Mark Byron

Twilight Izzone

It's been hard to follow sports the last week given the unsavory MSU headlines. However, it did drive me back here to vent/express stuff and hopefully show a few insights.

• Mr Nassar won't see the light of day as a free man, and deservedly so. He's lucky we don't do the death penalty for crimes that don't result in death, nor do we do the various types of tortures recommended by some less charitable folks.
• MSU and USA Gymnastics were asleep at the switch and/or covering their institutional kiesters. A full look into whether that inaction is criminal is warranted (the state AG has commissioned a dedicated investigation, putting him in part of the spotlight as he campaigns for a promotion to governor), since leaving Nassar on the job amounted to child endangerment. 
• I'm not sure what to make of throwing the basketball and football programs into this discussion. There were cases brought against players and coaches, but its hard to see what, if anything, was mishandled without criminal charges being filed and a full trial. However, the shortcomings elsewhere in the athletic department makes the rest of East Lansing suspect.
• My gut hunch is that there is more CYAing going on with football than basketball, although Paterno and Tressel are prime cases to remind you that even the programs you'd send your kids to gladly (yes, Tressel was OSU, but seemingly a class act other than a horrid choice in schools;-) can have ethical lapses.

The news of yesterday has John Engler getting named interim MSU president. Of course, the usual suspects on campus didn't like it, but they aren't going to like a former Republican governor turned big-business lobbyist out of pure instinct.

It's not a bad pick. You're not going to appoint someone from within MSU to the post, since they're too associated to the old crew. A uber-competent college administrator that you'd want in the job likely already has a day job and wouldn't be interested in a temp position. A respected (not if your a partisan Democrat, granted) Michigan pol who's otherwise unemployed seems a solid choice, since you need a good dose of gravitas to pull this off.

His predecessor in Lansing, Jim Blanchard (an MSU alum), wouldn't be a bad choice, if he were interested; as a Democrat, he'd not get the knee-jerk response beyond the grumbles about faculty and student stakeholders not being in the loop of the hiring decision. However, the apparent bug of Engler's GOPness is a feature in Washington, as he will be able to navigate any Education department or Justice department questions better than Blanchard.

Side point. MSU is a state institution. It's owned by the state, not the students nor the faculty. The board of regents gets elected by the citizens of Michigan and is responsible to them. Faculty and students need to be heard, but they don't own the joint, they just work/take classes there.

Meanwhile, l'affair Nassar is ruining a great MSU basketball season, as Izzo has to fend off question on how he handled rape allegations on current and former players years ago. I'm not sure if he can answer the questions fully without getting waivers from both the players and the accusers to air the case in question and justify why the book wasn't thrown at the players. Short of that, Izzo will have to give less than complete answers, although he's giving non-answers right now. 

It may take time for Izzo to craft answers that get the investigative reporters off his back but yet respect the privacy of the parties involved, including the accusers, for they might not want the gory details and the rebuttals of the accused to be public record. He's in a hard spot.

 

Sacrificial Pigskin

I spent my sophomore year at Eastern Michigan in 1980, May-to-December going during the summer. The football team stunk, I went to a road game that they managed to win at Bowling Green, the front bookend of a 27-game losing streak. Their one MAC title and bowl-win came in 1987.

Basketball's been competitive, and their track team has had its moments, with Hasley Crawford winning gold in 1976's Olympic 100 meters. but football has been an issue. When I was there, it was something of a commuter school, where a number of students could drive in from the western Detroit suburbs and the others largely got out of Ypsatucky for home turf on the weekend. 

With a bad team and a campus ghost-town, not to mention a stadium a mile east of the main campus, EMU's football attendance stunk, selling out only twice during that high-water mark in the late 1980s.

Thus, EMU's program bleeds red ink. Unlike it's big brother next door who rarely struggles to round up the 110,000 screaming idiots in the Big House, EMU loses roughly $900 a student on its athletics program.

Both the faculty and the student body have thus supported scrapping the football program and dropping down half a notch to the Horizon League; they've produced some good Cinderellas in March Madness; Vaplaraiso, Cleveland State and UW-Green Bay all have had their moments, and Butler made its two Final Four runs out of the Horizon before finding greener horizons in the Big East. Oakland U and the University of Detroit would have a new rival.

Big-time sports does create an environment for donors to cough up extra cash as well as provide publicity for the program, but when success is rare and publicity is often negative, it might be hard to justify. Add to the political incorrectness of football and the need to have a raft of woman's sports programs to offset the all-male football team's scholarships for Title IX purposes, you have a sacrificial pig(skin) waiting to happen.

Alabama-Birmingham scrapped their program after the 2014 season only to have donors resurrect it; it's slated to get back in swing in 2017. I don't see EMU getting such a second life if the academics have their way here.

Frostbite Falls, MI

The car thermometer read -3 (⁰F for readers elsewhere in the Anglosphere). All the schools in the area (at least all the public schools in slow-to-close Midland County and just about everyone else; I don't have a color-coded map of school districts handy to back up the "all") are packing it in for tomorrow in anticipation of -25⁰F wind chill factors by tomorrow morning.

I don't recall schools closing for cold that much in the past. Snow and ice, yes, but not freeze-the-[kiester]-off-a-brass-monkey cold alone. We don't deal with negative temperatures in mid-Michigan too often, maybe once or twice a year in a bad cold snap, but we've gotten those quite a bit this winter.

The more macho and old-school folks among us might be of the school that if we went to school in zero-degree temperatures uphill...both ways...so can our kids. It gives them character...

...not to mention frostbite and damaged lungs. We might have had protective parents who made sure we had hats and scarves and mittens and thermal underwear (a.k.a long-johns) to brave those bitter-cold days; the modern kid is much more likely to ditch everything but the undies when he's out of sight of his folks.... if the parents are around to see them off at all.

Calling school off is a bit more protective that I'm use to, but so is the new rules in football and other sports on concussions. We know more than to just write it off as "getting your bell rung" and throw them back into the fray; we know the damage that concussions can do to folks, and the NFL is getting hit with a nine-heading-towards-ten-figure tab for past concussion damage.

We're also more aware of the damages of things like hypothermia and frostbite; in the old days, Frostbite was the first part of the name of the mythical town that Rocky and Bullwinkle lived in, not something to worry about while playing in the snow.

The kids might have a makeup day in mid-June that has them sweating in 85-degree heat. However, you can manage sunburn better than you can frostbite.

One More Baptist Calvinism Fight

I interviewed for a finance teaching position at Louisiana College back in 2007; I may have been fortunate not to have taken a position there, for the Calvinism wars have broken out with the school brass siding with the free-will camp.

I don't remember that being as big of an issue in Southern Baptist circles at the time, but it has become so since then. I went to a SBC church in Lexington from 2007-09, and the issue was live there, as the music minister was a bit too Reformed for some folks' tastes and the pastor had an eclectic taste in evangelical thinkers that included some neo-Reformed folks.

I'm uneasy with both hard Reformed and hard Arminian thought. Despite going to a Free Methodist church here in Midland, I'd have to pick the Reform side of the aisle if forced into one camp. I'm not up for an in-depth post on that right now, but I respect both camps.

I'm not sure if the theological pruning would have extended to the business school, but being in the middle of a scuffle where both sides have solid theological points to bring to the table would be tough to live through. It was tough going through the internal struggles at Victory Baptist in the late 00s, and would have been tough seeing seemingly good colleagues let go for being on the wrong side of that debate.

The Medium Mostly Southern Called the "Big East"

The "Big East" is disintegrating faster than a stock car going into the wall at 200MPH. We had Louisville and Pitt head to the ACC, the seven Catholic non-football schools opt to form the nucleolus of a basketball conference (Butler and other Protestant schools might be welcome) and now Boise State has opted to pull a TCU and say "never mind" to joining what would be more accurately named the Medium Mostly Southern.

With all the defections, the Mountain West is a stronger conference than what's left of the "Big East." San Diego State is slated to follow suit, although the MWC is less interested in reconnecting the Aztecs than they are the Smurf Turfers.

21... Blackjack at Atlantic City 10

The Atlantic 10 is already numerically challanged, but it's now looking to get the Seven Jesuit Gangstas from the Big East to go to 21 teams. That way, they can be the Atlantic City 21.

No joke. A single round-robbin 20 game schedule would be feasible, but the playoffs would need tits own dedicated network for a week and a half.

Da Jesuit Gangstas

Re: Big East instilability-Yours truly, 11/28

If you took what's left of the northern private schools not leaving (Providence, St Johns, Seton Hall, Villanova, Georgetown, DePaul, Marquette, Temple) you'd have a very good basketball conference with being urban faith-based schools as a common denominator.

The remainder would fit better as a football-centric, Southern-based conference; the WAC imploded after over-expanding, with most of the original ganstas moving to the Mountain West. I could see such a split happening in the Big East.

ESPN this morning-

The seven Big East Catholic, non-FBS schools met with Big East commissioner Mike Aresco Sunday to express their concerns for the direction of the conference, multiple Big East sources confirmed to ESPN.com Monday.

Sources said the New York meeting was the first among the seven schools (Marquette, DePaul, St. John's, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall and Villanova) and could ultimately lead to them splitting from the Big East's football members.

In the case of the WAC's implosion, it was the old-timers who left and formed the Mountain West while the newbies got left with the name. The question under debate is who would get the Big East monicker if the Jesuit Ganstas took off.

As it sits, you have a mediocre football conference tacked on to a very good basketball conference. We might see some re-visioning of things in the next year or so, as the Big East ameobas into a Big East Jesuit and Big East Southern; actual names to be determined later.

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One more twist in the college sports musical chairs, as Louisville joins the ACC, replacing Maryland, who joined with Rutgers to give the numerically-challenged Big Ten 14 teams.

Focusing on the relatively small Louisville TV market might be a mistake; this gives the ACC most of Kentucky, as the ACC becomes a home conference for the whole state. The Cardinals don't have the following of UK statewide, but this will likely make the ACC the first choice over the Big 10 for the ABC regional package, since the SEC is off on CBS.

I'm not sure if I've heard this addressed, but you're moving towards a bifurcated Big East, which combines urban Rust Belt Catholic basketball schools with secular southern football schools recruited from CUSA and elsewhere. Cincinnati and UConn are a decent fit for the Jesuit crew, but the rest are an awkward fit.

If you took what's left of the northern private schools not leaving (Providence, St Johns, Seton Hall, Villanova, Georgetown, DePaul, Marquette, Temple) you'd have a very good basketball conference with being urban faith-based schools as a common denominator.

The remainder would fit better as a football-centric, Southern-based conference; the WAC imploded after over-expanding, with most of the original ganstas moving to the Mountain West. I could see such a split happening in the Big East.

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A number of schools like Boise State and San Diego State rushed to join the Big East when it was still one of the big-conferences with gauranteed slots in the BCS. Now that Big East has been demoted to mid-major status for the revised system, there isn't as much of a cache to the Big East, especially when most of the major players have moved on to greater pastures; Rutgers is slated to leave for the Big Ten and UConn is now rumored to fill the spot in the ACC vacated by Maryland.

Boise State and San Diego State are slated to join the Big East next season, but the Big East might not be much ahead of the I-AA Big West by the time the dust settles, and they might look to do what TCU did and pass on the Big East to find better pastures elsewhere. A retooled Mountain West starts to look more of a peer with the Big East as it essentially becomes mostly promoted C-USA and Sun Belt schools outside of BSU and SDSU.

Broncos tend to buck their riders and Aztecs tend to cut out your heart.

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Just as I was starting to get use to Nebraska being in the Big 10, the conference gets even more numerically challenged, as Maryland announced it's joining in 2014; Rutgers is rumored to be announcing a move tomorrow. That expands the Big 10's TV reach to cover Washington, Baltimore and New York as they have teams in the DC and New York media market; the Nets played their home games at Rutgers for a while.

I'm not sure how good of a sports ad this is. Maryland is a good basketball program but a so-so football one, and the reverse is true of Rutgers; they generally bring up the rear of the Big East in hoops and will be playing Louisville for the league title in football.

Both are academically solid schools. The Big Ten likes to pride itself on being top-tier in academics, and having top colleges helps keep that status.

UConn is rumored to be heading to the ACC to replace Maryland. It changes tradition some without one of the conferences' charter members, but it gives another good footprint in New England with some side coverage of New York. They get a killer basketball program and a football team that has become competitive in the last few years; the ACC already has Pittsburgh and Syracuse coming on board, so one more Big East refugee will be relatively easy to manage.

The Big East just about signed its death knell as a power football conference. It had already been demoted to mid-major status in football, as the new power structure gives the other five BCS AQs slots in the big bowls and giving the best of the rest one slot; if 2012 were played by the new rules, Kent State, Rutgers and Louisville would be fighting for a BCS slot as the best of the rest.

The Big East has always been a killer basketball conference, and will continue to do so. The block of Catholic non-football schools that make up the core are still around, but the big state schools are in the process of decamping for better football fits.

Quotas and Quotidian Statistics

This year's election has been hard to track, since a lot of pollsters seem to want to recreate the framework of 2008, when Democrats were on the rise and a tea party is something Anglophile women of a certain age did.

Thus, a number of pollsters have tended to tweak their samples to match 2008's partisan breakdown; thus, their polls seem to be on the Democratic side. Ones that assume a more neutral voter layout will have a more Republican slant.

Thus, you can shade your story by picking your preferred pollster. Republican-leaning press can play up Rasmussen, who assumes a more neutral distribution and gives results that are a few percent more pro-Romney than his MSM peers. The BBC on the other hand, seems to cite everything but Rasmussen in their poll of polls.

Whatever happened to just calling people and letting the chips fall where they may? Yes, I have studied political research methods back in the dark ages of the 1980 (a well-earned B- in that class), but the most tweaking that would be done is to adjust polls for demographic groups if the folks answering the question didn't quite mesh with black-Latino-Anglo or male-female breakdowns.

Tweaking for just the right partisan mix wasn't on radar back then. Why it has become so as of late is an interesting question that pollsters will have to answer for, especially if the MSM pollsters seem to have erred on the liberal side once the dust settles after tomorrow's elections.

Throwing Stones From a Glass Skyscraper

It was odd in the first place when The King's College hired Dinesh D'Souza to be their president, having a Catholic conservative pundit running an evangelical college. It did increase their profile, as it gave it a presence with people in the conservative Internet; D'Souza was a regular on National Review and a respected author.

After two years, D'Souza's now out as president; a divorce and affair prompted his resignation. He separated from his wife about the time he took the job, and has a fiancee already lined up; sharing a hotel room with his lady-love during a conference caught the attention of World magazine.

D'Souza's a bigger hero with the conservative faction, having done a documentary on President Obama, 2016, that harshly go after his African roots and his globe-trotting anthropologist mom, allegedly giving him the view of an anti-colonialist. A bit of the bloom will come off that rose, much like Henry Hyde went through during Bill Clinton's impeachment, when a past affair came out as payback for going after Clinton's indiscretions and lack of honesty.

However, in D'Souza's case, the affair was in the present and pointed out by a fellow conservative publication, albeit one more in the "compassionate conservative" side of the modern right.

Taliban Vrs. Talib

A 14 year-old girl who wants to be a doctor when she grows up and goes to bat for education with her blog would be a prize in most places, but in Pakistan's Sharia Belt, she gets a hit put on her;

Malala Yousufzai, 14, remains in critical condition a day after surgeons removed a bullet lodged in her neck. Taliban militants shot Malala and two other girls Tuesday as the girls headed home from school in Pakistan's conservative Swat Valley. The two other girls were not seriously injured.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for targeting Malala, who enraged the militant group by writing about her daily battle with the extremists who used fear and intimidation to force girls to stay at home instead of going to school. Malala's online writing earned her Pakistan's first National Peace Prize in November.

An irony here is that Taliban means students in Arabic; students of the Koran by implication, but they are gunning down a coed talib (that's the singular form) for wanting to be educated.

Educated in something other than 24/7 Koran. That might be the craw-sticker. Over in Nigeria, the jihadist group Boko Haram declares western-style education to be non-halal and harasses Christians and folks who don't oppose a secular approach to things. There might be a bit of that here.

However, since the Taliban come from the barefoot and pregnant school of culture (not so much religion; you'd be hard pressed to quote Muhammad sura and verse to back illiterate girls), a teenaged girl treating herself as their peer, if not their superior, is double-trouble.

It's one thing to send a prank 911 call to send a SWAT team to an offending blogger's house, it's another to send a Swat Valley team of hit men to kill a juice-boxer blogger. It shows something of the desperation of the Taliban to terrorize Pakistani culture to a point where the only thing you can do is survive and have your nose in a Koran when you're not doing the minimum to survive.

At Least They Aren't Miles Apart

The headline here on the lack of progress in Chicago's teacher strike caught my eye-"Teachers strike enters its 3rd day with two sides ‘kilometers apart’"

The head of the Chicago Teachers Union suggested the two sides remained “kilometers apart” as the strike entered into its third day Wednesday.

Not too many Americans think in kilometers; scientists often do, since metric units are the norm in the sciences, but it's an odd phrasing as a PR statement. You either look like an egghead or a European (my appologies to my Canadian metric-using readers) or both. That's not going to help win over blue-collar parents that you'll need to get any extra money out of the residents of the Windy City.

It's closer than "miles apart" by a factor of 0.62, but still not that helpful a statement, in more ways than one.

Bag Ram? The Teachers Might Want to Try that.

Here's one bullet point in Afghanizing things (a play on Vietnamization during the Nixon years); we've handed most of Bagram prison over to the Afghan government. The fine print has us keeping at least one wing, with some of the more problematic Taliban, under US control. The US is a bit leery of seeing the locals setting up a catch-and-release system, so they're slow in handing things over; it's a cheap shot, but they might be afraid that they'll treat the Taliban like an illegal immigrant stateside and want to get him out of the system ASAP.

_____________

Maybe I play too much Scrabble online (Facebook has a nice version), but I broke down Bagram into Bag Ram... as in Hizzonor Emanuel, (which means "Obama with us" in Chicagoese). The teachers are on strike despite having some of the best paychecks in the business.

Teachers also want to block changes to their health benefits and win concessions on classroom conditions.

Pay is also an issue. However, the union said the two sides are close to a pay agreement after school officials offered to increase salaries 16% over four years on average for most teachers. The average teacher salary in Chicago was $74,839 for the 2011-2012 school year, according to the district.

Shared sacrifice in tough economic times? Not here. Especially not when going up against them insures a very tough primary challenge in your next election.

The teachers conveniently waited until after the Democratic convention, so as to avoid having the issue play out where all the pundits could grill pols about it, but before the election, so that they can hold Democrats hostage, blaming the penny-pinching bosses for Johnny and Susie being home alone during the strike.

Would Hizzoner have the [insert PG chutzpah synonym] to fire the teachers and get replacements? Not too many Democrats would; Ed Koch might have tried that and Jerry Brown might, but Obama With Us is seemingly too much an operator to go that route.

Dead Program Walking

This week's issuance of the Freeh report on the Jerry Sandusky case saw a former head of the trustee board resign his trustee post today. It's become more probable that Penn State might see the death penalty for at least its football program.

On one hand, most of the people responsible for the cover-up are either dead or heading to jail; the current players at PSU weren't in on it and the coaching staff has been overhauled. However, when I did a Facebook post on that earlier this week, I neglected the deterrent value of punishment; it often isn't just to punish the perp, but to let others thinking about doing something similar think twice.

The one main application of the death penalty (actually a suspension of the program for a number of years rather than a total ban) was of the Southern Methodist football program. They had their 1987 season canceled due to an ongoing string of under-the-table payments to players with the knowledge of the school's president on down; that president, Bill Clements, wound up getting elected governor before things hit the fan.

Ongoing rapes of boys is far nastier than a booster slush fund for players; the latter is against NCAA rules but otherwise legal. For a poor kid struggling to make ends meet beyond having tuition and the dorm-room paid, it might even be something of a good thing outside of the shadiness of it all.

However, there is nothing good out coming from raping a child. If SMU got a year off from football and an away-only 1988 for running the second-best pro football team in Dallas, then Penn State would be lucky to be allowed to stay in the NCAA at all. I posited a 13 year suspension of the program to match the 13 years of cover up, but an indefinite suspension might not be out of the question.

It would leave an interesting hole in the Big Ten schedule and might result in PSU being replaced by another school (Cincinnati, maybe? Notre Dame, if they want to give up that Switzerland of football thing?) but that's a secondary matter.

"How many pedophile coaches are there to prevent?" Not that many, one would think and hope, but we have the prospect of more mundane rapes that might well be covered up.

Here's the story-line in my head. Star player has his way with a young coed and utters the nasty c-word, "consensual" when she presses charges; young lady is cast as a slut and nothing happens. The powers that be at a school might make sure the accuser is made miserable rather than doing the proper things.

Has that happened? Probably. Would a school think twice about allowing it to happen if PSU gets a trip to Jack the Dripper? You betcha, as the Sage of Wasilla would say.

P.S.-5800 Google hits for Sage of Wasilla; I guess that was too easy.

The HEAV Act- Part I - A Modest Proposal

Here's a little political thought experiment that will likely make me lose any conservative street cred that I have, if my last post didn't do it already.

The next Republican president puts forward a proposal to give every K-12 student a $2000 voucher to go to whatever school the student wants to go to on the condition that the school district that the student is in matches the voucher. If the kid goes to public schools, the system gets two grand from Uncle Sam, no strings attached. As part of the deal, No Child Left Behind and most other federal school regulations are scrapped. Special Ed and other high-degree-of-difficulty students will get higher voucher amounts to account for the lower teacher-student ratios in such programs.

That will put school districts $2K ahead for the kids they currently have and $2K in the hole for kids in private schools. $4k won't get you into BlueNose Academy, but it will get you into the local Catholic or evangelical school with a bit out of pocket.

Using my local schools as a guide, Blessed Sacrament charges $5000 for non-parisioners and Calvary Baptist charges $4600 for kids of non-members. The $4K voucher will cover the lion share of that, and many schools charging more than that might wind up "eating the co-pay" if they can make up the difference in donations.

After the NEA is done throwing a conniption fit, Senate Democrats make a counter-offer. We'll go with your voucher plan for K-12 if you make the Ryan-Wyden plan open to all citizens rather than just those on Medicare. Here's a write-up on the plan from last month

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on Thursday [12/15/11] plan to introduce a new Medicare reform plan that would allow seniors to choose between traditional Medicare and new private insurance programs.

The plan has some key differences from the Ryan blueprint that Republicans had rallied around earlier this year — and which Democrats had been united in pummelling in Congress and on the campaign trail as the beginning of the end of Medicare.

Dirty Harry and friends will push Obamacare under the bus if we make everyone eligible for Medicare and give them the option of taking a voucher for the average cost of coverage to an insurance company. If they already have a labor contract with qualifying coverage at work, they can cash in the voucher and keep their coverage. New labor contracts will see the voucher go to the employer if the employee wants the company health insurance.

The downside is that will cost money; the reason they needed the individual mandate is that didn't require shelling out cash for most folks and stuck the tab with businesses and the self-employed. We'll have the Cain Memorial VAT tax, a 9% tax on all purchases, with credit for VAT tax paid for supplies. The CBO has yet to score this bill, but they estimate that 9% should cover the cost of providing health care to all pre-seniors.

After Rand Paul gets done with some colorful verbiage and a 13-hour one-man filibuster, the Senate takes up consideration of the Health and Education Voucher Act

Assuming there isn't any killer details in the HEAV Act, would that be something that would make sense?

Just For Fun, He Says "Get a Job... and a Bath."

This Bruce Hornsby earwig was presented by Newt dissing the Occupiers-

The movement "starts with the premise that we all owe them everything," said Gingrich. And the movement's sense of entitlement is a "symptom how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" the former speaker of the House concluded.

With unemployment up around 9% and underemployment close to twice that, that's easier said than done; I'm in the latter category, holding down a nice part time job but wanting more. It's a nice line that goes over well in a Republican primary, but it sounds a bit too much like Hornsby's silk-suited one-percenter from The Way it Is, taunting the folks at the unemployment office.

However, Newt has a very good point slightly overplayed. A lot of college grads have the assumption that a good job is waiting for them once they graduate; the archetypal Occupier is the guy who can't find work with his master's degree in puppetry. Many less comic people with more marketable degrees are still on the outside looking in; everybody in the education system gave them the assumption that they had a career automatically waiting for them when they graduated, and the harsh reality doesn't match, making them bitter since their entitlement wasn't cashed in.

Part of that is the more disorganized US economy. In a more European system, more structured economies will feed college grads into standardized positions, but that structure doesn't help create a dynamic economy, disenfranchising folks who can't get a foot in the door.

In a US system, an over-emphasis on education as a door-opener creates a bit of systematic unemployment as people with liberal arts degrees and some specialist degrees chasing a declining number of jobs looking for their skills, with elementary ed degree folks working at a day-care center and Master of Library Arts grads clerking at Barnes and Noble... or PhD's in finance tutoring part time on-line.

Glenn Reynolds has been blogging on a pending higher ed bubble as of late; many of the Occupiers bought into the bubble and are grousing about their busted can of Jooky.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger East

Boise and Colorado Springs are in the East? Boise is closer to the Far East than the Big East, but in the ongoing game of musical conference chairs, the Big East is looking to reel in Boise State, Air Force and Navy as football-only schools and snag Central Florida as an all-sport school. If they can stem any further bleeding, that would put them at 12 football schools and open up a championship game.

Talk about big tents.

Hopaway Bride

TCU looks like it is changing its mind and is going to go to the Big 12 rather than the Big East. The Big East didn't make much sense other than as a way to get into an AQ conference; the Big 12 is in their back yard and TCU makes a good swap-out for A&M in a reconstituted South division. The Big East will get a $5M exit fee for a team that never played a game in it; there's a one-liner there, but I can't quite make it work.

The next problem is filling in the Big 12 North, which is down to four and may be down to three if Missouri jumps ship for the SEC. Louisville, West Virginia and BYU might be possibilities, as might Memphis and Cincinnati.

There might not be much left of the Big East once the dust settles. Sending Louisville, WV and Cincy to the Big 12 and UConn and Rutgers to the ACC would polish off all but South Florida from the Big East's football schools.

This looks like someone is playing a Sim NCAA game with real life.

Coed Nekkid Musical Chairs

Here is where things seem to be ending up once the balls stop bouncing in the college sports game. It looks like five major conferences will emerge, the ACC, Big 10, SEC, PAC-16 and what I'm christening the Fly-Over Conference scopping up the Big12 and Big East refugees.

PAC 16
Inland	Coastal
Texas	USC
Texas Tech	UCLA
Oklahoma	Standford
Oklahoma State	Cal
Arizona	Oregon
Arizona State	Oregon State
Utah	Washington
Colorado	Washington State

That makes a nice neat break, with the old PAC8 getting back together again.

ACC
North	South
BC	UNC
Uconn	NC State
Syracuse	Duke
Pittsburgh	Wake Forest
Rutgers	Clemson
Maryland	Georgia Tech
Virginia	Florida State
Virginia Tech	Miami

Once again, if the rumors of Rutgers and UConn are true, you get a nice north-south break, rather than the awkward one we have at present.

SEC
West	East
Texas A&M	Florida
LSU	Georgia
Arkansas	South Carolina
Missouri	Alabama
Mississippi St.	Auburn
Ole Miss	Tennessee
Kentucky	Vanderbilt

My friends in Lexington won't like getting UK sent west, but the other alternatives would either send Vandy west or break up the Alabama-Auburn Iron Bowl. This seems to be the most stable package for the SEC. One could see the Oklahoma schools coming in, but the inertia seems to have them pointing west.

Big Ten
North (Legends)	South (Leaders)
Michigan	Penn State
Michigan State	Ohio State
Nebraska	Indiana
Northwestern	Purdue
Minnesota	Illinois
Iowa	Wisconsin

There isn't anyone left in the region that would be a good fit. Notre Dame might work here, but you'd need a dance partner, which is in short supply among the available free agents. Missouri would be a good option; Iowa State would make sense geographically but not economically, as it doesn't add many eyeballs. However, if Mizzou heads to the SEC, the Big 10 seems set, with the exception of changing those funky division names.

Fly-Overs
West	East
Baylor	South Florida
Kansas	Cincinnati
Kansas St	Louisville
TCU	West Virgina
Iowa State	Notre Dame
BYU	Memphis

This is very flexible. I see 12 teams, for it gets you to a playoff. You could do this with nine teams, leaving Notre Dame, BYU and Memphis out; Memphis is a C-USA school, but would round out this conference rather well.

The Big East would get taken down to a smaller, basketball-centric core, shorn of its football schools, but the core of mainly Catholic big-city Rust Belt schools makes more sense.

I'm not sure how coherent 16-team conferences are. You'd likely play teams in the other division once every four years in football, if you go with a nine-game, round robin with in the division format. The WAC tried that back in the 90s and had the original ganstas go off and form the MWC. It makes more sense from a TV contract basis than it does from an academic basis.

Trip Two in the Books

I'm back in my comfy chair in the den after a second South U weekend, this one in Savannah. They have a nice main campus which reminds me a bit of Warner U (nee Warner Southern) and a bit of Florida Southern's Frank Lloyd Wright layout.

Of course, I had to fly through Atlanta and have a 5.5 hour layover; my scheduled flight got postponed than canceled, creating a mass exodus over to the ticket counter of Savannah-bound folks scrambling for alternatives.

I was this close to staying in Atlanta and doing the class from there (we do a teleconference with Atlanta, Columbia and Savannah and the first Saturday was in Atlanta), but the Delta ticket gal pulled a rabbit out of a hat and got me a ticket on the 8:30 flight... first class, no less. A guy who I was talking to got a similar bump-up, to seat 1D; I invoked the old Bob Eucker ad "Looks like I'm in the front rooooow." and he harmonized on "front rooooow".

We almost didn't get out of Atlanta, as the nasty stormfront that was item two on the BBC site just now was just about to hit. We were seeing those nasty red and orange shades on the radar heading our way and things were getting very dark (cue the "does that have a Hemi in it?" guy-"That caint be good"); we took off in the rain, but not yet thundery enough to shut things down. One of my Atlanta students, who was 15 minutes late, mentioned that a lot of power lines were down there once the storm did hit later Friday and early Saturday.

Disraeli said that there were three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics (I was teaching the latter yesterday). Disraeli never had to fly through Hartsfield, or he'd have a fourth- Atlanta airport schedules... at least in the afternoon and evening where weather and mechanical delays can create a game of musical gates. My morning flight back to Flint went just fine and on time other than returning to a sleety, windy mess.

Class proper went very well, better than any of the Saturday double-headers I had at Warner U. So, things are looking up.

One and Underdone?

Michael Wilbon's waxing about basketball's good ol' days when players had to stay in school longer and gets Jay Bilas in for backup-

"Now, it doesn't mean we're not going to have a great tournament; I think it could be an even better tournament than we normally have because it'll be volatile and it'll be fun to watch. The competition still is going to be great. But the quality of play is not what it has been. We've still got outstanding players; we don't have the tremendous superstars that are older that we used to have."

Bilas continued, "This is something the basketball community, the NBA included, is going to have to put its arms around because it's not just hurting the college game; it's hurting the NBA, too ... and the NBA product could be even better than it is, and right now I think it's outstanding."

As one who caught the UK bug while living in Lexington, it would have been nice to see the cadre that Calipari brought in last season get a second shot at the title after laying an egg in the regionals. However, John Wall is learning more basketball playing an 82 game NBA season with Washington than he would have playing a 30ish-game season at Kentucky. Likewise, Demarcus Cousins is getting a better basketball education at Sacremento.

Would the NBA be better if those two were forced to spend a second year (or more) playing college ball? If that were the case, why were teams hot to draft them back in June? If the NBA were better without them, the team formerly known as the Bullets would have sent Wall to the D-League like Houston did with Wall's UK running mate Patrick Paterson for a time earlier in the year.

If you made the current one-and-done rule requiring players to be a year out of high school before going to the NBA a three-and-done like the NFL does, you would have a crop of sophmores and juniors playing college ball. Brandon Knight would be coming off the bench for UK (or play for another school in the market for a starting point gaurd since Wall and Eric Bledsoe would be hogging the starting backcourt spots for two more years) and create a deeper UK team.

However, would the NBA be better with four guys off of D-league rosters than the four UK underclassmen who went pro this year? I think not.

It is nice to see players develop in college, to mature in their game and to see them develop a legacy at the school other than one fleeting season of promise like the UK bunch did last year. However, keeping folks who are ready for the next level in an extended period of indentured servitude (yes, tuition and room and board at a good school is nothing to sneeze at, but it's a fraction of the millions they make at the next level) doesn't help the game that much.

Bilas makes his living covering college basketball, so he has a vested interest in seeing that brand strengthened. Seeing folks like Grant Hill or Kalin Lucas stay for four years is better for fans of their schools than the one-and-dones that litter the modern landscape, but college is supposed to be preparing folks for life.

If one of my undergrad finance students had a million dollar offer from an investment banking firm, I'm not going to tell him to stay in school and finish his BBA; he can do that part-time while making the bongo bucks. That won't happen too often, but old-school folks would like to do just that with basketball stars.

Does the one-and-dones level the playing field? Yes, the more mature teams from mid-pack power conference schools and mid-majors can use age and treachery against youth and inexperience, so we see more parity in college ball and more teams with barely-above .500 records make the field, even adjusting for the extra three teams in this year's field.

However, that is just a side-effect of a somewhat free market in basketball talent. Shumpeter's creative destruction winds up doing a number on college dynasties, since if a team is good enough to win a title, it usually has an underclassman or two who will move on to the next level; the Florida team of a few years back who came back for a second title rather than go pro is the exception to the rule.

Southern Exposure

I'm going to be back in the teaching business at the end of the month; I'm working for South University, which is very reminiscent of Sullivan U as a for-profit southern business-centric college that grew from being a junior college into a full-function university. Both South and Sullivan have open up pharmacy schools in the late '00s. Interesting, South is named after a Mr. South who bought the school decades ago, not unlike the Sullivan family who still runs their namesake school.

The classes I'll be teaching are in their Accelerated MBA program, which meet for two all-day sessions on Saturdays while doing the rest on-line; it's a bit like the hybrid EMBA program at Sullivan where they met once a month in person and did the rest on-line, except with twice the face time and doing a class a month rather than three classes a quarter. I'll be teaching an introductory accounting-stats-finance class in April and a quant-methods class in May; more may well be coming if things work right.

I'll still be in Michigan; they're flying me into Atlanta for the Saturday classes. I've been through Atlanta any number of times, especially when we were living in Florida; we either drove through town or flew through Hartsfield, but I've never been to Atlanta. Not that I'll see too much, putting in a 10-hour day in the classroom and flying back to Midland on Sunday.

Dr. Byron is back in the saddle; I've tweaked the course syllabus and am working on an accounting 101 podcast, so I'm getting my professor sea legs back after a five-quarter absence.

Visiting Professor = I Just Lost My Seat

Here's to two new members of academe, Russ Feingold and Arlen Specter. Feingold will be teaching at Marquette's law school and Snarlin' Arlen is heading to the Penn.

The WSJ was making Marquette out to be some conservative bastion, being Catholic and Joe McCarthy's alma mater. That's a cheap and innaccurate shot, given that the left-leaning Jesuits at Marquette would be more likely to have been a target of Tailgunner Joe than a supporter were they in the public eye 60 years ago. Feingold will fit right in all too well.

One interesting thought is that Feingold might wind up heading right back to Washington. Wisconsin's other Senate seat is up next year, and Herb Kohl is of an age where retirement is a real option; Kohl turns 76 next month and might opt to call it a career, especially if he can turn things over to a rather good, albeit liberal, legistator.

Wave elections wind up carrying some decent pols out to sea, and Feingold was one of those this go-round; if there is a more liberal-friendly political climate next year, he might get the Cheeseheads to send him back to Washington.

 

Leaders Have People Following Them

I've been under the weather the past week and have yet to comment on the Leaders and Legends naming faux pas of the Big Ten. It may well wind up going the way of New Coke if commish Jim Delany's reaction is legit-

"I think we have enough experience with names, and expansion and development of divisions, to know that you never, rarely, get 90 percent approval rating," Delany said during the interview. "But to get a 90 percent non-approval rating was, you know, really surprising."

One of the problems with the balanced Big Ten split is that there isn't an easy geographic monicker to tag them. The ACC has a simular problem, where their divisions don't have geographic sense; they went with Atlantic and Coastal divisions via cannibalizing the conference name.

It's likely better to go with North for Legends and South for Leaders. It's hard to be a Leader when no one is following you.

Indian Giver

Harvard's already noted for their huge endowment, but they got a huge $50 million donation from Tata Motors to build a new business school building in Boston proper. Tata's current chair, Ratan Tata, is a Harvard grad.

That's going to buy more than $50m in goodwill, as they will have a friendly ear with one of the most influential business-schools in the world. Harvard Business Review case-studies are staples in business schools around the country and to have them flowing out of an Indian car company that is on the rise will give Tata some cache as they expand into the US market in the years to come.

If it were Toyota making the donation, a lot of folks would get reflexively protectionist. However, we don't have much in the way of anti-Indian sentiment other than occasional frustration at Bangalore call-center workers.

P.S.-I like the current ad with the Russian stall-artist-"You're tenacious like bull... I like... please hold."

Grad School Shuffle

Here's an interesting college football story, where former Oregon QB Jeremiah Masoli is getting a chance to play for Ole Miss this fall. Masoli got kicked off the Duck roster after multiple run ins with the law, but as a fifth-year senior who had already graduated, he took advantage of an NCAA rule that lets graduates with eligibility left to transfer without sitting out a year if their new school has a grad program that the old school didn't. Greg Paulus used that rule last year to play QB for Syracuse after playing basketball at Duke for four years.

If the NCAA were really pro-academics, they might want to change the rule to allow grads to transfer even if their schools had the program in question, especially if that was their undergrad major. Since your upper-division classes in a discipline are taught by the same professors that will be teaching the grad classes, you're going to be getting the same take on a field two or three times over. Having a new set of instructors at a difference school will give you a broader range of knowledge and insights.

However, that might lead to some volatility at the mid-major level. You could see a good QB graduate early as a third-year sophomore (easy to do if you go summers and/or CLEP/AP out of some classes; Patrick Patterson graduated from UK in three years, as did, if memory serves, Bernie Kosar) and transfer up to a better school for two more years.

The Old Gray BA, He Ain't What He Use to Be

Interesting but scary piece on unemployment, age and education. You're going to see fewer people with college degrees unemployed, but more of them are in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, especially those who are 45 and over. I recall a churchmate in Indy who was an unemployed computer programmer who was easily AARP-eligible; he had been unemployed for over two years.

I currently resemble that, for I have been underemployed for eight months after losing my teaching job in November; I've been freelance writing and online-tutoring part time, but regular work has been non-existant. Being both over-credentialed and under-experienced makes me a tough fit in a resume-driven job market.

It's somewhat encouraging to see that it isn't just me, but that a lot of folks in my boat are struggling.

May 4th +40

It will be interesting to see if this gets any press tomorrow, but they'll be marking the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings tomorrow. It's hard to think that they were only celebrating the 20th when I was getting ready to start grad school there two decades ago in 1990. Tempus doth fugit.