By Franz Beard
A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:
NFL DRAFT PROJECTIONS FOR UF PLAYERS
Here are the final projections for UF players for tonight’s NFL Draft by some prominent national writers.
Dane Brugler, The Athletic: Kaiir Elam, 1st round/No. 29 to Kansas City; Dameon Pierce, 5th round/No. 154 to Philadelphia; Zachary Carter, 6th round/No. 217 to Los Angeles Rams
Matt Miller, ESPN: Elam, 2nd round/No. 34 to Detroit; Pierce, 4th round/No. 120 to New Orleans; Carter, 4thround/No. 130 to Buffalo; Jeremiah Moon, 7th round/No. 248 to Tampa Bay
Chad Reuter, NFL Network: Elam, 1st round/No. 27 to Tampa Bay; Pierce, 5th round/No. 153 to Seattle; Carter, 6th round/No. 183 to New England; Moon, 7th round/No. 236 to Los Angeles Chargers; Jean Delance, 7th round/No. 250 to Minnesota
Vinnie Iyer, Sporting News: Elam, 2nd round/No. 37 to Houston; Carter, 4th round/No. 120 to New Orleans; Pierce 5th round/No. 157 to Jacksonville; Moon, 6th round/No. 216 to Indianapolis
Ryan Wilson, CBS: Elam, 2nd round/No. 37 to Houston; Pierce 3rd round/No. 104 to Los Angeles Rams; Carter, 6th round/No. 188 to Jacksonville
UF FIRES SOCCER COACH TONY AMATO
Tony Amato was a rather surprise choice when Scott Stricklin hired him to replace Becky Burleigh who retired. A year into the job and the worst record in UF history (4-12-4), Amato has been fired. It wasn’t necessarily the record that did him in but an unprecedented number of complaints from players and their parents. Soccer isn’t a revenue sport at Florida, Burleigh (14 SEC titles, 1998 NCAA title) established great tradition so Stricklin has to make this a priority hire.
UF SOFTBALL: GATORS SHUT OUT STETSON, 5-0
Sure, it was Stetson, but the Gators (36-12) desperately needed a good pitching performance and they got one as Lexie Delbrey, Riley Trlicek and Elizabeth Hightower combined to pitch a 2-hitter to lead UF to a 5-0 win. Delbrey (11-2, 2.35 ERA) went the first five innings, giving up two hits while striking out six. Trlicek struck out two in her one inning and Hightower struck out the side in the seventh. The best news for head coach Tim Walton was zero walks issued, the first time that’s happened all season.
Charla Echols had a pair of doubles and an RBI, Kendra Falby had two hits and two stolen bases and Skylar Wallace had an RBI and her 41st stolen base of the season.
The Gators travel to Baton Rouge to face LSU this weekend.
GATORS REMAIN NO. 1 IN USTA MEN’S TENNIS RANKINGS; UF WOMEN NO. 16
USTA men’s top 25: 1. FLORIDA; 2. Ohio State; 3. Michigan; 4. Baylor; 5. TCU; 6. Virginia; 7. Kentucky; 8. Tennessee; 9. Wake Forest; 10. Southern Cal; 11. South Carolina; 12. Georgia; 13. Texas; 14. Stanford; 15. Harvard; 16. North Carolina; 17. Arizona; 18. San Diego; 19. Pepperdine; 20. Middle Tennessee; 21. North Carolina State; 22. Auburn; 23. Louisville; 24. SMU; 25. Duke
USTA Women’s top 25: 1. Texas A&M; 2. North Carolina; 3. Oklahoma; 4. Texas; 5. Duke; 6. Virginia; 7. North Carolina State; 8. Ohio State; 9. Georgia; 10. Pepperdine; 11. Miami; 12. California; 13. Oklahoma State; 14. Stanford; 15. Auburn; 16. FLORIDA; 17. Michigan; 18. UCLA; 19. Arizona State; 20. Loyola Marymount; 21. UC-Santa Barbara; 22. Tennessee; 23. Southern Cal; 24. UCF; 25. Old Dominion
Other UF sports: Florida’s 6th-ranked lacrosse team (12-4) knocked off 22nd-ranked Jacksonville, 12-6, behind three goals by Emily Heller … The 11th-ranked women’s golf team was selected as the No. 2 seed in the Albuquerque Regional of the NCAA Championships which begin May 9.
SEC FOOTBALL/BASKETBALL
Alabama: New York Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum says the next Tyreek Hill is former Bama wide receiver Jameson Williams, who is expected to go in the first round of tonight’s NFL Draft.
Auburn: Defensive lineman Marquis Robinson, a former 4-star recruit, has removed his name from the transfer portal.
Georgia: Linebacker Adam Anderson has been indicted on rape charges. He has been suspended from the football team since last November 2 … Guard Christian Wright, who started 11 games last year while averaging 5.3 points and 2.2 rebounds, is transferring to Oregon State.
Kentucky: Jordan Robinson, a division II defensive back from Livingstone College, was flipped from Appalachian State to Kentucky.
LSU: Defensive lineman Joseph Evans, who played in 13 games in three years at LSU, is in the transfer portal.
Mississippi State: Center Tolu Smith, who averaged 14.2 points and 6.5 rebounds per game, announced he will return to MSU next season.
Ole Miss: Safeties Jordan Jernigan and Jalen Denton are in the transfer portal. Jernigan is a converted wide receiver who played in nine games in three years while Denton is a walk-on.
South Carolina: Ebrimma Dibba, who averaged 8.1 points, 4.8 rebounds and 5.4 assists at Coastal Carolina, is transferring to South Carolina … Tight end Nate Adkins, who caught 33 passes for 357 yards and a TD last season, is transferring in from East Tennessee State.
Tennessee: Former 4-star tight end Julian Nixon is in the transfer portal … Josiah Jordan-James has entered the NBA Draft but will not hire an agent, leaving the door open for a return to UT. He averaged 10.3 points, 6.0 rebounds and 1.7 assists last year.
Texas A&M: The Aggies are raising $120 million to redeveloping the Bright Football Complex, building a new indoor practice facility, adding 31 suites to Kyle Field and building a new indoor track stadium.
ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: There is good news and there is bad news with the NCAA. First the good news. Mark Emmert is stepping down as president. Now for the bad news. It won’t happen until June 30, 2023. Yesterday wouldn’t have been soon enough.
Emmert has been in charge of the NCAA for 12 disastrous years. He did not create the problems the organization faces – they were already in place long before he arrived on the scene – but he did nothing at all to face the problems head-on and do something constructive to solve them. He is the embodiment of The Peter Principle, whose premise is that ambitious people, for the most part, rise through the ranks until they reach a profound level of incompetence.
Of course, Mark Emmert doesn’t see it that way. In a statement announcing his decision to step down, Emmert said, “I am extremely proud of the work of the Association over the last 12 years and especially pleased with the hard work and dedication of the national office staff here in Indianapolis."
Hard work and dedication usually produces meaningful achievements. No matter what he does between now and next June when he rides off into the sunset, presumably for a cave on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu, Emmert is going to be remembered for these five things at the tail end of a less than illustrious career: (1) No enforcement plan in place to act upon the FBI evidence in the college basketball corruption trials, (2) no plan for football in the fall of 2020 after canceling sports in the spring due to the pandemic; (3) fighting and losing every legal battle faced by the NCAA rather than sit down with the athletes bringing the lawsuits forward to find reasonable and practical solutions; (4) allowing a biological male to win an NCAA championship swimming against women who spent years in the pool to get good enough to live out a dream by making the finals; and (5) standing on the podium in New Orleans back on April 4 and calling the newly crowned NCAA basketball champions the “Kansas City Jayhawks.”
Most CEOs would be fired for that kind of ineptitude, but not Emmert. As a former university president, he had the support of the majority of university presidents whose votes are the ultimate power in the NCAA. The Board of Governors gave him a raise and a contract extension a year ago. Perhaps they took a look around and found no one in their midst they thought could do a better job.
That is one of the real problems with the NCAA. It is a business that is being run by academics who, with the exception of the occasional John Lombardi or Bernie Sliger, are clueless. They have a tendency to take a one size fits all approach, ignoring the fact that the same rules and regulations that apply for the smaller schools that operate on very limited budgets should not apply to the big schools.
The dinosaur that is today’s NCAA began its death spiral when Walter Byers retired in 1988 after 37 years of ruling with an iron hand. Walter Byers was loathed and for good reason because if you got on his bad side, he would spare no expense to take you down (see Charley Pell; see SMU football and the death penalty in 1987). Byers did understand, however, that sports is a business. He also understood that the NCAA concept of “amateur sports” would eventually be its undoing. He wrote a book in 1995 called “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes” that should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the chaos that we have now in college sports.
This passage from the book says it all: “Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue; it is an economic camouflage of monopoly practice.” He went on to write that the NCAA operates “an air-tight racket of supplying cheap athletic labor.”
That was written long before Mark Emmert was doing his fabulous impersonation of the near-sighted Don Quixote charging up the hill to take on the windmill, better known as “NCAA v. Alston.” Final score of that encounter: Alston 9, NCAA 0. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA has no standing when it comes to preventing its athletes from making money off their name, image and likeness (NIL).
When the Good Ship NCAA struck the iceberg known as the Supreme Court, Emmert was exposed as a leader without a contingency plan. Since he lost every significant court case he chose to fight, one would think Emmert would have had a Plan B ready to go. Any decent CEO would have unveiled a new plan the day after losing a case like Alston, but to think Emmert would have one is to assume. Grandmothers throughout the English speaking world have long warned us that to assume is to make an ass out of u and me.
Now, we live in a world where there are no rules and regulations. It’s enough that the icons of college football such as Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney and Kansas basketball coach Bill Self are issuing warnings that at some point, this will all come crashing down. They are right. This is unsustainable which is why Emmert is standing, hat in hand, before the United States Congress, begging for intervention. As if a Congress split down party lines is going to come together for the good of college athletics when half lean toward socialistic solutions and the other half takes a more capitalistic approach. Additionally, Emmert has unveiled plans for an NCAA transformation committee that is to oversee sweeping changes that shift governance to conferences writing their own rules and regulations.
You don’t have to be a rocket surgeon or brain scientist to figure out there is no future for college athletics at the highest levels with the NCAA in charge. Without visionary leadership, the NCAA must be abandoned at least by The Haves of the college sports world. If The Have Nots wish to remain with the NCAA, so be it, but the schools that wish to compete at the highest levels really have no choice but to secede.
It should start with college football since it pays the freight for the power schools. Start a new organization that completely rewrites the rules, makes its own schedules, puts a playoff plan in place and hires a commissioner, who, unlike Mark Emmert, actually is the smartest guy in the room. Give the new commissioner absolute authority like the NFL did to Pete Rozelle, the greatest example of a sports CEO in history. Once the governance kinks have been worked out, then extend invitations to the schools that are capable of playing at the highest levels in the other sports.
For college sports to survive, there has to be a divorce from the NCAA and the new organization has to have both a plan to succeed and a commissioner capable of ruling with an iron hand.
A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:
NFL DRAFT PROJECTIONS FOR UF PLAYERS
Here are the final projections for UF players for tonight’s NFL Draft by some prominent national writers.
Dane Brugler, The Athletic: Kaiir Elam, 1st round/No. 29 to Kansas City; Dameon Pierce, 5th round/No. 154 to Philadelphia; Zachary Carter, 6th round/No. 217 to Los Angeles Rams
Matt Miller, ESPN: Elam, 2nd round/No. 34 to Detroit; Pierce, 4th round/No. 120 to New Orleans; Carter, 4thround/No. 130 to Buffalo; Jeremiah Moon, 7th round/No. 248 to Tampa Bay
Chad Reuter, NFL Network: Elam, 1st round/No. 27 to Tampa Bay; Pierce, 5th round/No. 153 to Seattle; Carter, 6th round/No. 183 to New England; Moon, 7th round/No. 236 to Los Angeles Chargers; Jean Delance, 7th round/No. 250 to Minnesota
Vinnie Iyer, Sporting News: Elam, 2nd round/No. 37 to Houston; Carter, 4th round/No. 120 to New Orleans; Pierce 5th round/No. 157 to Jacksonville; Moon, 6th round/No. 216 to Indianapolis
Ryan Wilson, CBS: Elam, 2nd round/No. 37 to Houston; Pierce 3rd round/No. 104 to Los Angeles Rams; Carter, 6th round/No. 188 to Jacksonville
UF FIRES SOCCER COACH TONY AMATO
Tony Amato was a rather surprise choice when Scott Stricklin hired him to replace Becky Burleigh who retired. A year into the job and the worst record in UF history (4-12-4), Amato has been fired. It wasn’t necessarily the record that did him in but an unprecedented number of complaints from players and their parents. Soccer isn’t a revenue sport at Florida, Burleigh (14 SEC titles, 1998 NCAA title) established great tradition so Stricklin has to make this a priority hire.
UF SOFTBALL: GATORS SHUT OUT STETSON, 5-0
Sure, it was Stetson, but the Gators (36-12) desperately needed a good pitching performance and they got one as Lexie Delbrey, Riley Trlicek and Elizabeth Hightower combined to pitch a 2-hitter to lead UF to a 5-0 win. Delbrey (11-2, 2.35 ERA) went the first five innings, giving up two hits while striking out six. Trlicek struck out two in her one inning and Hightower struck out the side in the seventh. The best news for head coach Tim Walton was zero walks issued, the first time that’s happened all season.
Charla Echols had a pair of doubles and an RBI, Kendra Falby had two hits and two stolen bases and Skylar Wallace had an RBI and her 41st stolen base of the season.
The Gators travel to Baton Rouge to face LSU this weekend.
GATORS REMAIN NO. 1 IN USTA MEN’S TENNIS RANKINGS; UF WOMEN NO. 16
USTA men’s top 25: 1. FLORIDA; 2. Ohio State; 3. Michigan; 4. Baylor; 5. TCU; 6. Virginia; 7. Kentucky; 8. Tennessee; 9. Wake Forest; 10. Southern Cal; 11. South Carolina; 12. Georgia; 13. Texas; 14. Stanford; 15. Harvard; 16. North Carolina; 17. Arizona; 18. San Diego; 19. Pepperdine; 20. Middle Tennessee; 21. North Carolina State; 22. Auburn; 23. Louisville; 24. SMU; 25. Duke
USTA Women’s top 25: 1. Texas A&M; 2. North Carolina; 3. Oklahoma; 4. Texas; 5. Duke; 6. Virginia; 7. North Carolina State; 8. Ohio State; 9. Georgia; 10. Pepperdine; 11. Miami; 12. California; 13. Oklahoma State; 14. Stanford; 15. Auburn; 16. FLORIDA; 17. Michigan; 18. UCLA; 19. Arizona State; 20. Loyola Marymount; 21. UC-Santa Barbara; 22. Tennessee; 23. Southern Cal; 24. UCF; 25. Old Dominion
Other UF sports: Florida’s 6th-ranked lacrosse team (12-4) knocked off 22nd-ranked Jacksonville, 12-6, behind three goals by Emily Heller … The 11th-ranked women’s golf team was selected as the No. 2 seed in the Albuquerque Regional of the NCAA Championships which begin May 9.
SEC FOOTBALL/BASKETBALL
Alabama: New York Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum says the next Tyreek Hill is former Bama wide receiver Jameson Williams, who is expected to go in the first round of tonight’s NFL Draft.
Auburn: Defensive lineman Marquis Robinson, a former 4-star recruit, has removed his name from the transfer portal.
Georgia: Linebacker Adam Anderson has been indicted on rape charges. He has been suspended from the football team since last November 2 … Guard Christian Wright, who started 11 games last year while averaging 5.3 points and 2.2 rebounds, is transferring to Oregon State.
Kentucky: Jordan Robinson, a division II defensive back from Livingstone College, was flipped from Appalachian State to Kentucky.
LSU: Defensive lineman Joseph Evans, who played in 13 games in three years at LSU, is in the transfer portal.
Mississippi State: Center Tolu Smith, who averaged 14.2 points and 6.5 rebounds per game, announced he will return to MSU next season.
Ole Miss: Safeties Jordan Jernigan and Jalen Denton are in the transfer portal. Jernigan is a converted wide receiver who played in nine games in three years while Denton is a walk-on.
South Carolina: Ebrimma Dibba, who averaged 8.1 points, 4.8 rebounds and 5.4 assists at Coastal Carolina, is transferring to South Carolina … Tight end Nate Adkins, who caught 33 passes for 357 yards and a TD last season, is transferring in from East Tennessee State.
Tennessee: Former 4-star tight end Julian Nixon is in the transfer portal … Josiah Jordan-James has entered the NBA Draft but will not hire an agent, leaving the door open for a return to UT. He averaged 10.3 points, 6.0 rebounds and 1.7 assists last year.
Texas A&M: The Aggies are raising $120 million to redeveloping the Bright Football Complex, building a new indoor practice facility, adding 31 suites to Kyle Field and building a new indoor track stadium.
ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: There is good news and there is bad news with the NCAA. First the good news. Mark Emmert is stepping down as president. Now for the bad news. It won’t happen until June 30, 2023. Yesterday wouldn’t have been soon enough.
Emmert has been in charge of the NCAA for 12 disastrous years. He did not create the problems the organization faces – they were already in place long before he arrived on the scene – but he did nothing at all to face the problems head-on and do something constructive to solve them. He is the embodiment of The Peter Principle, whose premise is that ambitious people, for the most part, rise through the ranks until they reach a profound level of incompetence.
Of course, Mark Emmert doesn’t see it that way. In a statement announcing his decision to step down, Emmert said, “I am extremely proud of the work of the Association over the last 12 years and especially pleased with the hard work and dedication of the national office staff here in Indianapolis."
Hard work and dedication usually produces meaningful achievements. No matter what he does between now and next June when he rides off into the sunset, presumably for a cave on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu, Emmert is going to be remembered for these five things at the tail end of a less than illustrious career: (1) No enforcement plan in place to act upon the FBI evidence in the college basketball corruption trials, (2) no plan for football in the fall of 2020 after canceling sports in the spring due to the pandemic; (3) fighting and losing every legal battle faced by the NCAA rather than sit down with the athletes bringing the lawsuits forward to find reasonable and practical solutions; (4) allowing a biological male to win an NCAA championship swimming against women who spent years in the pool to get good enough to live out a dream by making the finals; and (5) standing on the podium in New Orleans back on April 4 and calling the newly crowned NCAA basketball champions the “Kansas City Jayhawks.”
Most CEOs would be fired for that kind of ineptitude, but not Emmert. As a former university president, he had the support of the majority of university presidents whose votes are the ultimate power in the NCAA. The Board of Governors gave him a raise and a contract extension a year ago. Perhaps they took a look around and found no one in their midst they thought could do a better job.
That is one of the real problems with the NCAA. It is a business that is being run by academics who, with the exception of the occasional John Lombardi or Bernie Sliger, are clueless. They have a tendency to take a one size fits all approach, ignoring the fact that the same rules and regulations that apply for the smaller schools that operate on very limited budgets should not apply to the big schools.
The dinosaur that is today’s NCAA began its death spiral when Walter Byers retired in 1988 after 37 years of ruling with an iron hand. Walter Byers was loathed and for good reason because if you got on his bad side, he would spare no expense to take you down (see Charley Pell; see SMU football and the death penalty in 1987). Byers did understand, however, that sports is a business. He also understood that the NCAA concept of “amateur sports” would eventually be its undoing. He wrote a book in 1995 called “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes” that should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the chaos that we have now in college sports.
This passage from the book says it all: “Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue; it is an economic camouflage of monopoly practice.” He went on to write that the NCAA operates “an air-tight racket of supplying cheap athletic labor.”
That was written long before Mark Emmert was doing his fabulous impersonation of the near-sighted Don Quixote charging up the hill to take on the windmill, better known as “NCAA v. Alston.” Final score of that encounter: Alston 9, NCAA 0. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA has no standing when it comes to preventing its athletes from making money off their name, image and likeness (NIL).
When the Good Ship NCAA struck the iceberg known as the Supreme Court, Emmert was exposed as a leader without a contingency plan. Since he lost every significant court case he chose to fight, one would think Emmert would have had a Plan B ready to go. Any decent CEO would have unveiled a new plan the day after losing a case like Alston, but to think Emmert would have one is to assume. Grandmothers throughout the English speaking world have long warned us that to assume is to make an ass out of u and me.
Now, we live in a world where there are no rules and regulations. It’s enough that the icons of college football such as Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney and Kansas basketball coach Bill Self are issuing warnings that at some point, this will all come crashing down. They are right. This is unsustainable which is why Emmert is standing, hat in hand, before the United States Congress, begging for intervention. As if a Congress split down party lines is going to come together for the good of college athletics when half lean toward socialistic solutions and the other half takes a more capitalistic approach. Additionally, Emmert has unveiled plans for an NCAA transformation committee that is to oversee sweeping changes that shift governance to conferences writing their own rules and regulations.
You don’t have to be a rocket surgeon or brain scientist to figure out there is no future for college athletics at the highest levels with the NCAA in charge. Without visionary leadership, the NCAA must be abandoned at least by The Haves of the college sports world. If The Have Nots wish to remain with the NCAA, so be it, but the schools that wish to compete at the highest levels really have no choice but to secede.
It should start with college football since it pays the freight for the power schools. Start a new organization that completely rewrites the rules, makes its own schedules, puts a playoff plan in place and hires a commissioner, who, unlike Mark Emmert, actually is the smartest guy in the room. Give the new commissioner absolute authority like the NFL did to Pete Rozelle, the greatest example of a sports CEO in history. Once the governance kinks have been worked out, then extend invitations to the schools that are capable of playing at the highest levels in the other sports.
For college sports to survive, there has to be a divorce from the NCAA and the new organization has to have both a plan to succeed and a commissioner capable of ruling with an iron hand.
