The BJ Report is a free-flowing conversation that sometimes drifts completely off topic because it is dictated by two guys with zero focus.
Jesse: THE DRAFT IS COMING, AHH!!!
Brian: OK, well first, are we agreeing with the rest of the world about the top three prospects?
Now that the NBA draft lottery is done, we can all begin our favorite annual activity: making completely unjustifiable statements about our favorite inadequate management, our favorite players going pro, and our favorite conspiracy theories. With that in mind, I will now attempt to channel my inner Nostradamus and foresee what horrid fate will befall each tortured fan base.
Starting at the bottom…
This doesn’t have much to do with my article, I just think the t-shirt is funny and I needed a picture. When rape culture is at odds with capitalism.
The NCAA is not broken. It’s working exactly how it was designed. As a corporation in a capitalist society, your duty is to accrue as much profit as possible. Make no mistake, despite their non-profit status, both the NCAA and its member institutions are very much corporations. Basic economics would denote that one of the easiest ways to accrue said profit is to reduce labor costs. Luckily, we have this wonderful fallacy called amateurism that reduces labor costs to free. The best thing about amateurism is that the NCAA basically invented its contemporary definition, and exists solely to enforce the integrity of this made-up definition. College sports are dumb. I have a few suggestions to make it better. As always, I don’t consider any of them to be realistic, only correct.
I’m not gonna waste a lot of words on this one because the rule is so dumb that it doesn’t require much critique. Not only are college athletes not paid, but they are FORBIDDEN to receive compensation from anyone in any way, shape, or form. The implications of these restrictions range from the inability to accept a free dinner to the inability to profit off of… their own image. You think Johnny Manziel couldn’t be making bank off of commercial appearances right now? Ohio State football players were villainized for trading jewelry and trophies that THEY WON for tattoos—not even cash!
Objection! But won’t this disproportionately favor large schools with wealthy donors and bigger platforms to showcase athletes
Response: Of course! But how is this ANY different than the way it is now? This will effectively do nothing to parity in college sports because there is very little in the first place
This is actually more on the pro leagues than the NCAA. A player should have the ability to be drafted at any time, at any age. Every person in the world should automatically be eligible to be drafted at any given time. If a drafted player doesn’t want to go pro, then they don’t have to. If they get drafted and make a roster, they lose their NCAA eligibility. The only reason age restrictions exist is so that professional sports leagues can be protected from their own bad investments. College sports serve as a free filter to decrease the likelihood teams waste money, it’s not about what is “best for the athlete” like they claim.
Objection! But most athletes don’t make it on the pros, shouldn’t we be encouraging them to get degrees?
Response: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You know what the average salary for someone with a bachelor’s degree is? $55,000. The 30th pick in the first round of the NBA draft will make almost $1 million dollars (the top pick will make almost $5 million) during his FIRST YEAR. A 3-year NBA career for an average player likely garners more guap than someone with a bachelor’s degree gets in a lifetime. Even if you don’t make it in the NBA, playing in a European league will still be more financially prosperous than 98% of jobs. Same goes for football without the alternative leagues, but then again far fewer players enter the NFL without a degree.
Bonus Objection! Yeah but I just saw that documentary “Broke” and it says that most athletes blow all that money they make in The League
Bonus Response: Yes, this is unfortunately extremely common, but this isn’t an issue exclusive to pro ball players. A large percentage of major athletes are from working class background, and typically when working class folks get a lot of money at once, they spend it because saving is a foreign concept (see: lottery winners). Plus, you gotta put the whole team on–friends, families, boo thangs and all. Conversely, when working class folks get college degrees, they end up in six-figure debt and spend most of their lives paying it off. Neither of these are absolute outcomes, but if you’re choosing between one or the other, take the millions.
First of all, I want to say up front that I did not come up with this idea, I actually got it from one of my college professors. This might seem like the most radical of my suggestions, but it actually basically exists already. The schedules for major college athletes are so restricted that there are only a certain set of classes one can feasibly take anyway. There is a reason athletes seem to travel in packs around college campuses. The notion that these athletes are “students first” is idiotic when it’s virtually impossible for them to be students in the same way as everyone else. I propose that we just let them come to school and focus entirely on sports. Their academic schedule would consist of working out, going to practice, and gameplanning—in other words, exactly what they do now. You could even incorporate academic courses that increase knowledge of the game and educated around coaching strategies. Design a curriculum that helps these athletes be professionals in the field of their choice. There is no difference between this and what Art and Music students do.
Objection! Ok, I get that it’s more financially prosperous to play pro ball than get a regular job, but that doesn’t change the fact that most college athletes aren’t good enough to make a living in sports.
Response! No problem! I have two great solutions. The most feasible one is to allow athletes to come back and get a non-athletic degree at any time. Universities owe them that, which I’ll get to later. The other option is to allow athletes to get their degree while playing sports, similar to what is possible now. Athletes should have the agency to choose the option is most conducive to their success, just like everyone else.
A lot of people are in favor of paying college athletes, but generally folks are vague about how this would actually happen. I propose that something like a union negotiates a flat rate to be paid for athletes at various levels of competition (based on market value). For example, all Division 1 football and basketball programs would be required to pay each player $50,000 (I pulled this number out of my ass). Division 2 and non-revenue sports programs would not be required to pay their athletes because they generally have no market value, but the programs would still have the OPTION to compensate athletes in any fashion they so desire.
Objection! They already get paid! A four-year scholarship is often worth up to $200,000
Response: Chile, please. It’s hard to calculate the financial impact of the average college football or basketball player at any given school, but the existence of the team most certainly has a positive impact. At a handful of schools, this benefit comes in the form of direct profit, often up to tens of millions of dollars. At most schools however, major college athletics is a key contributor to the brand of the university (and remember, higher ed=corporation). Outside of the Ivy League, the only schools with major college sports whose academic reputations supersede their athletic programs are Stanford, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt. At any other Division 1 school, taking away their basketball and/or football team significantly enhances the perception of the school for the potential student (you know I’m right Michigan, Duke, and Notre Dame). This is not to say these schools are irrelevant without sports, but there is a reason the Student Activities Building at U of M has a Denard Robinson cutout you can take a picture with.
Even were all this not true, saying that a scholarship athlete costs a university the full cost of attendance for four years is not even close to accurate. To say that the University of Michigan loses $200,000 per athlete is to assume that said athlete is taking a place at the school that would otherwise go to a normal student paying the full cost of attendance. For one, because of either financial need of merit-based aid, very few people pay the full cost of attendance at any school. For two, because athletes are nearly always admitted to the school based entirely off of their athletic achievements, they are not even competing with other students because they have a separate admissions process. Assuming they have the space to house them, U of M could easily offset the cost by simply accepting more students.
Bonus Objection! Most schools lose money on athletics as it is, how can they be expected to pay their athletes?
Bonus Response: Two Options: Either don’t be in Division 1, or lower the cost of/drop your other sports. The only reason schools are able to offer a billion sports is because they take the money from exploiting football players. I would like for wrestlers to have the opportunity to wrestle at the college level, but there is no ethical reason a school should have to offer it (where are the positive externalities?). If a school would rather not cut sports, then cut football or drop a division. Limiting the teams who can call themselves Division 1 effectively does little but change the label some schools carry. Just as allowing athlete compensation will favor existing powerhouses, so will consolidating the size of Division 1.
Right now, a coach can take another job whenever he or she wants, even before the season is over (and of course get paid too). A player, on the other hand, must wait a year AFTER the season is over if they want to play at a different school. This is fuckin stupid. Players should be able to leave programs whenever they want and regain eligibility as soon as the semester starts. Y’ALL the ones who created capitalism, I’m just callin it like I see it.
Objection! Athletes make a commitment to the university, and it should not be that easy to dishonor that commitment!
Response: Right now scholarships are already one-year renewable commitments, so schools can renege if they can’t use your body anymore. College athletes are human beings and sometimes they change their minds about things. Their should be no penalty for dipping.
Now that Michigan’s loss in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has settled for a day, I feel prepared to process what happened. That’s not to say that this process is an easy or comfortable one, but it is one that I feel is necessary.
A couple of weeks ago, Grantland ran a series of interactive articles in which readers got to vote on the most hated player in college basketball history in an NCAA tournament style bracket (well, since hatred was invented in the 80s). Duke University appropriately got its own region and former Blue Devil Christian Laettner ultimately emerged as the tournament’s winner, defeating UNC ass hole Tyler Hansbrough in the final. This was pretty much the expected result. The winner had to be from the Duke section of the bracket and Laettner is the posterboy for all things Duke. In fact, if you had to pick a flaw in the bracket, it’s that in my mind JJ Redick was Laettner’s biggest competition, but Redick had to bow out in the Elite 8 because the competition limited Dukie final four participants to one.
People hate Duke for a lot of reasons–they win a lot; Coach K is whiny and annoying; the university itself oozes entitlement; and as the Grantland hateable hoopers bracket displays, they have a long history of players who are pricks. The most important reason to hate Duke, and really the only one that matters, is that Duke is white. When I say they’re white, I’m talking about more than the fact that they’re known for having white players. It’s that even their black players seem to have qualities we associate with whiteness. It seems like Coach K recruits exclusively at prep schools and Jack and Jill chapter meetings.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve developed this habit of watching every movie with an overly critical lens. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the movies, or even that I’m necessarily pickier than the average movie fan, but I do have the tendency to get a little too academic in my movie-viewing. Thus far this year, watching films has been far too much about mental stimulation and not nearly enough about visceral stimulation. I would hypothesize that this is partly due to my natural propensity to critique, and partly due to being under the influence of society’s increasing desire to be a hater. That’s why I needed this movie.
Every once in a while, Hollywood takes something from the internet and turns it into a mid-level silver screen embarrassment. Fortunately, Safety Not Guaranteed is not one of those movies.
I like most of the teams in the playoffs (and the league for that matter), but I don’t like the Miami Heat. I can honestly say that the only reason this is the case is because a team with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh are always going to SEEM like favorites to me, and there is no visceral appeal to rooting for favorites. Individually there is not one Heat player I have a problem with, and I have genuine sympathy for the shit LeBron in particular has to go through, but I can still never root for them.
What’s interesting about this series is that by most accounts, the Heat are coming in as genuine underdogs, and rightfully so. The OKC Thunder have beaten better competition and in a more convincing fashion. LeBron is probably a little better than Durant, and Wade is probably a little better than Westbrook, but James Harden is definitely better than a broken Bosh (if Bosh was healthy, it would be a wash for the Heat AT BEST). Past that, Ibaka is about twice as good as the Heat’s fourth best player (probably Chalmers), and to a man, the Thunder role players are pretty much all more consistently useful than the Heat’s (at everything besides dap giving, at which Ronny Turiaf is king).
The good news for the Heat is that the Thunder are not really constructed to exploit the Heat’s weaknesses. Miami has without a doubt the best perimeter defense in the league, but the true post presences on this team are borderline D-League players. Luckily, the Thunder can only counter with Kendrick Perkins and Serge Ibaka. Perk has negative offensive game, and Ibaka is more athletic than deft, getting most of his points off dunks. Occasionally Ibaka can get the jumper going, but if that happens Miami has no shot anyway. The Thunder have two combo guards who get most of the PT in the backcourt, and while both can create to some extent, neither is the Rondo-type (or entire Spurs team) ideal for breaking down the Heat defense. Theoretically LeBron can slow down Durant and some combination of Wade/Battier/Chalmers can take turns harassing Westbrook and Harden. If that happens, the Thunder won’t have anyone else who can create.
On the other hand, the Thunder have their own advantages for the same reasons.Since Miami’s offense operates most effectively with Bosh spreading the floor and knocking down open 18-footers With no one to guard in the post, Ibaka, who is by far the best shot blocker in the league, will have the freedom to roam around and do whatever the hell he wants. I wouldn’t be surprised if he averaged five blocks per game this series (averaged almost four in the regular season, so that’s pretty reasonable). I expect Durant to spend a good deal of time at the 4, allowing the Thunder to get both Harden and Thabo Sefolosha on the floor for large stretches of time. Sefolosha is pretty toothless on offense outside of the occasional trey, but he’s a very good defender who will be called upon to handle both LeBron and Wade at times. While LeBron is almost certainly going to have to spend the entire series guarding Durant, I think Durant is going to end up guarding Bosh, or even Battier for most of the time. This is going to save him a lot of energy, and he already has had more rest during the playoffs than his superstar counterparts. The Thunder aren’t quite the defensive team the Heat are, but they have better matchups and have rim protection that the Heat can’t match. The role players are really going to have to be hitting their open jumpers when Wade or LeBron meet Ibaka or Perkins at the rim and have to kick it out. Non-Bosh’s have not shown the ability to do this consistently to this point.
No matter what happens, this series is going to be fun as hell. I was rooting against the Heat the whole way, but I’m glad they’re here (if that makes sense?). This is the most fun possible finals matchup outside of Spurs vs. Spurs. In my lifetime there has never been this much athleticism on the court, and all the stars in this series give 143% while playing at 476 mph. It’s gonna be a largely center-less small ball series, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. We’re probably gonna see back-to-back cool shit that doesn’t seem possible, about 392584037285 bullshit narratives are gonna form and die between games quarters, and my head is probably gonna explode midway through Game 2.
I have a really bad feeling about this prediction, but I don’t see a way around saying anything other than Thunder in 5. Although the Thunder don’t have the bigs to kill the Heat, on paper nothing seems to FAVOR them besides the fact that LeBron is the best player. The Heat are already tired and bruised, and now they have to take on the most healthy, energetic team in the league. OKC has home-court advantage in more ways than one, because their fans are the best in the league while Miami’s are arguably the worst. No one is going to completely stop the two best players on either team, but a good game from any one of the Thunder role players probably means the Thunder are gonna win that particular game. For the Heat to win, their big three are going to have to trump the Thunder’s AND compensate for OKC’s other advantages–I just don’t see that happening.
By all accounts, the Thunder should win. Popular opinion is that Kevin Durant is at least as good as LeBron, Dwyane Wade isn’t the man he once was, Russell Westbrook is playing at a high level, and Chris Bosh is hobbled at best. Popular opinion is that Miami fades in big moments, that Oklahoma can be propelled to victory on its home floor by the crowd alone, and that Miami gets nothing at home.
And that’s exactly why I think the Heat are going to win this series.
Dear Mr. Romney,
I am contacting you to offer what I think is a mutually beneficial proposition. I am a politically disaffected American who has no stake in the upcoming presidential election. I am quite certain that I do not plan on voting. I have, however, been following the election process out of sheer curiosity. I want to applaud you on the success of your campaign thus far, but I do want to highlight an issue that I feel I can help rectify. I have noticed that when you are delivering your speeches, the ethnic makeup of the crowd behind you is relatively homogenous. Neither of us is naïve enough to believe that you will receive anything close to a majority of the popular minority vote, but it could be potentially detrimental to both your campaign and the Republican party as a whole if you are perceived to be unreceptive to diversity. Admittedly, I understand the struggles you must have securing a consistent brown face to showcase, especially when visiting key heartland states. Luckily, I am here for you. I am a 21-year old, college educated, black male willing to become a permanent fixture of the Romney campaign. I can represent a number of groups of people whose interest you struggle to attract. No one would confuse me for anything other than a minority, but my fair complexion and freckles offer two distinct advantages:
1.) I am effectively racially ambiguous; I am willing to be presented as both African American and Latino, if necessary.
2.) I am less intimidating to your base.
For the bargain price of $10,000 per appearance, I am willing to appear at frequent campaign stops, right behind you in the camera’s view. I would be willing to negotiate a discounted price for multiple appearances in close temporal proximity of each other. For a premium, I am also willing to be photographed shaking hands, or even firmly embracing you. I urge you to strongly consider this offer, as I am confident that you would like to be president as much as I would like to get out of debt. Contact me at your leisure, and we can begin discussing a plan of action.
Sincerely,
Brian Harris
My name is Ian Roberts, and I’m a “like”aholic. I’m helplessly addicted to the like button on Facebook. That’s not to say that I enjoy handing out likes, but I am constantly seeking them out, 
practically manipulating my Facebook friends into pressing that tiny little button above the comment box. The like button is a pat on the back. A tussle of the hair and a “I’m proud of you, son.” An almost zero-effort gesture of approval that is nonetheless more important to you than the home run you just hit. For the past two and a half years, the like button has shaped the way that I go about posting status updates and links and photos on Facebook.
The like button has become a validation of my sense of humor. If a particular link or status update that I post doesn’t get any likes, or gets likes from the wrong people, I have failed. I spend minutes wondering what I did wrong, and then I move my cursor to delete the horrible piece of trash that doesn’t deserve to be on the internet. But I stop. That’s the cowardly way out. Let the world see my failure, and I hope I have the strength to face their harsh criticism. Then I tear off my shirt in frustration and throw my computer out the window. And then I die. Yes, every time I don’t receive a sufficient amount of likes for a status update, I die. I die a slow, painful, melodramatic death. But each time, as my soul passes on to the next life, a wayward spirit comes up to me and says, “Seriously? You died because of the like button?” and then slaps me in the face so hard that I resurrect. It is a painful experience.
Sushi in Utah 