College Football 2024

Coach Potter said:
It’s definitely changing and “we” are losing it…right before our very eyes but the next generation of sports fan doesn’t care about the same things we do.

I’ve spent the last 13 years coaching the next generation of college football fans😂. Their perspective is different than ours. When I ask a HS kid who his favorite teams are he starts talking about his favorite player’s.
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True and I lose sight of that at times.
 
SurfnFish said:
When I was travelling extensively during my years building and managing high tech facilities, I was exposed by curiosity to the academic models in a handful of countries, all who have moved on from the antiquated Edwardian model the US is still operating on. Three year high school models in which young adults declare their intent to go the college route or technical school route by the end of their sophomore year, and either start college or technical courses minus fluff in what would be their third year of high school, finished with what be the equivalent of our four year degrees in the US by the time they are 18 or 19, ready for their profession. While here in the US we continue to educate through a four year high school and four year college model that only benefits the education system industry itself.
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Kind of a detour from the college football thread. I taught in the Washington community college system for 16 years (and many more years in public and private baccalaureate and higher institutions). In Washington, motivated high school students can enroll in college-level classes through the Running Start program at their local community college or College in the High School. These course credits enable them to complete their high school graduation requirements and are transferrable to any four-year public college or university in the state. I had many students earn their AA degrees and high school diplomas the same week. That saves their parents two years of college tuition while allowing the students to participate in high school extracurricular activities.
In many countries, the decisions (or test scores) that a 15, 16, 17-year old make locks them into their position. The American system, especially via well-run community colleges that are coordinated with four-year schools, allows students to change their lives. Maybe they weren't the most motivated student in high school, graduated, and got a job. But after several years, they wanted better opportunities for themselves and their families. They could go to a community college (open admissions), take the courses they needed to build their foundation, and then complete a technical degree, like nursing or medical assistant or dental hygiene, or transfer to a 4-year school if that fit their career goals. One of the most satisfying parts of my job was watching mothers in their late 20's graduate with their nursing degrees and knowing that they had already been hired into a great job. I know how hard they worked to get there and how much their families sacrificed to support them during the process.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Steve
 
I’m leaning toward an all Big Ten Championship game, with OSU being crowned the champ…
 
Cabezon said:
At some point, some college presidents will ask why their universities are engaged in fielding and paying for semi-pro sports leagues with all the headaches (and expenses) that go with this. Income from television rights are plowed back into the athletic department's budget, often augmented by mandatory fees paid by the general student body. Some poor college student working a minimum wage job to pay tuition and fees is subsidizing fellow students earning tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and coaches that are making millions. The lion's share of the players and the coaches are totally mercenary at this point, which makes total sense from their perspective. This level of athletics isn't central to the university's mission = higher education. In fact, if their "student-athletes" are truly interested in education, having to travel across the country to play in the train-wreck of top conference takes them out of the classroom for too much time. The UW football team will have traveled 17,000 miles (UCLA will fly 22,000+ miles) (see here).
Steve
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Not only that, but we've seen entire discipline programs and low income student financial support axed to save football programs that remain perennially in the red.

Adding insult to injury, a significant and mandatory fee is often added to each student's educational cost to support athletic programs that the vast majority of students do not participate in or have have little personal interest.

In all of my years in undergraduate and graduate school I never encountered a single 'scholar-athlete' in any classes. They were shunted off to bone-head remedial level academic programs engineered to accommodate their lack of interest in education and extensive team travel/training schedules.
 
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Cabezon said:
Kind of a detour from the college football thread. I taught in the Washington community college system for 16 years (and many more years in public and private baccalaureate and higher institutions). In Washington, motivated high school students can enroll in college-level classes through the Running Start program at their local community college or College in the High School. These course credits enable them to complete their high school graduation requirements and are transferrable to any four-year public college or university in the state. I had many students earn their AA degrees and high school diplomas the same week. That saves their parents two years of college tuition while allowing the students to participate in high school extracurricular activities.
In many countries, the decisions (or test scores) that a 15, 16, 17-year old make locks them into their position. The American system, especially via well-run community colleges that are coordinated with four-year schools, allows students to change their lives. Maybe they weren't the most motivated student in high school, graduated, and got a job. But after several years, they wanted better opportunities for themselves and their families. They could go to a community college (open admissions), take the courses they needed to build their foundation, and then complete a technical degree, like nursing or medical assistant or dental hygiene, or transfer to a 4-year school if that fit their career goals. One of the most satisfying parts of my job was watching mothers in their late 20's graduate with their nursing degrees and knowing that they had already been hired into a great job. I know how hard they worked to get there and how much their families sacrificed to support them during the process.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Steve
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there is no lock in, these are democratic countries where students are free to make the same changes as American students. I hired a project manager engineer for a data center build in Switzerland who originally thought he was going to be a teacher, and changed his study track accordingly. Students are free to start their courses, decide to take a year off to live a little, then get back on track when ready. One of the reasons their education tracks are so streamlined for function vs fluff is since the government pays citizen tuition, they have working councils who focus on verifying the curriculum's are relevant to career track without bloated delivery and infrastructure costs.
Four year colleges an extraordinary, often crippling expense for young adults who have to take courses that have zero value to their eventual occupation. The concept of four year colleges producing 'the well rounded citizen' faded in this era of instant information and distance learning. Yet four year school remain dug in, protecting their legacies, endowments, administration and faculty.
The irony here is our education system is based on the old Edwardian model from England, and yet England itself moved from a four year degree model to a three year degree model, recognizing the four year model was an unneeded financial burden to the students.
 
SurfnFish said:
there is no lock in, these are democratic countries where students are free to make the same changes as American students. I hired a project manager engineer for a data center build in Switzerland who originally thought he was going to be a teacher, and changed his study track accordingly. Students are free to start their courses, decide to take a year off to live a little, then get back on track when ready. One of the reasons their education tracks are so streamlined for function vs fluff is since the government pays citizen tuition, they have working councils who focus on verifying the curriculum's are relevant to career track without bloated delivery and infrastructure costs.
Four year colleges an extraordinary, often crippling expense for young adults who have to take courses that have zero value to their eventual occupation. The concept of four year colleges producing 'the well rounded citizen' faded in this era of instant information and distance learning. Yet four year school remain dug in, protecting their legacies, endowments, administration and faculty.
The irony here is our education system is based on the old Edwardian model from England, and yet England itself moved from a four year degree model to a three year degree model, recognizing the four year model was an unneeded financial burden to the students.
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I’m on my third kid in college…the amount of time and money they spend on absolute BS is staggering. More than half of their time is spent doing nothing that has anything to do with their discipline. College is an absolute money grab!

Some of the endowments at these institutions could make a dent in the national debt.
 
OSU
ND
 
Good game between North Dakota State and Montana State.
SF
 
Go Bison...
 
krusty said:
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An interesting read. It seemed, however, to fail to point out just how expensive it is to go to college for four years. Starting a career with thousands of dollars of crippling debt just isn't that appealing to many. We have recently discussed how archaic the American university system is and how the playing field is tilted toward college administrators and those at the top rather than the students.

Another fork in this road is that in an increasingly technically demanding world we are falling hopelessly behind in engineering prowess. About everything we touch in modern life requires engineering skills to make it possible. Food production alone requires a tremendous amount of engineering that goes on way behind the supermarket in order to produce and deliver what we eat every day. Growing, raising, packaging and distributing enough food to feed 7 billion inhabitants every day is an enormous undertaking that requires speed and efficiency. More obvious need of engineering is in high tech where innovation can often be the difference between success and failure. Things move very fast in this field and necessitate a huge number of engineers to keep pace. Autos, aircraft, home appliances, military weapons and almost anything else from paper clips to skyscrapers require engineering expertise.

I mention this because America produces less than 100,000 graduate engineers each year and China produces about 1.6 million. Just since 2000 China has added over a million engineers a year. Scientist are the same story as they have doubled the output of America, a field we once excelled at. As a kid in the '40's and '50's, Made in Japan meant cheaply made junk that quickly fell apart. Fast forward to now and Made in Japan means some of the most highly respected stuff on the planet. And just as Made in China initially stood for laughably inferior crap, they are now rapidly closing the gap and will at some point in the future be the world standard.

To put it in perspective, for every million dollars we pay a football coach we could produce between 6 and 7 engineers a year and of course with some guys getting about 10 million the number goes up by 10x. Our priorities are twisted. The Chinese government identifies promising students and fast tracks their education through college and into a responsible position. Here we identify our most promising athletes, give them millions in NIL money and have them end up as TV sports announcers. At the rate we are going some of you will live long enough to hear the Chinese talk about "Cheap American Junk"-
 
The big schools will no doubt survive, imposing ever greater tuition and fee loads on the steadily dwindling crop of incoming students, and cutting programs that generate marketable degrees.

Maybe they'll be able to finally admit that their primary function is to provide a 'scholar-athlete' farm league feeder system for professional sports.

After all...it's increasingly obvious that our society vastly prefers spectacle over boring old substance.
 


On to the Natty !!!!
 
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