Thanks to our sponsor Inteleca for helping bring back Q's Take my weekly look at things around GT and college sports from my vantage.
Conference realignment has been a big issue for me and many other traditionalist fans, but the open-ended free agency seems like an equal menace to college football and men's basketball in particular. I'll focus on those two sports since that is my lane of expertise.
We are in this weird portal era. It is not going to last because it is not possible for this to be the future of college sports, it will simply implode and things are moving toward contracts and some limitations on movement once again when all the dust settles but it is annoying to cover, frustrating for fans at times and a minefield for student-athletes trying to navigate life at one of the most difficult times for anyone in their life as they adjust from being a kid to adulthood and like most of us make horrible choices.
The analogy I will give goes with my favorite band Rush. For those who don't know Rush had basically different eras as a band, a very raw early phase sort of Led Zeppelin-esq band, then they went prog and brought in keyboards and extensive percussion and then they had a full 80s synth out phase and that time period highlighted by two albums I dislike a lot "Power Windows" and "Hold Your Fire" had them on the extreme end of keyboard cheese. Then they slowly drifted back to rocking, but they lost some fans along the way and it took time to gain some back. Eventually, pretty much every fan came back and by the end of the band they were rolling again and making good music that appealed to the hardcore old crew, the newer people who came along during the early 80s popular period and then newer fans who found them after the late-80s synth phase like myself who got into Rush as a pre-teen in the early 90s or later.
Unfortunately, the shitty oversight and leadership of the NCAA and then the breaking of the water pipe to flood the basement on NIL has led to the Wild West and we will suffer through the college spots equivalent to Rush's keyboard phase or KISS going disco on "Dynasty" or bands like Chicago or Bon Jovi who went soft as they aged up into middle of the road music/muzak.
I watched the Bon Jovi documentary on Hulu and it is great by the way. I saw them once before they went soft rock and Jon could still sing well and Richie was still in the band in the early 00s and JBJ sang like a foot away from me and friends in the crowd on the side of the arena which is something I've never seen any other artist do. He just popped up in the crowd.
Back on topic, this is going to be rough sledding for a minute for all of us. The joy we got in tracking young men as they progressed through their careers and developed into players will be intercut with drama on NIL or poaching attempts or whatever.
I think both Damon Stoudamire and Brent Key have a solid approach to trying to protect their most valued young assets and once there are enough data points to show how moving around and chasing money is an iffy proposition that should cool some of this stuff off as well. GT is more homegrown than many of their peers and I think you will see that pay off on both playing surfaces this fall and winter (for hoops).
It doesn't make our lives any easier though. I was standing on a field at Coppell HS covering a rough camp thanks to a horrendous storm system that moved through the area in the last 48 hours shutting down interstates and dropping tornadoes in unfortunate areas. I was more annoyed that I had to deal with the story than I was thinking about the impact it had on the GT program. That is the cold truth though.
Ride out the storm, stay with it and things will normalize away from the synth era of college sports. At least so far we have not reached the Allman Brothers with the keytar player era.
If you have never seen that and are a fan of the Brothers, you might throw up. See below
Conference realignment has been a big issue for me and many other traditionalist fans, but the open-ended free agency seems like an equal menace to college football and men's basketball in particular. I'll focus on those two sports since that is my lane of expertise.
We are in this weird portal era. It is not going to last because it is not possible for this to be the future of college sports, it will simply implode and things are moving toward contracts and some limitations on movement once again when all the dust settles but it is annoying to cover, frustrating for fans at times and a minefield for student-athletes trying to navigate life at one of the most difficult times for anyone in their life as they adjust from being a kid to adulthood and like most of us make horrible choices.
The analogy I will give goes with my favorite band Rush. For those who don't know Rush had basically different eras as a band, a very raw early phase sort of Led Zeppelin-esq band, then they went prog and brought in keyboards and extensive percussion and then they had a full 80s synth out phase and that time period highlighted by two albums I dislike a lot "Power Windows" and "Hold Your Fire" had them on the extreme end of keyboard cheese. Then they slowly drifted back to rocking, but they lost some fans along the way and it took time to gain some back. Eventually, pretty much every fan came back and by the end of the band they were rolling again and making good music that appealed to the hardcore old crew, the newer people who came along during the early 80s popular period and then newer fans who found them after the late-80s synth phase like myself who got into Rush as a pre-teen in the early 90s or later.
Unfortunately, the shitty oversight and leadership of the NCAA and then the breaking of the water pipe to flood the basement on NIL has led to the Wild West and we will suffer through the college spots equivalent to Rush's keyboard phase or KISS going disco on "Dynasty" or bands like Chicago or Bon Jovi who went soft as they aged up into middle of the road music/muzak.
I watched the Bon Jovi documentary on Hulu and it is great by the way. I saw them once before they went soft rock and Jon could still sing well and Richie was still in the band in the early 00s and JBJ sang like a foot away from me and friends in the crowd on the side of the arena which is something I've never seen any other artist do. He just popped up in the crowd.
Back on topic, this is going to be rough sledding for a minute for all of us. The joy we got in tracking young men as they progressed through their careers and developed into players will be intercut with drama on NIL or poaching attempts or whatever.
I think both Damon Stoudamire and Brent Key have a solid approach to trying to protect their most valued young assets and once there are enough data points to show how moving around and chasing money is an iffy proposition that should cool some of this stuff off as well. GT is more homegrown than many of their peers and I think you will see that pay off on both playing surfaces this fall and winter (for hoops).
It doesn't make our lives any easier though. I was standing on a field at Coppell HS covering a rough camp thanks to a horrendous storm system that moved through the area in the last 48 hours shutting down interstates and dropping tornadoes in unfortunate areas. I was more annoyed that I had to deal with the story than I was thinking about the impact it had on the GT program. That is the cold truth though.
Ride out the storm, stay with it and things will normalize away from the synth era of college sports. At least so far we have not reached the Allman Brothers with the keytar player era.
If you have never seen that and are a fan of the Brothers, you might throw up. See below
