I've got mail! This note came from "J" (many thanks J.) regarding my last post about the greed driven realignment in major college football (which has slowed, but may not yet be done as I will outline below):
"So now that Texas has decided to stay put, Nebraska bolts next year to the Big 11 (or are they the new Big 12?) and Colorado to the Pac-10 in 2012, what are your thoughts? It doesn't sound like there will be too much more movement for a while and college sports are saved!!"
Well, first of all let's get something straight--Texas didn't magnanimously decide to stay put. They knew they had the biggest dick in the conference and they decided to swing it around. And they will get paid--at least $20 million a year more for staying in the "Big 12" then they were already making plus a rumored 60-40 share of any revenues from a planned Big 12 television network package. The other schools in the Big 12 (with the exception of Oklahoma) didn't really have much choice since they had nowhere else to go if the Big 12 fell apart. (As much as I think the Mountain West conference is nationally undervalued, could you see Missouri, Kansas and Kansas State being happy there? I didn't think so.)
So while it seems like things have stabilized, I say Texas' decision only reinforces my original argument. I'd also like to add that we may not be done with realignment yet. We're not going to see four or five "superconferences" as some had feared, but Utah is being courted to join the "Pac-10/12", Rutgers and Notre Dame remain possible (although fading) options for the "Big 10/12" and both Arkansas and TCU may be replacement teams in the "Big 12"--they are natural long time rivals with Texas anyway, so at least that makes some sense.
Trust me, in five years, almost all of the top 50 BCS conference teams and a few others will have changed affiliations at least once, college football players will force some sort of further compensation beyond mere college scholarships to classes they don't attend anyway and every surviving power conference will have some sort of divisional championship game or playoff. In other words, it really will be the NFL Junior League. Get used to it! :-)
News & Notes
--I caught most of President Obama's Oval Office speech tonight. It was solid, forceful and well-crafted, but there wasn't very much there that was concrete I thought. He gave a nice shout out to Colorado's own embattled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and pledged a lot of future action, but aside from promising that the government would commandeer control of BP's compensatory payments to local businesses and citizens affected by the spill, there wasn't anything in the President's speech that anyone could really hang their hat on. Maybe that's because the networks were only willing to give him 18 minutes of Prime Time. Time will tell.
--I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of FX's new drama Justified. I thought after the first couple of episodes that Timothy Olyphant's portrayal of U.S. Marshal Ralyen Givens was the strongest part of the show, but I feared that the writing and the basic premise might get stale pretty quickly. Um, no. The finale was a tour-de-force of nail biting intensity leavened with Elmore Leonard's trademark droll wit and full-bodied characterizations. The episodes leading up to it developed the supporting cast expertly and added novel-like plot twists to the year's story arc. I'm looking forward to Season 2 and if there was any merit to these types of things, Olyphant would be assured at least a Best Actor in a Drama Emmy nomination for his work this year.
--Beware rapid weight loss diets! My wife just had a bad experience with Medifast, a diet which limits you to no more than 1200 calories a day (preferably less) and charges you hundreds of dollars a month for their calorie controlled shake packets and one (or at most) two solid meals of your own making a day. Once you get on this diet, it's hard to maintain both your weight and good organ health once you stop. It's insidious...you have to keep buying the packets to keep your body's metabolism under control, but your body craves solid food making it difficult to stay on the diet. And once you're off, you're in a world of trouble.
Spread the word...warn your dieting friends. I can't emphasize this enough! Doctors do not recommend this diet for anyone but the most morbidly obese, for whom the diet was designed in the first place. The good people of Medifast however, saw profit in America's dieting obsession and have marketed it for everyone. This is just another example of how the profit motive supercedes all else in America today. Tracy probably won't be too happy that I wrote about this, but I feel strongly about it. Something has to be said.
Enough for now...good wishes to those who are working to save the Gulf Coast shoreline, the water and the wetlands.
Peace.
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