Pac-12 Commish Larry Scott With 7 Networks for 10 Teams….The Big 12 With ONE Network for ONE Team! – Yes, That Makes Sense…NOT!
Before we get to the Butch Davis – North Carolina – NCAA debacle we first must say that Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott announcing in New York City the creation of a Pac-12 Conference national and several regional TV networks…
Pac-12 to launch national network, AP
Pac-12 Networks are coming, Los Angeles Times
Pac-12 Conference to create seven TV channels, New York Times
…was certainly in stark contrast to the pitiful and embarrassing spectacle of the Big 12 conference bickering in Dallas this week over ONE school having ONE network!
(One thing we did note about Pac-12 commish Larry Scott’s new Pac-12 Networks is right now they are only on cable TV (Pac-12 TV deal will be served as cold dish, John Blanchette, Spokesman-Review). We have both cable and satellite TV at Coaches Hot Seat Central and at most of our homes in case one of them goes out, but we prefer DirecTV here at CHS and if Scott really wants to reach serious sports fans in America he must get his Pac-12 Networks on DirecTV. Memo to Larry Scott: Give DirecTV CEO and Chairman Michael White a call about the Pac-12 Networks and if there are two men that are on the same wavelength it is you and White because both of you are big brand builders…Scott in the sports world and White during all his years at PepsiCo and now at DirecTV)
Jason King of Yahoo Sports lays out all the essential facts about the absurdity of the other Big 12 schools allowing Texas to form their own Longhorn Network…
Media Days again contentious for Big 12
…and we here at Coaches Hot Seat know just who to blame for the Longhorn Network being allowed to be formed in the first place.
Bill Byrne, Texas A&M AD
Joe Castiglione, Oklahoma AD
David Boren, President, University of Oklahoma
We have never met or run across Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin (You know what people say about folks that use a letter for their first name….right?) so we leave him out of this discussion of how these very weak-kneed people, Bill Byrne, Joe Castiglione and David Boren got rolled by the University of Texas in the summer of 2010 and how they are now thought of as nothing more than CHUMPS in the city of Austin!
Now Bill Byrne and Joe Castiglione rolling over for the Longhorns didn’t really surprise us here at Coaches Hot Seat since UT has been telling the other schools in the Big 12 what to do for a long time now, but how president of OU and former US Senator from Oklahoma David Boren allowed Texas to form their own TV network is shameful and we say that because we used to work with then Senator Boren when he was a US Senator and we don’t remember him as a man that could be rolled easily….but that is exactly what happened when Big, Bad Texas laid down the law last summer on the future of the Big 12 Conference!
Now, let’s see here…
Pac-12 has 1 National and 6 Regional TV NETWORKS for their 12 conference members…
AND
The Big 12 has 10 teams and ONE network that is owned and run by ONE team!
Yes, that makes perfect sense…in two places.
The Bizarro World
And
Anywhere Candy Asses hang out and at any school in the Big 12 that moved ahead with a new Big 12 with Texas having their own TV network where First-Rate Candy Asses that even puts these Candy Asses running the bowl games and college football postseason to shame!
Now, what would a REAL American Man or Woman do if they were told that a new conference would be going forward for the Big 12 after the departure of Colorado and Nebraska last summer and that Texas was going to have its own athletics network?
A REAL American Man or Woman would have told the folks at the Big 12 offices and the boys and girls in Austin they could stuff any planned Texas athletics network where the SUN DOESN’T SHINE and the Aggies and Sooners could have said it is either…
A Big 12 Network that will be for and cover all the schools in the Big 12 or we are joining the SEC!
What did the weak-kneed Candy Asses at A&M, OU and the other 7 Sisters of the Poor (We picked up that line from one of the Biggest Candy Asses to ever come down the pike: E. Gordon Gee (Hmmm, another guy that uses a letter for his first name…. Yes, you know what they say about that!) in the new “Big 12” do instead?
They let the University of Texas WALK ALL OVER THEM and as we said last summer Texas treated the 9 other Sisters of the Poor in the new “Big 12” as…
YARD DOGS!
Please, we know that Candy Asses will always get run-over by bullies but could someone help us out here because we are looking for the REAL David Boren to step forward because there is not a chance in Hell that US Senator David Boren would have allowed this Bullshit that has been pulled by Texas and their TV network to go forward….unless of course David Boren has turned into a weak-kneed Candy Ass! What’s up David?
Question: Is there anyone in the Big 12 Conference besides the boys and girls in Austin that has the courage of a ground squirrel?
Didn’t think so!
Berry Tramel of The Oklahoman said it best this past week about the Longhorn Network and the Big 12 in his column:
Longhorn Network turning Big 12 into a soap opera once again
“Big 12 folks speak gently in public about the Longhorn Network rift.
In private, not so much.
“Gotta stand up to ‘em,” one Big 12 coach told me about Texas.
“Texas won’t do anything unless you make them,” said a Big 12 administrator.
So goes life in the soap opera-like Big 12. As The Conference Turns.
A league that almost disbanded last summer is feuding again this summer over the Longhorns’ fledgling network.
The story of Big 12 Media Days, which concluded Tuesday at the Westin Galleria, was not the mighty Sooners or the upstart Cowboys and Aggies or even the suddenly-hapless Longhorns.
The story was how much of a rift the Longhorn Network has caused. Is this just internal squabbling, which is how commissioner Dan Beebe describes it, or a crack in solidarity?”
Could someone please get Big 12 commish a Clue Pill and how about some vision as well because right now the common ground squirrel…
….would be doing a better job running this conference!
Yes, we are still betting on the Candy Asses backing down from Big, Bad Texas, the Big 12 Conference eventually imploding, Texas going independent, Texas A&M and Oklahoma heading to the SEC to join FSU and Clemson, Kansas and Missouri to the Big Ten and the rest of what is left of the Sisters of the Poor heading off to the Mountain West Conference. Fear not, with the end of the Bogus BCS ALL teams in Division I-A football will have the opportunity to make the Postseason Playoff Tournament and play for a Real NCAA National Championship and the bowls that are left will take teams that have actually earned the right to go to a bowl game instead of teams going to bowls games each year that a Drunk Stumblebum could have coached them to!
As always, stay tuned to “As the Weak-Kneed Candy Asses Turn and Get Treated Like Yard Dogs by Big Bevo” otherwise known as the Big 12 Conference!
The North Carolina – Butch Davis – NCAA Debacle
Several of us here at Coaches Hot Seat have been visiting one of our favorite cities in America, Charlotte, North Carolina on a regular basis for years now since Hugh McColl turned a small regional bank into first NationsBank and then Bank of America after NationsBank merged with BofA, took their name and moved the headquarters to Charlotte from San Francisco. We were always told growing up that it is a good idea to remain on good terms with one’s banker and since many banking roads in America today lead to Charlotte we spend a lot of time there and have lots of good friends in the state of North Carolina.
We talked to one of those good North Carolina friends last year after the news of the problems at UNC became public and like most UNC alumni he was deeply troubled and wondered how in the Hell “that kind of thing” could have happened in Chapel Hill.
We asked our UNC friend then if Butch Davis should be fired from his job as head coach of the Tar Heels and like most folks in that part of the country firing someone right off the bat is not exactly looked on in a favorable light but as things dragged out over the past year and the NCAA delivered their notice of allegations to UNC in June we could hear our friend moving towards the idea of sending Butch Davis packing was the best move and it seems some powerful people at UNC agreed with our friend.
The real problem in the entire Butch Davis – UNC – NCAA debacle goes back to something that we have talked about quite a bit here at Coaches Hot Seat and that is the vital importance of a school finding the right “fit” when they hire a new head football coach and from where we sit Butch Davis was always a terrible fit at North Carolina.
Let us be very clear, Butch Davis is a very good football coach that learned from one of the best football coaches in the last 50 years in Jimmy Johnson, but Butch Davis would have never been on our list if we had been the AD and president at UNC and the reasons why are spelled out very well by Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports column on the Davis firing:
North Carolina killed Butch Davis
“North Carolina football killed Butch Davis. Not the other way around.
Sure, Davis is to blame for allowing the program to go rogue on his watch but that’s part of my logic. A coach successful enough to get to the highest level of the NFL, a man diligent enough to bring Miami back from the brink of scandal in a relatively short amount of time, a man who then basically delivered Miami a national championship, caved.
He caved because he knew North Carolina was not your normal salvage job. Even in the mediocre ACC, North Carolina’s football mediocrity stood out. The last coach to win 10 in Chapel was the first to do it in 16 years. Mack Brown got the hell out 14 years ago because he knew it couldn’t last. Butch Davis took the job because he was the latest in a line to believe he could make a difference.
But knowing the history of North Carolina football Davis was desperate enough to hire John Blake, a guy he had known for 30 years. That’s what makes the events of Wednesday even more tragic. It wouldn’t have taken much because Carolina fans don’t demand much.
That was Davis’ greatest mistake. He should have known better. He didn’t have to hire Blake, the coach by his notorious nickname “Black Santa”. Davis knew Blake’s recruiting coordinator’s rep. Hell, it looks like he hired Blake because of the dark side of that rep.
Davis ultimately concluded that Blake is what Carolina needed because it’s Carolina. There are reasons why the administration failed time after time to get it right, why a school with a glorious athletic tradition elsewhere has averaged 5 1/2 football wins since 1998.”
That is Dennis Dodd being SPOT-ON about Butch Davis and UCN and we could have not have said or even remotely written it better ourselves.
The University of North Carolina is a very good and very strong public university and as ACC commish and former UNC AD John Swofford said this week (UNC’s Butch Davis didn’t consider stepping down amid probe, Andy Gardiner, USA Today) about UNC:
“ACC Commissioner John Swofford, who was athletics director at North Carolina for 17 years, said the league by policy does not comment on ongoing investigations.
“North Carolina is a program that generally has been free of NCAA sanctions but any time we have a program that is dealing with major infractions it flies in the face of what we believe we’re all about and that we’ve shown we’re about,” he said. “We haven’t been free of (sanctions), but we’ve had less than any other conference.”
No, we would have never hired nor ever considered hiring Butch Davis at the University of North Carolina.
Alabama? Yes, we would have hired Davis at Alabama and ironically Butch Davis turned down the Alabama job when he was at Miami only to take the Cleveland Browns job which also ended badly.
What is the difference between the University of North Carolina and the University of Alabama?
If you don’t know the difference between UNC and UA then you know nothing about the history of college football and the different paths those two schools have taken over the past several decades.
Yes, there are honorable and good people at Alabama right now and the president at Alabama, Robert Witt, has done wonders to turn Alabama into a first-rate public university, but still…Alabama is not North Carolina and North Carolina needs a head football coach that fits its culture and approach to education and in our minds Butch Davis was not that man and UNC is paying a price for that decision right now.
Butch Davis – Very Good Football Coach….
BUT
Wrong fit or the University of North Carolina
Who would we hire at North Carolina right now to replace Butch Davis?
Well, as Dennis Dodd pointed out in his column on Butch Davis if North Carolina wants someone that graduates his players AND wins football games then…
Mike Leach is their man.
If Mike Leach is not the type of guy the folks at UNC want to see replace Davis, and we can see that, then there is no doubt we would put together “Roy Williams-type” money ($4 to $5 million per year) and offer the UNC job to the following coaches in order:
Chris Petersen, Boise State
Gary Patterson, TCU
Skip Holtz, USF
Art Briles, Houston
Troy Calhoun, Air Force
Kevin Sumlin, Houston
Greg Schiano, Rutgers
…and if none of them wanted the job we would call in order
Bud Foster, Virginia Tech DC
Gus Malzahn, Auburn OC
If none of those coaches wanted the job then maybe hiring Mike Leach in the first place would have been the way too go!
Mike Leach in Carolina Blue shaking things up in the ACC…
Now that would be great fun!
The NCAA Reform and “Getting Tougher” on the Cheaters Debate
With all of the conference commissioners talking in recent weeks about “reforming” college football and “getting tougher” on the cheaters we would like to call everyone’s attention to a story from almost a decade ago now on the NCAA “getting tougher” on the University of Alabama:
NCAA flexes its muscle with heavy sanctions, Tom Farrey, ESPN.com, February 2, 2002
“In handing down a two-year bowl ban to the University of Alabama football team, a resolute, almost indignant NCAA Committee on Infractions sent an unmistakable message that will no doubt reverberate in every corner of the country: It’s back in business.
Crimson Tide fans, justifiably, are shocked.
There was no reason to think the committee would pull out the whuppin’ stick. Sure, this was the third time since 1995 that an Alabama team had been found with major violations. Sure, the allegations — of large cash payments for prospects — were on par with anything the Southern Methodist rowdies could come up with in the 1980s. Sure, the NCAA had the benefit of piggy-backing on an FBI investigation focusing on booster payments to Memphis high school coaches.
The bottom line was that for the past seven years, the committee had come up with every excuse not to use its once-feared hammer. Didn’t want to hurt current players and coaches for the sins of former players and coaches. Didn’t want to hold schools responsible for rogue boosters. Didn’t want to come off as mean, vindictive.
So the law professors, conference commissioners and other members of this eight-person sanctioning body pulled out the feather duster on team after team — Michigan State, Florida State, Mississippi State, Kansas State, Notre Dame, Southern Cal and Wisconsin among them.
Alabama’s suggestion that it be penalized with scholarship cuts but no bowl ban oozed of cocky presumption, as if there was no way the committee had the guts anymore to knock a program — much less the institution Bear Bryant built — out of the postseason.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the next wrist slap.
The infractions committee, under new chair Tom Yeager, got tired of being mocked.
“The message is we’re not kidding,” Yeager said Friday in announcing the penalties. “If you refuse to adhere (to the rules), there will be consequences.”
The committee’s newfound resolve was not so clear after Kentucky was given a one-year bowl ban on Thursday, for separate recruiting violations of a Wildcats football staffer. After all, the ‘Cats were 2-9 last season and would have been lucky to earn a bowl of Cheerios next season. The NCAA added no further scholarship cuts to the 19 that Kentucky had already inflicted on itself as punishment.
But now it’s obvious the committee wants to be taken seriously. In giving Alabama the first two-year bowl ban since the Ole Miss and Washington cases in 1994, and taking away more than 20 scholarships for the first time since the Miami case in 1995, the committee not only threw a haymaker at a powerful and financially important program, but employed logic that ran against the grain of committee thinking the past few years.”
That is some nice writing by Tom Farrey from almost a decade ago, but we also direct everyone’s attention to a story written by the same Tom Farrey of ESPN only a few months ago:
Selling the NCAA
“NCAA president Mark Emmert travels the country highlighting the merits of amateur status for players; others say the current system is unfair and should change”
Are you thinking what we are thinking that we have all heard this song and dance routine about the NCAA “getting tougher” before and as everyone has seen the cheating, lying and downright flaunting of NCAA rules has continued….unabated even!
Yes, we are all right about the cheating, lying and downright flaunting of NCAA rules continuing, so then what can really be done to clean up college football and basketball?
The solution really is very simple.
The punishment for the crime must be bigger than the gain that can be gotten from committing the crime.
In other words, people that knowingly break NCAA rules should lose their jobs AND the offending schools where the rules were broken should be punished with heavy fines, scholarship reductions and postseason bans which will then lead to coaches following the rules and schools coming up with ways to punish their employees that knowingly break the rules…like writing employment contracts that claw back money that was earned while the rule-breaking was going on.
Yes, it seems that “getting tougher” message sent by the NCAA almost a decade ago did not get through to its intended target in and out of the intercollegiate athletics and take a gander at the comments of the head of the NCAA infractions committee on the Alabama case, Tom Yeager (again by Tom Farrey at ESPN):
“Yeager’s metaphors may be mixed, but not his message. He wants boosters everywhere — not just in Alabama — to know that the schools they are associated with will be punished, even if the NCAA can’t prove that school employees were in on the misdeeds.
“This is a message to a certain degree to everybody: You may think you’re helping, but you’re not,” said Yeager, whose day job is as commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association. He took over as chair of the infractions committee last summer.
The committee’s official report was similarly aware of what this case meant nationally.
“While rogue athletics representatives are new neither to infractions cases generally nor to the infractions history of the university, their level of involvement and spending is an increasingly visible and major problem in intercollegiate athletics,” the committee wrote. “Such rogue athletics representatives demonstrate a profound and worrisome immaturity in the satisfaction they derive from close and continued intermingling with college and even high-school age student-athletes.
“Even if sincere, their claimed motivation for cheating — helping a university to recruit blue-chip athletes — betrays a lack of integrity and a ‘win-at-all-costs’ attitude that undermines and cheapens athletics competition and corrupts the ethics and maturation process of the young people they claim to be ‘helping.’ “”
Well, AMEN to that Tom Yeager, but what about all of the cheating, lying and downright flaunting of NCAA rules over the past decade which was capped off with one of the biggest and most successful head coaches in college football, Jim Tressel, lying to the NCAA about wrongdoing by his players?
No, the “getting tough” approach by the NCAA did not work over the past decade because most coaches, boosters and others that are involved in the breaking of NCAA rules think the NCAA is a…
JOKE!
It is clear to us that the NCAA needs some help with the “third parties” that are out there doing all manner of wrongdoing when it comes to breaking NCAA rules and manipulating our young people and where we can help we will be more than happy to be the bird dog and flush out some of these Cheating Bastards but here is a Newsflash for the NCAA…
When the wrongdoers are flushed out and the wrongdoing has been proved….
Punish the SOBs….and Punish them SEVERELEY!
As for Ohio State University getting off scot-free because the NCAA found that there was not a “failure to monitor” charge against the school the NCAA better Damn realize that Jim Tressel’s behavior was much worse than the behavior of boosters around the Alabama football program over a decade ago because Jim Tressel was…
THE INSTITUTION
…at The Ohio State University and if the man in charge can do what Jim Tressel did, blatantly LIE and WITHOLD information that he KNEW would impact the eligibility of players and thus DID impact the outcomes of games and the season while the school’s football program was led by the man that blatantly broke NCAA rules then all of this talk about “getting tougher” by Mark Emmert, Mike Slive, John Swofford and others will be nothing but Complete BS.
If Southern Cal can get hammered with the loss of 30 scholarships and a two-year bowl ban because of the actions of a player that the NCAA was unable to prove that anyone at USC knew anything about then when a head coach LIES to the NCAA and WITHOLDS information that would have directly affected the eligibility of players on his team then Ohio State’s punishment bidding should START at how severely USC got penalized by the NCAA (USC hit hard by NCAA sanctions, Robinson and Cole, Yahoo! Sports):
1. A postseason ban in football following the 2010 and 2011 seasons.
2. A loss of 30 total football scholarships over the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons.
3. A vacation of all football victories starting in December 2004 and running through the 2005 season. This includes the national championship win over Oklahoma on Jan. 4, 2005.
4. All statistics vacated for Bush, Mayo and women’s tennis athlete Gabriela Niculescu in the games which the NCAA deemed them ineligible due to rules violations.
5. Bush and Mayo must be disassociated from USC athletics.
5. An acceptance of USC’s self-imposed penalties on its basketball program, which included a forfeiture of all wins in 2007-2008 and a one-year postseason ban
If Pete Carroll had done what Jim Tressel did which are in our opinion the most blatant and proven NCAA rules violations by a head football coach in our lifetimes please don’t try to tell us that USC would not have been hammered hard by the NCAA…because we all know the truth of that reality….right?
Of course we know the TRUTH about what would have happened to USC and if the NCAA lets Ohio State skate off with a slap on the wrist then Mark Emmert can quit going around the country talking about “getting tough” and the importance of “amateurism” because ALL coaches will have been sent a very clear message that they can do whatever the Hell they please and if they win they will be paid handsomely for those wins and championships and if they get fired then…..”so what”…I made the money, we got the wins and thus cheating, lying and downright flaunting of NCAA rules was worth it.
Either Ohio State goes down just like USC (and Alabama did a decade ago) because of Jim Tressel’s actions or the NCAA will have turned itself into nothing more than a little poodle that has no bark, has no bite and is completely reliant on the news media to do its job because as we were told once by someone that knows…..
“The NCAA couldn’t find its ass butt naked in a roomful of mirrors!”
Memo to the NCAA: Either start sending a message…starting with harsh punishment of Ohio State that had their Damn head coach blatantly breaking NCAA rules or quit talking about “getting tough” and holding schools, coaches and when possible boosters accountable for their actions.
In other words…
Open Your Damn Eyes, Find Your Ass and let’s start cleaning-up the game of college football.
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