I’m gonna get a little grumpy here at the outset.
Don’t Give Disney the UC-Riverside Rights
UC-Riverside won last night on about the best buzzer beater you can script. It was a great moment for a rising college basketball program with a stud young coach in Mike Magpayo, who, with his players, is making something where there was previously nothing. Arizona State isn’t very good, but they’re good enough that they’re supposed to beat the UC-Riversides of the world, and for a team hoping to win their league and play Cinderella in March, this is a great second game.
Adding to the drama is that last year, UC-Riverside rather publicly mulled over the possibility of getting rid of sports. Their logic was that their sports lose money, which is pretty good logic in a time of skyrocketing costs of education. They ended up keeping the athletic department around, but they’re trying some different things to make money, because the structural problems still exist. UCR’s a solid academic school (on par with Marquette, Iowa, Michigan State) and does awesome things for low-income students, but the sports just aren’t cutting it, competitively or financially. They’re keeping them…but it isn’t pretty.
This is a great story. UCR athletics are playing for their existence. An up-and-coming basketball coach is defying stereotypes (Magpayo is the first D-I men’s basketball coach of Asian descent). It was a dramatic early-season win, hopefully en route to bigger and better things.
It’s also a very real-life story, with all the real-life mundanity and uncertainty. We don’t know if the athletic department will hang on. We don’t know if it’s even smart for the athletic department to still exist. We don’t know where UCR’s season will go, and they should be hoping ASU’s far from the best team they beat this year. There’s a temptation to over-dramatize this, to turn it into some Disney flick fifteen years from now where ASU is a powerhouse, the shot saves the athletic department, and it makes college sports accept Asian-Americans, but it’s a better story in the way it exists in the real world, where the credits do not roll once the shot goes in. It’s a better story in that this team still has a whole season to play, with a tough game on Wednesday night over at San Diego. And the university still has a budget to balance, one where sports need to figure out how to do their part.
I Hope Cincinnati Makes the Playoffs
Continuing the curmudgeon streak:
I realized this morning that the reason I want Cincinnati to make the College Football Playoff is not because they’d be the little guy who pulled it off, or because I have a particular love of Luke Fickell, or because I think they’re the best team in the country or anything like that. I want Cincinnati to make the College Football Playoff because people keep saying that there’s no way the committee will let a Group of Five team into the playoff, and I do not believe that’s possibly true. There has to be a way. It might be a hard way. It might be an unreasonably hard way. But you go on Twitter (and of course it’s Twitter, there’s part of my problem) and you get folks applying their the-powerful-are-against-me worldviews to college sports and saying, with complete certainty because they say everything with complete certainty, that Cincinnati can’t make it. They’ve been doing this shtick for years. It’s dumb. Cincinnati can make it. They might not make it. But there’s a way.
The MLB Did a Goofy CBA Proposal
Alright, final bit of grump: Major League Baseball’s latest CBA proposal reportedly included two headline-grabbing bits:
The first, the smaller bit, is that they want free agency to start once a player has turned 29.5 years old, which would be terrible for players who enter the league early even if it hastens free agency for players who enter the league late. The idea of making it age-based isn’t the worst one, but what players really want, and what would be better for players being paid their worth, is for free agency to start sooner in terms of both age and service time. 29.5 is right around when players, especially position players, start declining. It’s so late.
The second, which got more of the attention because it was evidently misrepresented and the misrepresentation would have been hilarious if it was true (shocking that something fed indirectly out to the media by a negotiations participant wasn’t cleanly reported at first), was that MLB wants to replace arbitration with a set of formulas in which what a player makes is based on how good they’ve been. In the example, fWAR was used, which then became the meme, with FanGraphs writers having to say they didn’t want their stat used to determine players’ salaries because what was reported was, “MLB wants to use fWAR to determine salaries,” when what was really evidently happening was that MLB wanted to use a formula of some sort and used fWAR as the example.
This is all kind of silly, and there’s plenty to hate about Major League Baseball as an organization, and I personally hope we get closer and closer to a real free market approach to where players can sign and how much they can be paid, because I think the guys providing the value deserve to get that value. But silly as it is to get grumpy about the way the fWAR thing was reported, it’s important to remember that we’re going to get some wild misrepresentations of what’s going on behind closed doors as these negotiations wind on.
This Weekend, in College Football
I wrote a lot more about this weekend’s games here, but the bottom line as to what’s happening is that the teams with playoff hopes are fighting a war of attrition, trying to hold ground while hoping others lose to their respective foes. We should get something like three or four of the thirteen teams in the mix taking a loss tonight and tomorrow. Hopefully it’s an interesting three or four.
This Weekend, in College Basketball
It’s mostly just teams jockeying for position, games that could prove crucial but will probably just be data points. That said, Villanova plays at UCLA tonight and Texas plays at Gonzaga tomorrow and both should be fun. One great part about this is that they aren’t neutral-site games. They’re home games. Hopefully there are some good crowds. Bets for tonight in college basketball and the whole weekend in college football here. More college basketball bets tomorrow morning and likely Sunday morning.
This Weekend, in Iowa State
Iowa State visits Texas Tech tomorrow afternoon in football, desperately needing to win. It’s a game they should not lose, and there’s enough of a glimmer coming through the conference title door that there really might be something to play for.
Elsewhere in the league, I’m not sure if Iowa State would be helped or hurt by Baylor beating Oklahoma. Baylor holding that head-to-head is a reason to want them out, but Oklahoma’s looked vulnerable enough that ISU could conceivably hope on passing the Sooners with a win next weekend. I don’t know. I haven’t seen simulations. I do know that TCU beating Oklahoma State would be massive for the Cyclones no matter what happens in Waco.
On the basketball court, the men’s team hosts Oregon State tonight in what’s projecting as a toss-up. In a season where the goal is probably going to be to not be too close to the bottom among power conference teams, it would be nice to not have this loss.
Cubs Injury Updates
Jordan Bastian has updates on Cubs injuries, with the summary basically that David Bote probably won’t be back until May at the earliest, Jason Heyward is symptom-free after that concussion in September, and everyone else of much note is fine. Not the worst roundup at this point in the offseason.
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Tonight, I think the move is to see if Cincinnati can destroy USF and to then watch the Nova/UCLA game. Tomorrow, Texas/Gonzaga is a good filler between the primetime college football games winding down and Oregon/Washington State potentially heating up. You do you, though. Enjoy it.
