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Feel like that’s probably been posted 100 times on different message boards
OFFICIAL 2022-2023 COLLEGE FOOTBALL THREAD
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by Bobby Layne,
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Serious question: Where do you all think all this stuff with teams jumping to other conferences will lead to?
It's all pretty mind boggling to me. You essentially have 2 super conferences, the Big XII, then the rest. I get schools are chasing the money, but you'll have most of the historically and current top programs beating up on eachother, possibly hurting chances at the playoff - even considering expansion. I guess good for us as viewers, but why not just blow it all up and make it make sense? It's all way out of balance.
It's all pretty mind boggling to me. You essentially have 2 super conferences, the Big XII, then the rest. I get schools are chasing the money, but you'll have most of the historically and current top programs beating up on eachother, possibly hurting chances at the playoff - even considering expansion. I guess good for us as viewers, but why not just blow it all up and make it make sense? It's all way out of balance.
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Per Anthony Dasher of UGA Sports, the previous citation was related to an unpaid ticket after Ingram-Dawkins was cited for parking in a spot designated for people with disabilities. Ingram-Dawkins was released on a $13 bond less than one hour after being booked.
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They should build a drag strip there so they can all race their Challengers. Good recruiting tool 
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dacomeup
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Y’all realize the Mas brothers… who just got Messi to come to the MLS are bigger boosters for Miami than John Ruiz
. Dude made himself a target for all the attention he craved, but this is largely inconsequential to Miami or Miami recruiting.SPACs are dog **** companies and anyone who has paid any attention over the last few years shouldn’t be shocked by any of this.
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Is and always was a fraud.
It’s the dudes that bark the loudest always on some silly **** - and it was never more obvious than with Ruiz.
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Decent, but I'm not crazy about the pattern on the sleeves. Doesn't look as bad on the players, and looks a lot better on the White and Black jerseys though. Definitely better than all of the alternates we've had over the past decade.
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ThaxbyChamblis Following up on Zandamela, that sounds like more of just a speculative rumor more than being based in anything. Zandamela himself said USC led for him for way longer than people realized.
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Someone pointed out that an fsu insider that said zandamela is flipping also said that Itete was solid and not flipping. Basically that all of this is speculation and sometimes you get lucky and look right.
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So much chatter and I bet nothing happens
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Scoop city must have the same sources as message board geniuses.
A thing we will see is Uw and Oregon leaking propaganda about them to the BXII to try to bluff the B1G Into jumping on them.
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freaky frog
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I think the B1G will get acclimated with USC/UCLA for a couple years before adding more
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Inside USC, UCLA and the Big Ten’s prep for realignment’s toughest travel puzzle
For UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond, June 30, 2022, was a day of celebration coupled with exhaustion. The Bruins had gotten out of the Pac-12 and into the Big Ten alongside rival USC, securing their financial future and gaining stability in an otherwise uncertain time for college sports.
But then he woke up the next morning, and the real work began.
How were UCLA and USC going to actually pull this move off — for every varsity sport? The idea of a coast-to-coast college conference sounded great in theory, but the details would be devilish. What the two Los Angeles schools will experience almost exactly one year from now when they officially join the Big Ten on Aug. 2, 2024, will be unprecedented in major college sports.
“We have to get it right,” Jarmond told The Athletic. “From day one, we want to be competitive at the highest level in the Big Ten. What that means is really trying to optimize everything that goes into being competitive. … When you make a move like this, there are so many moving parts that you really have to bring the focus inward and just do one thing at a time. ‘OK, what’s most important?’ And you just go down that list.”
The checklist is long. It changes. Its priorities will surely shift many times over the next 365 days and the years after. Both USC and UCLA need to figure out the logistics surrounding all their cross-country trips ahead. They need to work with the Big Ten as the league pieces together schedules for every sport. They must build out infrastructure to accommodate their new conference’s network. They have to invest more in resources for academics, nutrition and mental health. They need to talk to sleep experts about body clocks and athletic performance.
Some steps have proven more difficult than anticipated. Others are less daunting than expected.
“USC has taken long trips before — it’s going to be the rigor of the Big Ten and doing it repetitively that’s the challenge,” said former Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour, a consultant who joined USC’s leadership team in May following the departure of Trojans athletic director Mike Bohn.
That is the crux of the challenge: Travel alone isn’t a new concern, but the length of the trips in the aggregate will be. Can they provide all of the support that their programs need and do it in a cost-effective manner?
These two schools say yes. But their leaders still have much to do in the lead-up to next August, as does new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who reiterated last week that his No. 1 priority is a smooth integration of USC and UCLA into the conference. One of his first trips after being hired in mid-June was to visit the L.A. schools. And one of the first decisions he made after taking the job was to hire Becky Pany as his senior vice president of sports administration, tasked with overseeing the integration of USC and UCLA with a particular focus on the league’s 25 Olympic sports.
“My message to Becky when she started was like, ‘Look, there’s nothing sacred as far as I’m concerned. I’ll call you with crazy ideas myself,’” Petitti said. “Let’s make sure that when we’re done, we’re seeing things that we haven’t done before.”
For more than a year, every decision or idea about UCLA’s move to the Big Ten has run through Matt Elliott. He’s the Bruins’ chief strategy officer and the official point person for the move. Elliott brings more than 10 years of experience in Westwood to his discussions with a boss in Jarmond who has lived and worked at two Big Ten schools. Together, they assembled a three-phase process for 2022-2024.
“We just thought about like, let’s compare this to an athletic event,” Elliott said. “The first thing we’re going to do is our scouting report. So, that’s going to be phase one of our process. Second phase, we’re going to call the gameplan, which is really how we’re going to make our decisions about how we’re going to attack all this. Phase three, we’re going to call training camp, which is really kind of the implementation of the ideas that we’ve come up with and the decisions we make in phase two.
“That all leads up to game day, which we’re looking at as August 2, 2024.”
As part of the first phase, Jarmond solicited feedback from current UCLA athletes about the move: their concerns, what they were looking forward to and the why behind both. Jarmond met with more than 300 athletes either individually or as a team, and the majority told him they were excited to compete at that level and to be part of a truly national conference. They also had questions and mentioned areas they wanted the athletic department to prioritize.
UCLA athletes asked for more resources devoted to their nutrition and to their mental health. “It was glaringly apparent to me that, resource-wise, we weren’t where we needed to be,” Jarmond said. The Bruins are already trying to address that by adding meals on campus and team meals on the road. By the time UCLA gets to the Big Ten, Elliott said every athlete on campus will have breakfast and lunch served to them, which he noted was a big change for the athletic department. No more cards for meal plans or trying to run back to a dining hall in between classes. It’ll be baked into the schedule. On the road, instead of per diems, there will be more team meals; nutritionists and dieticians can make sure the athletes are fueling properly.
They also plan to increase staffing for both mental health and academic support. Academic advisors will travel with teams. Additional support ideas could include noise-cancelling headphones for all athletes, and maybe Wi-Fi hotspots, too, to make it easier to do schoolwork while traveling. Elliott suggested that athletes might also want to take more summer classes, so their schedules are a bit lighter and more flexible in-season.
Barbour highlighted USC’s sports science efforts, which she said will help athletes with nutrition and sleep optimization. They’ll also help figure out best practices for air travel — how best to help athletes prepare and recover in a pressurized environment. The Trojans are trying to approach everything around the transition with a student-centered focus.
Jarmond has been in contact with professional sports teams based on the West Coast that travel across the country regularly. He talked to the Los Angeles Rams and the Chargers, and he even reached out to Brad Stevens, the Boston Celtics’ president of basketball operations, whom Jarmond got to know when he worked at Boston College. Stevens connected Jarmond with a sleep expert.
Maybe USC and UCLA will eat and sleep on West Coast hours while out east. Perhaps they won’t. Maybe coaches will adjust practice times and dates so that teams aren’t practicing the day after a five-hour flight. Experts will help the programs make educated guesses for athletic performance, but there will also be a great deal of adjustment based on what works and what doesn’t.
“It’s just really the process of connecting all of those dots,” said USC senior associate athletic director Ed Stewart. “A lot of that has to do with: What are the competition models going to ultimately look like? We know what that looks like now in football. So, that box is checked. That’s the first domino to drop, if you will, and now we’re going to try and see what those actual competitive models will ultimately look like, across the board in all sports.”
Much of Petitti’s world these days is uncertain. He’s trying to navigate the present and future of college sports as it is attacked on all sides. He reminds himself this as he works through the integration of USC and UCLA. Sure, it’s complicated — but it’s something the Big Ten can control. And things like schedules can always be tweaked.
“The football part is probably the easiest, right? It’s everything else that we have to spend time on,” Petitti said. “That’s what we’re doing every day. In every sport, it’s different. Every sport’s playing format in the regular season and the postseason are different.”
The Big Ten unveiled its 2024 football scheduling model earlier this summer. The Flex Protect Plus, as the league is calling it, allows teams to play up to three protected rivals each year and rotates through the rest of the conference while trying to prioritize competitive balance. But football only plays once a week. It’s going to take more creativity to piece together not just the soccer schedule but also the slate for field hockey, cross country and everything else that will be in-season at the same time.
For example, maybe the league can pair UCLA men’s soccer with USC women’s volleyball, and the two teams could charter together to play Northwestern and Illinois on the same weekend. Alternatively, they could fly commercial together and share buses. One other example of the minutiae of these travel considerations: In this scenario, the order of the L.A. teams’ games should be Illinois, followed by Northwestern. That way, those teams would end up much closer to O’Hare International Airport and could fly home directly after the games.
“How do you take advantage of members that are close by each other?” Petitti said. “You can double up and alternate. We’re also thinking about the size of our postseason formats. … One of the things I’ve tried to do — my philosophy overall — is that playing for a Big Ten championship is incredibly meaningful. So, for those sports where we have postseason Big Ten play, what’s the best way to like prioritize that? And then we have to have the regular season work.
“Ultimately, our goal is to win NCAA championships in every sport, so we’ve got to put ourselves in the best position. We’ve got to get the right regular season and the right postseason, so we have the maximum available qualifiers.”
Scheduling with postseason qualification in mind was a priority when creating the new football model. The Big Ten wants challenging but balanced slates for the best teams so that multiple teams can be positioned for at-large bids in the new 12-team College Football Playoff. That same philosophy can be taken with, say, softball. Because UCLA has historically been dominant in that sport, the Big Ten could make sure the Bruins play the top half of the rest of the league more than they play the bottom half, so as not to drag down their RPI. Or, if USC and UCLA appear to have NCAA Tournament-caliber men’s basketball teams, the league could avoid sequencing matchups so that those teams would have to go all the way to the Eastern time zone and back on two consecutive trips. The Big Ten has tasked scheduling guru Kevin Pauga with piecing together these puzzles.
The east-to-west flights back to L.A. will also help cap the total number of days of trips. Elliott said that in many cases there are more return trip options later in the day from airports such as Newark, Detroit and O’Hare than there have been when UCLA teams have been trying to get home from Pac-12 locales such as Pullman or Tucson. Plus, the time change allows athletes to get back from weekend action on a Sunday instead of a Monday and be able to make Monday classes.
“This is not more travel,” Jarmond said. “In most instances, it will be the same number of trips that we take right now. And then a few (teams) will have a fewer number of trips. That’s one thing that I think people miss. Now the distances are farther, and that’s what our focus is going to be — how best to minimize the impact of the distance.”
Stewart noted that much of this will come down to the modes of transportation. Some flights — but not all flights in every sport — will be chartered. “I don’t think you have to do that,” Jarmond said, citing the major airports in the Big Ten footprint with direct flights to L.A. But the key will likely come down to the pairing of opponents, which means leaning into bus rides once the West Coast teams are in the area. Elliott estimated that some teams may only add two total days of travel from what they’re currently doing. Others may have the same number as they do now.
“Once the competition models get finalized, you’ll get a better feel for the exact number of trips that you have to take,” Stewart said. “I think folks may be surprised when they see that.”
It’s likely much of the planning and execution of cross-country travel will surprise fans in and out of the league. The undertaking is unlike anything else in college sports, even as other conferences have expanded across time zones and into areas less accessible by major airport. No Division I conference stretches fully from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. No one else has to figure out how Rutgers and USC will play a regular-season tennis match.
For USC and UCLA, “game day” is fast approaching. With little more than a year to go, those involved in the planning remain confident they can get this right. Or that they can fix it if they need to. Failure isn’t an option.
“The overarching impetus behind all this is that we want to remain at the level we’re at — we want to continue to recruit the best student-athletes possible and compete for championships,” Elliott said. “And if you can’t offer the best nutrition, the best travel opportunities and experiences, the best mental health services, and the most academic support, student-athletes are not going to choose your school. You have to offer the best experience.”
For UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond, June 30, 2022, was a day of celebration coupled with exhaustion. The Bruins had gotten out of the Pac-12 and into the Big Ten alongside rival USC, securing their financial future and gaining stability in an otherwise uncertain time for college sports.
But then he woke up the next morning, and the real work began.
How were UCLA and USC going to actually pull this move off — for every varsity sport? The idea of a coast-to-coast college conference sounded great in theory, but the details would be devilish. What the two Los Angeles schools will experience almost exactly one year from now when they officially join the Big Ten on Aug. 2, 2024, will be unprecedented in major college sports.
“We have to get it right,” Jarmond told The Athletic. “From day one, we want to be competitive at the highest level in the Big Ten. What that means is really trying to optimize everything that goes into being competitive. … When you make a move like this, there are so many moving parts that you really have to bring the focus inward and just do one thing at a time. ‘OK, what’s most important?’ And you just go down that list.”
The checklist is long. It changes. Its priorities will surely shift many times over the next 365 days and the years after. Both USC and UCLA need to figure out the logistics surrounding all their cross-country trips ahead. They need to work with the Big Ten as the league pieces together schedules for every sport. They must build out infrastructure to accommodate their new conference’s network. They have to invest more in resources for academics, nutrition and mental health. They need to talk to sleep experts about body clocks and athletic performance.
Some steps have proven more difficult than anticipated. Others are less daunting than expected.
“USC has taken long trips before — it’s going to be the rigor of the Big Ten and doing it repetitively that’s the challenge,” said former Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour, a consultant who joined USC’s leadership team in May following the departure of Trojans athletic director Mike Bohn.
That is the crux of the challenge: Travel alone isn’t a new concern, but the length of the trips in the aggregate will be. Can they provide all of the support that their programs need and do it in a cost-effective manner?
These two schools say yes. But their leaders still have much to do in the lead-up to next August, as does new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who reiterated last week that his No. 1 priority is a smooth integration of USC and UCLA into the conference. One of his first trips after being hired in mid-June was to visit the L.A. schools. And one of the first decisions he made after taking the job was to hire Becky Pany as his senior vice president of sports administration, tasked with overseeing the integration of USC and UCLA with a particular focus on the league’s 25 Olympic sports.
“My message to Becky when she started was like, ‘Look, there’s nothing sacred as far as I’m concerned. I’ll call you with crazy ideas myself,’” Petitti said. “Let’s make sure that when we’re done, we’re seeing things that we haven’t done before.”
For more than a year, every decision or idea about UCLA’s move to the Big Ten has run through Matt Elliott. He’s the Bruins’ chief strategy officer and the official point person for the move. Elliott brings more than 10 years of experience in Westwood to his discussions with a boss in Jarmond who has lived and worked at two Big Ten schools. Together, they assembled a three-phase process for 2022-2024.
“We just thought about like, let’s compare this to an athletic event,” Elliott said. “The first thing we’re going to do is our scouting report. So, that’s going to be phase one of our process. Second phase, we’re going to call the gameplan, which is really how we’re going to make our decisions about how we’re going to attack all this. Phase three, we’re going to call training camp, which is really kind of the implementation of the ideas that we’ve come up with and the decisions we make in phase two.
“That all leads up to game day, which we’re looking at as August 2, 2024.”
As part of the first phase, Jarmond solicited feedback from current UCLA athletes about the move: their concerns, what they were looking forward to and the why behind both. Jarmond met with more than 300 athletes either individually or as a team, and the majority told him they were excited to compete at that level and to be part of a truly national conference. They also had questions and mentioned areas they wanted the athletic department to prioritize.
UCLA athletes asked for more resources devoted to their nutrition and to their mental health. “It was glaringly apparent to me that, resource-wise, we weren’t where we needed to be,” Jarmond said. The Bruins are already trying to address that by adding meals on campus and team meals on the road. By the time UCLA gets to the Big Ten, Elliott said every athlete on campus will have breakfast and lunch served to them, which he noted was a big change for the athletic department. No more cards for meal plans or trying to run back to a dining hall in between classes. It’ll be baked into the schedule. On the road, instead of per diems, there will be more team meals; nutritionists and dieticians can make sure the athletes are fueling properly.
They also plan to increase staffing for both mental health and academic support. Academic advisors will travel with teams. Additional support ideas could include noise-cancelling headphones for all athletes, and maybe Wi-Fi hotspots, too, to make it easier to do schoolwork while traveling. Elliott suggested that athletes might also want to take more summer classes, so their schedules are a bit lighter and more flexible in-season.
Barbour highlighted USC’s sports science efforts, which she said will help athletes with nutrition and sleep optimization. They’ll also help figure out best practices for air travel — how best to help athletes prepare and recover in a pressurized environment. The Trojans are trying to approach everything around the transition with a student-centered focus.
Jarmond has been in contact with professional sports teams based on the West Coast that travel across the country regularly. He talked to the Los Angeles Rams and the Chargers, and he even reached out to Brad Stevens, the Boston Celtics’ president of basketball operations, whom Jarmond got to know when he worked at Boston College. Stevens connected Jarmond with a sleep expert.
Maybe USC and UCLA will eat and sleep on West Coast hours while out east. Perhaps they won’t. Maybe coaches will adjust practice times and dates so that teams aren’t practicing the day after a five-hour flight. Experts will help the programs make educated guesses for athletic performance, but there will also be a great deal of adjustment based on what works and what doesn’t.
“It’s just really the process of connecting all of those dots,” said USC senior associate athletic director Ed Stewart. “A lot of that has to do with: What are the competition models going to ultimately look like? We know what that looks like now in football. So, that box is checked. That’s the first domino to drop, if you will, and now we’re going to try and see what those actual competitive models will ultimately look like, across the board in all sports.”
Much of Petitti’s world these days is uncertain. He’s trying to navigate the present and future of college sports as it is attacked on all sides. He reminds himself this as he works through the integration of USC and UCLA. Sure, it’s complicated — but it’s something the Big Ten can control. And things like schedules can always be tweaked.
“The football part is probably the easiest, right? It’s everything else that we have to spend time on,” Petitti said. “That’s what we’re doing every day. In every sport, it’s different. Every sport’s playing format in the regular season and the postseason are different.”
The Big Ten unveiled its 2024 football scheduling model earlier this summer. The Flex Protect Plus, as the league is calling it, allows teams to play up to three protected rivals each year and rotates through the rest of the conference while trying to prioritize competitive balance. But football only plays once a week. It’s going to take more creativity to piece together not just the soccer schedule but also the slate for field hockey, cross country and everything else that will be in-season at the same time.
For example, maybe the league can pair UCLA men’s soccer with USC women’s volleyball, and the two teams could charter together to play Northwestern and Illinois on the same weekend. Alternatively, they could fly commercial together and share buses. One other example of the minutiae of these travel considerations: In this scenario, the order of the L.A. teams’ games should be Illinois, followed by Northwestern. That way, those teams would end up much closer to O’Hare International Airport and could fly home directly after the games.
“How do you take advantage of members that are close by each other?” Petitti said. “You can double up and alternate. We’re also thinking about the size of our postseason formats. … One of the things I’ve tried to do — my philosophy overall — is that playing for a Big Ten championship is incredibly meaningful. So, for those sports where we have postseason Big Ten play, what’s the best way to like prioritize that? And then we have to have the regular season work.
“Ultimately, our goal is to win NCAA championships in every sport, so we’ve got to put ourselves in the best position. We’ve got to get the right regular season and the right postseason, so we have the maximum available qualifiers.”
Scheduling with postseason qualification in mind was a priority when creating the new football model. The Big Ten wants challenging but balanced slates for the best teams so that multiple teams can be positioned for at-large bids in the new 12-team College Football Playoff. That same philosophy can be taken with, say, softball. Because UCLA has historically been dominant in that sport, the Big Ten could make sure the Bruins play the top half of the rest of the league more than they play the bottom half, so as not to drag down their RPI. Or, if USC and UCLA appear to have NCAA Tournament-caliber men’s basketball teams, the league could avoid sequencing matchups so that those teams would have to go all the way to the Eastern time zone and back on two consecutive trips. The Big Ten has tasked scheduling guru Kevin Pauga with piecing together these puzzles.
The east-to-west flights back to L.A. will also help cap the total number of days of trips. Elliott said that in many cases there are more return trip options later in the day from airports such as Newark, Detroit and O’Hare than there have been when UCLA teams have been trying to get home from Pac-12 locales such as Pullman or Tucson. Plus, the time change allows athletes to get back from weekend action on a Sunday instead of a Monday and be able to make Monday classes.
“This is not more travel,” Jarmond said. “In most instances, it will be the same number of trips that we take right now. And then a few (teams) will have a fewer number of trips. That’s one thing that I think people miss. Now the distances are farther, and that’s what our focus is going to be — how best to minimize the impact of the distance.”
Stewart noted that much of this will come down to the modes of transportation. Some flights — but not all flights in every sport — will be chartered. “I don’t think you have to do that,” Jarmond said, citing the major airports in the Big Ten footprint with direct flights to L.A. But the key will likely come down to the pairing of opponents, which means leaning into bus rides once the West Coast teams are in the area. Elliott estimated that some teams may only add two total days of travel from what they’re currently doing. Others may have the same number as they do now.
“Once the competition models get finalized, you’ll get a better feel for the exact number of trips that you have to take,” Stewart said. “I think folks may be surprised when they see that.”
It’s likely much of the planning and execution of cross-country travel will surprise fans in and out of the league. The undertaking is unlike anything else in college sports, even as other conferences have expanded across time zones and into areas less accessible by major airport. No Division I conference stretches fully from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. No one else has to figure out how Rutgers and USC will play a regular-season tennis match.
For USC and UCLA, “game day” is fast approaching. With little more than a year to go, those involved in the planning remain confident they can get this right. Or that they can fix it if they need to. Failure isn’t an option.
“The overarching impetus behind all this is that we want to remain at the level we’re at — we want to continue to recruit the best student-athletes possible and compete for championships,” Elliott said. “And if you can’t offer the best nutrition, the best travel opportunities and experiences, the best mental health services, and the most academic support, student-athletes are not going to choose your school. You have to offer the best experience.”
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dacomeup
Supporter
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Def not waiting that long to announce something
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You think it’ll be this week like everyone says?
dacomeup
Supporter
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Nah, not buying that part of it but I def don’t think it’ll take a few years. I’d imagine the B1G will have their next wave of new teams by 2026
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