Author: Stagger Lee

I know much was made of how the President “backed down” regarding the scheduling of his address to Congress, but after the media attention last night to the GOP debate – and to Rick Perry’s assertion that he intends to run as both Jed Bartlett’ opponent from The West Wing and as the scourge of Social Security – I’m starting to wonder again if there’s not some “pleeeeeeease don’t throw me in that briar patch” going on at 1600 Penn.

The chaos is well and truly underway.  The Big XII is finally imploding, with the imminent departure of Texas A&M to the SEC leaving only nine teams behind.  Now the rumors are starting about Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-16 (!) and Kansas to the Big East (where their football-to-basketball ratio will be an asset rather than a liability).  Missouri keeps getting pitched as a possible 14th for the SEC.  And this leaves Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas State…standing without a chair when the music stops.

In 1984, the Supreme Court rules that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law by collectively selling the rights to college football broadcasts.  As a result, 64 schools broke away and formed the College Football Association to sell their game rights to the highest bidder, while the Big Ten and Pac-10 in turn made a separate deal with ABC.  Famously, Notre Dame then went to NBC for their home schedule exclusively, and before long every conference was trying to make the best arrangement for itself…which is how we got here.  The SEC got the world from CBS and ESPN, only for the Pac-12 to get the universe from Fox, and now the arms race has hit critical mass yet again.

The situation we find ourselves in is this:

1) Conferences will be increasing their membership in an attempt to reopen their broadcast deals and negotiate better arrangements for themselves.

2) Most conferences are at 12 members already.

3) Conferences larger than 12 are inherently untenable owing to the limited number of games available in a season.

4) Conferences as large as 16 will invariably function as a joint alignment of two 8-team conferences, and will in almost all cases result in splitting up intraconference rivalries.

5) Superconference realignment for football purposes stands to have a deleterious impact on non-football sports.

6) At some point, schools will be unable to keep up with the arms race associated with major college football, either from a financial standpoint or from an unwillingness to prioritize the sport.

 

We are reaching a point where another CFA-type situation is in the offing.  The biggest-ticket programs – think the SEC exclusive of Vanderbilt, the Big-XII as of last season, USC, Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, probably BYU and possibly Ohio State and/or Michigan, and possibly a few others – could conceivably assemble themselves as a new CFA, withdraw their football programs from NCAA sanction and set themselves up as their own thing.  Call it the College Football Premier League.  All the big-time programs – Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Ohio State, basically anyone who’s played in a national title game or more than one BCS bowl in the last decade – will go off on their own, along with the Auburns and the South Carolinas and the Oklahoma States and the Texas Techs and the other schools intent on being a football factory first.

Say, the top 64 teams, organized into four 16-team conferences for the sake of a name and a title game, but effectively playing in 8-team pods en route to an 8-team playoff for their own championship of college football.  And the rest of what’s currently NCAA Division I-A possibly reorganizing as a sort of I-AA-plus, possibly with its own championship tournament, possibly not. Either way, you can forget about the bowls, save perhaps as a sort of framework for the Premier League playoffs or a series of consolation matches among the teams knocked out.

Except for the Rose Bowl, of course, and the Big 14 and Pac-14, which probably won’t go for that Premier League nonsense.  Or maybe they will, who knows – but then, if there’s a bowl and a conference that have always held themselves to be above the rabble of mortal football, it’s the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten.  So who knows.

Either way, I doubt Vanderbilt makes the cut.  The eternal argument – serve in heaven and cash fat checks, or reign in hell and be the best of the dregs? – might be settled forcibly.  I doubt the new-look CFA is going to be all that concerned with AAU membership or endowment and research credentials; the key metric will be the ability to deliver eyeballs on Saturday afternoons…

They’ve got it down to a science in Boise.  Get a season-opening game against a big-name program of suspect quality, win big on national television, and glide to an undefeated season, constantly moaning about disrespect and being ignored and not getting a fair shake – while getting a half-dozen ESPN games and opening the year ranked #5.

Nobody is saying that Boise State wouldn’t do just fine in another conference – even in the SEC or Pac-12, they’d probably be good for at least 9 wins a season – but the notion that they could roll undefeated through any conference but the WAC, year after year, is risible.  But they are the darlings of ESPN, so now we get to hear all about them for another four months.

You know, sports is really taking more from me than I take from it lately…

The mall is an easy place to see what’s doing with the tablet business. It seems like every other shop has some Honeycomb-based Android gadget on offer. Telling, though, is the fact that they’re all 10-inch models. So much for the notion that cheap 7-inch tablets would eat the iPad’s lunch. Ironically, the rumblings about the new Amazon Kindle based on an Android fork are making me interested in the 7 again. A 7 might fit in a jacket pocket. An iPad or its imitators? No chance.

Sony has some new tablet that’s thick and round at one edge, a bit like a folded magazine or a regular tablet with it’s cover open. My immediate reaction, unfortunately, was to blurt “You’re not serious.” I don’t think a wedge-shaped tablet is the key to consumer electronic resurrection for Sony, alas.

All these tablets – whether at T-Mobile, AT&T, the Sony store, the Verizon kiosk or the Samsung display – are a widescreen 10.1″ that strongly suggests they are meant to work horizontally first. The vertical orientation was not comfortable for the DSC-in-law and I suspect the round side of the Sony was an attempt to cope with that.

Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich is the answer. Having a unified Android release for all devices might help clean up some of the fragmentation issues – and hopefully put an end to the custom UI blight. But the fact that Amazon is choosing to fork – and the Great Mentioner is higher on the putative Kindle tablet than any iPad competitor yet – suggests that once again, the key to a mobile device is cutting out the carrier and designing the whole widget yourself.

Are you Superman disguised as Clark Kent, or are you Clark Kent disguised as Superman?

“It is still the single most breathtaking play I have ever seen not because of the raw athleticism, but because it was never over for George Teague. To hell with the flags, or the angles, or the score: if Lamar Thomas were streaking toward an endzone a thousand miles away, guided toward it only by the sun, the stars, and a compass in his soul pointing towards the goal line, George Teague would have found him and stolen the ball and run the other way until he died exhausted and alone.

“It happened on a down that appears in no stat line, no sheet of formal records. The turf is Astroturf, the game a glorified exhibition put on by a corporation hiding under the guise of a non-profit, involving players likely violating the rules of amateurism, beaming through satellites to flicker on the television of a fake house in a fake neighborhood in a fake state to a family in the last stages of living under the same roof. And yet it still stops my heart when I watch it. George Teague doesn’t give a shit what down it is. He gets the ball, or he dies.”

-Spencer Hall, “God’s Away On Business”

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

This time, things will be different.

That’s been the message for months now.  This time, we’re not going to hire whatever random school’s assistant will take the job.  This time, we’re not going to pay lip service to “winning the right way” and promptly drop ten games. This time isn’t going to be another dose of “Same Old Vandy.”

Now is different.  Now we have a young, energetic coach who believes in the program and wants everyone else to believe.  Now we have upgrades to the facilities, to the tailgates, to the locker rooms.  Now we have multi-star prospects poached from big-ticket programs, guys with three and four and five stars who mockingly try on a Vol hat before declaring “it doesn’t fit” and choosing us.  Now, we have YouTube video going viral and Twitter accounts whipping up the faithful and blogs to bang the drum.

And now, it’s our turn.

We have been made a promise: that things are going to be different.  Now it’s our turn to hold up our end of the bargain.  We have to watch.  We have to show up.  We have to be black and gold from stem to stern.  We have to scream, and shout, and sing, and carry on like it’s the end of the world.

If you’re a student, use your tickets.  Make it the whole day.  Start early, stay late, on time and on target.  If you’re a season ticket holder, fortify yourself however it takes and be prepared to be leather-lunged and sore-footed by day’s end.  If you’re local, and you haven’t got tickets, climb over the fence.  If you’re not local, tune in.  Find the stream.  Find a radio.  Wear your black and gold.  Throw up the VU at everyone and no one.  Blog.  Tweet.  Don’t let anyone in a Commodore shirt walk across the street from you without “WHO YA WIT!” even if you’re three thousand miles from campus.

We don’t know how this is going to work out.  Nothing is certain, and we could still find ourselves looking up at ten losses despite everything.  This is a bet – that we can change the course, that we can turn this thing around, that we can transform Vanderbilt football into what it once was, what it should always have been, what it can be going forward.  But James Franklin, his staff, his administration and his student-athletes are going to lay it all out there to make it happen.  They have promised us everything they’ve got.

What are you prepared to do?

“It’s like when you take the pan of brownies out of the oven because you think they’re done, but they’re not done, and you just end up with a gooey mess.”

I tasked my double-second-cousin-in-law with the initial test of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ because she’s the only one in the household who carries an Android phone.  (The rest of us rock two iPhones and a Blackberry Torch.)  After a little playing around, I thought that I should staff the evaluation out to someone who was already familiar with Android, so as to diminish the familiarity bias I have for iOS.  And since she’s never used an iPad either, it was a true test of the utility of the Android tablet qua tablet rather than in comparison to anything else.

The early reviews were not good.  The settings were complicated, and everything seemed to take an extra step.  The thing was too difficult to hold in portrait mode (probably due to the wrist leverage from its length) and everything was generally optimized for landscape anyway, which sort of undercut the Kindle app.  But the Kindle app itself was fine, and she was able to create and start up an Evernote account without a fight.  Plus streaming video from SyFy seems to work just fine, and she seems to be happy with the Redfin app (they are house-hunting, as you would expect anyone living with me to do).

For my own part, I was a little put off by the inability of one of the flagship Android devices to run the Economist application, which was annoying.  But then, maybe I didn’t have the download preferences set properly to allow non-Market downloads, which might be necessary.  I did find apps for Twitter, Foursquare and Evernote without a fight, although the UI was not as satisfactory for any of them.

Most puzzling, though, was the utility of the Google apps themselves.  The Maps app was fine until I got into Street View, at which point I could only navigate by dragging the little pegboard man to a new place – where the view would then be reoriented.  The tradition “just click on the line down the street to advance down it” familiar from the web – or the iPhone – wasn’t there, and that was a little surprising.  The Google Reader app, meanwhile, wasn’t materially different from the mobile version of the Reader website.

Long story short: it’s not terrible or unbearable by any stretch.  They seem to be enjoying it perfectly well.  But after a night and a day of experimenting with the combination of the latest OS and the newest hardware, I would be hard-pressed to offer a typical civilian user a good reason to take it over an iPad.  The only legitimate cases to be made for it are either highly technical or ideologically colored; it’s not going to win on price, weight, screen clarity, speed, app selection or ease of use. Although if you’re willing to use your Google account for everything, it does do a superior job of integrating with those services (and backing the tablet up to same).

So…will keep poking away and see what’s doing.  But I’m not expecting this to make a major dent in my current mobility assessment.

I don’t remember quite when I first started in on Slashdot.  My UID is below 125K, so I was kind of late to the party.  I think I came in on a link back from one of the incarnations of Mac OS Rumors back in the old days.

For me, Slashdot was the daily diary of the boom.  The emergence of Linux, the famous Halloween memo, the return of Jobs, the Mozilla project, the new Star Wars movies, all kinds of things.  Slashdot was indispensable.  That green layout exists in my mind behind a loop of HFS songs, Eddie from Ohio, and my earliest MP3 downloads, all playing out on the screen of a PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 8.6.  The days when I would do ridiculous shit like try to club together an external SCSI drive so I could try to book my PowerMac 6100 into MkLinux…and then try to telnet into it from work.

Slashdot was also the first place I saw community moderation on a message board.  And it pretty much worked.  You could set your filter at +3 and pretty much be assured of skipping the dross that plagues almost every other comment forum on the Internet.  It was innovative, to say the least, and I wish it existed on more sites.

I don’t know when it dropped out of my regular rotation.  It still has pride of place in the “Geek” folder on my bookmark bar, although the days when I run through those folders are long gone thanks to RSS. I last commented on the site one time in July last year.  Before that, my prior-most comment was in 2007, and before that in 2004, so it’s not like I was a particularly active member lately; it probably didn’t survive the transition to an Apple job where sitting at a desk hitting refresh was no longer a daily option.

But hearing that Rob Malda – whose infamous proposal to his girlfriend inspired part of mine – is stepping away from the monster he created?  Even if it’s not part of my life now, it really struck home how long it’s been since those early days in DC, and how long I’ve been gone from there, and – most of all – how many years I have in the industry now.  Next year makes fifteen.

Where does the time go?

A couple of months ago, I turned off push-notification on my iPhone’s connection to work mail.  I was getting sick and tired of the constant stream, and wanted to drive home the point that the correct way to reach me was through the appointed channels, not by personal email.  And somehow along the way I wound up turning off push notification for my primary personal account as well.

I also shut down my Facebook account (although I haven’t yet nuked it from orbit) to prevent unwanted family sniffing – plus it occurs to me that I kind of need to start my social networking over and actually go by the dictionary definition of friend rather than the Facebook definition.  My whoever, whatever, what-the-hell-I’ll-follow-you content has been passed into a couple of Twitter accounts, and I find that I check Twitter far more than email or any social network.  That is, when I’m not shutting off the iPhone altogether on Tuesday nights.

I find, too, that email is starting to slip through the cracks if I don’t address it right away.  Things get lost in the shuffle, buried in the daily digital avalanche – and it’s not nearly as bad as it’s been in years past, when I subscribed to a listserv that pummeled my mailbox with daily digests when it wasn’t sending a firehose of individual messages.  I have to make a conscious effort to go back and look and be sure email hasn’t gone down the rathole.

So why has this happened?  Part of it is because Twitter is such an effective means of having a constant social stream – unencumbered by terrible games, spam links (mostly), enormous pictures or the need to provide information that constantly gets unwillingly shared.  Twitter is fully pseudonymous and doesn’t care if you have multiple accounts (I’m responsible for several).  And Twitter can be had anywhere – website, laptop app, phone app, or even converted into a stream of text messages if you’re not on one of those asshole US cellular carriers.  Hell, in 2007, I ran my Twitter from my tourist phone in the UK, with great success.

But part of it is also because email itself has gone by the boards.  I don’t have much to email about anymore.  Everything is a tweet or a text, or else a blog post, and punching out email on a phone is problematic if the mail is longer than, say, a tweet.  Making the mobile phone the locus of computer communication has, of necessity, curtailed how much you have to say.  Spam is still out of control in some sectors; two of my accounts literally stop hundreds of spam emails a day.  Talking on the phone?  Means of last resort.  I haven’t felt the need to routinely converse on the phone since 2004 sometime, and have discussed elsewhere the creeping dread that comes with the ringing of a telephone, so strike that.  And forget about snail mail.  Maybe a postcard from friends, but that’s about it.

Maybe I’m just making a conscious effort to do my socializing in person these days.