GP1

There are a lot of quotation marks around a lot of the article. KD wrote a lot of it for him. He should have never taken the interview if he was going to be that honest. I'm not sure how I would take this article if I was one of his players.

How many people are watching it? Does anyone know the ratings the Can't games are getting? I think it is a neat story in some ways, but I don't buy into the CWS having a major impact on a school. South Carolina won last year and everyone was excited for about five minutes...then they started to think about SEC football. Five minutes after Can't is finished, everyone in Ohio will start to worry about whatever football team they watch. Don't get sucked into the hype. America isn't talking about Can't baseball.

Strange to say the least. KD doesn't come off good at all in this article. Should have never given the interview considering the circumstances.

There are a lot of ways to look at this. People have to watch something in bars. Can't is a local story. People will watch a local sports story before they watch anything else. Can't baseball is a fad right now. It will go away like disco.

It was a no brainer for them. They did a study and found the number of house fires drop the last two weeks of June and figured they had to keep their crews busy doing something. Every TV station can send every crew they have to Omaha...hardly anyone is watching.

Paragraph 1: Sounds like government employees. Paragraph 2. At least the NFL players have three reasons for playing, not just two.

This is a serioius issue. Don't turn it into high school debate club.

Are you saying the NFL knew about the head injuries and the long term danger? If so, the NFL is in worse trouble than I think they are. If DiG is correct, the NFL is still in trouble. Either way, the NFL has a huge problem. Personally, I believe the NFL knew the long term dangers of head injuries for a long time. I also believe they know there may be a connection between PEDs and head injuries and possible depression from players trying to get off of steroids. The NFL got fat off of abusing the bodies of their employees in a way far beyond the limits of acceptable risk for the sport. They are really going to have to cough up some money for that.

I'm not interested in watching flag football either. I'm also not interested in watching football turn into cockfighting. Football is a physical sport. When it goes from being physical to violent, it becomes pornography/cockfighting. People who call it violent don't understand what violent really means and have a limited vocabulary. Pornography isn't just dirty movies, magazines, etc. Pornography is also a visual designed to bring out an emotional response in someone. Watching guys loaded up on PEDs take cheap shots on defenseless players doesn't make me happy. It doesn't take a tough guy to hit someone in an effort to harm them when they can't see it coming. It isn't good for society to have a sport promoting that activity. The reason the NFL needs to settle the class action case is so they can establish a fund administered by someone else that will handle all of the cases the former players are already filing. There are currently over 2,000 cases filed. The NFL can't afford, both politically and literally, to take every one of them to trial. This issue needs to get out of the headlines asap for the NFL, and the settlement is the best way to do it. Companies do it all the time with issues such as asbestos and the NFL needs to do it as well.

I don't know about timing, but a good source told me a Freshman is going to start next year.

When you guys had Q&A time with Coach B at the golf outing, did he mention he was planning on starting his freshman QB? George Thomas, Have you heard this?

Did it run before or after the house fire story?

Maybe they are just now finding out the risks. Jacob Bell now has a better understanding and walked away. It isn't unreasonable to believe players thought they had less risk because of helmet technology improvements. The increased protection can't keep up with the size and speed of players due to the amount of guys taking PEDs. Nobody talks about that being the problem, but it is really the case. Unless the NFL and college football adopt serious PED testing programs, the head injuries aren't going away. Real PED testing will result in smaller and slower players....basically, shrink players down to what a normal person can do without help. Is it a slippery slope? Yes. The NFL needs to settle a class action case ASAP, set up a fund established by a judge and let an administrator hand out the money....right after they start a real PED testing program.

Your summary is correct with the exception of one point. As long as there are old people with a desire to watch a story about a house fire before turning out the lights for the night, there will always be the 6:00 evening news.

Maybe on a local level, but there is no way on the national level. Nobody watches local news except for old people who watch the 6:00 evening news before going to bed. There is no way a school gets more national coverage for the CWS than for the Elite 8.

There is media attention and then there is media attention. Another harsh reality is very few people watch the local news so the attention is almost meaningless. Can't was on a nice run, but they were completely out classed yesterday. The run is coming to a close in the near future and the players will fade into the background of college athletics where college baseball is mostly played. I'd take a national championship in any sport compared to that outcome.

Agreed, which is why it should be on campus. If someone wants to go to a game, they will go to a game. If the possible sites for the games are less than 1 mile, it won't impact a decision by a fan to go or not to go.

I say good luck to him. He did everything the Zips asked him to do for four years and earned a degree. What's one more year of football? At some point, we all grow up and maybe this was that point for him. Playing college football really isn't a "grown up" thing to do because other people tell you how and when to do everything. You're really treated like a child. A little time away from it provides reflection and insight into another part of life as a grown up. I don't think he was much of a candidate for the NFL and I think he knows the same thing deep down inside. He is a hard working, smart guy. I believe he will do well in anything he decides to do. Again, good luck.

I guess I could have asked the question of any school. Wouldn't it make more sense to have the same number of students with a higher quality of student entering the school? For example, Harvard has 27,000 students.?.? Since this is a sports forum, I'll put it another way. Wouldn't the MAC better off with fewer, high quality teams than adding teams like UMASS? More isn't always better. Dr. Proenza is a smart guy, but this is a backward way of thinking.

College of Charleston I've posted this before, but it is worth a look again. Give me something like this with 2,500 more seats and it is enough. Enough with the 10-15,000 seat nonsense (even worse with curtains trying to fool people into believing their tax dollars weren't a complete waste of money). CoC is located in Charleston (a very different city than Akron), but is its own section of town, like UofA is. I drove by it yesterday and thought of the Zips. When you drive by, you would never know it was a basketball arena if it wasn't for the signs. Fits the historic town perfectly. UofA needs an arena that fits the look and feel of the new campus, not the look and feel of the City of Akron. A packed stadium is better than a half empty stadium with an empty promise of a bigger conference down the road. Dr. Proenza has always had a vision for UofA that includes limited partnership with the City of Akron. It works. Any new arena should be on campus. BTW, the girl:boy ratio at CofC is 3:1 if you are interested. I have a customer who is a dirty old man and likes to meet me at the Starbucks across the street from the main gates to watch girls while they walk around. He schedules his times for meetings for when classes are changing. We like some of our customers for different reasons.....

Are they trying to get 10,000 quality students, or 10,000 morons? There are a lot of ways to "grow". Not all of them are always good.

Again....How may empty seats do you want to see on gameday? How is a half empty arena good for the program? If we join the Big East, in basketball we will be last in more than one category. The size of the arena won't matter at that point.

Kids gravitate to sports they are good at? Or, they gravitate to sports they can get on the field in because they couldn't perform well against the others in the sport they quit? If you aren't very good at something, go do something you don't have to be very good at. Only in America would a kid not good enough to use both hand and eye coordination quit baseball for soccer. Baseball takes some talent. Soccer at the youth level takes the ability to run a lot and kick a ball...and act like you have been shot if someone touches you....everyone is a winner and nobody has to be "the man". The reason Americans are so horribly bad internationally (Let's face it, our national soccer team is a joke. ESPN is probably praying they can pull their heads out of their @$$es long enough to win a couple of games to keep people watching over the summer.) is because we don't deploy our best talent for soccer. It is playing other sports. In Europe, soccer is the sport kids play and the other sports are what they play if they can't play soccer. I may not know a lot about soccer, but I can turn on the US national team and see they don't have much talent compared to their European counterparts. European players are also very aggressive and attack the game...American soccer players tend to be passive and meek compared to the European players, which is why they shy away from sports like football and basketball. I know this is the point where a soccer fan sites a handful of Americans who are "just as good as the Europeans". Maybe, but they have minor league soccer teams in Europe who could beat the American national team.

How many empty seats do you really want there to be on gameday?

Since we will never see that poll, I'll weigh in. Winning the cws would be better. The cws is played at prime time on ESPN and not ESPNwhatever. The soccer national title game is played on ESPNU and it on at the same time the NFL is on. I guess ESPN has to fill the air with something. Americans care about baseball and we don't really care about soccer. At least not enough for ESPN to put the national championship game on primetime against a popular sport. Soccer is a college sport, like hockey, where a school like Akron or Ferris State or University of Denver can focus on and get good. There aren't many good college soccer programs like there aren't many good college hockey programs. It is easier to get good in these sports and compete on a national level. American kids who tend to not do well at other sports gravitate to soccer so the gene pool isn't as great so the talent is equally bad for all teams. Below average Europeans can come to America and do extremely well in college soccer and they would have never seen the field in Europe because the talent for soccer is so great. Get a few good Europeans to make the Americans look good and you can have a national championship college soccer program. The formula really isn't that difficult. Many of the teams the Flashes are able to compete against, and win, are southern schools. They take baseball very serious down here and most of the schools play many more games than their counterparts. In the summer, many kids play in a league like the CPL, similar to the Cape Cod League if anyone has heard of it. We have a local team around Charlotte called the Gastonia Grizzlies (The games are a blast to go to and the do a better job of making the time at the game fun than the Charlotte Knights, AAA White Sox). They play many more games than their northern counterparts and are very well trained. Can't is doing great against some very, very good talent.