The Orioles are getting new ownership. After decades of life under the notoriously dysfunctional Angelos family, Baltimore native and business tycoon David Rubenstein is leading a group that will reportedly slowly purchase the majority of the Baltimore Orioles. If we understand correctly, they’ll begin running the franchise before they own that fifty percent.
Fans are happy about this, as fans should be. But as it goes for citizens celebrating after a tyrant is overthrown, there’s no guarantee the next one won’t be bad. The hope is that the Orioles will finally have the money to extend Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, but will they? It’s unclear. More importantly, it’s unclear if that will even be a good idea in the form they do it, should it happen. For as great as Rutschman is, and for as strongly as the MLB CBA incentivizes these pre-arbitration extensions on both sides, it’s possible to sign a dumb one.
The point is this: An inconvenient development for The Prevailing Angelos Narrative is that the Orioles just won 101 games. It doesn’t make the narrative wrong—it’s hard to look at the family’s track record and call them good owners, and their present state is one of especial chaos—but winning in baseball is less tied to things like free agency aggression than it was twenty years ago. The sport is a young man’s game now. That’s how the 2023 Orioles won so many games. The present Orioles front office, improbable though this may be, is playing this young man’s game quite well. Will the team come down to earth this year? Probably. At least a little bit. But even so…this would be the time to change fewer things, not overhaul a mess of an organization.
What Rubenstein and his team need to do, then, is not only smooth things out in the owners’ suite, and it’s definitely not to blindly throw money at the franchise in ways that satiate vocal fans. It’s to run a strong organization, top to bottom. That’s a hard thing to do. It might be even harder in this bizarre circumstance Rubenstein inherits, one in which their predecessors were unquestionably flawed but also, presently, highly successful.
Celebrate, Orioles fans. You should celebrate. But your future is still in your prospects. You’ve got a good raw product right now. The hope should be that the Rubenstein group burns out the impurities, like a refinery turning iron to steel. The fear should be that the Rubenstein group tries to start from scratch, or tries to win an offseason at a time when the biggest offseason winners tend to fall flat.
NIL Is (Probably) About to Get Even Looser
The question for the NCAA is what it can really enforce regarding NIL, and that’s a question both legal and practical. Legally, it appears possible that if the right lawsuit went through the right courts, the NCAA could be forbidden from forbidding NIL inducement in the first place.
The attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA on Wednesday that challenged its ban on the use of name, image and likeness compensation in the recruitment of college athletes, and in response to the association’s investigation of the University of Tennessee.
I don’t know where this is going. I’m not a legal expert. The NCAA, though, has been losing a lot lawsuits lately, at least in terms of the effective outcome. It’s hard to expect this one to turn out differently.
This is, on paper, good. Recruiting inducement is a good thing for college sports. There’s no good reason for college sports to not have free agency. What’s hard is that schools and fans don’t actually want college sports to have free agency. As it stands right now, the NIL world is a near-constant bidding war. Schools don’t like that. Fans don’t like that. Schools don’t want their coaches to have to recruit 365 days a year. Fans don’t want their favorite college athletes to change schools every offseason.
We’ve talked before about a possible end state for this, one with formalized contracts in which schools and recruits (high school or transfer) can agree on one, two, three, four, or five-year deals. Let everybody choose. The issue is getting to this end state legally, given how much college sports run up against employment laws in terms of, among other things, the demands placed on athletes’ time.
In the meantime, what’s been happening is that there’s been a mostly free market for NIL offers as recruiting inducement, with the NCAA recently trying to take big swings at a few big offenders of the nominal rules, hoping that these swings will be enough of a deterrent to calm things down from the 365-day bidding war. Today’s development is that the attorneys general of Virginia and Tennessee are trying to stop the NCAA from even taking those swings. The attorneys general of Virginia and Tennessee, rightly or wrongly, are trying to legally eliminate the one lever the NCAA seems to have in its futile attempt to moderate the chaotic world of NIL.
What happens next? If the NCAA loses the lawsuit, more of the same, but with fewer holds barred. Maybe that will become a sustainable steady state. Maybe we’ll all get used to it and players will gradually learn that the grass isn’t always greener. Maybe the Charlie Baker Solution will be enough to get this streamlined into a somewhat workable state. The alternative is that employment laws will need to be addressed, meaning the future of college sports—a field with situations ranging from SEC football to Division III tennis—will indeed rest in Congressional hands, hands with very little familiarity with the industry they’re trying to regulate.
It’s hard to begrudge the lawsuit, and the lawsuit might get us closer to a sustainable state. In the meantime, expect more chaos because of this, not more order.
The Rest
Note: We’re posting this later than planned, so some of what follows may be out of date.
College basketball:
- South Carolina upsetting Tennessee was the story of last night, and yes, Lamont Paris should currently be the leader for national coach of the year. The Gamecocks were one of those teams whose preseason kenpom rating popped out at you as surprisingly high (they were one of the worst power-conference teams last year). Paris had quietly pulled together a solid roster. That made South Carolina an interesting sleeper, but by that we meant sleeper for a tournament bid. Not to win the SEC. They’re half a game back of Alabama now, and their only road game against the SEC’s top teams comes in two weeks against Auburn. Every other game is winnable on paper, and it’s hard to say the trip to Auburn isn’t winnable given they just won the trip to Knoxville. Consider us South Carolina believers. The second round is still probably the destination, but this team isn’t much worse than the one who made the Final Four in 2017. It’s better than the recent Miami teams were at points in their respective seasons.
- Elsewhere in the SEC, Mississippi also climbed to 18–3, holding off Mississippi State in Oxford. After losing three of five to open SEC play after a bunch of nonconference layups, it looked like Mississippi was coming down to earth. Instead, they’ve gotten much better these last three games. We’re still skeptical, and they have three tough ones in a row coming up, but for all his serious faults, Chris Beard is a very effective basketball coach when he is coaching basketball. The SEC’s depth is regenerating, even with Texas A&M disappointing and Arkansas’s implosion.
- UNC finally lost a conference game, and while they probably got hosed on a call at the end, I doubt UNC has cumulative grounds for any frustration with ACC officiating. Credit to Georgia Tech, who’s been inconsistent but shown some great highs in Damon Stoudamire’s first year. Credit to Naithan George for the game-winner.
- I’ll admit that I kind of expect Purdue to obliterate Northwestern in the West Lafayette rematch, but Boo Buie is such a player you can count on (and Brooks Barnhizer is such an effective sidekick) that any Northwestern game is at least intriguing. What in the world happened against Chicago State.
Chicago, the Packers, Iowa State:
- Dalen Terry got hurt in the Bulls’ loss to the Raptors last night. Sprained his ankle. I know Terry isn’t the most promising guy in the world, but he’s having a good year, and him turning into a reliably strong rotation piece would be a solid development for the franchise. It doesn’t appear he’s been ruled out for Saturday, but he’s not going to play tonight in Charlotte.
- The Bears are bringing Thomas Brown (former Panthers OC) in to be the team’s passing game coordinator, and to be honest, I don’t know how many teams have a passing game coordinator. Maybe it’s a good role to have, maybe not. I have no idea. Either way, the calling card for Brown is that he has recently worked for Sean McVay, just like new OC Shane Waldron did (as the Rams’ passing game coordinator). Is this an asset? Maybe. It also might just be a new baseline. I’d like to see how many teams have offensive staffs without any McVay apostles. I have a hunch that’s the rarer thing now.
- The Packers’ defensive coordinator decision is in, and it’s…*drum roll*…Jeff Hafley? The Boston College head coach. I’m sure we’ll get more intel on Hafley over the next few days, but one interesting thing: If Hafley was the first option, this would make it two DC hires in a row in which Matt LaFleur’s top choice came from the college game, given the reports he wanted Jim Leonhard when he hired Joe Barry.
- The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a statement today standing by their investigation into gambling by athletes in Ames and Iowa City. I don’t know how significant this is or isn’t—the issue’s in the courts now—but they’re standing by their guy for now.
Four more:
- I was a little surprised to see Jim Harbaugh’s reported salary ($16M, per Mike Florio). I don’t think the money made the difference, but the report was that Michigan making Harbaugh the highest-paid coach in college football only meant making a $12.5M offer. To be honest, I didn’t think NFL coaches made more than the really big college coaches. I thought that made up for how much more year-round the college job is. Turns out, it’s decently comparable once you’re in the top reaches of the college list. College coaches probably enjoy a more efficient market—there are so many more colleges than NFL franchises—but whatever the cause, the highest-paid NFL coaches make more than the top college guys, while the average top-25 college coach makes more than the average NFL guy. Please update your frame of reference accordingly. (I’m going to need to search this blog post in eleven months to remind myself how this works.)
- I’m excited to see Portland’s reaction to Damian Lillard’s return tonight. Also, I’m curious. If they follow the Detroit blueprint vis-à-vis Matthew Stafford, Portland will continue to adore Lillard and will live vicariously as Bucks fans until they’re good. That could be forever.
- Joel Embiid got hurt last night, and while he’ll have an MRI and miss a few games, he’s expected to be fine. The main story with the injury is that Embiid will now definitely not play 65 games this season, making him ineligible to be the league’s MVP. This has folks upset. Should they be? On the one hand, valuable should mean valuable, and since value is a counting stat, if a player is the most valuable player and missed 20 games, that doesn’t make them not the most valuable player. On the other, the NBA has expanded its playoffs so wide that it needs something to incentivize stars not to lean heavily on injuries as excuses to rest. It needs an incentive. The 65-game minimum seems to be working as a motivator. It sucks that Embiid got hurt, but if the goal was to weed out players sitting thanks to bullshit injuries, it’s a good sign if players are instead trying to play through too much. It means the motivator is working, and maybe only needs a slight tweak (if anything).
- My impression of the PGA Tour investment news is that golfers will now, through their PGA Tour membership, get some chunk of the broader PGA Tour pie, and that the size of the chunk will be determined by their performance. Basically, a little more money. That’s my impression. Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems to be what happened here, and it’s still unclear what exactly will be worked out between the tour and Saudi Arabia. If you understand this better than I, please correct me.
