Recent content by sbillini

The Mikey dudek of Illini basketball. Feel terrible for him. I’m sure he’ll bounce back whatever direction things go, but hope it’s soon!

honest question - if someone gets into a car accident while drunk (let's say they don't injure anyone) and admits that they're an alcoholic and needs help, does society give them access to AA and then let them keep their driving privileges? or, at the very least, give them support and time to...

IANAL here as well. while i agree with you on the technicalities, i don't think there's any doubt that this creates a slippery slope and where the line is on NCAA's (or any sporting body, for that matter) ability to govern its respective league. Should a governing body have legitimate power to...

I agree. I just don't see the logic of adding a 19th entirely external entity with more of a profit motive than the other 18, being necessary in order to have a more professional, commercially focused group that the BTE was proposed to be.

regarding the first bolded section - then why not just create BTE, structure it as a separate entity that's wholly owned by the big ten and leave it at that? why bring in UC Investments at all? as you said, they're effectively going to be a passive investor anyway. regarding the second point...

Technically speaking, the proposed Big Ten and UC pension plan deal is, by definition, private equity. it's an equity stake (as opposed to debt or some of stakeholder structure) in a non-publicly traded for-profit entity (or, in this case, a new for-profit entity to be created) where the...

From the coverage I’ve seen of the proposed big ten deal and the caveat that a lot of the coverage has been confusing (probably because most sports writers don’t know the nuances of investment deals and don’t talk about them quite right), it certainly seemed like a private equity deal. The...

I’ve heard their NIL situation (surprisingly to me) isn’t that great. If that’s true then yea, tough situation. Does UNC open up too? I hope it doesn’t but wouldn’t help Wisconsin either

It used to happen all the time. Will happen for a while this season as teams figure out these new PUs. As for the Mercedes customers team issues relative to the works team, might be something there. Works Mercedes only has so much incentive to help customer teams, especially a top tier team...

Michael Lewis (author of liars poker and other great books fame) has a really good podcast in this very topic (I think the episode is literally called “You Suck Refs”. I suggest taking a listen. One of the basic takeaways was that refereeing has actually gotten better over the years but the...

I do find it ironic that Bruce Weber is widely regarded as a weak recruiter while at the same time tang’s early success is widely attributed to the roster he inherited at ksu. Just an interesting observation…try not to point the pitchforks at me! 🙃

I think the bigger risk (for us) is he wants to take on a greater challenge at some point (eg conference commissioner). I would guess he’s pretty well respected in sports admin circles and still has a lot of years of career ahead of him.

Doesn’t that type of trade off decision making happen every day? You’re looking for a job and you decide to pass on it and then you get laid off your current job. Most the time you can’t go back to the original offer. Even if the spot is still there, the employer probably won’t even want you. Is...

Interesting. Can’t say I’d be particularly happy as a taxpayer with that, esp given it’s only available to $5k+ “donations”. I put donations in quotes because I also find it very interesting things like sponsorship deals (and perhaps NIL deals?) are included. Those are already likely pre-tax...