23andCounting Posted May 15 Posted May 15 1 minute ago, Bobref said: I have nothing against Cignetti or IU. I’m going strictly on probabilities. How many teams have had 2-3 great years … and gone on to be dominant for a decade? You can count them on one hand and have a finger or two left over. The odds are that IU will regress toward the mean. But it will be very interesting to see just how the portal/NIL may affect that historical record. Yeah, but Cignetti appears to be a different beast. The man made IU a champion after two seasons. That's not a typo. IU is our national champion. There's something different about Cignetti. It's like there's a gap between him and everyone else. Smart and Freeman...............great coaches. But damn, I'm betting on this guy. One can only presume that the level of talent that he has to work with will only get better. Quote
Bash Riprock Posted May 15 Posted May 15 35 minutes ago, Bobref said: I have nothing against Cignetti or IU. I’m going strictly on probabilities. How many teams have had 2-3 great years … and gone on to be dominant for a decade? You can count them on one hand and have a finger or two left over. The odds are that IU will regress toward the mean. But it will be very interesting to see just how the portal/NIL may affect that historical record. LOL....I smell fear. We are in the same age groups....I can certainly remember when Georgia had good teams under Vince Dooley, but wasn't the program they are now. Same for Bama...had a few down years before sustained excellence under Saban. Oregon....before the influence of Nike money, very little from them in the PAC 10. Ole Miss...mid to bottom of the SEC a few years ago. Other programs such as Nebraska used to dominate during the Osbourne years...not so much today. But the top programs have 2 things in common...great coaching and resources. Indiana has both. There is a no reasont to believe they cannot sustain unless they lose one or the other. Face it..ND doesn't rule the state of Indiana with ease anymore....they have some competition in the southern part of the state. 1 Quote
Bobref Posted May 15 Posted May 15 1 hour ago, 23andCounting said: Yeah, but Cignetti appears to be a different beast. The man made IU a champion after two seasons. That's not a typo. IU is our national champion. There's something different about Cignetti. It's like there's a gap between him and everyone else. Smart and Freeman...............great coaches. But damn, I'm betting on this guy. One can only presume that the level of talent that he has to work with will only get better. 58 minutes ago, Bash Riprock said: LOL....I smell fear. SILLY We are in the same age groups....I can certainly remember when Georgia had good teams under Vince Dooley, but wasn't the program they are now. Same for Bama...had a few down years before sustained excellence under Saban. Oregon....before the influence of Nike money, very little from them in the PAC 10. Ole Miss...mid to bottom of the SEC a few years ago. Other programs such as Nebraska used to dominate during the Osbourne years...not so much today. But the top programs have 2 things in common...great coaching and resources. Indiana has both. There is a no reasont to believe they cannot sustain unless they lose one or the other. Face it..ND doesn't rule the state of Indiana with ease anymore....they have some competition in the southern part of the state. I hope you’re right. Be nice to have that competition. It would be good for football in Indiana in general. Besides, it would keep the Boilers in their place. 😉 Quote
Bash Riprock Posted May 15 Posted May 15 13 minutes ago, Bobref said: I hope you’re right. Be nice to have that competition. It would be good for football in Indiana in general. Besides, it would keep the Boilers in their place. 😉 just having fun with the smell fear comment Bob....I had to chuckle with the Purdue comment!! Quote
Irishman Posted May 17 Author Posted May 17 Not surprised in the least bit. My question is why in the HELL are D3 players entering the portal at all? 1 Quote
Irishman Posted May 17 Author Posted May 17 Total numbers per sport. I could not find a breakdown by division Quote
Irishman Posted May 17 Author Posted May 17 Just a few months in….zero games coached, and ALREADY on the hot seat. lol Great job Lane Quote
Komets2727 Posted May 17 Posted May 17 On 5/15/2026 at 1:01 PM, Bobref said: I’ll let the on field results do my talking for me. Won’t take long. Been hearing that from Irish fans since 1991… just sayin Quote
Komets2727 Posted May 17 Posted May 17 3 hours ago, Irishman said: Just a few months in….zero games coached, and ALREADY on the hot seat. lol Great job Lane Is there a more unlikable coach than Kiffin? I think not… 2 Quote
Coach Nowlin Posted May 17 Posted May 17 4 hours ago, Irishman said: Just a few months in….zero games coached, and ALREADY on the hot seat. lol Great job Lane check that little Readers Added Context.....that silly internet.... 18 minutes ago, Komets2727 said: Is there a more unlikable coach than Kiffin? I think not… I appreciate the villain role he knows he owns.... As a natural Heel in my Wrasslin career and what I gravitate to in watching, I can respect Lane's game both on and off the field. Quote
Irishman Posted May 18 Author Posted May 18 20 minutes ago, Coach Nowlin said: check that little Readers Added Context.....that silly internet.... Not directed at you. Just cussin at myself and 1 Quote
Bobref Posted May 18 Posted May 18 1 hour ago, Komets2727 said: Been hearing that from Irish fans since 1991… just sayin Keep listening. 1 Quote
Komets2727 Posted May 18 Posted May 18 18 hours ago, Bobref said: Keep listening. More crickets? Quote
23andCounting Posted May 18 Posted May 18 3 hours ago, Komets2727 said: More crickets? Certainly you're not comparing Freeman to Davie, Willingham, Weis, and Kelly. Now, Kelly was a good coach, it was widely accepted that Notre Dame under his leadership was a Top 10 program. Right now Notre Dame is Top 5. I don't think it's off the wall to think the Irish has as good of a chance as anyone this season. Quote
Sparty Posted May 19 Posted May 19 As an ND fan, I can say I was not sold on Freeman when he was initially hired, but I am 100% bought in on his coaching and recruiting. He genuinely seems like a real good man. Quote
23andCounting Posted May 19 Posted May 19 9 hours ago, Sparty said: As an ND fan, I can say I was not sold on Freeman when he was initially hired, but I am 100% bought in on his coaching and recruiting. He genuinely seems like a real good man. I think character had a lot to do with it. I don't think that always the case when a program goes after a head coach.........see LSU. Freeman was the perfect guy for the job from a character perspective. Speaking of LSU, there was NO WAY Notre Dame was going to allow LSU to take their head coach AND one of the most sought after young coordinators in the country. If Freeman went to LSU, that would have been a curb stomping of all curb stompings. Notre Dame was retaining this guy at all costs. Risky move, but sometimes risks are rewarded. 1 Quote
Muda69 Posted June 2 Posted June 2 IU was just given the Kiss of Death for this upcoming season: 1 Quote
Muda69 Posted June 2 Posted June 2 The Feds are coming! The Feds are coming! The Protect College Sports Act Trades NCAA Chaos for Federal Overreach https://reason.com/2026/06/02/the-protect-college-sports-act-trades-ncaa-chaos-for-federal-overreach/ Quote After the failure of the SCORE Act in the House of Representatives, there's a new bill on the Senate side to "protect" college sports. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) introduced the Protect College Sports Act on Wednesday. The bill is the NCAA's best chance yet (if only because every other effort has failed) to get its long-awaited help from Congress in wresting back control of college sports. It's a wide-ranging bill that covers a lot of things you'd expect (name, image, and likeness [NIL] payments and transfer rules) and touches more aspects you probably wouldn't have thought Congress would weigh in on (conference realignment, coach movement, and scheduling of both college football and NFL games). On transfers, the bill would only allow student-athletes to transfer schools once (additional transfers would require a season off, unless the athlete is transferring because their coach left or the school eliminated the team). Athletes would have a maximum of five years of eligibility for college sports, with exceptions for pregnancies, missionary work, military service, and any other reason approved en masse by the NCAA. Any athlete who's played professionally would have no eligibility (to oversimplify: prize money is allowed, salaries are not, and the NCAA would have discretion to decide what's allowed). The NCAA and the College Sports Commission (formed in 2025) would have legal backing to enforce their NIL rules. That includes a "salary" cap, where schools would have $21.3 million to spend on their student-athletes across all sports. The College Sports Commission would basically be able to determine what payments are under-the-table NIL payments designed to go around the compensation cap. As Cruz described it: "If it's fake NIL, if it is a booster just handing an athlete a bag of cash under the table, that is breaking the rules." The bill also stops conference realignment in its tracks—at least for the Big Ten and SEC. Conferences with $1 billion in revenue in 2025 would not be allowed to merge or add members. (That restriction only applies to 2025 revenue, so even if revenue changes, it still only applies to those two conferences in perpetuity.) It also includes the infamous "Lane Kiffin rule," where coaches and key staff are not allowed to leave for another team in the same season—not just for gameday coaching functions, but also for recruiting and other off-the-field purposes. Conferences would be given an antitrust exemption to pool their media rights—if they want to. The smaller conferences would have to placate the Big Ten and SEC to get them involved, though. One thing that would probably stand in the way of a deal big enough to entice the Big Ten and SEC: If a certain basketball or football game is going to be shown exclusively on a streaming platform, the broadcaster would still have to make that game available in a university's market area "without charge" (i.e. on network TV or cable, even though people pay for cable—free content on a streaming platform would be allowed too). The Federal Communications Commission would oversee which local markets each school's games must be shown in. That's going to diminish the financial value of any deal offered by broadcasters to the conferences. Furthermore, any school in a conference that pools its media rights would fall under new rules over "traditional rivalry"—its football team could be required to play a certain team every four years or every year if the teams have played each other often enough in the past. By law, student-athletes would be allowed to have an agent and wouldn't lose eligibility for hiring one. Agents for student-athletes would have to register with a state government and would have their fees capped at 5 percent. It's not getting much media coverage, but the bill also requires various safety standards relating to concussions, heat injuries, asthma, and other ailments (by outsourcing these standards to various nongovernmental bodies, usually the NCAA). Medical personnel get "autonomous, unchallengeable authority to determine medical management and return to play decisions" in the bill's text, and "No coach or other nonmedical personnel of an institution may attempt to influence or disregard" those decisions. If it passed, you could also say goodbye to a few more quirks in the NFL schedule: the NFL would not be allowed to broadcast on the first Friday in September (as of now, it's the second) or the third Saturday in December (as of now, it's the second). The college football season would also be legally required to end by January 8 every year, "to the extent practicable." One thing the bill doesn't touch on, because movement in either direction would be a poison pill for either side of the aisle, is whether student-athletes are employees. Democrats generally want to see them designated as employees so that the athletes have collective bargaining rights and could form a union, while Republicans (and the NCAA) generally want the law to prevent that. Cantwell insists the collective bargaining debate is not over. The Consequences If you read all of that and thought, "Wow, it's kind of crazy that Congress is going to set the governing rules for a major sports entity," I'm with you. A lot of this feels like overreach that people would find crazy in other industries, even if you agree with the aims (like transfer rules—restricting athletes to one transfer is inevitably going to end up challenged in court, or with as many loopholes as Swiss cheese). Consider, for example, the health and safety standards. Obviously we want healthy athletes (even at your rival college). But giving "autonomous, unchallengeable" power to medical personnel seems like a reach. Perhaps your star running back takes a knock and is only feeling 95 percent ready to play in the national championship game, and there's a minuscule chance of a career-ending injury. If he wants to take the risk, and the coach wants to take the risk, the medical staff can still keep the player out—the coach is not even allowed to appeal and try to "influence" that decision. The bill is wise to not directly set the safety standards on concussions and other ailments into law. But outsourcing those standards to the NCAA and other organizations doesn't mean we can trust them to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific findings. Perhaps you hate conference realignment and are sick of the Big Ten and SEC expanding. Consider two possible loopholes to the bill. First, every other conference would still be allowed to merge and expand. In theory, every other conference could join together and start their own superleague without the Big Ten and SEC. Second, the bill doesn't actually stop the current schools of the Big Ten and SEC from forming a superleague—those schools could still leave the NCAA altogether for a newly formed entity. What about the proposed salary cap? That's just asking for under-the-table deals, like the paper bags full of cash that were rumored to run recruitment in the days of college sports yore. As Ross Dellenger wrote in great coverage of the bill for Yahoo Sports, "Next year, each school has $21.3 million to spend on all of their athletes, but many programs, in order to achieve an advantage in a competitive recruiting environment, have redirected corporate sponsor cash to their rosters disguised as third-party NIL — compensation that doesn't count against the cap." You might think it's wise for a cap to slow down the arms race on NIL payments, but market value always prevails—the cap is just going to move the payments into the darkness. Likewise, the "Lane Kiffin rule" is obviously unworkable. Coaches will reach under-the-table deals to upgrade to bigger schools that will just get finalized on the first day allowed. They'll zone out of their current job and start backchannel communications with recruits and their agents for their new . The rule is possibly unconstitutional anyway under other employment laws. The NCAA has failed to enforce its own rules for decades. Why do we think it would successfully enforce this one? There's also the rule that keeps athletes who have played professionally from returning to college sports. This made a lot more sense when the NCAA had strict amateurism rules—now it's a bit rich considering the payments players are getting to be good at sports. It's essentially saying: "Yes, you got paid to be good at sports. But you weren't paid by us, you were paid by some Italians, so you're banned." The bill has some good reforms, to be fair, but they're mostly codifying certain things that are already happening anyway (like NIL payments and the right to hire an agent). One major improvement is the antitrust exemption, which allows conferences to pool their media rights together—but even that comes with a ton of restrictions. Congress should not be managing the NCAA just because the organization failed to manage itself for decades. Imagine if Congress got involved in MLB in the 1960s and said the league couldn't let the American League and National League merge for business purposes, or that they couldn't expand or let teams relocate. What if the NBA said "Our tanking problem is out of control, Congress can you please fix the draft lottery for us?" Congress is trying to micromanage football schedules when it should be trying to assert its authority over trade and military actions. Instead of the economy or life-and-death issues, they're spending their time on what is basically an entertainment industry that exists to promote colleges to prospective students. Will the Bill Pass? I'm not saying you should disregard all of this, but the bill probably won't pass, at least not as it currently stands. Even if it fails, another effort to reform college sports will come up in the future that will include many of these ideas. Sportswriter Jesse Dougherty talked to sources on Capitol Hill for insights on whether the bill can pass. Many were waiting to see how Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) weighed in, since he often sets the tone for progressives in the Senate. Murphy eventually released a statement that said: "We are all still reading this bill…but this seems like a great deal for the NCAA and the rich guys who run college sports, and a bad deal for athletes." It seems like a safe bet the Congressional Black Caucus will agree with him, since gerrymandering is still a thing. Combine progressive opposition with the fact that most of the powerful schools don't want it. The SEC came out strong against the bill (at least on the pooling of media rights), and only a few people affiliated with Big Ten and SEC schools have come out in support. If the athletic departments, administrators, alumni, and boosters for the biggest, most powerful schools in the South and Midwest are all yelling at their members of Congress to oppose the bill, it's going to be an uphill battle. If you were looking at this issue from a purely left-right perspective, though, Republicans might want to take this deal. It accomplishes much of what they want, and it seems unlikely that congressional Republicans will have more power after the 2026 midterm elections, and probably not after the 2028 elections either. (I shudder to think of what a Democratic trifecta under President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do to college sports.) On Wednesday morning, Cruz and the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing about the bill featuring testimony by Nick Saban, Notre Dame's athletic director, former president of Ohio State and other universities Gordon Gee, the Pac-12 commissioner (yes, it still exists!), and a Utah football player. It will be interesting to see what each senator says about the bill and to parse the questions they ask witnesses. Quote
Bash Riprock Posted June 4 Posted June 4 According to these guys, top 10 highest college football payrolls. Any surprises? I would have thought Georgia and Michigan would be on the list. Surprised ND in top 10. Thoughts?? Quote
23andCounting Posted June 4 Posted June 4 2 hours ago, Bash Riprock said: According to these guys, top 10 highest college football payrolls. Any surprises? I would have thought Georgia and Michigan would be on the list. Surprised ND in top 10. Thoughts?? Surprised Georgia and Michigan aren't in there there. Not surprised at Notre Dame. Quote
Bash Riprock Posted June 8 Posted June 8 The new line of defense for an athlete gambling on his teams in collegiate sports..... 1) Sue the NCAA to get a judge local to your university to hear your case 2) argue that gambling is a mental health disorder Get reinstated...taking a quote from Ken Nunn...."its just that easy". Integrity of the game? Who needs it? Brendan Sorsby was smart enough to have a university get the right attornies and the right venue for him....I guess well played?? In their defense of his gambling, attorneys for Sorsby used his 'mental health disorder' as a reasoning as to why the NCAA should have accepted the two-game suspension proposal from the quarterback, while also proclaiming that none of the bets placed were compromising the actual game. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/brendan-sorsby-wins-court-injunction-ncaa-betting-team-multiple-times Quote
Bash Riprock Posted June 9 Posted June 9 7 hours ago, Bash Riprock said: The new line of defense for an athlete gambling on his teams in collegiate sports..... 1) Sue the NCAA to get a judge local to your university to hear your case 2) argue that gambling is a mental health disorder Get reinstated...taking a quote from Ken Nunn...."its just that easy". Integrity of the game? Who needs it? Brendan Sorsby was smart enough to have a university get the right attornies and the right venue for him....I guess well played?? In their defense of his gambling, attorneys for Sorsby used his 'mental health disorder' as a reasoning as to why the NCAA should have accepted the two-game suspension proposal from the quarterback, while also proclaiming that none of the bets placed were compromising the actual game. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/brendan-sorsby-wins-court-injunction-ncaa-betting-team-multiple-times Interesting……. 1 Quote
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