gehringer_2

Hronek with a contribution.

georgia appears to be toast. That sucks since it means Alabama and Georgia are both going to the playoff.

but the reason that space is grey is exactly because we don't have a security treaty with Ukraine or Taiwan and are not likely to in the time frame that something could happen.

yeah - that was about as 'down to the wire' as a football game can be. The way Baylor's D gave up the 1st 90 yrds didn't inspire much confidence they would hold in the end.

additional signings will be arms that throw from the mound.

There is a point there with respect to the sense of the bill of rights but you run into the problem with the black and white text in the 8th amendment. If they had intended to ban bail, they would not have instead set limits on it. That's a hard argument to get around. Far harder (logically if not politically) than banning handguns under the 2nd would be. When you have an internal logical inconsistency you probably need (or at least should have) an explicit amendment to make the change. I know - the amendment process is broken, but that's not the founders' fault.

if you caught cancer going to school I bet they would have. She's a total moron. Not quite yet on a the scale with Michelle Bachmann's claim that CO2 couldn't be harmful because it was 'natural' but challenging to give her a good run.

++++

I'm not arguing there are not places going overboard with bail diversion - it is the new "thing", and like any other reform that is probably overdue, it is being overdone in places. I am arguing that it is not a particularly partisan issue. WI state legislature is still in R hands and until recently had a R gov. A lot of state GOP legislatures love sentence/bail/prison reform because in many states corrections are or are close to, the single biggest item in the budget anymore.

we just disagree here. There is no way any conference will allow a cost free for all on signings. Ain't gonna happen - at least if they have anything to say about it - and I grant it's possible, though I still believe unlikely, they won't.

and this is nowhere as simple as just tossing it out there. Lets look at numbers. There are 32 NFL teams. How many would want more than 1 top minor league affiliate? But you have 128 in the FCS. Who gets to decide who affiliates and who gets left out? There are lots of moving parts here and no-one really knows what the end point looks like. Plus you have the basic question of what kind of connection you end up with between a college, its team and a sponsoring pro team. Do the schools get keep their gates if the NFL is paying the salaries? What will it take in the long run to keep the schools 'in the game' so to speak. You still have to pay them to keep them playing. If you make a college team a minor league team, what do you do with players that the NFL doesn't want but are still better than anyone else on the current team? Can the school keep them a al AAA? If not where do they go? What is a 'college' football team with 50% of their guys 25 yrs old? I really don't have a dog in this fight, I don't care what it looks like in the end, but I'm just continually surprised that people think that somehow you can change the single most important thing - a system of player compensation, and not have that drive change in everything else.

It just goes to show that hitting a baseball is a capability that transcends athleticism. Michael Jordan (and conversely, Rusty Staub) can testify.

that's no answer to the recruiting morass that NIL is going to create. One of the reasons other sports have organized minor leagues to create an organized system of player procurement. You could basically transplant the NHL system into football, where guys are drafted and then go to school while already 'belonging' to a pro team. But NIL even upsets that, because even if a player is already property of a pro team you face financial bidding to get him to come to your school. It's not a matter of purity, it's a matter of having some semblance of an orderly system that doesn't bankrupt the schools for the privilege of playing. If recruits have an opportunity to be paid competitively to attend a school, it seems inevitable that the schools are going to figure they need to have a draft system. *Every* pro league has come to that same conclusion. If NCAA football becomes professional, why should it avoid that same end point?

It's an curious calculus. Putin attacking Ukraine is not a direct threat to the US like the wars in the middle east that threatened oil supplies a generation ago were. And in fact if Ukraine fell back completely into the Russian orbit it would not even have significant impact on the world economy. The ex-Sov block are not serious economic players and even on the energy front Putin wants a puppet gov in Ukraine more to guarantee he *can* sell gas into Europe than so he can threaten the EU not to. What's at stake in Europe is all about principle, not so much actual security or economics, and Putin may be right that the West may rather compromise principle than actually spend blood and treasure when it's just as easy to say "Well Ukraine has been part of Russia since Catherine the Great - this is just a return to the longer term status quo" Taiwan is a much tougher case. If an attempted Chinese take-over of Taiwan led to widespread destruction of the Taiwanese economy it would seriously upend the world economy. The are a big player and are huge in many critical technologies like semi-conductor manufacture. And of course if the Taiwanese actually landed any blows of their own on the mainland? It's formulae for real chaos. I don't see the Japanese or Korean or even us being willing to go to war with China over Taiwan, but it still would be chaos enough short of that. But Xi is probably too smart for that. Unlike Putin who is too imperialist to care about what he may break, Xi wants his cake and to eat it too. He wants Taiwan intact. So I think we are looking at a very long game pressure campaign hoping to just tire everyone out - and the question of how hard the Taiwanese would actually fight? Who knows on that one. Bottom line I wouldn't argue that China is a more serious threat, but Putin is a more immediate one to cause trouble.

Hmmm. Seems to me Clinton(D) passed the harsh sentencing laws and Grassley (R) has been at least one working to change them, but carry on.

could be an irony that the most desirable QB might be a guy like Ewers who still has freshman eligibility (not sure if Ewers does or not but that's not the point, he could...) and has burned his transfer already. Also that means that the team with the best chance it land most top recruit QBs is going to be the one that has the biggest sugar daddy lined up to give him the biggest NIL deal. I wonder if the folks in Columbus feel burned that they they didn't tie Ewers' deal to staying there - or maybe the people that gave him the deal aren't ever local and don't care - not a detail I want to know more about. I find it all depressing. Functionally NIL is basically taking the game right back to bad old dirty boosters days, but just like baseball and gambling, we are told by our new overlords that we can forget all those arguments from the past about why these things are bad ideas. Relax, that was then, this is now! (sure...........until it isn't......) So of course you know where this recruiting arms race will have to ultimately end? A HS recruit draft.

Speaking of OSU. Ewers is gone. QB goes to Columbus, doesn't play, walks away taking a 7 figure $$ NIL deal through the portal with him. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/32781078/ohio-state-quarterback-quinn-ewers-set-enter-transfer-portal the team, the team, the team,..............my deal, my deal, my deal!

maybe that is part payoff from some of those early wins when we all expecting them to start working on the passing game but they just kept pounding the rock. Maybe their approach was that an O-Line gets more out of running the ball in live games than they could get ever get in practice.

crappy showcase for Thibodeaux. One sack.

Pay half a billion for two SS and have them play 2nd and 3rd? It's not my team so works for me! But something we know from watching Mike Ilitch at the end - there is a difference between signing bats and building a team.

Football is a game of unit to unit match-ups, and for all the reasons you describe, this M team was a bad match-up for OSU. Especially when M was able to score first. What I wonder is whether Harbaugh and his staff sat down last off-season and decided to design a team that could defeat a Ryan Day squad (OSU has been going with pretty much the same game plan for a few years now), or whether they dumb lucked into it. The other factor is that M stayed relatively healthy this year - esp on the D side. I was not fan of his, but in fairness to Don Brown, IIRC one of his teams that got torched by OSU throwing crossing routes over the middle had lost 3 or 4 LBs from opening day.

doesn't seem likely this is going to end well.

that's all we need now, a Michigan version of Ruby Ridge in Hillsdale Co.

To me they violated the 1st rule. They spent a lot of money to replace a position where one of their best players was already playing. Kiner-Falefa had the same WAR last year as Seager and was still arb eligible. Though TBF, Kiner_F probably goes to 3B so the comparison should be to Brock Holt, who was more like replacement level last season.

Rangers had a -190 run differential. Rangers had the 3rd worst ERA, 2nd fewest saves, fewest shutouts, 2nd fewest strike outs, 3rd worst ERA+, and 2nd worst FIP in the American League. They have added a career 107 ERA+ pitcher. Meanwhile, in the field, Kiner-Falefa was +9 Rdrs at short, while Nick Solak was -7 Rdrs at 2B. They totalled -16 batting runs. Seager and Semien totalled +9 Rdrs and 48 batting runs. So with 75/yr million spent I figure they are still short of closing half the run differential to get to even.