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Jeff McNamee's avatar

Oregon needs to stay. Sorry. It’s an absolute fish out of water in the SEC. It’s only mildly better in the Big Ten. Uncle Phil needs to screw his head on straight. There’s not a great answer here but we’re talking entire universities worth of athletics here, not just football. These are kids and they go to school.

I don’t care how many people say “it’s all about the money!” It sort of isn’t. Maybe at a few high-profile, Div I football and basketball schools, it is...but, beyond that, it absolutely is not. So we need to be careful.

Also, again, NCAA football is not the NFL. It’s nowhere near the caliber, so we shouldn’t approach it as if it is. If we want the NFL, watch the NFL. I don’t want to watch a younger version of the USFL. At least the USFL is effectively a professional minor league...and very few universities are gonna beat a USFL team.

No, I don’t care if the difference is $28M/yr. Sadly, for a lot of universities, that’s chump change - even some of the mid-sized ones like UO. Heck, UO’s annual budget alone is $1.1B, meaning this amounts to about 2.5% of the total. For UW, it’s WAY less - like 0.5%. All of this assumes that there is no loss in revenue from a conference move - a loss in competitiveness, a diminished brand, harder recruitment (we get lots from CA, HI, and Pacific islands), reduced merchandise and ticket sales, etc. I could easily see this netting out to half this total...which means we need to SLOW. THIS. DOWN.

Seriously.

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Ken Goe's avatar

Thanks for your reporting on this, John.

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