On the Diamond

I won’t be around to post about the baseball and softball teams tomorrow. The baseball team is in Houston to take on the Cougars starting on Friday and softball will be in Waco to face Baylor also on Friday.

On the Court

Lamar Washington announced that he is entering the transfer portal, which means that if you look at yesterday’s eligibility chart this means that there are now just 4 scholarships taken and there are 9 to fill.

Red Raider Sports’ Ben Golan talked to Jazz Henderson, Jr. about his commitment as a preferred walk-on:

“I’m good with just being an extra coach. I’m a second coach on the floor I feel like, that’s kind of my calling card just being another coach on the court. Just making my coaches job easier. I can bring knockdown shooting from the perimeter because I’ve taking that, I’ve been getting better at that over the past years. That’s my main point in what I’ve been working on in my game, but mainly I feel like my calling card is being a second coach, running my team and winning games.”

On the Gridiron

Head coach Joey McGuire announced that Behren Morton will be held out the rest of the spring. Here is the official statement:

“First and foremost, if we were to play a game today, Behren Morton would be our starting quarterback,” McGuire said. “This decision was made in the best interest of Behren’s health going into next season. Behren will resume full football activities later this summer.”

“As I’ve said for the past several months, we have got to develop depth this spring, including at the quarterback position,” McGuire said. “With this decision being made today, it allows us to divide our reps over the back half of spring ball to find out who our No. 2 quarterback will be. Behren is unquestionably the leader of our offense and has proven that with his performance this spring. At the same time, this is a great opportunity for the rest of our quarterback room to go out and compete to see who will be that next guy up when needed.”

This doesn’t sound great and we go back to the whole idea that McGuire wants Morton to be a runner too and I hope that this changes because those runs aren’t worth whatever this is. Morton isn’t 100% and they are trying to get to that point because if he was 100% then he probably wouldn’t be taking the rest. That seems like a logical statement. The remainder of the snaps will go to Cameran Brown, Jake Strong, Will Hammond, and Cooper LaFebre (along with Will Burns, but I think he also plays baseball).

The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel and Andrew Marchand ($) write that important college football people want to create a group of 80 programs that would be part of a superleague. Before we get too excited, it is headed by West Virginia AD Gordon Gee and Syracuse AD Kent Syverud along with a bunch of companies that want to profit off of this situation. I have zero confidence in something that Gee touches. The major conferences have not met with this group because they don’t want to upset their television partners (what a bunch of wimps).

I don’t know about the superleage model because it’s headed towards a dangerous place, but I do think that the following is true:

While the CST model would eliminate the longtime conference structure for football, it would create one entity to negotiate with a prospective union that would represent the players on NIL, transfer portal and salary structure rules. This embrace of collective bargaining could allow it to avoid the antitrust issues that have limited the NCAA’s ability to enforce its own rules.

“The only way to solve the problem is to have a solution that is legally defensible, politically acceptable, commercially prudent and is able to strike a partnership with student athletes in a way that’s really good for them,” Perna told The Athletic.

College administrators are particularly concerned about the House v. NCAA class-action suit in Northern California, seeking NIL revenue denied to athletes prior to 2021 rule changes. If the plaintiffs are successful, the NCAA and the power conferences could be on the hook for billions in damages. The House case is one of several potentially crippling federal antitrust suits related to athlete employment rights and NIL compensation.

“I really think conferences in the NCAA are at a very significant likelihood of going bankrupt in the near future because of the lawsuits, both the ones that are going to trial soon and those that will follow,” Syverud said.