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crashcarson15

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crashcarson15 last won the day on June 28 2018

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    Resident CRJ stan
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  1. New Yankees road threads are basically a tweaked version of what they wore in the Field of Dreams game a few years back, which looked phenomenal, IMO.
  2. Personal feelings about the school aside — and the fact that SMU didn't really cover itself in glory in its bowl game — Liberty getting the NY6 slot was ridiculous in the first place, especially paired with the logic that kept FSU out of the playoff. C-USA is a glorified FCS conference at this stage, and you functionally punished SMU for scheduling a pair of Big XII teams that were far better than anyone on Liberty's schedule.
  3. I mean, the geographic distribution overlays pretty well with the NCAA attendance leaders — most of the bigger crowds are in the Midwest or at like, Hawai'i, Texas and Florida. If I'm banking on anywhere adopting pro volleyball, I think starting in the Midwest feels like a good place to be. Unless I'm missing someone, Maryland was the closest thing to a northeastern team in the top 50 of D1 volleyball attendance last year.
  4. A handful of running thoughts, starting specifically on the pandemic: Specifically during the pandemic year, I think being (a) a winter sport and (b) a fundamentally non-social distanced sport really hurt basketball numbers (especially on the girls side), compared to a sport like volleyball where like, hey, it was fall 2020 and the pandemic wasn't that bad and also at least you're always on the other side of a net from any opponent. In the program I coached in, our numbers were already lower, and multiple parents pulled their kids as the year went on due to pandemic concerns. One of those kids was a freshman we were excited about, who played like, two JV games and never came back. She's now the school record holder in a couple track events! With everyone's numbers down, schools canceling games, etc., you had a lot of nights where maybe you'd play 2 JV quarters or other nights where there was no JV game at all — so now that kid you want to get excited about basketball is maybe tipping off a JV game at 6:00, which finishes before 6:30, and now gets to go to practice for two weeks before getting to do that again. For kids who don't play travel basketball or for who maybe have another sport that's their favorite (which I think is a much larger part of the basketball player pool on the girls side), I think the interruption really hurt their desire to stick with the sport/deprioritize other sports, or if you didn't play for a year, you probably weren't coming back. More general, non-pandemic driven thoughts: Specific to basketball vs. volleyball, there's more opportunities for more kids to play in volleyball. Volleyball has 6 on the floor at all times, but really 7 "starters" counting the libero. Because of substitution patterns, even the tightest rotations have 8-9 kids playing real action every game. Compare that to basketball, where you only need 5, and very few girls teams materially go past 6-8 in a rotation. We were maybe the deepest program in our enrollment class last year, and we still only played 6 in key games. As an example, at our volleyball state finals in Indiana this year, 76 girls played 3+ sets across the 8 teams. At our girls basketball state finals, only 50 girls played 5+ minutes across the 8 teams. This is all mostly to say that there's just more opportunities for a kid to actually play in volleyball than basketball, across any one school or program. Something I think is relatively unique to girls basketball compared to the boys game is that most good freshmen are playing varsity out of the gate on the girls side, where on the boys side, it's pretty rare to see a freshman playing for a good team (this is both a talent depth thing and probably more importantly, a physiology thing — the vast majority of girls aren't growing six inches at 15 or whatever). That has the downstream impact of meaning more playing time is "spoken for" down the line (e.g., if I'm a sophomore JV player, am I really gonna stick around when two freshmen are playing varsity already?), and there's less importance in developing kids who are maybe fringe players. At least in Indiana, basketball is a much longer season (13-week regular season) than volleyball (8-week regular season), is disruptive to school work in both semesters, and also often means giving up the ability to travel at Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year's. Going back to the volleyball/basketball divide specifically, it's a lot easier for a travel basketball player (generally a spring and summer endeavor) to play high school volleyball than the other way around (since travel volleyball plays during the winter months and basketball school season). And maybe more than anything, basketball is also just … physically taxing in a different way from a lot of other sports. If you're a post player, basketball is running 75 feet, then turning around and doing the same thing 20 seconds later, and doing that over and over and over again, while also playing what is functionally a skilled game. I don't think most of this impacts the boys game in the same way because (a) more boys play sports to begin with and (b) it's probably still more of a mainstream cultural thing to be involved in. None of this necessarily constitutes an actual take or anything (maybe I could throw it together into one), just a series of observations from the last few years, and I think the growth of volleyball is pretty logical in a lot of ways as the sport continues to slide more into the mainstream.
  5. What's the point of having a "chance" in a competition that loses all its meaning? Any mid-major college basketball program would rather make the NCAA tournament than have a "chance" to win the NIT.
  6. Gonna be honest, I didn't have "the nation's top soccer league gets into a war with the federation over the Open Cup" on my "society tries to run back the roaring '20s" bingo card, but hey!
  7. Something I think that gets lost a little bit in the growth of women's basketball at both the college and pro level is that the game itself at the younger levels is somewhat in decline — high school girls basketball participation is down nearly 10% over the last five years, and here in Indiana, many small schools don't have JV squads and some aren't fielding Varsity teams at all. The trend was already happening, but COVID really hurt girls basketball in a lot of high schools nationwide and it just hasn't recovered. Volleyball doesn't have that problem — and it's why I find it hard to buy that there isn't some market out there for viable pro women's volleyball in the US. Almost 100,000 more high school girls played volleyball than basketball last school year, and the sport's growth wasn't thwarted by the pandemic like many high school sports — high school girls volleyball participation is up more than 5% over the last five years despite the pandemic and nearly 12% over the last decade. It's a fun sport, both to play and watch, and the overall growth is there in TV viewership at the college level as well, with both semifinals pulling 1+ million on ESPN2 on Thursday. I'm a little biased because Indianapolis is an expansion market if the league makes it to year two, but I hope PVF can get off the ground successfully and start to build something. It feels like the best path for pro volleyball is to tap into the growth of the college game (similar to the Catilin Clark effect hopefully coming to a WNBA arena near me), and Asjia O'Neal jumping right from Texas into the PVF in a handful of weeks feels like a plausible launching point for the league. But long-term, any league will need real financial backing, and PVF still hasn't announced its TV deal, which is slightly concerning.
  8. The Heisman isn't for the most valuable player, though — it is awarded to the most outstanding player. There's a lot of stuff out there, but I have a hard time rationalizing the "Daniels shouldn't win because his team didn't go to a NY6 bowl" take (1) when the reason his team didn't go to a NY6 bowl was LSU's defense giving up a double-nickel to Ole Miss, and (2) when it is combined with "Washington did not score an offensive touchdown against a 3-9 Arizona State team".
  9. Minor note here, the #1 seed is … not going to be all that it's made out to be. Play out this season with next year's conference alignment and the 12-team playoff format … if you were Georgia a week ago, would you rather: Win the SEC championship, be the #1 seed, and play your quarterfinal at a neutral site between the winner of, say, #8 Alabama vs. #9 Oregon Lose the SEC championship, be the #5 seed, host Liberty in the first round, and then play Big XII champion Arizona in the quarterfinal If we're quickly moving toward a place where almost all the good teams are in two conferences, it means most of the good teams are going to be at-larges and not taking up the #3 and (particularly) the #4 seed. This trend was probably happening anyway before the implosion of the Pac-12, but especially now, and why it's not a huge deal that Notre Dame can't be better than the #5 seed (which they should always be at 12-0). Looking at prior years with future conference alignment, the #5 seed would play (rankings are final CFP rankings): 2023: No. 23 Liberty (13-0 C-USA) + No. 14 Arizona (9-3 Big XII*) 2022: No. 16 Tulane (11-2 AAC) + No. 7 Clemson (11-2 ACC) 2021: No. 23 Louisiana (12-1 Sun Belt) + No. 12 Pittsburgh (11-2 ACC) 2020: No. 12 Coastal Carolina (11-0 Sun Belt) + No. 8 Cincinnati (9-0 Big XII*) 2019: No. 17 Memphis (12-1 AAC) + No. 7 Baylor (11-2 Big XII) 2018: No. 21 Fresno State (11-2 MWC) + No. 8 UCF (12-0 Big XII*) 2017: No. 20 Memphis (10-2 AAC) + No. 12 UCF (12-0 Big XII*) 2016: No. 15 Western Michigan (13-0 MAC) + No. 10 Colorado (10-3 Big XII*) 2015: No. 21 Navy (10-2 AAC) + No. 11 TCU (10-2 Big XII) 2014: No. 20 Boise State (11-2 MWC) + No. 5 Baylor (11-1 Big XII) Obviously some power dynamics will change some, but in the CFP era, the 33 ACC or Big XII members for 2024 have combined to produce multiple national title contenders … once in 10 years? Maybe two or three times if you want to make a case that those UCF teams would've gone 12-1 or 13-0 in the Big XII? Every year, the #5 seed would've set up to play a non-power team at home in the first round — and there's no obvious non-power programs right now lined up to play at the level UCF or Cincinnati have shown — and then mostly get a not-super-competitive ACC or Big XII winner in the second round. I'd much rather play that then getting someone from the glut of Big Ten and specifically SEC teams that are going to go 10-2 or 9-3 and end up in the 8/9 game. This is the primary reason I expect the conference championship requirement to get a bye to go away for the new contract in 2026, BTW.
  10. I mean, not from a numbers standpoint, but we're pretty much at the point where the Big Sky and MVFC are the two FCS super-conferences thanks to almost every successful program below the Mason-Dixon line moving up to FBS over the last decade-plus. The more FCS auto-bids there are, the fewer good teams are actually in the bracket.
  11. If you can't understand that the primary appeal of college football is engaging in slightly irrational pettiness, I can't help you.
  12. Just noting that UCLA-USC hasn't been on the last week of the season since 2015, and is only ever on that date in odd years due to USC traditionally finishing even years at home against Notre Dame. There's always the chance the Big Ten puts an end to that, but you'd think their media partners (read: NBC) would rather have Notre Dame @ USC penciled in for the last game of the season than UCLA @ USC (not to mention the 2024 and 2026 ND-USC games are already scheduled to end the year).
  13. I sense this might not be the most popular opinion, but I really don't like the Civil War in color-vs.-color, especially not when Oregon State wears orange. There's some contrast between the colors, but I find this pretty hard on the eyes at times: … especially when you compare to the last time they played at Autzen and Oregon State wore a traditional road set, which I just think is a really nice and balanced matchup: The one color-on-color combo I think works decently from a readability standpoint is Oregon State in black and Oregon in yellow, but that suffers from Oregon's yellow stuff normally being yellow and black vs. being yellow and green:
  14. It bugs me that Indiana won't own this element; their script is something unique from the other some shade of red-and-white schools in the Big Ten, and I actually think it perfectly fills a helmet (as long as they don't throw stripes on it). Pair it with a bit of candy stripe flair (see their baseball sleeve striping below) and I think you'd have something that actually feels differentiable from Nebraska, Rutgers, Wisconsin, etc. I just don't think their current approach of "what if we added black when we're a school that otherwise doesn't use it at all" works. I'd also love to see them pull it through on a set of basketball jerseys other than the women's pink jerseys — though I think it's a poor fit on this Adidas template — as something different in the arsenal (or a unique element to their women's team):
  15. The truly incredible thing is how the Browns would be a very genuine Super Bowl contender if they had just … kept their first-round draft picks and tens of millions of dollars in cap space. The Mayfield situation had probably gotten to an untenable point — which is in part a failure of the organization — but this Browns team as otherwise assembled, plus two first-round draft picks, plus a free agent signing or two and even like, Jacoby Brissett or Josh Dobbs at quarterback would be a much better team than what they're rolling out now. (It all ignores what @infrared41 pointed out as well, which is that the Browns made a "win now" trade in April 2022 that effectively tanked the 2022 season with. Wild management.)
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