any cousins of mine would have been up in those trees with guns . . . either pirched up there looking to shoot some deer, possum, or a commi. no way in hell they would be caught dead mixing with tree huggers
btw, IMO for much of this decade cal has had a player on that initial list. you guys have had great talent over the past decade and i expect things to keep getting better.
[deleted corny fucking picture]
since when were you not? who was that basketball player 'on the take' around 1997?
"That one guy"? Compared to what every other big time school does..? Nt trying to name names here, but...
Come on...even the all wise and powerful hines can see there is a difference.
Cal's Bball coach before Ben Braun did some shady things, your garden variety ethics violations, and he would have gotten away with it at most other schools since there is a huge machine designed to mask that crap. I'd put what he did at about a 3 on the Bush scale. Quite a few players left the program out of disgust as a result, but that's really not what I mean by moneyball.
A top down approach to pushing the limits of what you can get away with before you get a violation with a system built around it to justify and hide the goings on is what I mean by moneyball. Not until Sandy Barbour came in 5 years ago did that start. Cal was mostly lucky when it won, and Pac-10 punching bag for the rest of the time.
Interestingly, Cal's basketball program is not really involved in the level of "success building" that the football team is now.
I have a theory why it is that Cal didn't start to play moneyball until recently.
Cal grads are NOTORIOUS for not donating money after they graduate. Ever. Stingy fuckers. Seriously. Like Germans in Maine.
When Jason Kidd agreed to come play there in 1991 or so, instantly interest was generated, shirts sold and BING donations came in. The AD's up to Barbour failed to capitalize on the opportunity, but I am pretty sure Barbour was brought in SPECIFICALLY to raise the profile of the football program by putting money into it, and turning the sleepy little Cal brand up north into what U$C is down south. Football success equals alumni donations, something U$C has always known.
Get used to it, because I think this is the direction Cal will be going in for a long long time.
Personally I am mixed on it. I appreciate having something interesting to talk about with Cal, but I always took pride in the "At least we're not scummy" feeling when we lost.
I'm not turning a blind eye to it, and I really really hope Barbour and the machine she is building can walk that fine line between ramping up and not going over the edge. I have to say that history shows that schools that ramp up like this fuck up relatively quickly though so the odds are NOT with me on that one.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
-H. L. Mencken
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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "unskilled people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average.