<p>I heard a sports show where the person talking said he had gone back and reviewed all the clock time downs after a play, first downs etc. and found the seconds counted down exactly as they had at the end of the game. No attempt was made to review and put those seconds back on the clock. TCU should be in the national championship game and Texas should be playing Boise State (which would probably put the fear into Texas more than Alabama; a loss to Boise State and Mac Brown would be fired).</p>
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<p>So true, idad! It’s no surprise that many of the brightest stars leave early for the pro ranks.</p>
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<p>Yea - I saw the replay - the whistle did not blow until AFTER there was no time left on the clock. By rule, the clock can not stop until the ref blows the whistle. It never stops automatically when the ball goes out of bounds.</p>
<p>FWIW - I have no team interest in any of the teams involved - just calling it like it really was. The ref’s wrongly gave Texas a gift</p>
<p>The ref blowing the whistle made the mistake.</p>
<p>I agree about the stipend to play. Unfortunately, the education they receive isn’t important to many college football players; they’re just passing time until they can go pro. Witness UT safety Earl Thomas: </p>
<p>"Thomas is a third-year sophomore, who is draft eligible and finishing a better-than-expected season that has propelled him up the mock draft boards. </p>
<p>" ‘Obviously, you come to college to put yourself in position to make money. If I’m projected (in the draft) where I want to be projected, I’ll go forward and try to play on Sundays (in the NFL),’’ he said. ‘I’ll just have to see how my grade report comes back. Yes, I’m hearing good things.’ "</p>
<p>I don’t like that attitude, but it’s reality.</p>
<p>Substitute I’m just waiting to see if I get that part in Hollywood or Broadway or that job with Google because I’m a computer genius. An NFL job anywhere near the upper range means making more money in a few years than most college grads see in a lifetime. You can always go to college. Your NFL shelf life is very narrow.</p>
<p>I certainly don’t blame him. I’m sure Sam Bradford wishes he’d gone pro last year after winning the Heisman.</p>
<p>Refs are now overruled regularly by instant replay. Why should clock stoppage be any different? A clock and a video tape are more reliable that a ref’s eyes and lungs.</p>
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<p>I hope he bought one of those insurance policies that pays out if the player is injured before he gets to the NFL. I understand they’re becoming more common.</p>
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<p>He did. Question is who paid for it? I’ve heard those policies are VERY expensive.</p>
<p>What’s going on with this thread or board??? Non-posts have put this on the second page … Odd.</p>
<p>Well, now it’s fixed, and I look crazy. Whatever.</p>
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That’s fine, if it is done consistently. The issue is that it is not. It is the selective use of the replay that is the problem. It was not even consistent with calls made throughout the game. That is why it was wrong.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s applied inconsistently. And there are certain plays or penalties on which replay isn’t even allowed, for no good reason that I can figure out. But then, you can’t review every single play, or the game would slow to a crawl. There’s a middle ground somewhere, and I don’t think they’ve found it yet.</p>
<p>??? This board is goofy today. I just posted something, but it’s on the previous page instead of this one.</p>
<p>[EDIT] And so is this one! I mean, it was, until it appeared on the wrong page, and now it’s that one instead of this one. Or something.</p>
<p>Texas football brings in 80 mil to the school a year. Next time a prof does that go ahead and complain about his salary.</p>
<p>The truth is that only a small number of college players end up making it in the pros, so getting an education should be important. </p>
<p>Refs routinely ask for seconds to be put back on the clock. That’s not a “gift.” </p>
<p>I know it would be unreasonable to review every and all plays, but it’s annoying to see pass interference being called when it didn’t happen and not being called when it did happen!! I think the games need one more ref on the field, too, to catch holding and blocks in the back that often go unnoticed.</p>
<p>I do think that college football players should be given a stipend - not a big stipend - but some pocket money, maybe $200/month. It’s unreasonable to expect that football players (many from poor families) aren’t going to need some “walking around money”. I guess the concern is that if they allow stipends for football players, they’ll have to give stipends to all athletes and that would be a problem since most of the other programs (especially the womens programs) end up costing the colleges too much money as it is.</p>
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<p>If they call holding or blocks in the back that “go unnoticed” they would be calling it EVERY single play. Do you really want that? It has been shown that holding occurs on EVERY play. The question that has to be answered is how obvious was it and how much did it affect the play?</p>
<p>This is a very interesting article that my mom sent me. Note that these exes give a lot to athletic AND academic programs! There are a lot of wealthy people in Texas. Tex Moncrief gave $18 million to the engineering school in February!</p>
<p>Texas Football Boosters Think Big
Billionaire Supporters Help the Longhorns’ Program Set a Revenue Record; ‘Put Me Down!’</p>
<p>By HANNAH KARP</p>
<p>In college football, the most indispensable players are not necessarily star quarterbacks. Sometimes they’re the overeager alumni who write big checks and weigh in from the sidelines. And in that department, nobody can mess with Texas.</p>
<p>The Longhorns, who will take on Alabama next month for the national championship, have what is, hands down, the nation’s biggest, wealthiest and most eccentric collection of college football boosters.</p>
<p>Red McCombs while he owned the Minnesota Vikings in 2004.</p>
<p>“The recession hasn’t broken any of us,” says oil and gas mogul W.A. “Tex” Moncrief, who gave $18 million to the school’s engineering department in February and whose name is plastered on the school’s athletic center. “We’re all in damn good shape.”</p>
<p>While revenue at many big-time college football programs has fallen or stayed flat last season, revenue at the University of Texaswhich comes from things like ticket sales and suite rentalsjumped by 20% last year to $87.6 million, the most ever generated by a college football program and almost $20 million more than second-place Ohio State University pulled in.</p>
<p>The bulk of the $14.6 million increase came from the addition of a building on the north side of the stadium with 9,000 new seats that was financed by alumnus and former Minnesota Vikings owner Billy Joe “Red” McCombs.</p>
<p>At Texas, alumni donations fund more than one-third of the athletic department’s $127 million budget. In addition to buying football tickets, Texas alumni contributions help pay coaches’ salaries. Last week, the University of Texas System raised coach Mack Brown’s annual pay to $5 million from $3 milliona move that disgusted a group of faculty members who this week called the raise “unseemly and inappropriate.”</p>
<p>Kicker Hunter Lawrence after beating Nebraska</p>
<p>An athletic department spokesman said the complaint represented the views of only a few faculty members. One of the school’s major donors, Dallas banking and real-estate mogul Mike Myers, said Mr. Brown’s raise was driven by market forces. “He’s in the entertainment business,” said Mr. Myers, who says he gives as much to academics as he does to athletics. “It sounds kind of crass but that’s just a fact of life.”</p>
<p>All schools have their ardent supporters, of course. But in many cases there are just one or two mega-boosters at a school whose names always seem to end up on the most coveted facilities. It would take a brave Oregonian to compete with Nike co-founder Phil Knight, for example, who’s given the University of Oregon hundreds of millions over the years. Billionaire T. Boone Pickens, the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, is equally hard to topple as chief booster at Oklahoma State University.</p>
<p>Texas, on the other hand, has a club of at least ten big shots who egg each other on. There’s Mr. Myers, who was the No. 1 Bible salesman in the country as a Texas undergraduate (the university’s 20,000-seat track and soccer stadium bears his name); WWII hero and Austin attorney Frank Denius, who at the age of 84 attends not only every game but most practices (he stands on the sidelines and watches the defense); energy consultant B. M. “Mack” Rankin Jr., whose name graces the athletic dining hall; and former UT tackle Jim Bob Moffett, now the chief executive of Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold.</p>
<p>The Longhorns run onto the field before a November game.</p>
<p>Robert Rowling, who made his fortune in the oil industry and who now owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym, gave the keynote speech at the Longhorn football banquet last week. It’s a close-knit crew, and though they sit in separate suites at games, they lunch together frequently and bond over golf and gin rummy.</p>
<p>“You’re better off having a bunch than one,” says UT’s athletic director, DeLoss Dodds, who describes the group as being “just so Texas” because of their outsized school pride. When a school has just one major booster, he explains, there can be a tendency for that person “to try to run it.”</p>
<p>While they don’t try to steer the ship, the Longhorns’ big boosters are all keenly aware of the influence they wield. They are often invited to speak to players once a year and some go even further to cement their connections to the team. Though Mr. McCombs says he stopped participating in recruiting years ago, he invites players and their families to his ranch in the hills outside of Austin each August where he grills steaks and takes them fishing. Players call him frequently for advice, he says.</p>
<p>The coaches always return boosters’ calls promptly and sometimes even call them out of the blue for moral support. Last week Mr. Moncrief says he was caught a bit off-guard when Coach Brown buzzed him at home in Ft. Worth for no apparent reason.</p>
<p>“I guess he just called to say hello and pass the time,” says Mr. Moncrief, who adds that the two men usually talk about football.</p>
<p>Houston-based billionaire Joe Jamail, a personal-injury lawyer known as the “King of Torts” is one of the most well-known boosters on campus. The 84-year-old Mr. Jamail was recently swooped off the ground by Texas linebacker Sergio Kindle during a postgame visit to the team’s locker room with his friend, country singer George Strait. (Mr. Jamail says he yelled at Mr. Kindle to put him down.)</p>
<p>Mr. Jamail says he was honored that his alma mater named the football field after him in 1997until the Longhorns suffered an embarrassing loss to UCLA early in the season. “I called the athletic director and said, 'How much money will it take to get my name off” that field? Mr. Jamail recalls. The coach at the time, John Mackovic, was fired at the end of that season and the selection committee sought Mr. Jamail’s opinion on Mr. Brown before hiring him.</p>
<p>When Mr. Brown took the helm in 1998, former Longhorn coach and athletic director Darrell Royal instructed him to call Mr. Jamail and ask for his blessing. “It’s his field, you need to get his permission,” Mr. Royal told Mr. Brown, who did as he was told.</p>
<p>School officials say the football program owes its broad base of boosters not just to the team’s winning record and the general passion for football in the Lone Star State, but to the strength of the region’s economy, which has drawn strength from sectors like energy, high tech, homebuilding and health care and has benefitted from a surge in population. Economic growth in Texas has outpaced the national average since 2004.</p>
<p>Boosters aren’t always a positive force in college football. Across the country, overzealous supporters have gotten their schools in trouble by wining and dining recruits or by giving current players clothes, cash or cars. Still, Texas has not had any scandals in recent years. “I’m not saying it won’t ever happen, but we’ve been lucky so far,” says Mr. Dodds.</p>
<p>One advantage Texas has over many schools is that the school has some 500,000 alumni still living in the stateand seems to have a new crop of donors almost every year who come out of the woodwork to snap up the suites in the new Red McCombs Red Zone.</p>
<p>Last year, Mr. Dodds, the athletic director, says he asked one young booster for a $4 million donation to help fund a specific project. At first, he recalls, the booster thought he’d been asked for $40 million, but Mr. Dodds assured him he didn’t need that much.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Mr. Dodds says, the next day he saw that the money was being wired to the school’s accountand that it had already surpassed $5 million. Mr. Dodds says he called the donor to find out if there had been a mistake and the donor told him he was having a little trouble getting the wire transfers sorted out.</p>
<p>“How do you shut this thing off?” the donor joked.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>LOL…</p>
<p>I love the part…“how do you shut this thing off?”</p>
<p>This is what the UT president had to say:</p>
<p>A number of comments asked, who is responsible for deciding how much money flows from Intercollegiate Athletics to the academic enterprise at UT? Also, why doesn’t athletics contribute more money to academics?</p>
<p>Ultimately, I make the decision, although I do it in consultation with the directors of men’s and women’s athletics. The goal is to make the contribution as large as possible. But it must be done in a way that ensures that athletics continues as a self-sufficient business model. As I said in a previous post, it was not that many years ago that academics subsidized athletics.</p>
<p>Some athletics revenues are predictable while other revenue streams are cyclical. Expenses can vary from year to year and from sport to sport. Recent reports concerning football revenue may lead some to believe that Intercollegiate Athletics enjoys large profits. Don’t forget that athletics must pay for many men’s and women’s programs besides football, and the majority do not pay for themselves. The profit of Intercollegiate Athletics is far less than the profit of the football program.</p>
<p>The good news is that our highest revenue-producing programs are experiencing great success, and Intercollegiate Athletics should again be in a position to contribute financially to the academic mission of UT.</p>
<p>Bill</p>