governor?  Is that too much to ask?

 

Hopefully, something will come out the disaster that is California, because often it has been this state that has led the country in many things, some good things, some bad.  Maybe, just maybe, the people of California will get fed-up with both the Democrat and Republican parties and start a new political party that will emerge from this mess.  Hey, let’s call it the American Party, a political party that would represent the American People, because certainly most of the people in the two main political parties in our country have made it very clear they don’t give a damn about the American People.  A political party that actually represented the American People.  What a novel idea!  We shall see…

If you want a great read on just what is going on in Washington DC, Washington Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser is out with a new book that is both revealing and depressing at the same time:

So Much Damn Money, “The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government”

Yes, “We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore!”  Take that Arnold “Girlie-Man” Schwarzenegger!  When you get back to California and decide you finally want to get to work doing your job, we would appreciate it if you let the people of California know that you are back on the job….

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Steve Spurrier is one of a handful of coaches (along with Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden and a few other coaches) that if he was ever in trouble and by some strange accident he called Coaches Hot Seat and asked us for our help, we would immediately be calling the airplane charter company so we could fly out and help out the Ol’ Ball Coach so it pains us to listen to Coach Spurrier now and hear the frustration in his voice.  In an interview this past Wednesday on the Paul Finebaum Radio Show (Spurrier Interview – audio), Coach Spurrier sounded terribly discouraged in his and his team’s performance since he got to Columbia and we cannot help but agree completely with Spurrier’s sentiments.  Steve Spurrier has just not gotten the job done at South Carolina and he knows it and with that in mind we look at what we expect from Spurrier and South Carolina in 2009:

 

Excerpt from our analysis on Spurrier and South Carolina in 2009:

 

“Listening to a replay of an interview with Steve Spurrier when he appeared on the Paul Finebaum Radio Show (Spurrier Interview – audio) on Wednesday (May 13, 2009) we couldn’t help but think about Spurrier and his South Carolina team’s chances this fall.  As one can tell from the sound of Coach Spurrier’s voice, he is not real thrilled with what he has been able to accomplish in Columbia so far, and it would be hard to blame him for those feelings after 4 seasons and a 28-22 overall record.  Even worse, Coach Spurrier is only 15-17 in the SEC conference at South Carolina and those overall and SEC records have got to be not only very disappointing to the Ol’ Ball Coach, but also must make him feel like a Florida Large Mouth Bass getting gutted and thrown on the grill.  Very simply, Steve Spurrier has what we call the John Wooden Syndrome, which also could be called the Jack Nicklaus Syndrome, the…..”

 

Steve Spurrier and South Carolina in 2009

 

Enjoy!

 

 

In Coaches Hot Seat’s continuing wanderings far beyond the game of college football we return to the issues of Energy and “Global Warming” and how America can address this very important issue.  A few days ago in a blog post we discussed “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” and we summarize that post in the following way:

 

1.  For all the hysteria on “global warming” by the Chicken Little’s of the world that go around screaming that that the world is coming to an end, according to temperature data of those same very Chicken Little’s, the Earth has warmed only 1.3 degrees over the past century.  1.3 degrees is now “global warming,” but rather a very small warming that is well within many temperature ranges in the past 15,000 years when humans have been dominant on Earth. 

 

2.  Since 1998, a particularly very strong El Nino year, the Earth has actually been cooling, not warming, which is the exact opposite from the hysterical Chicken Little’s that go around screaming the world is about to end predicted with their climate computer models.  A fact:  Since 2000, the Earth has not been warming, but has in fact been cooling, even though CO2 amounts have been increasing during that time.  No one can argue that point, because that is a fact.

 

3.  The Argos Buoy program run out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2003 has actually shown that the oceans of the Earth are actually cooling, not warming as predicted by every climate computer model.

 

4.  The climate computer models that have predicted since 1998 that the temperatures on the Earth would continue to rise with increased CO2 being put into the atmosphere have been completely wrong, because not only is the air temperature of the Earth cooling, the Earth’s oceans are cooling as well.  All of the computer climate models, not actual real temperature data mind you, but computer models predicted in the late 1990s that the Earth would continue to warm into this century, but the exact opposite has happened and that leads us to the following very simple observation: 

 

If the climate computer models have been completely wrong since 1998, why would we trust them now for what will happen in the future and even worse make public policy based on those bogus climate computer models?  Answer:  Only a fool would do so.

 

(If you would like to see a summary of temperature and climate data please see the following April 2009 SPPI Monthly CO2 Report (pdf).)

 

So, where does all of the above leave us?  We have a lot of people running around screaming the world is about to end and that unless we all alter our lives dramatically we will all be playing a part in the Earth’s demise.  That is HOGWASH and anyone that believes the Al Gore’s of the world could be talked into about anything, and unfortunately there are lots of people that can be duped, starting with many of our political leaders.  On Capitol Hill right now, in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Congressman Henry Waxman is trying to pass what he calls “The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” which in our mind is the “Let’s Rip the American People Off and Make a Lot of People on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley Even Richer Than They Are Right Now!”  Let us explain…..

 

At the core of Henry Waxman’s bill to control and reduce CO2 are two main components:

 

1.  A “Cap and Trade” Plan which “caps” emissions of CO2 at certain levels and the hopefully reduces those emissions through a system that is set up to trade those emissions much like commodities are traded on various exchanges.

 

2.  The second component of Waxman’s bill is a requirement that utilities buy a certain percentage of “renewable” energy, wind, solar, etc.,.

 

The main problem with the above two items as see here it at Coaches Hot Seat, is that the above two items will at a minimum double the cost of energy in the United States and will set our country up for speculators in a “carbon trading” exchange to be able to bid up the price even higher on energy, which involves everything that we do from heating and cooling our homes to the cost of food at the grocery store.  Since all of us here at Coaches Hot Seat live in the state of California we have had first-hand experience with something that is very close the “Cap and Trade” bill that the Democrats want to pass and here is the reality of how that has affected us:

 

Our energy bills have doubled and for some of us tripled in the last 5 years. 

 

That’s right, in the state of California it now costs upwards to 32 cents per KW Hour for electricity when the average in the United States is around 12 centers per KW Hour.  If we look at our Pacific Gas & Electric power bills and figure out how much we are actually paying for our energy it is very clear that the environmental policies that have been put into place have at least doubled the cost of our energy and since our energy prices increased the California economy has been on a straight downward path only propped up by what all of us know was a bubble-driven real estate market.  Since the real estate bubble has popped here in California, revenues have taken a large dive down ($12 billion down just in the last year) as the cost of doing business in this state is no longer competitive with nearby states.  Yes, the very same policies that have at least doubled the cost of energy for our homes is the exact type of bill that the Democrats hope to make law in the United States and that can only mean one thing, the Waxman bill is:

 

A Massive Tax Increase on the American People

 

Imagine for a moment how a doubling of the energy prices of Americans that live in areas of the country that have to do a lot of cooling their houses in the summer and heating them in the winter, of what the impact of doubling or even tripling the cost of energy would be.  Here in San Francisco Bay area several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat are lucky enough to live very near the Bay which allows us to live in one of the most temperate areas in the country, which should be keeping out energy costs down.  In 2008, most of us never turned on the air conditioners in our homes because it never got above 80 degrees where we live and we only run the heater in our homes 20 or so days a year in the winter when it the temperature drops between 30 and 40 degrees.  Most of the year the temperature is between 50 degrees at night and 75 degrees during the day and even though we use very little energy in our homes, our home energy bills average over $600 per month, which is at least a doubling, and for some of us a tripling of what our power bills were only 5 years ago.  We have friends that live out away from the Bay area 50 miles or so and they have to run the air conditioner in their homes in the Summer and they have power bills in the $2,000 range in the Summer months and that is the kind of bill that many in America can expect if the Waxman bill is allowed to become law.

 

Besides drastically increasing the cost of energy on all Americans, mind you all because the Earth has warmed 1.3 degrees in the last century (but has been cooling over the past 10 years!), and not only do these folks want to force utilities to buy costly renewable energy which will drive up the cost of electricity so that those renewables will be competitive (a sham of an idea by the way), they want to set up a “carbon exchange” where carbon will be trade on an open market like oil.  Now this idea makes us think that the folks behind this “Cap and Trade” idea are lunatics or fools, because if these people really believe it is a good idea for speculators (i.e. Greedy Bastards on Wall Street) and others entities from outside of the United States to be able to enter into this “carbon trading” market and drive up the price of carbon and thus the price of energy on all Americans, then these folks are beyond help.  Didn’t we all see last year that by allowing speculators to be able to get control of the oil futures market (see Enron Rule and how it has cost all Americans big!) which drove the price of a barrel of oil last summer to around $150 dollars, when the underlying fundamentals of oil had not changed at all?  Yes, we all remember that $4.00+ per gallon of gas and if the Democrats in Washington DC get their way not only will our oil markets continue to be manipulated by the Greedy Bastards on Wall Street and even foreign countries that have an interest in seeing the price of oil go higher, these same speculators will move into this new “carbon trading” market and they will drive up the price of carbon and thus energy and take our country back to the brink of disaster, as we were in the Summer of 2008.  Yes, that makes a lot of sense.  No, only an idiot would support a bogus “Cap and Trade” approach, or someone that wanted to put the price of energy and thus the national interest of our country in the hands of people that could do our country great harm. 

 

Do Democrats really want that?  Do they really want to pass a law that will at least double the price of energy on all Americans and then set up a system that will allow the Greedy Bastards on Wall Street and speculators to drive up the price of energy, which affects everything we do in our lives?  We thought that Democrats claimed they gave a damn about the common man, but as we have seen here in California the very scheme they are cooking up in Congress is punishing the average citizen and now they want to tie a bogus “carbon trading” approach that will drive energy prices even higher.  Are these people stupid or are they so owned by some in the environmental movement (many here in the Bay area) and on Wall Street who are poised to make billions if a bogus “Cap and Trade” bill is passed?  Well, if the Democrats are that stupid and they actually believe that a 1.3 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature in the last century and real and verifiable cooling in the last 8 years is worth the pain that this “Cap and Trade” bill will inflict on the American people, then have at it.  By all means, have at it, but let the Democrats and President Obama be forewarned, if energy prices have doubled or worse a year from now, the Democrat Party will pay dearly at the polls in the midterm elections, because if energy prices double in the United States of America there will be a lot of people on fixed incomes and in the middle class that be punished severely.  As for the plan by Democrats to try and rebate the increased cost of energy, do they really think the American people are so stupid that they don’t realize that once money starts flowing to the Federal Government that it will ever come back to the people?  No, we are not that stupid and that is why the Democrats should think long and hard about the Waxman “Cap and Trade” bill, because not only will a doubling or worse of energy prices give the Republicans a chance to get off the mat, those higher energy prices and the dislocation they would cause in our economy would create the opportunity for new national political parties to form as a counter-weight to the two parties that have gotten this country into so much trouble over the past 20 years.  Yes, pass “Cap and Trade,” but please don’t be surprised that as energy prices go up, all created by a bogus and unnecessary “Cap and Trade” bill, that it doesn’t come back and bite the Democrats on the ass.

 

OK, we have made it very clear that we believe, based on our personal experience here in California, that the “Cap and Trade” bill before Congress will double or more the cost of energy in the United States.  It is logical to assume that we do not believe that a doubling of the American people’s energy prices is a good idea for what we consider a very small amount of warming of the Earth, but that does not mean that we do not believe that the United States needs a big and broad National Energy Plan that will achieve 4 main goals:

 

1.  Energy Independence of the United States by 2050

 

2  A reduction of the United States reliance on fossil fuels as we move towards the next generation of energy products and sources

 

3.  A continuation of the strides we have made in the last 40 years cleaning up our air and water under the Clean Air and Water Acts

 

4.  Create enough energy so that we can have an economy that can grow with at least a 4 percent rate yearly and can thus create millions of new business and good paying jobs.  (This last goal is very important because the United States is now facing a fiscal disaster with all of our current outstanding debt (13 trillion or so) and the large amount of unfunded mandates we will have to pay ($50 trillion or so) and if we do not grow our economy and create lots more wealth, income and thus federal tax receipts the United States will be bankrupt in the next 25 years.  We must have solid growth in our economy going forward and no modern economy can grow at a 4 percent rate unless it is creating reasonably priced energy that can then be used by entrepreneurs to create news businesses and new jobs.  In California, the cost of energy has gotten so high that the “wheel of commerce” has almost ground to a halt and we are seeing first-hand as high earners and businesses are fleeing the state and taking billions in tax revenues with them.  Economic growth is paramount and we are going to needs lots of new energy sources in the future to create that energy to get our economy moving again)

 

Here is how we would propose to achieve the above 4 goals:

 

1.  Conservation – We may not always agree with the new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu (a former professor at Cal, Berkeley and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997), but no one can doubt the man’s intelligence and his primary goal of creating an energy policy that is in the best interest of the United States.  That may sound obvious, but there have been many people in government in recent years that cared more about making certain industries rich rather than what was best for the country and although we may disagree with Steven Chu on some things, we would never doubt the man’s sincerity.  One of the main things that Steven Chu talks about a lot is the United States becoming a country where we conserve as much energy as possible and this is a place where we can all make our homes and businesses more efficient and thus save lots of energy that can be used elsewhere in our economy.  Yes, conservation of energy is very important, but it cannot be something that is harped on too much by our leaders because Americans if pushed will pull back their energy use to such a level that it will impact the general economy and right now we need Americans and entrepreneurs to go out and live their lives and create new businesses.  Focusing on conservation is important, but an over emphasis on conservation can be detrimental to the economy.

 

2.  Major Investments in New and Renewable Energy Sources – The United States government should directly through the Department of Energy invest in and even subsidize all type of new and renewable (solar, wind, battery technology for vehicles. etc..) energy sources that could help create more energy for our country.  The United States, led by the President, needs to create a “Manhattan Project” type of project that will engage entrepreneurs in the US that will work to create all different kinds of new energy and this will require large expenditures of money so that we can move forward aggressively on all energy fronts.  The current Department of Energy budget is around $25 billion dollars.  We would increase that by at least $75 billion so that we were spending at least $100 billion per year in our country to create new forms of energy that will move our country away from fossil fuels.

 

3.  Nuclear Energy – In addition to investing in all kinds of new and renewable sources we would have the federal government make major investments along with a handful of private companies to build at least 100 new nuclear plants in the United States before 2050.  In addition, we would also work to see if where we could add nuclear reactors to any of the current 104 nuclear plants in the United States.  Nuclear energy and new nuclear energy sources (like the National Ignition Facility & Photon Science project in the Bay area) will have to be a big player in the future energy sources for the United States, especially because as we develop battery technologies that will be able to create battery powered electric cars that we can all drive (like the new E-Mini Cooper which is just coming on the market in Los Angeles), that when all of us go to plug in those cars at night we will have the energy available to charge those cars.  New Nuclear plants and other new different types of nuclear energy are a must and if someone tells you that the United States can become energy independent without building lots of new nuclear plants they are either a fool or a shill for someone that does not have the best interests of the future of the United States at heart.  If France can get 80 percent of their electricity safely from nuclear power then the United States can do it as well. 

 

4.  Common Sense instead of “Cap and Trade”:  A Carbon Tax – Instead of the tomfoolery that is the Waxman “Cap and Trade” bill the United States needs to come up with public policy that will nudge our country away from fossil fuels over the next 50 years without doubling the cost of energy and punishing the American people.  An obvious approach instead of the bogus and in our opinion dangerous “Cap and Trade” bill is a straightforward carbon tax that would tax the use of carbon that is in all of our energy sources, oil and gasoline, natural gas, coal, etc..  Three Congressmen actually introduced a proposal for a Carbon Tax this week, but their approach is way to punishing on people that get power from coal power plants and a much better approach would be to add a small carbon tax to all of our sources of energy that create carbon so that the tax would have a small impact on the American people and our economy.  We go by the maxim of Jack Kemp when proposing a Carbon Tax in that:

 

“When you tax something you get less of it and when you subsidize something you get more of it.” 

 

The federal and state taxes on cigarettes has proven that if we put a tax on something it will be used less and thus a small Carbon Tax that increased gradually over time coupled with using the money generated from the Carbon Tax to subsidize new energy sources, like solar, wind, biofuels, battery technology, would be the ideal situation because it reduce the use of energy that uses carbon and towards new energy sources that don’t create carbon.  Isn’t that just plain common sense?

 

One of the best arguments for a Carbon Tax is that it would begin to move Americans away from using sources of energy that created CO2 and towards new energy sources that will move the United States towards energy independence, which must be the overall arching goal of our country’s National Energy Policy.  A few of us here at Coaches Hot Seat spent a considerable amount of time in the Persian Gulf region of the world before, during and after the Gulf War in 1991 (Desert Storm) in the US Navy and US Army and we believe it is our nation’s national interest to move away from relying on oil from the Middle Eastern region of the world.

 

Yes, we believe that a straight-forward and common sense Carbon Tax that placed a small Carbon Tax to start and gradually building over the next 50 years at a constant rate and then using the money generated from a Carbon Tax, would be the way to go instead of the totally crazy and dangerous Waxman “Cap and Trade” bill.

 

The leaders of our country, starting with President Obama, need to step up and be honest with the American people and say that we are facing a huge problem with energy that is impacting the national security of our country and that we must over the next 40 years or so become energy independent, and that we can do it if we all pitch in to move towards that goal.  As Abraham Lincoln once said and is very apt for the issues that surround Energy in our country right now:

 

“I am a firm believe in the people.  If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis.  The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

 

How true President Lincoln, and that is the exact tact our leaders should take as they address Energy and other major issues in our country today.  “Cap and Trade” is a fraud that we believe that approach will put our country in great danger as we turn over the price of energy to speculators and the Greedy Bastards on Wall Street.  A straight-forward Carbon Tax that uses the money raised to fund new sources of energy of all types makes common sense and is an American way to get at this problem.

 

5.  Natural Gas – The United States of America is the Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas in the world and we need to over the next 40 years as we move to new sources of energy use our natural gas (that burns much cleaner than coal and puts out much less CO2) to power both large power plants and uses put in our vehicles with a focus on using natural gas in our large trucks and in vehicles owned by the federal government and large companies that have lots of vehicles.  The Pickens Plan created by T. Boone Pickens, which includes taking advantage of the large wind corridor in the middle of our country, makes perfect sense to us and we need our government to move aggressively to move lots of vehicles so that they can operate using all of our abundantly available natural gas.

 

6.  Oil – We need to quit kidding ourselves and aggressively start to drill for sources of oil in our country and off of our coasts because there is a very simple equation at play here.  For every barrel at oil that we can find here in the United States that is one less barrel of oil we would need to import from the Middle East and South America.  Over the next 40 years as we move from getting most of our energy from fossil fuels to other sources of energy, we need to make sure that we get every barrel of oil that we can from right here in the United States.  Anyone that opposes drilling for oil here in the United States is only working against the national interest of our country and requiring us to continue to keep our armed forces in parts of the world where we must import oil from.  We must find all the oil we can in the U. S. and turn it into as a clean of a product as possible so we can use it in our vehicles before we move to other ways to transport ourselves and our families.  Electric cars at reasonable prices will be available by 2020 and until then we will need and even after we will need to use lots of oil for our energy and we need to get all the oil we can from right here in the United States. 

 

From our point of view this is all very simple, but the Democrats in Congress and many in the Obama Administration are trying to make our Energy problems not only as complicated as possible with a bogus “Cap and Trade” bill that will not only double or even triple the cost of energy, but will also put the price of our energy under the control and manipulation of the Greedy Bastards on Wall Street.  No, that does not make any sense, especially from a political party that claims to care about the Common Man.  No, what we need is good old common sense and a leader that can talk directly to the American people about the policies that we need to put into place in order to both protect our national interest but also to get the country into a position by 2050 where we will be able to control our own destiny on Energy. 

 

The countries of the world that are able to build systems and create technologies that will make that as close to possible energy independent in the future will be the countries that will emerge as the winners in this century.  It is far from clear that the United States of America will be the leader of the world in the year 2100 as we are today, but if we do not act on Energy now to insure that we will be able to control our destiny in the future, we will most certainly not be the leader 90 years from now.

 

We must act now to aggressively move towards securing our energy independence, not because of a bunch of Chicken Little’s running around saying the world is about to end because the temperature went up 1.3 degrees in the last century, but because it is foolhardy and dangerous for our country to be dependent on other countries for something as critical as Energy, which in the end affects the price of everything in our lives and thus our economy as well.

 

We must act now.  Will we move to enact the foolishness that is currently working its way through the U.S. House that will punish the American People for just living their lives or will it be something that is American and that is defined by great goals and will move the American People forward towards achieving those goals by clearly defined policies that can be clearly understood and implemented.  It is our leaders’ choice, and they had better choose well.

 

Next up:  Creating a Federal Income Tax Code that can generate maximum revenues for the government and maximum growth in the economy.

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What better place to start off the Coaches Hot Seat predictions for the 2009 season than with Charlie Weis and the Irish!  We currently have Weis on the No. 7 Hot Seat, but a couple of losses this fall and Charlie will zoom to the top of the Coaches Hot Seat Ranking and more than a couple of losses in 2009 and the Weis era at Notre Dame will be over.   

So let’s get the predictions cranked up for the 2009 college football season and we start off our full analysis and game-by-game prediction with: 

                                       Charlie Weis and Notre Dame in 2009 

Our analysis of Charlie Weis in 2009 begins like this: 

 The three-time Democratic nominee (1896, 1900 and 1908) for the Presidency of the United States Williams Jennings Bryan once said:

“Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” 

 For Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weis, the 2009 Irish football season will either be a rise by him and his football team to the heights of college football or the Weis era in South Bend will be over.  After Charlie Weis and Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick met in a hotel room in San Jose, California early last December……”

Enjoy!

 

For those of us that have DirecTV we ran across a concert on Channel 101 recently of a band from the 1980s that we grew up hearing their songs on the radio, but never really paid any attention to, Simply Red.  This particular Simply Red concert was held in Taormina, Italy (map of Taormina, Italy) 

Taormina, Italy is a terrific little town with a lot of history on the eastern coast of Sicily right on the Mediterranean and right in the path of the Allied Invasion of Sicily in July and August 1943.  In fact, Taormina is the area of Sicily where British General Montgomery’s troops got bogged down while General George Patton was capturing Palermo on the northwestern side of Sicily with Patton then turning his Seventh Army eastward to race toward Messina, in hopes of beating Montgomery and the British there.  Patton did indeed beat Montgomery to Messina which was portrayed in a great scene in the movie Patton with Montgomery marching into Messina with his army to find Patton already there!  (The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson, Google Books).

 

Today, Taormina, Italy and much of the rest of Sicily is a great place to visit and below is the Greek Theater where this Simply Red concert was held with Mt. Etna in the background

 

 

 

Here are a couple of songs from that Simply Red concert at the old Greek Theater in Taormina, Italy. 

 

 

Simply Red – You Make Me Feel Brand New

 

 

 

Simply Red – Stars

Enjoy!

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Almost anything it seems can be justified in Washington DC today by some people, and that attitude now includes the BCS, as we all learned this past week in an article on Politico.com that former Oklahoma QB and Republican Congressman J. C. Watts has been doing $620,000 worth of lobbying work for the BCS over the past 5 years.  How nice for J. C., that he can generate money from a system that treats some Americans in an inferior way compared to other Americans.  How proud J. C. must be, and clearly these BCS Boys are mighty proud of their creation, but where we sit not only is it not right for some Americans be treated so shabbily and poorly just because they play for certain football teams, but it is also un-American. 

 

In George Orwell’s classic novel, Animal Farm, Mr. Orwell wrote about the Soviet Union leading up to World War II.  From Wikipedia on Animal Farm:

 

“The short novel Animal Farm is dystopian allegory in which animals play the roles of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and overthrow and oust the human owner of a farm (Manor Farm), renaming it Animal Farm and setting it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are equal; however, class and status disparities soon emerge between the different animal species (the pigs being the “greater species”). The novel describes how a society’s ideologies can be manipulated and twisted by those in positions of social and political power, including how Utopian society is made impossible by the corrupting nature of the very power necessary to create it. Throughout the novel Orwell shows that no matter how equal a society starts, the smarter, richer, or more powerful creature will come out on top. As the story says, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

 

The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia destroy any possibility of a Utopia. While this novel portrays poor leadership as the flaw in revolution (and not the act of revolution itself), it also shows how ignorance and indifference to problems within a revolution allow the horrors to happen.”

 

How appropriate it is that Animal Farm comes to mind when we think of the BCS and in that novel Mr. Orwell wrote one of the truest lines in human history, and the following line goes to the heart of these greedy and power hungry bastards running the BCS:

 

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

Yes, that is what this really about.  The BCS Boys, the conference commissioners, the bowl executives, the university presidents and yes, even some athletic directors in “BCS conferences” actually believe that the football players on the “BCS conference” football teams are the following….

 

“All college football players on the I-A level are equal, but some college football players on the I-A level are more equal than others.”

 

Yes, that is really what this all about.  It is not about saving the bowls from a legitimate way to crown a champion in college football with a postseason playoff, which is a ludicrous statement, but rather that the BCS Boys believe that the college football players they represent “are more equal” than the college football players in “non-BCS” conferences.  Of course, student-athletes in every other sport in collegiate athletics are treated equally and championships are won on the field of play, but for some completely “bogus” reason (Joe Paterno’s word on the BCS, not ours), not in college football. 

 

Yes, how proud these BCS Boys must be, but no one should kid themselves, these BCS Boys are greedy bastards that care more about power and money than the college football players they claim to represent and anyone that stands with them to continue the very unfair and un-American BCS must understand that they do not believe in the principles of our nation nor even our founding document:  the Declaration of Independence.  How proud all of the BCS lovers must be, but don’t kid yourself into believing anything but the BCS runs counter to everything all of have been taught about what the United States of America stands for.

 

Yes, how proud J. C. Watts must be and how proud the BCS Boys and their supporters must be.  George Orwell nailed the BCS Boys over 60 years ago and even today his words ring true even in America where people that are representing institutions (public colleges and universities) that are funded by the American people actually have the gall and are allowed to treat one group of Americans in a preferential way over another group of Americans in the same division of college football.  If anyone can point to anyplace in sport or our society where a “BCS” type situation is allowed to exist in America, we would love to hear about it. 

 

Pete Carroll, Joe Paterno, Kyle Whittingham and dozens of other college head coaches have it right and the BCS Boys are dead wrong and the saddest thing is that they don’t give two rips that they discriminate against our fellow Americans.  For all of you BCS supporters, how proud you must be, but sure damn don’t call yourself an American, because real Americans believe in a very simple principle that the BCS Boys don’t give two rips about the basic premise that our country is based upon, namely that “All Americans are created equal.”  All should be clear that there is a difference between someone that recognizes the BCS is wrong and un-American and what supporters of the BCS clearly believe:

 

What Americans Believe:

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

 

What Supporters of the BCS Believe:

 

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

Yes, how proud you BCS supporters must be…  Actually you should be ashamed that you could support such an outrageous and un-American institution and we only hope that the children and the grandchildren of the BCS Boys are treated in the same discriminatory manner as the BCS Boys are treating some student-athletes, coaches and schools in major college football today.  Yes, that would be real justice for the very un-American actions and views of these BCS Boys.

 

 

One of the great things about being college football fan that is able to get to a lot of football games and thus college and universities is being able to see the great college campuses in our country.  When most of us here at Coaches Hot Seat think about the hundred or so college campuses that we have been lucky enough to visit, so many of them come to mind and each has its own charm and history, but one that stands out when considering this blog post is the University of Colorado in Boulder and particularly the stunning CU University Library.  Inscribed above the Colorado University Library is the following:

 

“Who Knows Only His Own Generation Remains Always A Child”

 

It would be very had indeed to find a truer statement and how appropriate that the above quote is inscribed on the building where one can indeed learn about past generations and history and along that line of thought we here at Coaches Hot Seat look back at the 2008 season and our ’08 preseason predictions.  No, that is not quite looking back to even the last generation, but we believe it is wise to look back and see how we did in predicting this past season, not only for the entertainment it provides, but also to see if we can learn anything from our picks.

 

Before the 2008 season we made predictions of won/loss records for every I-A college football team and we also predicted which coaches would not be back for the 2009 season.  Let’s see how we did:

 

The below webpage…

 

2008 Coach and Team Predictions Review

 

…is the starting point to see how our predictions for ever team and if the coach would be back for the ’09 season, with the teams being listed from the undefeated teams, and we predicted that 3 teams would go undefeated in ’08……

 

Team	Coach	‘08 Prediction	‘08 Record
Oklahoma	Bob Stoops	12-0	11-1
Boise State	Chris Peterson	12-0	12-0
Virginia Tech	Frank Beamer	12-0	8-4

 

 

 

 

 

…and that 4 teams would win only 1 game in ’08…

 

Team	Coach	‘08 Prediction	‘08 Record
Washington St.	Paul Wulff	1-12	2-11
Utah State	Brent Guy	1-11	3-9
Idaho	Rob Akey	1-11	2-10
UNLV	Mike Sanford	1-11	5-7

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of our predictions on win/loss records in ‘08, we here at Coaches Hot Seat were exactly right with the win/loss records of 17 teams and…

 

Exact Won/Loss Record – 17 teams

1 Game off of Won/Loss Record – 39 teams

2 Games off of Won/Loss Record – 27 teams

3 Games off of Won/Loss Record – 12 teams

4 Games off of Won/Loss Record – 17 teams

5 Games off of Won/Loss Record – 5 teams

6 Games off of Won/Loss Record – 3 teams

 

From the above numbers, Coaches Hot Seat was off of the Win/Loss records of 2 or less games on 83 teams or 69.2% of the 120 teams in I-A football which seems decent to us, but we were also off 5 or more games for 8 teams which isn’t very good.

 

At the following webpage you can see the teams listed according to our Best Picks/Predictions for the 2008 season…

 

2008 Predictions – Best Picks

 

And at the below webpage the teams listed according to our Worst Picks/Predictions for the 2008 season

 

2008 Predictions – Worst Picks

 

Another very important measurement, perhaps the most important measurement for head football coaches is how they do against the expectations that the fans and media have for their football program.  To that point below are two webpages that show how coaches and teams did relative to our predictions for 2008:

 

2008 Predictions – Overachieved

 

2008 Predictions – Underachieved

 

We note that of the Top 20 head coaches that underachieved according to our ’08 predictions for them, 7 of them were fired.

 

Now let’s look at how we here at Coaches Hot Seat did on our predictions of which coaches would be fired and would not return for the 2009 season.

 

Coaches we predicted would be fired or would retire in 2008 and would not return for the 2009 season:

 

Joe Paterno, Penn State – Did not retire

Mike Bellotti, Oregon – Did not get fired, retired in 2009

Bobby Bowden, FSU – Did not retire

Al Groh, Virginia – Did not get fired (but came close after posting a 5-7 record!)

Dave Wannstedt, Pitt – Did not get fired (Had a nice bounce back year at 9-3)

Jeff Genyk, Eastern Michigan – Got fired

Mike Stoops, Arizona – Did not get fired (7-5 was a step-up for Stoops)

Doug Martin, Kent State – Did not get fired (..even with a 4-8 record)

Hal Mumme, New Mexico State – Got fired

JD Brookhart, Akron – Did not get fired (…even with a 5-7 record)

Greg Robinson, Syracuse – Got fired

Brent Guy, Utah State – Got fired

Mike Sanford, UNLV – Did not get fired (Yes, 5-7 was a big improvement…)

 

Overall we predicted that 13 coaches would be fired or would retire in 2008 and only 5 of those 13 coaches are not returning for 2009, and in that 5 is Mike Bellotti who most certainly did not get fired at Oregon.

 

Following are the 17 coaches that actually did get fired during or after the 2008 college football season:

 

Tommy Bowden, Clemson – Did not predict

Tommy Tuberville, Auburn – Did not predict

Phillip Fulmer, Tennessee – Did not predict

Gregg Brandon, Bowling Green – Did not predict

Ty Willingham, Washington – Did not predict

Joe Glenn, Wyoming – Did not predict

Shane Montgomery, Miami (OH) – Did not predict

Tom Amstutz, Toledo – Did not predict

Jeff Jagodzinski, Boston College – Did not predict

Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State – Did not predict

Ron Prince, Kansas State – Did not predict

Jeff Genyk, Eastern Michigan – Did predict firing

Chuck Long, San Diego State – Did not predict

Hal Mumme, New Mexico State – Did predict firing

Stan Brock, Army – Did not predict

Greg Robinson, Syracuse – Did predict firing

Brent Guy, Utah State – Did predict firing

 

So in 2008, 17 coaches got fired from their jobs and we predicted before the ’08 season only 4 of those firings.  Probably, the most surprising firings to us from the above list was Tommy Tuberville at Auburn and Jeff Jagodzinski at Boston College, but both of those coaches had ‘situations” with people in power at their schools and thus were vulnerable when they got into their own particular situations.

 

Overall in 2008, 22 coaching jobs changed hands, with 17 of those jobs opening up due to firings, 3 coaches retiring or resigning (Rocky Long at New Mexico, Joe Tiller at Purdue, and Mike Bellotti at Oregon), and 2 coaches moving on to other jobs (Gene Chizik from Iowa State to Auburn and Brady Hoke from Ball State to San Diego State). 

 

The last thing to look back at regarding the 2008 college football season for us here at Coaches Hot Seat was our last 2008 Preseason Coaches Hot Seat Rankings, which you can find here…

 

Coaches Hot Seat Rankings – August 28, 2008

 

As one can see from the above rankings, Coaches Hot Seat had 30 head coaches on the “Hot Seat” entering the ’08 season and of those 30 coaches, 9 were fired and are not returning in 2009.  Those 9 coaches were:

 

Ty Willingham, Washington

Joe Glenn, Wyoming

Greg Robinson, Syracuse

Chuck Long, San Diego State

Hal Mumme, New Mexico State

Ron Prince, Kansas State

Brent Guy, Utah State

Tom Amstutz, Toledo

Stan Brock, Army

 

What does all of this mean?  Not much, but it is interesting to look back at with football season 4 or so months away….

 

Next up in the CHS Blog:  We begin our Coach and Team Predictions for the 2009 season starting with Charlie Weis and Notre Dame.  Now that should be an interesting prediction on ’09 record and on whether Weis will be back for the 2010 season!

 

 

Now we here at Coaches Hot Seat turn away from college football for a few minutes to address what we believe is a critical issues for our nation: 

 

Energy and the future of the United States of America

 

There is so much misinformation from both sides of the so-called “global warming or climate change” debate that we will attempt to actually get some real facts and science onto the table as we discuss this issue and we have been heartened to see that the Obama Administration has declared that science will again be paramount and one of the most important considerations for government decision-making in areas involving science issues.

 

Yes, let’s put science first, but let’s make sure that real science is being put first and not the “science” that fits the goals and objectives of the people in this world that have been running around for about a dozen years now telling everyone that the world is about to end unless we turn the clock back on our advanced civilizations by reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the earth’s environment.  As we will discuss here, the “chicken-little’s” that have been driving the “global warming” debate do not occupy the high-ground of this debate and if they do get their way, especially the one’s that dream of rolling back the standard of living of Americans, you can kiss away the life that many of us here in America have lived during our lifetimes.

 

Yes, let’s start with science and yes, we will even start in one of the  most liberal places on the earth and a center of many “chicken little’s” of the world, and that is the University of California, Berkley.  At Cal, Professor Richard A. Muller teaches the course Physics C10, which is also known as “Physics for future Presidents.”  In addition to teaching this course he has also written a great book, Physics for Future Presidents, The Science Behind the Headlines and in both the book and course Professor Muller goes into many very interesting subjects related to physics, but one of the key issues that he addresses is: “Is global warming actually happening?”

 

A few years ago it would have been hard for anyone, especially a professor at a school like Cal, to even ask the question “Is global warming actually happening,” but Professor Muller not only challenges his students to think long and hard about “global warming and climate change” but also to consider the actual science behind the subjects.  Recently, Professor Muller has done a couple of interviews on Dr. Bill Wattenberg’s radio show on KGO-AM 810 in San Francisco and in those interviews Professor Muller addressed many of the issues around “global warming.”  One of the issues that came up during these interviews was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth and Professor Muller did make his views very clear that in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore “used misleading information” to advance his own personal point of view on “global warming.”  Professor Muller is too much of a gentleman to say that Al Gore lied in his movie, but from where we sit there are many scenes in An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore displayed things, like the flooding of coastal areas around the world due to global warming, which is total hogwash.  Even the worst case scenario by the “global warming” alarmists has the sea level in the coastal areas rising “possibly’ 1 meter by 2100, but Al Gore in an Inconvenient Truth showed coastal areas getting flooded with a 20 foot rise in sea levels.  As we said, TOTAL HOGWASH.  As for us a few of us here at Coaches Hot Seat, we had the opportunity to be around then Senator Al Gore when he ran for the Presidency in 1988 and straight-out we wouldn’t trust the guy to watch our dogs.  No, it is worse than that.  If we had 1000 No. 2 pencils we would not trust Al Gore to watch one No. 2 pencil.  No, it is worse than that.  If Al Gore was in a room with a greedy bastard from Wall Street and a BCS Boy, we would trust the greedy bastard from Wall Street and the BCS Boy with one No. 2 pencil before we would ever trust it with Al Gore.  Very simply in our minds, Al Gore and his purported “science” on “global warming” is a fraud, and we believe the man is a demagogue (and a pompous ass as well!).  In addition to that, Al Gore goes around the world telling everyone else how they should live their life by reducing their energy usage and Al Gore lives like an Egyptian pharaoh by flying around the world in private jets and splitting time between a large mansion outside Nashville and a multi-million dollar condo in San Francisco.  Why anyone would listen to Al Gore on “global warming” or any other public policy issue is beyond us, because in our mind not only is Al Gore a hypocrite but in our opinion his particular recommendations to solve “global warming” would do tremendous damage to the United States.

 

Now let’s get to some actual science and to just what is behind this “global warming” debate.  The organization driving the “global warming” debate is the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has produced several reports in the last 20 years which they believe shows that humans have caused “global warming” on the Earth.  If one actually reads the IPCC reports and looks at the temperature data for the Earth from Great Britain’s Hadley Centre one will see that from 1920 to 1940 temperatures increased 0.7 F.  From 1940 to 1975 there was a cooling of 0.4 F.  From 1975 to 2008 there has been a warming of 0.9 F, for a total increase in temperature in the 20th century of 1.3 F.  (There was no net change from 1900 to 1920 according to the temperature data)  That’s right, in a century when the Industrial Revolution was ramped up in the US and around the world and tons of the so-called evil C02 was being added to the atmosphere the temperature of the Earth increased 1.3 degrees F, and that is the data according to the biggest ‘chicken little’s the world is coming to an end,” the IPCC.  Yes, all of this hysteria about “global warming” and that the world will end because of all the CO2 that evil humans are putting into the atmosphere is over the following:

 

“A 1.3 degree F average worldwide temperature increase in the last century.”

 

That’s right, only a 1.3 degree F increase in the average temperature has got people running for the hills and even our own leaders in the United States telling us that we will need to drastically alter our lives or the world will end.  Of course, that a 1.3 degree F temperature change in 100 years is something unusual on the Earth is total hogwash.  We live on a dynamic planet that had had thousands of wide climate changes in the last million years and just in the past 15,000 thousand years humans have noted about a dozen wild swings in the climate, as has been documented starting from Ancient Greece up until 2009:

 

“Theophrastus (374-287 BC), in turn a student of Aristotle, followed the tradition with De ventis and observed that Crete’s mountains had previously produced fruit and grain whereas at the time he wrote, the winters were more severe and had more snow falls. In De causis plantarum, Theophrastus also noted that the Greek city of Larissus once had plentiful olive trees but falling temperatures killed them.” 

 

It wasn’t Plato’s Hummer, after all.

The Holocene Warming a (11,600-8,500bp). The Egyptian Cooling (8,500-8,000bp). The Holocene Warming b (8,000-5,600bp). The Akkadian Cooling (5,600-3,500AD). The Minoan Warming (3,500-3,200bp). The Bronze Age Cooling (3,200-2,500bp). The Roman Warming (500BC-535AD). The Dark Ages (535-900AD). The Medieval Warming (900AD-1300 AD). The Little Ice Age (1300AD-1850AD). Recall that the Greeks survived the warmings without air-conditioners.  “History,” writes Plimer, “cannot be rewritten just because it does not fit a computer model with a pre-ordained conclusion.” 

From:  Heaven + Earth, Global Warming:  The Missing Science

 

Yes indeed, “History cannot be rewritten just because it does not fit a computer model with pre-ordained conclusion,” and the people that believe devoutly in “global warming” and want all of us to dramatically alter our lives because they think the world is coming to an end,  love to use computer models, but they all too often forget about what has happened in Earth’s history and what is actually happening right now.

 

Now let’s move to what has been going on in the first decade of this century, a decade in which all of the “global warming” alarmists predicted that temperatures on the Earth would continue to go upwards because tons of CO2 was being emitted into the atmosphere both in the Western industrialized countries but also by the emerging economies of China and India.  Yes, let’s put science first and go to the real temperature numbers.  Isn’t that a novel idea?  In this century so far, the temperatures, according to Great Britain’s Hadley Centre the following temperatures have showed up so far averaged across the Earth (Below numbers represent centigrade above the 1961-90 estimated average global temperature):
 
2001  .40
2002  .46
2003  .46
2004  .43
2005  .48
2006  .42
2007  .41 

2008  .40

 

That is not cumulative temperatures rising, but the average temperature each year above the average temperature of the Earth between 1961-90, which is the standard measure the “global warming” folks use as what they think the temperature on the Earth should always be (that the Earth is a dynamic planet and has had dozens of ice ages and very hot periods in the last million years (when humans were hardly around) doesn’t seem to register with these “chicken little’s,” but that is another debate entirely).  In other words in this century the average temperature has been about .43 CENTIGRADE (not Fahrenheit) above the 1961-90 average (which is nothing), and in fact temperatures have been quite constant this century which has been at a time when global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever (i.e China, the rest of Asia, and the developing countries of South America have been going full bore this century and really for the past 25 years).  The computer models that the entire “global warming theory” is based upon, not actual real data mind you, but computer models looking into the future predicted much higher temperatures this century in 1999 and that is why the models that are now looking forward by these same “global warming” folks, have now been proven to be bogus by the actual real temperature data.  There has not been 1 year that C02 emissions have decreased in the last 50 years, so by faulty reasoning of the “global warming” crowd, global temperatures should be increasing at a steady rate along with those emissions, but the temperature on the Earth is not increasing, and the Hadley Centre’s data has been backed up by temperature data at NASA that actually shows more cooling in this century than the above numbers and less of a temperature rise at the end of the last century.  In addition to temperatures not going up in this century as the “global warming” computer models have predicted, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a program of “Argos Buoys” have been deployed in the world’s oceans and those buoys are sending back water temperature data and that data is showing that the “global warming” computer models have been wrong, again…  The Argos Buoys are sending back data that shows not that the oceans of the Earth are not warming, but are actually cooling by a little bit, which is in direct opposition to what the “global warming” computer models and “global warming chicken little’s” predicted when the buoys were launched in 2003.  Are you starting to see a trend here? 

 

Yes, these “global warming” folks have been on a very bad run lately, because their belief “the world will come to an end unless all of us drastically change our lives” is coming apart at the seems, because the very
“global warming” computer models that have predicted 5+ degree F temperature increases in this century have been completely wrong up to this point.  Yes, that is real science that you will not hear from the Al Gore’s of the world, from many in our government that are licking their chops in hopes to get more control over our lives, and most certainly not from the “global warming” hysterics who are desperate for you to believe that the Earth is on its final legs.  We have some news for the “global warming” fear-mongers…. You hogwash is increasingly being exposed for what it really is, and that is junk science.  Yes, that is right, we here at Coaches Hot Seat believe that current “global warming” theories that dominate the public debate and the news media are nothing more than junk science and that “global warming” is built upon the false assumption that our dynamic Earth should always be within a particular temperature range, namely the average temperature range between 1961 and 1990.  As we showed earlier, the Earth has been through many large climate changes just in the last 15,000 years, and it has only been during the last 100 years or so that CO2 was being put into the environment in any large quantities by humans.  Since the “global warming” crowd wants all of us to believe that it is humans putting CO2 into atmosphere alone that has caused the Earth to warm 1.3 degrees F in the last century, we believe it takes not only a suspension of all logic and common sense, but also a suspension of science for anyone to believe that humans are THE cause of a 1.3 degree F temperature change.

 

Now that we have some of the science surrounding the “global warming” debate on the table, we will turn in one of our upcoming blog posts to some of the solutions that the “global warming” crowd wants to inflict upon the American people and what is at the heart of their hoped for public policy, namely a “Cap and Trade” bill that the co-CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger (with Warren Buffett) calls:

 

“…monstrously stupid to do right now.”

 

Yes, the Democrats led by Congressman Henry Waxman in the House of Representatives have their sights on instituting a massive energy tax increase that will touch everything we do in our lives and raise the cost of electricity and other forms of energy on all Americans to levels that those of us here in California have had to deal with for several years now.  If the American people are not ready to see their electricity and other energy costs double, then they should be paying attention to what is going on in Congress right now, because there is a massive multi-Trillion dollar tax in the hopper that will not only make all Americans poorer, it will in our opinion slow down economic growth in a very significant way.  In the state of California, very radical environmentalists have raised the cost of doing business and the cost of energy in our homes to such a level that they have literally removed billions of dollars out of the economy that could be going into investments in our local communities and in businesses that could hire new employees.  We will go into the cost of living and energy here in California in our next blog post, but sadly the people driving the train in this state do not understand, nor care from what we can tell, that their actions are inflicting tremendous damage on the state, and now California Congressman Henry Waxman wants to inflict that same damage on the country.  The Orange County Register has a terrific editorial on Waxman’s “Cap and Trade” bill:  Editorial: Cap-and-trade stumbling in D.C.

 

In our next blog post on Energy we will also address what we think are the important issues relative to how our country should generate energy in the coming decades and how very important it is for the United States to become as close as possible to being energy independent and free of the necessity to purchase oil from countries that are in many ways hostile to the U.S..  Yes, there are many places where we agree with environmentalists, especially on the importance of protecting our communities from pollution and on how vital it is for the U.S. to become energy independent, but we have a vastly different way that we would address our energy problems as compared to the “Cap and Trade” bill that is a massive tax increase that Congressman Waxman is proposing.  We believe that how we create, generate, distribute and use energy is one of the top 3 issues for the United States over the next 50 years and when an issue is that important it should not be left up to what we consider to be a bogus “Cap and Trade” system that we believe will actually turn our country’s energy pricing to the greedy bastards on Wall Street and even to foreign countries that might want to secretly manipulate our commodity markets (as we believe many did last year in the oil market when it went to $150 a barrel).  No, “Cap and Trade” legislation is not the way to go, but government does have a critical role to play and instead of dreaming up bogus systems that are subject to manipulation by bad actors, President Obama should be look at another model to reshape our energy future, namely the same model used by President Kennedy when he spoke about our determination to go to the Moon:

 

 

 

No, John Kennedy would not be wasting his time with a bogus “Cap and Trade” scheme that will punish the American people if he was around today…..No, President Kennedy would address the issues of Energy head on and in the way Americans have always taken on great challenges, by directly defining the problem, setting the goals and objectives, and then laying out a very clear path to solve those problems in an uniquely American way.

 

More on our ideas for Energy and America going forward in our next CHS Blog Post….

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Before we get to the BCS Boys and some other matters we must note the passing of Jack Kemp over the weekend.  All of us here at Coaches Hot Seat were still in diapers when Jack Kemp retired from the Buffalo Bills in 1969 so we never got to see Mr. Kemp play football, but we have seen enough highlights and read enough about the man to know he was a very good football player.  Several of us did run into Jack Kemp though when we were in college in the 1980s when Representative Kemp was still serving in the US House of Representatives and during Mr. Kemp’s run for the Presidency in 1988.  “Mr. Kemp” as we called him seemed to always be talking about economics and ideas flowed from the man like a fast flowing river and he always had time to talk to everyone, but especially for people that worked for a living, like the fry cook, the waitress and yes, even inquisitive college students.  Jack Kemp was truly “a prince” of a man and our world lost a lot over the weekend with his passing.

 

So many stories come to mind when we think of Jack Kemp, but a Time magazine story in 1996 when the presumptive Republican nominee Bob Dole was considering his Vice-Presidential choices, had Senator Dole asking his aides:

 

“Dole had been playing with the idea of Kemp for some time. Since June the Dole team had been running background checks on a short list of Republican Governors and Senators that did not include Kemp. But from time to time Dole would startle some aides by asking, “What about the quarterback?””

 

It was not easy for Bob Dole to pick Jack Kemp as his VP because (from that same Time magazine story):

 

“For a moment last week, two traits of Bob Dole the lawmaker came to the rescue of Bob Dole the candidate–the ability to swallow your pride and to make peace with your past. To arrive at the astonishing choice of Jack Kemp as his running mate, a man who has spent a good part of his political career spearing Bob Dole, required both. Dole admitted as much in a Thursday-night phone call to Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, his successor as majority leader and a good friend of Kemp’s. If Kemp was the one, Dole told Lott, it would be a signal to everyone of how seriously Dole wanted to win, for there could hardly be a tougher choice for him to accept.”

 

 

Of course, the ticket of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp lost to the incumbent President Bill Clinton in 1996, but Jack Kemp never stopped talking and selling his optimistic view of how we can solve the problems of this world.  As Jack Kemp once famously said:

 

“When you tax something you get less of it, and when you reward something you get more of it.”

 

Where all of us at Coaches Hot Seat now live, in the state of California, the above quote by Mr. Kemp could not be truer as both the Democrats and Republicans that are running this former great state have through their wild-spending ways and out-of-control and over-the-top regulations brought this state to its knees and to the edge of insolvency.  As Jack Kemp knew all too well, a government that at its core despises business and often even its own citizens will eventually reach the tipping point where even the most innovative and hard working in the society cannot make a business work when they are up against oppressive taxes and asinine regulations.  Only a very stupid person would start a manufacturing company in California today or any non-professional company for that matter and that is the main reason that so many of hard working lower and middle class folks in California cannot find decent jobs.  As CEO Magazine recently found after polling CEO’s across the country, California is the worst state in the Union to do business in, and this is the fourth straight year it has been rated in the last spot.  How proud  Schwarzenegger and the state of California senators and representatives must be with all of their handiwork in recent years, but enough of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have spoken with enough of these government folks to know they do not care that it is very hard to run a profitable business in California, only that they always want more and more revenue to fund more and more programs that the state cannot afford. 

 

Yes, Jack Kemp knew very well that…“When you tax something you get less of it, and when you reward something you get more of it” and as the state of California sails off into oblivion, we can only hope that at least a few of these fools would took a moment to ponder if adding more taxes, often on the poorest in our society, and more regulations is really the best way to go about running the state of California.  We are not holding our breath and if things continue down the current road many of us here at Coaches Hot Seat may join many of our friends and their corporations on the exodus out of the state, because it makes little sense to stay in a place where the state is hell bent on destroying all commerce, even if that will destroy the state long run.  No, the folks in Sacramento don’t give a damn about the people of California and they prove it every day by their actions.  Yes, that is a damn shame, but at truth nonetheless.

 

Jack Kemp, 1935 – 2009 RIP.  You will be missed Mr. Kemp, but never forgotten…

 

 

Coach Joe Paterno was out late last week in several different media reports pushing for the Big Ten to expand to 12 teams so that the conference could hold a Big Ten Championship Game and without a doubt Coach Paterno’s suggestion has got to be one of the most common-sense things said recently in Big Ten country, but that should not be surprising because JoePa is one of sharpest people in the game of college football.  Coach Paterno has been way ahead of everyone in promoting a playoff in college football for a couple of decades now actually calling the excuses for why we don’t have a playoff right now:  “Bogus.”  Now Coach Paterno has brought his keen intellect forward to make the point that:

“Everybody else is playing playoffs on television,” Paterno said. “You never see a Big Ten team mentioned. So I think that’s a handicap.

 

“I’ve tried to talk to the Big Ten people about, ‘Let’s get a 12th team — Syracuse, Rutgers, Pitt — we could have a little bit of a playoff.’”

 

Of course, adding a twelfth team to the Big Ten makes way too much sense for the folks in the Big Ten offices which are filled with people that are lucky to know what day of the week it is when it comes to the game of college football, forget about having vision or the ability to do something that might actually be better for the game as a whole.  Oh, we forgot, the actions by Big Ten officials in recent years have proved to us completely that they don’t give a damn about the game of college football as a whole.  No, there are way too many greedy bastards in the Big Ten office that are both afraid to move to a playoff because they are wisely scared that would allow for all the world to see that the Big Ten is little more than the MAC Conference, only with larger student bodies, and we certainly cannot have something like that, and maybe even that it would move us closer to a playoff in the college football postseason.  The very even keeled columnist Bob Hunter of the Columbus Dispatch wrote a piece over the weekend entitled:

 

Paterno gets it, but Big Ten fossils don’t

 

How true Bob, how so very true… 

 

If the people in the Big Ten ever did get a clue, the no-brainer decision of all-time is to add Notre Dame to the conference in all sports and allow the Irish to keep their NBC TV contract for home games.  You add Notre Dame to the Big Ten, and you would have a conference that could challenge the Big 12 and SEC for supremacy, that is if Notre Dame ever decides to get off the mat.  Of course, adding the Notre Dame to the Big Ten would take someone with the ability to see beyond next Tuesday and someone that believes that a championship is won on the field of play, and there is no one in sight like that anywhere near the Big Ten offices.  No, beauty queens and Rose parades are seemingly more important than football in the Big Ten offices, so no, we are not holding our breath that anyone is listening to JoePa….

 

 

Speaking of Rose parades, the US House Energy Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection held last Friday the first of several hearings that are slated in Congress on the BCS in the coming months.  The BCS Boys sent a representative in ACC commissioner John Swofford, and the other people testifying included Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson, Derick Fox, CEO of Alamo Bowl and Gene Bleymair AD at Boise State.  Several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat watched a replay of the hearing over the weekend (which you can watch here on the C-Span website) and read each of the prepared statements by the above witnesses and we have to give Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson a lot of credit for the testimony that he prepared for the hearing:

 

Craig Thompson Testimony (.pdf)

 

(Boise State AD Gene Bleymaid also had some great testimony (.pdf))

 

In his testimony MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson laid out his Five Flaws of the BCS:

 

1.  The BCS Revenue Distribution is Grossly Inequitable

 

2.  The BCS Relies on Non-Performance-Based Standards to Determine Automatic-Qualifying Conferences

 

3.  The BCS is Based on a Flawed Premise, and Nearly Half of the FBS Teams are Eliminated from the National Championship Even Before the Season Begins

 

4.  The BCS Uses Confusing Computer Formulas and Pollsters to Determine Rankings

 

5.  The BCS Dictates Unbalanced Representation of Conferences on the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee

 

We could not agree more with Mr. Thompson Five Fatal Flaws of the BCS and Mr. Thompson has done some great work in the last few months to put together an alternative college football postseason proposal that would actually represent the values of the United States of America, namely that all Americans should be treated equally and that championships and titles should be earned on the field of play.

 

We wonder though, with all of the blather in the media by several columnists that trip all over themselves to defend and enable the BCS, which is nothing more than a series of meaningless exhibition games and a bogus “championship game,” if there really is an American citizen that can argue against all Americans being treated equally and determining championships on the field of play. 

 

Are there really Americans that believe that all Americans are not equal and that championships should be won on the field of play?  Please, can there be any member of the media or any American that actually believes that the members of the Utah and Boise State college football teams that should be treated differently that members of college football teams in the Big 12 or SEC?  If there are Americans that believe that college football players in BCS conferences are somehow inherently better and should be treated so, and that championships should be determined and won somewhere besides the field of play, we would love to meet you. 

 

Of course, in large parts of US history, some Americans were thought and even legally considered to be less than full Americans and we can go back to one of our founding documents to find the same type of things that these BCS Boys are up to today.  In Article 1 Section 2 of the US Constitution, slaves were to be counted as “….three fifths of all other Persons” so yes, even in our own US Constitution these BCS Boys can look with pride that them treating some Americans today as less than full and equal Americans has a place in our history.  The BCS Boys should be proud that they have something in common with our Founding Fathers…

 

Of course, even with the Fourteenth Amendment to our US Constitution that (Amendment 14, Article 1)….

 

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”

 

…..as students of US history know, the Fourteenth Amendment did not actually guarantee that black Americans would be able to have all the rights of other Americans, because for almost 100 years after the Civil War, some parts of our country were ruled by “Jim Crow” laws that denied rights to black Americans only because of the color of their skin, which has been best chronicled in the Jim Crow Guide (only read if you have a strong stomach and still be prepared to be outraged).  Yes, for the vast majority of our country’s history some Americans have thought that they were better than other Americans so maybe it is not that hard that the BCS Boys believe that the teams in the BCS conferences are somehow superior to teams from the “non-BCS” conferences, even though they all play in the same NCAA division of college football.  It makes no sense to us how someone could believe that a group of Americans were somehow superior to other Americans, but as MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson pointed out in his testimony to the House of Representatives, these BCS Boys very clearly favor one set of Americans over another set of Americans.  Not only is that wrong, that the BCS Boys favor one group of Americans over another group, we believe that this unequal treatment is illegal because all of these institutions of higher learning that these college football teams represent receive federal grants and financial aid.  Yes, that these colleges and universities are able to both receive aid from the US Government and they are also able to treat one group of Americans better than another group of American sounds not only wrong to us, but also very illegal. 

 

What kind of people are these BCS Boys?  How can they possibly set-up a system for college football’s post-season where some teams in I-A college football are treated differently that other teams?  Or, as MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson says:

 

“The BCS is Based on a Flawed Premise, and Nearly Half of the FBS Teams are Eliminated from the National Championship Even Before the Season Begins”

 

When those of us here at Coaches Hot Seat encounter people, institutions or systems that do not make sense in the year 2009, we look back in history to find comparables and we believe we have found a very good historical comparison to the BCS and the way it treats some Americans different than their “preferred” Americans….

 

 

 

Yes, that’s right, these BCS Boys remind us of George Wallace when he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in June 1963.  George Wallace thought that only whites should be allowed to attend the University of Alabama and the BCS Boys through their own Selection Procedures treat one group of Americans different from another group of Americans.  George Wallace was wrong and the BCS Boys are wrong and wrongs of this nature in the United States of America always tend to get corrected and the BCS Boys need to think long and hard about this bogus system that they have instituted for the college football postseason because this is about a lot more than just a bunch of meaningless exhibition games and an “exclusionary” championship game.  This is about one very simple premise….

 

If you believe in the BCS then you believe that it is OK to treat on group of Americans in a preferential way over another group of Americans.  That is what this whole thing is really about.  We happen to think that is wrong, but there have always been people in this country of ours that have attempted through the use of their power to treat other Americans in an unfair and discriminatory way.  It is very clear to us that the BCS Boys will continue to favorably treat the teams in the major conferences compared to the college football teams in the “non-BCS” conferences and not only is that unfair, not only does that run counter to everything the United States of America supposed to stand for, it is also outrageous.

 

Therefore, if you believe that it is OK to treat one group of Americans in a preferential way then you have made it very clear that you stand with the George Wallace’s of the world…

 

 

On the other hand, if you feel that all Americans should be treated equally and that it is outrageous that a very small group of people are able to favor one group of Americans over another group of Americans (who are representing institutions that are receiving federal/US Government aid), then you stand with the traditions and laws of our Republic.  So who do you stand with?  George Wallace or the truly American idea that “All men are created equal.”  If you stand with the BCS, then make no mistake about it, you are on the wrong side of history, you are on the side of allowing a very small group of people to treat one group of Americans in a preferential and very unfair (and in our mind, illegal) way compared to another group of Americans and yes, you stand with the likes of George Wallace.

 

There is one very clear reason that the Congress, which represents the people of the United States, should be involved in the BCS and that reason is that we do not believe the BCS Boys care at all about the group of Americans that they are treating in what we consider to be a discriminatory way.  It will take the US Government standing up for what is right and standing up for the laws of the United States of America in order to insure that these student-athletes are treated as full and equal Americans by the BCS.  If you stand with these bastard BCS Boys and actually believe that Americans can be treated unequally, then shame on you, but you can be mindful that there have been many like you in the past…..

 

 

…and there will be plenty of Americans in the future that will want to discriminate against Americans, as long as there are people around that will allow them to get away with the same type of shenanigans that the BCS Boys are getting away with right now.  This is about a lot more than meaningless exhibition games and a college football postseason that defies all logic, as Boise State and Utah showed everyone last year when they both finished the season undefeated but did not have a chance to play for a national championship, this is about fundamental fairness and the American Way.  We certainly wish someone could explain to us how the major Catholic university in our country Notre Dame gets 1 full vote with the BCS Committee and how the major Mormon university in our country, BYU does not receive 1 full vote as well.  For that matter, why does Notre Dame get 1 full vote, and schools like Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Alabama and Florida only get a fraction of 1 vote since they are members of conferences.  Does that make any sense at all?  Does that not strike you as very un-American?  If not, just what in the Hell are you thinking?

 

As people that are for (and how could any American really be for the bogus BCS?) and against the BCS, take a minute to consider what America must have been like before anyone here at Coaches Hot Seat was alive in 1963 when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to bar black Americans from registering to attend the University of Alabama.  That was only 46 years ago, but clearly that was an America that none of us are familiar with.  Yes, racism of all types clearly exists today and yes, the BCS in our mind clearly discriminates against one group of Americans, but just what in the Hell was George Wallace thinking when he stood in that schoolhouse door?  Evidently, by George Wallace’s own words later in life, he was wrong in 1963 and we cannot imagine that there is anyone today that believes it right or fair for the BCS to discriminate against a group of student-athletes just because they happen to play for a particular group of college football teams.  Or, maybe there are some George Wallace-types still around…..

 

Bravo to Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson and Boise State AD Gene Bleymair for standing up for what is right, for what is just, and for what the United States of America is supposed to stand for.

 

If you are on the other side of this debate, in our opinion on the side of the discriminators, including the BCS and their enablers in the media, shame on you, because you are against the very values and laws that protect your rights in our Republic.  Yes, you believe in those values and laws when they apply to you or things you believe in, but you believe that those same rights should not extend to these student-athletes that are being discriminated against by the BCS folks and yes, EVEN BY YOU.  Shame, or rather, how in the world can any of the BCS folks or people in the media sleep at night realizing that the system they defend treats a group of American unequally?  Can you say the George Wallace-type will never be gone from our society?  Yes, we thought so….

 

If you really want to see what went on both at the University of Alabama with Georgia Wallace and the Kennedy Administration in June, 1963, just watch the below documentary that was being filmed concurrently with the happenings of that time on both sides of the issues.  We start the documentary in section 4 and display section 5 as well, but all are certainly worth watching, because one can never know too much US history.  Below the documentary, watch the speech by then President Kennedy as he discusses the problems at Alabama and elsewhere involving civil rights in the early 1960s and then read his words below and imagine how those same words apply to what we consider the outrageous actions by the BCS Boys today:

 

Part 4 of 5 – Alabama/George Wallace School House Door Documentary

 

 

 

Part 5 of 5 – Alabama/George Wallace School House Door Documentary

 

 

 

President Kennedy’s Speech to the Nation on Civil Rights – June 1963

 

 

 

Below are some words from President Kennedy’s Speech that the BCS Boys and supporters of the BCS should think long and hard about….

 

“This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

 

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.

 

This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents.

 

Therefore, I’m asking for your help in making it easier for us to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves.

 

As I’ve said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.

 

This is what we’re talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens.”

 

So, are there still people out there that think some Americans, some student-athletes should continue to be discriminated against by the BCS Boys?  If so, how can you possibly call yourself an American?   

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