Bunk Moreland

I can tell you exactly how he’s going to respond: Let me be perfectly clear: if college athletics is truly going to survive in the modern era, then we must stop pretending that young athletes should be held to some impossible monastic standard while every other entity in this ecosystem monetizes them from sunrise to sunset. Universities profit. Television networks profit. Conferences profit. Coaches sign contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. Entire media empires are built upon the backs of unpaid or underpaid athletes—and yet the moment a young man makes a mistake, suddenly the same people who turned college sports into a Wall Street commodity rediscover their moral outrage and wave around NCAA rulebooks like they’re carrying tablets down from Mount Sinai. The American spirit has never been about destroying young people for one error in judgment. It has been about redemption, proportionality, and common sense. The Constitution itself was written by imperfect men who understood that rigid orthodoxy destroys institutions faster than mercy ever could. If we are serious when we say college football belongs to the American people—not to bureaucrats, not to gambling interests, not to television executives—then we ought to remember what the people actually believe in: fairness, opportunity, and second chances. Permanently stripping a student-athlete of eligibility over conduct that harmed nobody, altered no outcome, and occurred inside a system drenched from top to bottom in legalized sports gambling hypocrisy does not protect college football. It weakens it. The true threat to the integrity of the game is not a young quarterback making a mistake. It is a system so blinded by performative sanctimony that it forgets the very values of grace, liberty, and pragmatic justice that made American institutions exceptional in the first place.

Did Sark address the rumor that Joe Z knows more about football than Kyle Flood?

@Jeff Howe just for fun, I compared Arch’s performance in those games to Quinn’s performance against teams in the 2024 final AP top 25. I thought it might be an interesting comparison since Quinn was without question surrounded by a much better cast and he was a 4th-year player that took his team to the semifinals of the CFP, whereas Arch was starting his first full season. The exercise shows that Arch and Quinn had eerily similar numbers under those circumstances. If anything, Arch’s numbers are slightly better (most impressively, he protected the football better against elite competition than Quinn did in 2024). Arch was 4-2 against final top 25 teams; Quinn was 2-3. Here were Quinn’s stats: 112 for 182 (61.5%) for 1376 yards (275 ypg), 9 passing TD, 6 INT (134.8 passer rating) What this all suggests to me is that there is no reason to think that Arch Manning—with a full year of starting experience under his belt, surrounded by a much stronger supporting cast, and having matched the output of Quinn against top competition as a CFP semifinalist—shouldn’t have Texas in serious contention this year.

This is excellent work, Jeff!

*insert parody of the show Community with Sorsby in the Jeff Winger role, McGuire playing the dean, and Ken Jeong as himself*

CJ standing next to Hank and Jordan

Yep, this is the answer. Texas is clearly focused on signing 8-10 elite high school recruits, surrounding them with a bunch of high-upside but cheap developmental prospects, and maximizing the NIL to bring in a bunch of Cam Coleman-level players next year to replace what they lose to the draft. And I happen to think they’ve figured out the right formula.

They still haven’t figured out what Texas realized after signing the #1 recruiting class: if you’re going to invest all that NIL in high school players, they’d better be on the field contributing next year. Otherwise it’s just dead money that you can’t allocate to bringing in a badass portal class. Didn’t work out so well for Texas last year and Sark is already showing he’s not going to make the same mistake twice.

You know better than to share your food obsessions on a livestream, CJ. That is going to haunt you forever, like Gerry and mayo corndogs. From now on you are going to be KC (Kettle Corn) Vogel.

My Heroes reference for, like, 2 people on here.

What are we even doing here? What a joke.

Wow, what a connection, Hank! I followed those Stanford teams very closely. Mitch was a tough, clever player. Not a very good shooter, but could hit the occasional clutch 3. But his court vision and IQ were excellent and he had a gift for creating plays in the halfcourt game. That 2007-08 Stanford team was loaded with talent. In addition to the Lopez twins, they also had Landry Fields (who played five years in the NBA and was the GM of the Hawks) and Anthony Goods and Lawrence Hill (who both played overseas for years). They never reached their potential because Trent Johnson could never maximize his squad. I had a hard time watching that sweet 16 game because I loved both teams.

Fair enough. Apologies for my defensiveness. I completely agree with you that the coaches should ideally allocate substantial resources to DT recruiting and that it should be split between elite prospects and more developmental players with elite traits or high upside. Using the latter criteria, I would say that Sweat and Murphy had elite traits, even if the industry did not consider them elite prospects. Byron Murphy had elite strength, quickness, and productivity. He broke Von Miller’s high school sack record at Desoto. That’s elite disruption at a high level of competition. The staff should look for guys with those sorts of traits, even if they’re not 5-stars.