Tim McLoone going rooftop
- By NYShoreGuy
- Pirate Hoops Chat
- 0 Replies
AP Rooftop opening three stories above Asbury Park boardwalk
Tim McLoone is opening AP Rooftop, his fourth restaurant on the Asbury Park boardwalk. It sits three floors above Iron Whale.
www.app.com
Florida big flooding
- By NYShoreGuy
- Life Off the Ship
- 0 Replies
Orlando-area Senators call on Gov. DeSantis not to veto stormwater projects
'We have walked through knee deep water in our communities, and seen firsthand how our population growth has affected our water system.'
floridapolitics.com
And the Great DeSantis vetoed
Houston, Alabama among field for Players Era Festival
- By Halldan1
- Pirate Hoops Chat
- 2 Replies
Sources: Nov. tourney with NIL payouts sets field
Houston, Alabama, Rutgers, Notre Dame, San Diego State, Texas A&M, Oregon and Creighton will take part in the first Players Era Festival, an in-season tournament that promises NIL opportunities outside of the competition, sources told ESPN.
Jay Bilas, College Basketball Analyst
The field for the first Players Era Festival, a new in-season men's college basketball tournament that promises to provide each team at least $1 million in name, image and likeness opportunities outside of the competition, is expected to be announced this week and will feature six schools that participated in the NCAA tournament last season, sources said.
Sources said the first-round matchups will be Houston vs. Alabama, Rutgers vs. Notre Dame, San Diego State vs. Texas A&M and Oregon vs. Creighton.
The event will be played in Las Vegas during Thanksgiving week.
EverWonder Studio, the content studio and production company behind the event, will soon announce the launch of "Players Era," an initiative aimed at engaging fans and providing college athletes with the chance to participate in unique NIL activities. Each participating team in the tournament will take part in more than $1 million in NIL opportunities with Players Era sponsors outside of the event.
EverWonder is also expected to announce that the Players Era Festival will expand to at least 18 teams in 2025, adding Gonzaga, Michigan, Syracuse, Saint Joseph's and St. John's to the field, sources said.
It is expected that future events and tournaments under the Players Era umbrella will be added, which could include women's basketball and men's college basketball preseason events, sources said.
Interview with Jerry Carino Part 1
- By Halldan1
- Treasure Trove
- 22 Replies
By Colin Rajala
Trove: Jerry, thanks for taking some time out to speak with the Trove. It would be great to talk about Seton Hall’s NIT Championship. You were in Indianapolis for the championship game at Hinkle Fieldhouse and witnessed the Pirates comeback victory after surrendering the late lead – what was the experience like for those not in attendance?
What value, if any, did the Pirates get for playing in and ultimately winning that tournament?
Carino: First of all, the games in Walsh were absolutely electric. I feel like the atmosphere really lifted the team off the ground after the devastating Selection Sunday. I would include Shaheen Holloway in that as well. Sha was devastated by what happened, and the way the fans responded sent a message to him: we've got your back. I think he hadn't felt that message till that moment.
He came out of the NIT, especially those home games, with renewed appreciation for that. That's big, because you want to keep him here for a long time. In a way, a bond built there between the fans and Holloway through those games at Walsh. Just a unique, amazing experience.
With the final, we all would have liked the championship to be Madison Square Garden, but I have to say that Hinkle was just a fantastic substitute. It was the first time I had ever been there. The storied place is the perfect size and it was absolutely filled with Indiana States fans. Part of the reason why the NIT final was so good and got so much attention -- and you don't have to take my word for it – look at the viewership numbers, they were off the charts, right? More people watched that game than any other Seton Hall game all year. More people watched that game than several first-round NCAA Tournament games, including the first four round games.
My game story had the highest online readership for any I’ve ever written in 21 years. The thing was a smashing success because you had the two teams who were snubbed in the NCAA Tournament, two teams with compelling players between Kadary Richmond and Robby Aviles. You had the angry Big East versus the darling mid-major. And Seton Hall had to deal with that road environment. That made it that much more special than if they won it somewhere stupid like Vegas, where it will be next year. Instead of some antiseptic half-filled arena where nobody's really engaged, this was really a championship game environment and a lot of credit goes to the Indiana State fans.
It was one of the more memorable things I've covered in 21 years on the beat. I know we can argue this till the cows come home, but I'm convinced that this was preferable to the one and done NCAA tournament losses. I’ve covered Seton Hall getting its rear end kicked by Gonzaga, TCU, Wichita State. Those felt like you weren't even in the tournament. Look how embarrassed Virginia was by their
performance in the first four. They came away disgraced.
This NIT was great for the hardcore Seton Hall fan to feel good about this season and especially with Shaheen Holloway is capable of. I really do think it was important for Sha because he would have had a very bitter taste had they ended the season with a bad loss or turning down a bid like St. John’s did. In terms of his stewardship of the program, it reinforced he can win here and he belongs here.
Antitrust settlement creates certainty for new system
- By Halldan1
- Pirate Hoops Chat
- 2 Replies
Baker: NCAA settlement adds pressure, certainty
NCAA president Charlie Baker, speaking to reporters on Monday, said the pending antitrust case settlement will put financial pressure on everyone in college sports, but he believes it also creates more certainty for schools to plan for a new system.
Dan Murphy, ESPN Staff Writer
LAS VEGAS -- NCAA president Charlie Baker said the association's pending antitrust case settlement will put financial pressure on everyone in the college sports industry, but he believes it also creates more certainty for schools to plan for a new system that will allow them to share more money with their athletes.
The NCAA announced last month that it had agreed to terms to settle three federal antitrust cases that loomed as the most immediate and arguably largest threats to the future of the association. As part of the settlement, the NCAA will pay former athletes nearly $2.8 billion in back damages. In addition, schools will be allowed to share a significant portion of revenue -- roughly $20 million per year starting in 2025 -- directly with their athletes. In exchange, the plaintiffs have agreed to drop three cases that some in college sports believe could have resulted in close to $20 billion in total damages.
"There is a lot of pressure here on everybody," Baker said. "I think it's much better than the pressure of what could have been catastrophic losses. That would have taken another few years. So, we'd be spinning our wheels for another few years without really knowing what was going to happen."
Baker, in his first extensive interview since agreeing to a settlement, told reporters that he hopes the terms of the settlement establish a way for schools to provide fair compensation to their athletes without turning them into employees.
The NCAA remains a defendant in multiple lawsuits which argue that college athletes should be considered employees of their schools or conferences. While the settlement does not resolve those issues, Baker and many others in college sports are hoping the plans to share revenue with athletes in the future will spur Congress to write a new law that will prevent athletes from becoming employees.
"If the court blesses [the pending settlement], then it puts us in a position where we can go to Congress and say: 'One of the three branches of the federal government blessed this as a model to create compensation without triggering employment,'" Baker said Monday. "I think that's a good place to start a conversation with Congress."
The NCAA and conference leaders have made little progress during the past several years of lobbying politicians on Capitol Hill for a new law that would create a special status for college sports as an industry. Baker said he has heard positive feedback from several federal lawmakers since the terms of the settlement were made public.
At a conference for athletic directors in Las Vegas this week, Baker said he has been peppered with questions about how some details of the settlement might impact the future shape of college sports. He said more answers are likely to come within the next 30 days, when lawyers for both sides of the antitrust cases are expected to submit the fine-print details of their settlement in court.
The detailed terms of the settlement will still need to be approved by the federal judge overseeing the cases -- a process that is likely to take several months and include a window for athletes to object or comment on the terms.
"I'm a little uncomfortable about getting too far ahead of that," Baker said. "People are starting to think about how to plan for it. We certainly are. But we absolutely recognize and understand there is a bunch of stuff that needs to happen before the thing becomes official."
Some legal experts have questioned if the judge in this case will take issue with a class action settlement that will make it difficult for athletes to sue the NCAA for antitrust violations in the future. When asked if he had concerns about the settlement being approved, Baker said the central figures on all sides of the argument for compensating college athletes that has played out over the past 10 years are involved in the case.
"If you think the players on the field matter, we've got most of them," he said.
The two biggest pending questions for school officials gearing up for a new business model concern the roles that Title IX laws and booster collectives will play in how revenue is shared with athletes in the future.
Title IX regulations require schools to provide equal benefits and opportunities to men and women for their varsity sports on campus. The Department of Education, which oversees Title IX on college campuses, has not made any comment on whether schools will have to split payments to athletes equally among men and women to remain compliant with the law.
"I'm going to wait and see where the dust lands [on the settlement] before we start engaging in those conversations," Baker said. "The one thing we should do here is not race. We should be deliberate and trust the process here."
Multiple sources have told ESPN that part of the settlement aims to rein in collectives -- groups of boosters associated with a particular school that have served as a de facto payroll in some places as the NIL market has evolved in the past three years. Baker said he does not believe collectives are going to disappear as a result of the settlement, but he does hope that the new revenue-sharing arrangements will make it easier for schools to "own the primary relationship" with their athletes.
The NCAA plans to pay the $2.8 billion of back damages throughout the course of the next 10 years. Baker said at least $120 million (or roughly 42%) of the yearly payment for the settlement will come from the NCAA's national office budget. The other 58% will come from reducing the amount of the money the NCAA typically distributes to its members -- 33% from FBS schools, 13% from FCS schools and 12% from Division I schools that don't have a football program.
Some athletic directors and conference officials from smaller leagues have raised objections to the amount of money they will be missing over the next 10 years from the NCAA's distributions to help solve a problem that pertains mostly to the power conferences that generate large sums of money from football. Baker said the back damages are related to a set of rules that the entire NCAA membership -- including the schools from those smaller conferences -- approved and maintained.
Baker also said that he thinks the 10-year span of the settlement will serve as "glue" to help bind together the larger group of Division I schools, avoiding the potential for power conferences to form a separate entity with their own rules. Keeping all of Division I together will allow the NCAA to maintain the March Madness basketball tournament that generates the overwhelming majority of money that the association distributes to its schools.
"We now have the ability to move forward with the assumption that we're all going to be one big, maybe happy, family moving forward," Baker said.
Baker said the NCAA's national office has committed to potentially increasing its contribution to the damages payments beyond $120 million if revenue for the national tournaments it organizes continues to grow.
Interview with Jerry Carino Part 2
- By Halldan1
- Treasure Trove
- 17 Replies
By Colin Rajala
Trove: Switching gears a little bit, there is at least one scholarship player left to fill out the 2024-2025 roster, but I wanted to get your opinion on the 24-25 basketball team as it currently stands. What are your expectations for the team?
Carino: It's just become harder than ever to project what teams are going to be because so many players are new on so many rosters. Not only do I not really know what to expect from Seton Hall, but I don’t know what to expect for most of the teams. It's a crapshoot. Every year I make predictions on Rutgers and Seton Hall in November and that’s after I’ve seen the team practice and after a whole preseason of writing about them.
This past year, I was the most wrong I've ever been because it's just so hard now with all of the musical chairs. I have an AP Top 25 vote and that preseason ballot is just throwing darts against the dart board now. You look back on it now and look how it shook out and it's embarrassing, but there's no real way to do it.
KenPom should not have preseason rankings. What are they even based on? KenPom should come out on December 1 or December 15 after a month or so of games where there's a lot of data, then start rolling from there. Even the AP Top 25, which has been around since the 1940s and serves as a valuable frame of historic reference, it’s hard to take these preseason polls seriously. That's in October and November, forget about the people coming out with stuff in May and June when these rosters aren’t even finalized yet. So, I don't really have a good answer for you there.