aucom96

44 minutes ago, GwillMac6 said:

That plays in to what I was saying. Football’s nil can compete with almost anyone. In basketball schools like cincy and ucf are outbidding us…

I'm not sure football's can. Projected numbers I last saw have 8 teams in conference ahead of Auburn in available NIL dollars and we're way behind the likes of Texas, UGA, A&M and Alabama. Football is a sport with so many moving pieces that being behind will likely cement you in place with NIL. With basketball, I don't think that's as much the case. I know who Auburn is and know all the money is going to go to football, but in terms of purely investment, it's probably the worst sport for us to dump money into. Cincy and UCF understand that, but they don't have the football history.  

11 hours ago, GwillMac6 said:

Don’t think we had much of a choice based on the schools they chose…. It really is a even playing field these days.

 Not really. It’s about how much a school’s boosters can pony up, and Auburn blows everything on a middling football team.

4 hours ago, JerryAU said:

WR's were poor, but the day Auburn gets back the old "AUBURN" rushing attack is the day the offense starts clicking.  Auburn was always known as a team that could pound the ball and we could always depend on the run game.  Sadly, that hasn't been the case for a few years which places a heavier load on the QB and the WR's.  I don't mind seeing an RB catch a few passes out of the backfield and take off plowing through for 6-8 yrds. 😄

Those days are done. The game is OL, QBs and WRs, period. We had decent backs and have had decent backs throughout our slump. We've had only two QBs worth a flip in nearly a decade, we've never had top receivers and Gus didn't think we needed an offensive line. Our success this year is going to be Peyton Thorne. The line should be somewhat improved. WRs should be quite a bit better. If he can rise to that talent level around him, we could see 8 wins. If the guy who took the field against Maryland shows up, we might match last year's record. I don't expect our rushing numbers to change very much. 

12 hours ago, GwillMac6 said:

What makes CBM so great is that fire, intensity and competitive edge he plays with.

And every team we play next year is going to be baiting that guy to do just what Yale got him to do and the refs - just like with Yale - will be waiting for it. And it will cost us. 

There's a reason the teams annually showing up deep in the tourney stay there. They play disciplined ball. CBM is a talented player, but the word's out on him now. If he can't reign it in next season, he'll be on the bench one way or the other and if he can't play his best while reigning it in, this is as far as his basketball journey is going to go. 

2 hours ago, Auburn93 said:

Player discipline doesn't seem like a strong suit for any coach at any team that is competing at a high level. You want discipline go hire a Tommy Joe Eagles clone and let him recruit and win eight games a year. Bryan Harsin would be an even better choice. This is not the military. These are immature children that you have to motivate to action. You do what is necessary and that requires you giving them power. 

Yale knew perfectly well they could bait Mazara and they did and it worked. Pearl knew KD was an out of control turnover machine and still had him in the game in critical moments. 

Pearl has weaknesses that blueblood coaches tend to minimize. He gets a lot out of less talent than others, but getting over the hump in terms of tourney play is going to continue to be a challenge because of discipline... because that's when it's needed the most. 

I’m thinking 7-5 as well. If we have more New Mexico State type games, could just match last year’s record.

Maybe when it becomes apparent we can’t afford a playoff football team, more money will come back to basketball. We have a much better shot of championship level play in that sport now.

2 hours ago, DAG said:

as football is the major sport, which college athletics seems to be shaped upon based on revenue, that is where the resources will be mostly allocated to. It has never just been about competing for championships. 

True, but now that the game is openly about money only and players can leave just about whenever they want, the amount of investment needed to build even a competitive team in the major conferences is going to be a continually escalating number... and that kind of investment will require results. It's hard to see average record teams getting off the ground in this new game. And as the above average pool shrinks, basketball may quickly catch up to football in interest at the college level. 

7 hours ago, AURex said:

Most of the NIL is going top FB, but CBP has some money coming in. The return of Broome is evidence of that.

That said, CBP does like to pull in guys from lower divisions or who have not been given a lot of respect, because he thinks they are more "hungry" and want to prove their cred.

Fact is, he cannot throw the kind of NIL money at players the way Kansas, UNC, Duke, UK, Texas and now Arky can do. IMO, he is doing the best he can with what he's got.

Ans WDE - He's done an awesome job here at Auburn!

 

At this point, I'm starting to feel like we should start moving more of the NIL we have towards basketball. I think football is going to be a losing cause for a lot of teams, if they're expecting to compete for championships, where as in basketball I think that NIL money can go a lot farther. 

3 hours ago, cbo said:

I'm willing to bet the NIL money for the football program is at least in the top 20. 

That’s the big question and from the look of things so far, I’m not so sure. I fear a lot of teams are going to be forced to readjust their traditional view of where they stand due to NIL making everything purely about booster dollars.

6 hours ago, aubcali said:

It works perfect on my Netscape Navigator.  🤷‍♂️ 

You haven’t made the move to AltaVista yet?

Dye brought the Iron Bowl to Auburn and put us on top of the conference. He made Auburn a team people expected to see in the polls every year. Shug, I can get the argument for. He was a great man and as great a representative of Auburn as they come. 

Outside of those two, only Tuberville deserves to be in the conversation in my mind. Chizik got us a championship, but I can't help but feel he started us on a path that now has us scrambling to catch up with the Mississippi schools rather than expecting to beat Georgia or Alabama every year. Gus aggravated the situation and Harsin punched the accelerator right into the wall. 

I just hope we get another candidate in the years to come. 

9 hours ago, autigeremt said:

College Athletics is semi-pro. May as well be ran like it. 

The NFL would be run at the behest of the owners in partnership with the player's union. 

Who "runs" college football in a pay world? The universities? Some sort of booster collective? The broadcasters? 

I think this thing is far more messy than some give it credit for. 

22 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

Absent some total collapse, I'm confident we'll be in the "haves," but I think how it plays out is pretty up in the air. Right now, the P4 schools have long-term TV contracts so I think any new configuration (e.g. a super league that ditches the NCAA) would require some significant renegotiations. But the current model seems unsustainable and the basic premises underlying big-time college sports have unalterably changed. It seems to me the future has to involve some type of employment contract for players to manage transfers, "salary caps," etc., and restore at least some measure of stability/predictability to rosters. What we've evolved to at present will exhaust coaches and those bankrolling programs. The fact is, it's pro ball now with less rules. the pro part ain't going away. There's gotta be a push toward more order, I would think.

I think the P4 schools, with maybe a handful of additions, leave the NCAA for at least football and form some type of association to manage it all.

Even if we are in the "haves", I suspect we'll be in the middle, at best, and with Texas and OU, maybe lower middle. It just being a question of booster money now, this entire thing only gets more tenuous with unions and seems much more dependent on inflated TV contracts which are probably going to wither as the effects of NIL take hold on the game itself. 

What is morbidly interesting to me is how much interest college football will continue to generate when the "haves" grow increasingly fixed in place and the "have nots" drop investment in the game altogether. 

12 hours ago, CameronCrazy said:

Some of us aren’t in a position to donate anything “significant”. But I promise you that if I was… you better believe I would be pouring my money into OTV! And I would expect any hardcore Auburn fan to do the same. 

And that’s what I don’t understand. Your money goes further now more than ever! We are supposedly funded by 4-5 different billionaires (according to WDE). It’s now LEGAL to pay for players. If we truly have the money, we should be competitive in EVERY sport. 

There are sports that we’ve never been truly competitive in, but we should have an opportunity to change that now. I don’t expect the NIL “Wild West” to last forever…. But while it’s here, we should be getting the talent we need in EVERY sport. 

Double edge to that. 

Those with the biggest money will have the best results. That isn't going to be fan collectives. That's Jimmy Rane or Harbert. And if our success is now tied primarily to booster money, I don't think that's going to work out well for us. It's not going to work out well for a lot of schools who are used to more success in their sports programs. 

NIL is garbage. The portal rules are garbage. Both will eventually kill the golden goose both for fans and the players. The boosters will still be rich. 

32 minutes ago, arktiger1975 said:

I think Aden wanted to go to the "stellar guard developer" so he can jack as many 3's as he wants and not play a lick of defense. Which fits his game perfectly. In all honesty, he probably felt like, with the addiction of Pegues, he was being recruited over. 

Yeah, that's really the only potential upside I saw to his game... in potential. He's not physical enough to drive in the post and isn't a good defender. Oats offense has a definite quality of jack the threes and pray, so he probably fits right in. I hope he sucks there and we beat him by 100. 

Bottom line, we needed a real PG and his wasn't and isn't it. Hopefully we found one. 

57 minutes ago, e808 said:

I would argue Cobb is a better option in the passing game IMO

Which, these days, is the only game that matters. 

12 hours ago, CameronCrazy said:

Could you even imagine the negative recruiting that Oats would be able to do if he balled out at UAT? We would never hear the end of it.

Holloway is more salary he has to carry, more he has to convince boosters to spend, more Holloway will have to prove to justify it, same as here. 

No player has to stick around for four years and no program has to continue to pay their assumed market value, either. I doubt we had to money to wait for Aden to grow into his rep. It will be the same story at bama, if he chooses to go there. 

3 hours ago, GwillMac6 said:

AU has shown we aren’t willing yet to pay top dollar for that caliber of QB recruit or QB transfer.

And until we become that way, we're going to be permanently middle of the pack to suck. 

This isn't a four year game. It's a one year game and QBs are where it starts and ends. 

Does it really matter in this era of college athletics? 

You are what you can pay. We can buy middle of the pack in football and maybe slightly better in basketball. There's always been some element of this, but I feel like the ceilings are fixed, now. 

I was in Auburn the past few days and it's a different town. The pickups are now Landrovers. The pizza joints and college dives are now high end restaurants and lounges. The small town charm is now stuffed with condos, the tailgates are purchased at top dollar and so are the seats to games. We aren't mediocre, we're just a defined product, now. Being a fan at any level for a college team is going to be more difficult for everyone without letting go of a lot of how we're used to perceiving the game. That's just the way it is. 

11 hours ago, GreenTiger said:

Well clearly you have spent a lot of time working with student athletes and fully understand their position and what they place value on. 

You're dodging. Is there a significant monetary value to what college athletes were getting pre-NIL to play major sports? Obviously, they placed value on it or the sport would not have thrived from lack of participation. It isn't college football's fault that the NFL and to a lesser extent, NBA don't have the instant out of school developmental employment that baseball has. 

They can profit off their likeness now. Good. But the door has been left wide open to something that will benefit no one. I don't really care how much time you've spent working with student athletes. When the scholarships are no longer there and the booster money starts drying up from diminishing returns at these schools, I can promise you what they used to have won't seem so valueless anymore. 

12 minutes ago, GreenTiger said:

Were you a D1 athlete? But to counter a portion of your argument… there is another prevailing attitude that somehow there were these generous “benefits” to having a athletic scholarship and while it’s easy for a bunch of boomers to believe that it doesn’t seem to resonate with those actually experiencing the “benefits”. Side note… I was a college professor/ department chair at a small university for 15 years and have worked with hundreds of student athletes. 

What does "boomers" have to do with anything? Does a college tuition have a monetary value? Yes or no? Does food, board, training, coaching, national broadcast exposure plus a lot of other monetary benefits disclosed and undisclosed have monetary value? 

Now they get to fully participate in a "business". Part of that "business" is a product that people want to invest in and consume. The more this wild west show continues in college football, that product IS GOING to become less attractive and that will effect the money available both from boosters and those wanting to spend money for these player's likeness. It has nothing to do with boomers and it has nothing to do with your position with a university. 

31 minutes ago, GreenTiger said:

Yes. Players benefited. No debate. But clearly the players and the courts did not see the transaction as fair. Does this have negative implications for the sport??? Of course. Did the former system have issues??? Absolutely. 

Were the former transactional benefits limited and lop sided???? Absolutely and it needed addressing. Are the current changes fair and have they fixed the problems??? Probably depends on who you ask 

Yeah, the courts have made their decision. That's fine. Now the athletes will have to deal with the full brunt of "it's just business". 

I think there's this prevailing attitude of fat cats versus poor, innocent athletes and that was never true. Scholarships costs students across the board their time, effort and other sacrifices as a trade-off for money toward an education. The courts, as I understand it, ruled that athletes have the right to profit off sales from their likeness/trademark. That's not what NIL has become and what it HAS become will greatly diminish the amount of training these players receive, the injuries their upprepared bodies take because they're paid to start, ready or not. It will raise the price across the board for fans and for most teams, will diminish their ability to compete. More and more college programs will cut their investments in these sports because it's just not sustainable for them. The larger programs will have trouble keeping boosters happy who are pouring money into rosters that turn over every single year. More of the top coaches will get sick of not having any leverage on a blue-chip freshman who is pulling down a 7 figure salary and doesn't feel the need to show up for practice. If ESPN finally keels over or is bought out - which has been somewhat expected for years, now - then this sport and these players are in for a major reality check. 

The courts opened a massive can of worms and left the NCAA and universities practically no ability to manage the fallout and that fallout is going to be bad for everyone who watches, profits from or plays the game. 

We'd better get the best we can from the portal, because it's hard for me to see Holloway as a starting PG next season. There's just too much still a project with him. 

I hate it. At times, Donaldson looked like a great player. He was just very inconsistent. 

5 hours ago, GreenTiger said:

IMO I’m surprised college athletics has been so slow to adopt a more player centric transfer portal as freedom and autonomy is a core value of both education and capitalism. I’m fascinated how a person or group can hold these values ( freedom and autonomy) so tightly for themselves but get upset when other individuals or groups want the same. 

The players benefitted from a transaction where they got a free education of considerable value, free training, facilities, food, room and board also of considerable value and a forum to showcase their abilities to a professional industry at no charge to them. All of the above is still expected in addition to professional level pay with no contracts, terms or conditions. Eventually, either these players are going to find themselves in a professional employment infrastructure or we're going to continue this chaotic state we're in now, which over time, will result in bad football, lack of parity, reduced fan interest and subsequently, less pay available to these players. The golden goose will die and they can ply their trade with the Birmingham Stallions or their city semi-pro team for minimum wage. 

Regardless, the product that gave us NIL will ultimately be destroyed by NIL.