I wrote a column last year with the headline: “Why would I want to play for these idiots?”

It was a quote from Cali McClave, a senior on the women’s basketball team at Western Oregon. She’d written it on a slip of paper when administrators asked players to cast votes on whether they wanted to finish the 2023-24 season.

Nine players decided they didn’t want to play another minute for women’s basketball coaches Jessica Peatross and D.J. Marlow. The season ended six games early.

The players were subsequently stripped of their scholarships. Most of them left school and never played organized basketball again. What price do you put on that?

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Bruce Barnum knew it was coming.

His athletic director had stopped talking to him. Matt Billings hadn’t even bothered to travel to road games after the middle of last season. If you’re a struggling football coach looking for indicators of job security, these were a doozy.

Nevermind that Billings had apparently assured Barnum early in the season that he had nothing to worry about.

“I saw it coming every day,” Barnum told me.

After 11 seasons, Barnum was unceremoniously fired by Billings on the airport tarmac last December. It was a sobering reminder of the cruelty of the college athletics.

“Best job in the world,” Barnum said. “Worst profession in the world.”

Portland State went 1-11 last season. The Vikings play their home games miles from campus, in Hillsboro. They also schedule a series of virtually impossible “payday” games to start every season. And their scholarships aren’t fully funded, leaving them at a recruiting disadvantage against even their Big Sky peers.

“They have to stop playing those money games and give themselves a chance,” he said.

Last season, Barnum’s team faced BYU, North Dakota, Hawaii, and Tarleton State in games they were paid to play.

They went 0-4, of course.

Cumulative score: 184-23.

This season, PSU will play Oregon, San Diego State, and North Dakota in non-conference “payday” games under new coach Chris Fisk.

Said Barnum: “I’ll root for those guys.”

However, Barnum says, unless Portland State changes how it schedules and how it funds football scholarships, the cycle will just repeat itself. Will Billings listen? Will University President Ann Cudd?

Dumping the payday games might create a bigger gate and more momentum, but it would add more than $1 million to a cash strapped athletic department budget. Beefing up the scholarships would result in additional expenses. And what about the conundrum of the home stadium?

Donors and the current football staff have renderings for a cozy, 8,000-seat on-campus stadium built where the practice field sits. But it remains to be seen if university administrators will dedicate resources and energy to the project.

Barnum stared down a mountain of obstacles. His job was seemingly impossible. How did he try to approach it?

“You’re stubborn,” he said. “You’re a coach. You’re going to beat the odds.”

PSU went 9-3 in his first season. Barnum finished 39-75 overall.

Barnum broke his silence this week, talking about the meltdown of his Big Sky football program and his feelings after the dust has settled. Barnum said he received a text message from his friend, ex-Penn State coach James Franklin, after the firing.

Franklin was fired midseason.

The note read: “Sorry to hear what happened. I can relate.”

Watch:

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If Bill Simmons ever gets a flat tire, he ought to call a Trail Blazers’ fan.

Roadside service?

Help with a move?

Feed a cat, walk a dog, water a plant?

Simmons has one coming after he backed Blazers fans this week, ripping majority owner Tom Dundon and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver in a NSFW rant on his national podcast.

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The Monday Mailbag aims to solve the ongoing rift between the Trail Blazers and the city of Portland. We aren’t just bellyaching here. We’re offering a creative solution that involves Moda Center — not Portland’s NBA team — changing hands and landing with a private owner who doesn’t care about politics and isn’t limited by money.

Know anyone with billions who might be interested in a legacy play?

I do.

I received a trove of terrific questions this week. Readers wanted to know about Oregon’s offensive playcaller, Sean Mannion’s big career move, vacation spots, Oregon State’s bowl chances, cringy group text messages, and more.

Thank you also for reading and sharing this publication with friends, family, and co-workers. If you’d like to gift someone a subscription, have at it. And a big thanks to those who donate paid subscriptions to seniors on a fixed budget.

Now, your questions… and my answers:

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I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time travel. Science fiction books and movies about time machines and wormholes have always captured my imagination.

Marty McFly had Doc Brown’s DeLorean in “Back to the Future.” Bill and Ted had that phone booth to fuel their excellent adventure. Years later, in “Interstellar,” Matthew McConaughey found the fifth dimension.

I had an interesting time-travel moment this week. My parents are visiting Oregon. My father, who turns 80 this year, brought two baseball gloves and a ball.

“Let’s play catch,” he said.

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It’s occurred to me more than once that Tom Dundon might be trying to get Trail Blazers fans to break up with him.

It’s the oldest manipulation trick in the playbook. Create friction. Foster distance. Break down communication. Poison the relationship and gaslight. Make Portland fans so frustrated and angry with you that they throw their hands up, stop showing up, and play the role of bad guy, ending the relationship themselves.

Do you miss Paul Allen?

Mark Warkentien, a former assistant general manager with the Blazers, told me numerous times that fans would miss Allen after he was gone. Warkentien gave me the “Portland fans don’t know how good they have it,” speech more than once.

Paul spent on his NBA roster. He sprung for T-shirts. His NBA staff threw lavish sponsor parties and always reached for the tab at events. I heard stories about Allen pulling out the electric guitar in front of staffers on his yacht — Tatoosh — and playing as if he were Jimi Hendrix.

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I have some Pac-12 Conference updates.

Also, I sat down with Boise State football coach Spencer Danielson, who offered a book recommendation and his thoughts on the first football season. He’s not the only Division I football coach to point me in the direction of a good book lately, either.

What are the coaches reading?

I’ve got it for you.

A disgraced former NBA official is making a bold prediction about sports-wagering scandals he sees forming on the horizon. I have thoughts on that.

Is Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon intentionally alienating the Portland market? I’ve wondered lately. And I have an update for those eager for the return of the syndicated BFT radio show.

Emptying my notebook today…

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I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Jase Coburn and the Portland State men’s basketball team come through the gates of the parking lot at La Salle High School on Thursday.

They show up here every summer, after all.

Camp Exceptional is in its 13th year. It’s the summer sport camp run by the Bald Faced Truth Foundation. My brother and I dreamed this camp up on a park bench years ago. He’s a special-education teacher from California. I write a sports column.

The camp features typical kids and those with special needs, working alongside each other, learning sports skills and having fun. Coburn brings his team on the day the campers play basketball. I never ask him to do it. He just keeps showing up. On Thursday, I finally asked him the question.

“What do you get out of this?” I asked.

“It’s good for our team’s soul,” he shot back.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Chris Fisk, the new football coach at PSU, either. His predecessors, Bruce Barnum and Nigel Burton, both brought their football players to the camp. They volunteered for the entire week.

Fisk was hired in December, changed practice times, altered program protocols, ordered new equipment, and brought his own philosophy. It’s what new coaches do. They often go out of their way with intentionality, and refuse to duplicate the practices of the failed coaches who came before them.

Yet, here came Fisk, dedicating eight players a day as team leaders all week. And on Wednesday — the day of camp traditionally dedicated to flag football — dozens of his players piled into cars after their morning workout and drove from the downtown Park Blocks to the suburbs to show up for a bunch of kids they’d never even met.

“This stuff is important,” Fisk told me. “It’s a cornerstone of our program.”

A Big Sky Conference football program that has largely been marginalized and pushed out of its home football stadium, underfunded by its own school, relegated to playing in Hillsboro in front of a sparse crowd, decided for the 13th straight summer that it was going to show up for your kids.

How can we ignore that?

How can we forget that Coburn’s team, which won the Big Sky regular season men’s basketball championship last year, first spent a week last summer helping kids with intellectual disabilities and physical challenges?

Fisk had every reason to do things differently than Barnum. He could have blown off the camp. Everyone would have understood. Instead, he and his players decided that a thin, frequently unseen and overlooked stripe of society was too important to ignore.

Barnum got fired last season. His athletic director did the deed on the tarmac of the airport after a game. There are still bad feelings. But guess who reached out to me a few weeks before camp with a check-in call related to PSU?

Barnum said: “Is the new guy there supporting the camp?”

“He’s in,” I replied.

“That’s good to hear,” the former Vikings coach said.

I do all sorts of things in the media space that feel big and important. I report on the fall — and rise — of the Pac-12. I chase leads and weigh in on the Trail Blazers ownership saga. I travel all over during football season, covering big games. But when people ask me what the most important thing I do is, I always tell them about Camp Exceptional first.

“If it doesn’t challenge you!!!” my brother shouts at the campers.

“IT DOESN’T CHANGE YOU!!!” they holler back.

David Goggins would love this camp. It pits young people against their limitations. It arrives in the middle of July, laced with empathy, understanding, sweat, and lots of smiles. The sponsors get it. Adidas comes up big. Jamba supports. Lots of local businesses such as Shoe Mill, First Call Heating and Cooling, Gresham Ford, The Wall, Wilsonville Carpet and Tile, and others buy in. Parents adore it. The campers come back, year after year, eventually aging out at age 15 and then turning into volunteer team leaders.

People ask me where they should buy a car, get new shoes, or install new air conditioning, or put in carpets, or a patio. I always have the answer. Go with the company that supports your community, of course. So why not support the college teams and players that do the same?

I received a message a couple of months ago from a parent. He explained that his son had special needs and they were looking for a summer camp. The guy wanted to travel from out of state to attend and wondered if we had room for his kid. They’d exhausted the camp options in their area.

I talked all about how the camp builds relationships. It’s a sports camp, sure, but it’s more about the connection between young people and their sport-specific mentors. Some of the kids at the camp leave with more confidence. Others make a friend or three. One year, I had a parent approach me with glassy eyes and tell me it was the first time they felt like their child, who had a physical disability, was part of a team.

Room for a camper?

Sure.

Always.

“How old is your son?” I asked the guy on the phone.

“38,” he said.

Way too old to be a camper, but we’d try to find him a spot to volunteer, of course. I sometimes think there’s more in this camp for the people volunteering than the kids, ages 5-15, who are bouncing about, participating.

A 17-year-old named Parker, a former repeat camper with Down Syndrome, now serves as one of the official camp photographers. He’s been around all week, snapping photos.

Another former camper, Zach, has autism. He first attended Camp Exceptional when he was 7. He’s 21 now. He’s aged out as a camper and has served as a team leader for the last few summers. When Zach applied for a job a couple of years ago in the food service industry, I got a call from his prospective employer.

He’d put me down as a reference.

I smiled.

Of course, he did. He’s hard-working and relentlessly positive. He got that job.

Portland State athletes are here. Every year. Doesn’t matter who the coaches are. Doesn’t matter who the AD is. It’s almost inconsequential. The women’s basketball team came to volunteer one year. The women’s soccer team showed up another year. The football players and men’s basketball players have always been here.

The Vikings show up.

Will you show up for them this season?

Attend a game. Any game. Pick it on the calendar and bring your friends and family. Coburn’s basketball team played the best and most consistent college basketball in the state last season. Still, attendance was sparse. It shouldn’t be that way.

Fisk is new on the scene. He’s got challenges with his budget and a tough four-game stretch to start the season. His players start Fall Camp on Monday. They have the rest of this week off, but still showed up to help.

I was walking past a group of PSU football players earlier this week who were talking about their travel plans on Friday-Sunday. Two of them were planning to volunteer at camp through Friday at noon, then share an Uber ride to the airport, fly home for the weekend, then fly back on Sunday night for Monday’s first official practice.

Wrap your head around how important this must be to them. Decide if you’d like to make them feel important in return. I get it. We’re all busy. Excuses are easy to find. Apathy is real in today’s college ecosystem. But if you’re looking for a corner of the college sports world that is unselfish and soulful, I’m here to tell you it’s still out there.

The Vikings showed up again on Thursday.

Nobody should be surprised.

Will you show up for them?

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I was up early. I saw the sun rise on Tuesday. Watching that beginning hit me like a bag of bricks — the days just keep coming.

The city of Portland made a very respectable offer on Friday. It spilled its proverbial guts in a $573 million term sheet to the Trail Blazers that officials strategically made public. It must have felt scary and vulnerable to put all that out there, pouring out the details of a 20-year lease in black and white, but the city did what it needed to do.

Then, Tom Dundon’s group spit all over it.

A “non-starter,” an unnamed source told The Athletic.

Hey, at least they replied.

I’ve long felt like one of the weaknesses of city government is inaction. I’m decisive, assertive, and know where the lines are for me. I’ll go to the mattresses to make things work within that framework. An inch beyond it, though, is a ‘no-go.’ I was impressed that the city made a strong, early play, drew some boundaries, and put itself out there.

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The Trail Blazers saga continues. The team is pushing back against the city of Portland in negotiations. I got asked questions about it in this week’s Monday Mailbag.

I also received questions about the Pac-12, the University of Oregon, Goodwill finds, USC football, Jody Allen’s mood, playground games, and Portland State football, among others.

Thanks to all who submitted questions.

Thank you also for reading and sharing this publication with friends, family, and co-workers. If you’d like to gift someone a subscription, have at it. And a big thanks to those who donate paid subscriptions to seniors on a fixed budget.

Onto the Monday Mailbag…

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Who has the Intellectual Property rights to Jackie Robinson’s and Bill Walton’s video clips and highlights from UCLA? John Elway’s video content from his time at Stanford?

Their schools?

Or the Pac-12?

I have the goods on that.

Plus, the league’s direct-to-consumer offering will soon be announced. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned there. And the legislation in Washington, D.C., that aims to save college sports is in a race to the finish line.

A World Cup prediction?

A $33 wager that would pay $1,353?

Also, um, a skydiving college president?!?

Emptying the notebook…

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I don’t blame you if you bet against the foot-shuffling rubes at Portland’s City Hall, making a smart move in the poker game with the Trail Blazers’ ownership group. But that’s exactly what happened.

Faced with the prospect of negotiating behind closed doors, the local politicians and their hired negotiator hatched a novel idea. They brought the fight right out in the open, into the sunshine, where everyone could see it.

I’m eager to see whether Tom Dundon, a guy who made his fortune in subprime auto loans, knows what to do with that kind of sunlight.

Probably ignore it, I’ll bet.

The term sheet didn’t look like an initial salvo. It was polished. More like a final offer than a first one. It had the fingerprints of Carl Hirsh, the city’s mercenary negotiator, all over it.

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Gloria Nevarez is a fighter. When the Mountain West commissioner was faced with an existential crisis, she didn’t wilt. She pulled out some brass knuckles, started swinging, and made a promise of a financial windfall to UNLV and Air Force.

She lost five of her top schools, sure, but she held what was left of her conference together and got a media-rights deal despite being the last football-playing conference to go to market. It took guts and brains. Give her credit.

This week, speaking at her football media day in Las Vegas, Nevarez announced, “The Mountain West will be meeting all their obligations under the Grant of Rights.”

Also, she said, “Feeling good about our stability right now.”

Is conference realignment done?

Or is there something else happening?

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The saga involving the Trail Blazers is sucking up a lot of oxygen.

City officials in Portland say Tom Dundon isn’t engaged in negotiations to extend the team’s lease at Moda Center. Meanwhile, city and state leaders haven’t yet unlocked $600 million in funds aimed at arena improvements.

Fans are understandably anxious that the Blazers will leave Portland. Is Dundon aiming to take the team to Nashville? Is he on a slow walk out of town?

Will he agree to a long-term lease for the NBA franchise? And will NBA Commissioner Adam Silver step in at some point?

I dedicated Wednesday’s episode of “Bald Faced Truth: Unfiltered” on YouTube to the soap opera involving Dundon’s group, the Trail Blazers, city leaders, NBA owners, and a short-term arena lease that is melting in the summer sun.

I don’t let Jody Allen off the hook, either.

She engineered the sale to a group that had no ties to Portland.

The episode is worth your time:

Brian Berger, the host of Sports Business Radio, joined me for a candid conversation about the chess game being played. He believes Dundon is already dug into his position.

Said Berger: “He’s going to want most, if not all, of the revenues. He’s going to want property development around the arena. He is going to want all the money, and if you’re the city, can you look yourself in the mirror, can you go to taxpayers and say, ‘This is the deal I made, and this is why it’s a good deal for taxpayers’? There are two hurdles here, and I don’t think we’re going to clear both of those hurdles.”

Berger said that Silver, the NBA commissioner, is in a tricky position. Would Silver step in, mediate the dispute, or require Dundon to sell the team to an owner who wants to stay in Portland?

“I think the only way that Dundon will stay in Portland is if the league makes him stay in Portland or makes him sell to an owner that wants to stay,” Berger said.

Silver said this week that he is monitoring the negotiations between the city and Dundon’s group. Said Silver: “I was hoping more progress would have been made by now on that agreement. It seems to have gone off track in various ways.”

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A source in the middle of the action at City Hall tells me Tom Dundon’s ownership group isn’t acting like it wants the Trail Blazers to stay in Portland.

“We sent them a letter in April — no reply,” said the source. “We sent them six questions in writing two weeks ago — no response. They gave a verbal response, but nothing back in writing.

“Dundon doesn’t want to put it in writing that he’s not putting any money in. He doesn’t want to say that he doesn’t want to pay rent. This is not the city being stupid. We’re trying to do the right thing.”

City officials are huddling this week. Dundon’s group has been busy planting stories with the media about how non-responsive the city has been. That raised the ire of some involved parties who tell me the city and state are more than willing to trade hundreds of millions in public investment for a long-term lease agreement.

They’d like Dundon’s group to come to the table in a meaningful way.

“These are people who are not engaged,” the source told me.

Those familiar with the playbook Clay Bennett used to get the Sonics out of Seattle wonder why NBA Commissioner Adam Silver could allow the current uncertainty to unfold on his watch. I doubt Silver is happy about what’s playing out. I also don’t think Jody Allen, the untrustworthy trustee, should get a pass.

If the Blazers leave — it’s on her.

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Is this Big 12 and Oregon State stuff real?

Or just smoke?

I received amazing questions in the Monday Mailbag this week. They deal with expansion rumors, the pressure to win, the Seahawks, the Trail Blazers, Fox broadcaster John Strong, and the rumors about Oregon State (and maybe Boise State) joining the Big 12.

Thank you for reading and sharing this publication with friends, family, and co-workers. If you’d like to gift someone a subscription, have at it. And a big thanks to those who donate paid subscriptions to seniors on a fixed budget.

Onto the questions…

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Years ago, in the infancy of mixed martial arts, I was covering an event on a Saturday night at a tribal casino in California.

It’s where MMA fights were held before they became legitimate and were sanctioned. Anyway, the promoters had a fighter back out on one of the undercard bouts. Rather than cancel it and leave a hole in the program, they found some guy in the crowd who raised his hand and offered to step in.

Ticketholders were intrigued. It was one thing to attend one of these fights as a civilian. It was another thing to find yourself actually in the octagon throwing punches.

Anyway, everyone leaned forward in their seats as the fight started. The surrogate fighter looked like he was in good shape. They’d suited him up and warmed him up. The guy even threw a flurry of impressive fists in the first 30 seconds of the bout.

Then, his arms turned into sandbags.

He’d punched himself out.

The guy could barely lift his hands. His opponent seized the opportunity and moved in. Within a minute or so, the substitute fighter’s face was covered with blood. Still, he was somehow on his feet. Just before the bell sounded, ending the first round, the substitute fighter stepped back, paused, shook his head, and raised a hand.

Everyone stopped.

The crowd grew quiet.

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Trent Bray struggled in media interviews.

He was rigid.

He sounded tongue-tied.

Those aren’t the biggest sins ever committed by a Division I college football coach. But Oregon State knew it had a problem before last season.

Ideally, the head football coach needed to be an ambassador, a fundraiser, a recruiter, a pseudo-CEO, and the face of the operation. What the Beavers had was a very good “ball coach” when it came to X’s and O’s, but a guy who looked at times like he’d rather be anywhere else except in front of the room.

OSU assigned an athletic department lieutenant to work 1-on-1 with Bray early in the season, per sources. It helped some. He improved over a couple of months. But what Bray probably needed more than a weekly media-training session was a long-snapper.

I spoke with Bray this week for the first time since his firing in mid-October. He told me that going 0-7 to start the season and getting dismissed by athletic director Scott Barnes shook him.

Said Bray: “When you get fired, and it’s on you, it messes with your head and it messes with your confidence.”

Bray now has a new job as the defensive coordinator at Washington State and what he described as “a complicated” relationship with his alma mater.

I sat down with Bray for a wide-ranging interview. He was candid, talking about the death of his father, long-time college football coach Craig Bray, and how difficult it was for his dad to watch the winless season spiral into a nightmare.

“In a lot of ways, it was harder on my dad,” Trent said.

Washington State coach Kirby Moore scooped Bray up in the offseason, hiring him as a defensive coordinator last December. Craig Bray, Trent’s dad, died in February.

I’m left thinking that Moore — a first-time, first-year head coach — didn’t just get a playcaller on defense. He got an assistant who, as a first-time coach, just walked barefoot through a field of broken glass and might help Moore avoid some missteps.

Where did it go wrong for Bray? What would he do differently? Lots of things, he said. Bray said he’d change the organization of his staff and make some different hires. Also, Bray shook his head at maddening losses to Fresno State and Appalachian State.

“Those were two that we had complete control over,” Bray told me. “You can look at the Houston one, too, but that would have been kind of an upset if we’d have beaten them. The Fresno State and App State game we should have won, and we outplayed them for most of the game.”

One of my primary goals with interviewing subjects is to get them to relax and talk freely. To humanize the subject, veer into surprising places, and bring the viewer, listener, and reader into the experience. Bray came a long way toward that in this interview.

Think about Bray’s journey. He could have bailed to Michigan State with Jonathan Smith after the Pac-12 splintered. He could have turned his back on Oregon State, too. Instead, he signed on for a high-wire act in high winds — holding together a disintegrating roster, helping rebuild a conference, and doing all that amid a wave of uncertainty.

Angie Machado, who has covered Oregon State for years as a reporter, reached out to me after watching the Bray interview on YouTube with a comment. Machado spent time around Bray, watching him operate. The guy she saw on Friday looked like a different person.

“Like a 1000-pound weight was off his shoulders,” she told me.

Offensive coordinators who have faced Bray will tell you he’s quick to adjust. He learns from errors in strategy, alignment, and execution. On-the-fly in-game adjustments are his speciality, and one of the reasons why he prefers to be on the field, not in the box, during games.

“I like to look my guys in the eyes on the sidelines,” he said.

As much as the business of college football chews up coaches and spits them out, I wonder if Bray might get another chance to run his own operation someday. I wonder how much better he’d be. Or if he’d even want the headaches, given the transfer-heavy, portal-infected system. He’d be perfectly fine coaching the defense, after all.

Would Bray entertain the idea of another head coaching job?

Would he be better at it the second time?

Said Bray: “I’m never going to say never because I used to say I didn’t want to be a head coach, and then I became one.”

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There’s a lot of conversation about the Big 12’s jersey-patch deal with Monster Energy Drink. I’ve done some calling around on that front, and it’s not just fans who are outspoken. The sponsorship and athletics industry is shaking its head as it sorts through this, too.

Washington State fans are still mad at former Athletic Director Pat Chun. No way around it. Chun’s interview on my “BFT Unfiltered” show elicited some harsh feedback from WSU fans. Chun hit on a few things worth discussing further here.

One of the things Chun said about Mike Leach got me thinking about the Oregon Ducks and Ohio State. Dan Lanning vs. Ryan Day. Those two Big Ten programs are national title contenders in football, but are taking very different strategic approaches.

Emptying my notebook…

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University of Washington Athletic Director Pat Chun said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday.

“We’re overleveraged in this environment by agents. We’re overleveraged by rumors, and we’re overleveraged because everybody recognizes the need to win in football. There’s no restraint. This has become a billionaire’s playground,” Chun said.

The Huskies AD spoke with me in a wide-ranging 1-on-1 interview on the “BFT Unfiltered” show.

We talked about the saga involving UW quarterback Demond Williams, Jr., the trajectory of Jedd Fisch’s football program, the challenge of competing in the Big Ten, legislation aimed at saving college sports, and the Washington rivalry with Oregon.

Chun on the Oregon-UW rivalry:

“A true rival brings out the best in you. So I’ll just say this: from a Washington standpoint, we’re fortunate to have a rivalry that brings out the best in us. We’re very different than Oregon on so many different levels. We don’t want to try to be Oregon. The best thing about a rivalry, and why rivalries matter so much, is that they bring out the best in each other. We recognize what they have as an advantage, and we’ve got to try to figure out what our advantages are at UW.”

Chun on QB Demond Williams, Jr., announcing he was transferring, then backtracking after last season:

“It’s like anything in life. I remind anybody that we’re still in the business of using sports to teach life lessons, and this is a great laboratory for young people to figure out who they are, what their purpose on this planet is and where they’re supposed to get to. I think as we head into this fall, just seeing how he’s behaved and how he’s grown up, he’s still 19-20 right now. I think it’s going to be one of the great learning lessons of Demond’s life, and I think it will help him grow up, too.”

Chun on the legislation in front of Congress that aims to save college sports:

“If we can get to that place, hopefully you can get the support to happen. I think we all recognize the challenge of getting anything passed through Congress. It was always going to be a challenge, and I think this thing is going to be a challenge today because it does not answer questions that are specific to the Big Ten.”

Chun on the tiers forming in college athletics:

“There’s always been a gap between the top and the bottom for the last hundred years of college sports. I do believe there needs to be, for the overall health of college sports, there needs to be there needs to be rules and regulations. There still needs to be some type of mechanism and environment that, you know, other than spending the most money on the best players, there has to be something in which coaching makes a huge difference, in which you can mitigate some of the differences.

“I think where we’re headed right now, it feels like if you want to be a monster program, it’s just going to take dollars. And you know, for a school like Washington, I mean, we’re out there constantly looking for new dollars to add to our budget.”

Watch the full interview on YouTube.

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