With corporate I was thinking, doubling down on things like boxes for games for corporations given Seattle has a shit ton more than the markets where the schools UW is competing against do. I guess that's season tickets though and not specifically NIL and I don't really see the benefit of NIL things for companies, especially if they're national. Penix did some light stuff with Amazon I assume came from being local but I don't think there's much appeal for them with anything UW.
I guess the World Of Warcraft shit might be the biggest score with that and I wonder how that worked out for Blizzard? Does their audience give a shit about football, let alone college football.
The issue with NIL and what they want the average fan to do is when pussies like "Coker" say stuff on X like "It's really frustrating for the AD when fans tell them to just go to the boosters."
For real? A ton of the non-booster fans have spent tens of thousands of dollar on the program the last couple of years.
They aren't even offering anything for the money, just 'Please hook your credit card up to our website for auto-payment'.
Beer, coffee etc is a good start, but they need to start getting creative.
Does anyone think the UW AD is run efficiently or that or that they've done everything they can to prepare for the revenue sharing? Have they cut any sports or departments or spending? Probably not. So asking fans to bail them out just comes across like your typical university begging for money shit that every alum has grown tired of.
Agree with you. The idea of a true collective built by average fans is a nice idea but ultimately a pipe dream. A few issues. This town is a ridiculously expensive city to live in and there are many people here who are making a couple hundy and hanging on by the skin of their asses to their little $1.3 M 95 year old house that needs shit done to it and paying Seattle's 20 mile long list of taxes. If they have season tickets and are buying $9 beers and $7 hotdogs and $95 Adidas sweatshirts, that's about all you're going to get out of them. So then it's guys like me, and some of us are working on the second home or a bigger boat and helping kids live in Boston and paying for Pomona and winery weddings and other stupid shit and we? are only going to give so much to a machine that should be running itself. And then you have the tech bros. Some of them went to UW, but many did not. This town is full of people from somewhere else, and they just DGAF. And among all Tech Bros, you have a healthy population of scarf-tards (not being funny; that's a real thing) and guys who @YellowSnow and his band of goons beat up behind Kane Hall or had sand kicked in their faces in high school by football players and thus are hostile towards sports. Don't even bother soliciting that crowd.
So, yeah, go after more big boosters, ask more of them and lick their toes clean; and run the department better. All of this evolution should result in fewer non-revenue sports across the board at many schools.
Begging and guilting common fans for money just show how busted the sport is getting. My family already buys 10 season tickets, merch, concessions, gas to and from the stadium, parking, cable and YouTubeTV fees to watch away games. It's enough. It also just shows a real and enforced salary cap and a player union type of thing needs to be installed. The players won't want the union because now they have a great setup where JAGGY players are getting a bunch of money because of artificial scarcity so it would kind of have to be forced on them.
The rivals driving up costs thing is real too. For example, had we just stayed in a Pac-12, we would have probably been able to get away with spending less except that we'd constantly be fucked with having to compete with Oregon overpaying. Michigan is probably in the same boat with Ohio STate.
It's depressing to me to consider how much money is required to field a competitive college football product in 2025 vs, say, 1993.
What was DJ making in 1993 - like $400K? According to my beloved BLS.org CPI calculator (hi @pawz ) that's like $888K in 2025. So less than $1 million for a HOF coach and $50,000 loans for Billy Joe. Now we're paying $7 million to get a coach "on the cheap" and $15 million a year to talent acquisition. It's a sad state of affairs if you ask me and poor allocation of our nation's collective wealth. And all because some rich fucking alumnus wants to talk shit to some other rich fucking alumnus.
People forget row boat was the canary in the coal mine here. Back in my day, there were no schollies for men's crew and almost all the top athletes were US nationals. Along comes Rick Cronk, the Dreyer's Ice Cream Barron, who asks Cal corch Steve @Gladstone what he needs to quit losing to hated Washington. Steve says give me an endowment to fund 16 full rides so I can recruit elite HS rowers from Canada, Australia, Germany, UK, etc. Next thing you know, CAL reels off 4 Natties in a row and the sport was never the same. Axe @whlinder what those dark times were like until UW followed suit.
Actively trying to find this segment on Softy's show and it's reminding me of when I surfed through a bunch of old Tom Leykis episodes trying to find when my friend was on it 20 years ago. I feel stupider for having listened to this and like I'm in a time warp back to 2004.
And Ohio State and Oregon who were loaded up, it's-now-or-never type of rosters this year that exceeded 20 million and people talk like that is the baseline for fielding a competitive team. So now that's what every fanbase talks about in terms of pass/fail which is why I hate even discussing the collectives.
I mean I'm seeing that Penn State's all getting fluffed like that now because Franklin sees this as his window next year, and their own fans are reminding everybody how shit changes when you have to invest 700 million to renovate your stadium on top of everything else and how they pretty much need to reach out for corporate partnerships to handle all of it.
Just skimming through I was shocked by how actually offensive it was and this was a fucking national popular radio show just on the air. I listened to an episode that was like 30 minutes of just calling Kelly Clarkson a fat pig for no real reason. Blow me up, Tom!
This Softy shit is pretty bad. I turned it off when they were talking about the fucking prices of like a Kraken Ale or Kraken Dong Dog and shit and then joking "when comes the coronary? Whoops! Who farted? Splat! Is Geno the guy? I don't know I don't think he is. The Mariners aren't spending money!!!! It's buy one get four at the beer garden in the WinCo parking lot in Auburn. Come down and get a beer coozy. Is Geno the guy?
Why do you think I was so critical of Jen for so many years?
Regardless of whether Dannen was the person or not, there was a reason I was vocal and pissed about the legacy Jen AD effectively pushing Dannen out so that they could bring in a Jen clone in Chun.
Thank you for indirectly amplifying the point I was making about how the AD hasn't created a compelling value proposition
The reality is that they aren't getting their approaches to be successful across any front
They have a few donors tied to football/basketball that are funding the program at this point. They are committed to the point that when something major is needed they pick up the phone, make the ask, and get the funding.
The membership numbers tied to Joe Fan highlight that the guilt trip approach isn't resonating (shocking I know) …
The fact that they are struggling to unlock the business model also highlights that things aren't working and it starts with offering a positive value proposition …
But there's a lot of academics tied into UW Athletics and they frankly are not well prepared to have conversations with business leaders
Neu getting 1m per in 1999 was like a huge deal for pushing coaching salaries higher. And yet it would be chump change today to just add inflation to that.
We hated losing to Cal and in fact did always lose to Cal in rowboat when I was there. Eventually we flipped back on them. Competition is good, but also needs some basic rules around the sport. And the sport as a whole went from having a bunch of different schools win (90s saw Wisconsin, Northeastern, Dartmouth, Navy, Penn, Brown, Princeton, Washington and Cal all win natties while Harvard/Yale skipped it every year) to it being a Washington vs Cal vs Yale vs Harvard event now. Those 4 schools have every rowing natty back to 1999 except for Wisconsin popping once in 2008.
Reminds me of when we had a neighborhood flag football league, which once opened to "friends of residents" became a recruitment game to find the most athletic (typically former college FB or CFL) "friends". We no longer have a neighborhood flag football league.
I wouldn't take advice from "Coker" on this subject because he's going to typically default to "people need to step up" and being a bit of an apologist for the Athletic Department
For UW to take a step forward, there needs to be a better connection between the Athletic Department, Collective, and Joe Fan … the historical approach of just telling people to donate isn't good enough anymore
As you noted, there isn't even an attempt to provide a compelling value proposition … it comes off as tone deaf
I can't speak for others, but your last point is one of the primary concerns that I have. There's been no discussion as to how ADs and Collectives will work together going forward once the rules change heading into the 25-26 academic year. There's been no discussion as to how the AD is adjusting based on the changing dynamics and what spending means … and I agree that they likely aren't addressing that. There appears to be zero appetite for being accountable.
So when you come with your hand out and you're just one of many doing so (both in the UW community and the greater Seattle area as a whole) … there's only so much money to go around. And let's be honest, I'm never going to criticize someone that chooses to donate money to Fred Hutch for cancer research or Seattle Children's or anything like that.
The general lack of awareness is just flat out maddening
Really good call out on the coaching salaries. It's not like that cost went away either.
Still, this game is hugely affected by quality coaching and I think you start there. Can't fuck up the coaching position or all that bought talent won't amount to a pile of shit.
This is the first thing that I just don't even want to have to explain.
"So what's this 100$ charge I'm seeing every month to 'Montlake Futures'? Is that some new husky site subscription or something? Some kind of husky Fab Fit Fun box?"
"No, it's so we can pay this 18 year old edge rusher's dad so that 2027 will be special"
Comments
With corporate I was thinking, doubling down on things like boxes for games for corporations given Seattle has a shit ton more than the markets where the schools UW is competing against do. I guess that's season tickets though and not specifically NIL and I don't really see the benefit of NIL things for companies, especially if they're national. Penix did some light stuff with Amazon I assume came from being local but I don't think there's much appeal for them with anything UW.
I guess the World Of Warcraft shit might be the biggest score with that and I wonder how that worked out for Blizzard? Does their audience give a shit about football, let alone college football.
The issue with NIL and what they want the average fan to do is when pussies like "Coker" say stuff on X like "It's really frustrating for the AD when fans tell them to just go to the boosters."
For real? A ton of the non-booster fans have spent tens of thousands of dollar on the program the last couple of years.
They aren't even offering anything for the money, just 'Please hook your credit card up to our website for auto-payment'.
Beer, coffee etc is a good start, but they need to start getting creative.
Does anyone think the UW AD is run efficiently or that or that they've done everything they can to prepare for the revenue sharing? Have they cut any sports or departments or spending? Probably not. So asking fans to bail them out just comes across like your typical university begging for money shit that every alum has grown tired of.
Agree with you. The idea of a true collective built by average fans is a nice idea but ultimately a pipe dream. A few issues. This town is a ridiculously expensive city to live in and there are many people here who are making a couple hundy and hanging on by the skin of their asses to their little $1.3 M 95 year old house that needs shit done to it and paying Seattle's 20 mile long list of taxes. If they have season tickets and are buying $9 beers and $7 hotdogs and $95 Adidas sweatshirts, that's about all you're going to get out of them. So then it's guys like me, and some of us are working on the second home or a bigger boat and helping kids live in Boston and paying for Pomona and winery weddings and other stupid shit and we? are only going to give so much to a machine that should be running itself. And then you have the tech bros. Some of them went to UW, but many did not. This town is full of people from somewhere else, and they just DGAF. And among all Tech Bros, you have a healthy population of scarf-tards (not being funny; that's a real thing) and guys who @YellowSnow and his band of goons beat up behind Kane Hall or had sand kicked in their faces in high school by football players and thus are hostile towards sports. Don't even bother soliciting that crowd.
So, yeah, go after more big boosters, ask more of them and lick their toes clean; and run the department better. All of this evolution should result in fewer non-revenue sports across the board at many schools.
Begging and guilting common fans for money just show how busted the sport is getting. My family already buys 10 season tickets, merch, concessions, gas to and from the stadium, parking, cable and YouTubeTV fees to watch away games. It's enough. It also just shows a real and enforced salary cap and a player union type of thing needs to be installed. The players won't want the union because now they have a great setup where JAGGY players are getting a bunch of money because of artificial scarcity so it would kind of have to be forced on them.
The rivals driving up costs thing is real too. For example, had we just stayed in a Pac-12, we would have probably been able to get away with spending less except that we'd constantly be fucked with having to compete with Oregon overpaying. Michigan is probably in the same boat with Ohio STate.
It's depressing to me to consider how much money is required to field a competitive college football product in 2025 vs, say, 1993.
What was DJ making in 1993 - like $400K? According to my beloved BLS.org CPI calculator (hi @pawz ) that's like $888K in 2025. So less than $1 million for a HOF coach and $50,000 loans for Billy Joe. Now we're paying $7 million to get a coach "on the cheap" and $15 million a year to talent acquisition. It's a sad state of affairs if you ask me and poor allocation of our nation's collective wealth. And all because some rich fucking alumnus wants to talk shit to some other rich fucking alumnus.
People forget row boat was the canary in the coal mine here. Back in my day, there were no schollies for men's crew and almost all the top athletes were US nationals. Along comes Rick Cronk, the Dreyer's Ice Cream Barron, who asks Cal corch Steve @Gladstone what he needs to quit losing to hated Washington. Steve says give me an endowment to fund 16 full rides so I can recruit elite HS rowers from Canada, Australia, Germany, UK, etc. Next thing you know, CAL reels off 4 Natties in a row and the sport was never the same. Axe @whlinder what those dark times were like until UW followed suit.
https://calbears.com/honors/california-athletics-hall-of-fame/rick-cronk/302
I transcribed it the other day…
WE WANT MORE OF YOUR MONEY
It's not like @Joey is driving a brand new fucking bus down to Husky Stadium.
Actively trying to find this segment on Softy's show and it's reminding me of when I surfed through a bunch of old Tom Leykis episodes trying to find when my friend was on it 20 years ago. I feel stupider for having listened to this and like I'm in a time warp back to 2004.
And Ohio State and Oregon who were loaded up, it's-now-or-never type of rosters this year that exceeded 20 million and people talk like that is the baseline for fielding a competitive team. So now that's what every fanbase talks about in terms of pass/fail which is why I hate even discussing the collectives.
I mean I'm seeing that Penn State's all getting fluffed like that now because Franklin sees this as his window next year, and their own fans are reminding everybody how shit changes when you have to invest 700 million to renovate your stadium on top of everything else and how they pretty much need to reach out for corporate partnerships to handle all of it.
Hey, Leykis ruled!
Admittedly in my 40s, it's hard to get through more than 30 minutes of it. Some of the callers, or possibly 99%, are mouth breathers.
Just skimming through I was shocked by how actually offensive it was and this was a fucking national popular radio show just on the air. I listened to an episode that was like 30 minutes of just calling Kelly Clarkson a fat pig for no real reason. Blow me up, Tom!
This Softy shit is pretty bad. I turned it off when they were talking about the fucking prices of like a Kraken Ale or Kraken Dong Dog and shit and then joking "when comes the coronary? Whoops! Who farted? Splat! Is Geno the guy? I don't know I don't think he is. The Mariners aren't spending money!!!! It's buy one get four at the beer garden in the WinCo parking lot in Auburn. Come down and get a beer coozy. Is Geno the guy?
No shit … dynamite drop-in
Why do you think I was so critical of Jen for so many years?
Regardless of whether Dannen was the person or not, there was a reason I was vocal and pissed about the legacy Jen AD effectively pushing Dannen out so that they could bring in a Jen clone in Chun.
Thank you for indirectly amplifying the point I was making about how the AD hasn't created a compelling value proposition
The reality is that they aren't getting their approaches to be successful across any front
They have a few donors tied to football/basketball that are funding the program at this point. They are committed to the point that when something major is needed they pick up the phone, make the ask, and get the funding.
The membership numbers tied to Joe Fan highlight that the guilt trip approach isn't resonating (shocking I know) …
The fact that they are struggling to unlock the business model also highlights that things aren't working and it starts with offering a positive value proposition …
But there's a lot of academics tied into UW Athletics and they frankly are not well prepared to have conversations with business leaders
Tequilla I was and am roundly critized here including by you for pointing this out a year ago
Thank you for the concession
I was right
Neu getting 1m per in 1999 was like a huge deal for pushing coaching salaries higher. And yet it would be chump change today to just add inflation to that.
We hated losing to Cal and in fact did always lose to Cal in rowboat when I was there. Eventually we flipped back on them. Competition is good, but also needs some basic rules around the sport. And the sport as a whole went from having a bunch of different schools win (90s saw Wisconsin, Northeastern, Dartmouth, Navy, Penn, Brown, Princeton, Washington and Cal all win natties while Harvard/Yale skipped it every year) to it being a Washington vs Cal vs Yale vs Harvard event now. Those 4 schools have every rowing natty back to 1999 except for Wisconsin popping once in 2008.
Reminds me of when we had a neighborhood flag football league, which once opened to "friends of residents" became a recruitment game to find the most athletic (typically former college FB or CFL) "friends". We no longer have a neighborhood flag football league.
This is really the crux of the problem
I wouldn't take advice from "Coker" on this subject because he's going to typically default to "people need to step up" and being a bit of an apologist for the Athletic Department
For UW to take a step forward, there needs to be a better connection between the Athletic Department, Collective, and Joe Fan … the historical approach of just telling people to donate isn't good enough anymore
As you noted, there isn't even an attempt to provide a compelling value proposition … it comes off as tone deaf
I can't speak for others, but your last point is one of the primary concerns that I have. There's been no discussion as to how ADs and Collectives will work together going forward once the rules change heading into the 25-26 academic year. There's been no discussion as to how the AD is adjusting based on the changing dynamics and what spending means … and I agree that they likely aren't addressing that. There appears to be zero appetite for being accountable.
So when you come with your hand out and you're just one of many doing so (both in the UW community and the greater Seattle area as a whole) … there's only so much money to go around. And let's be honest, I'm never going to criticize someone that chooses to donate money to Fred Hutch for cancer research or Seattle Children's or anything like that.
The general lack of awareness is just flat out maddening
Really good call out on the coaching salaries. It's not like that cost went away either.
Still, this game is hugely affected by quality coaching and I think you start there. Can't fuck up the coaching position or all that bought talent won't amount to a pile of shit.
Washington in 1997 was the last IRA champion comprised of all Americans. Wisconsin was the last school to win IRA (in 2008) w/o schollies.
It's insane to look back a Rick getting $1,000,000 @whlinder
I liked college football better when Oklahoma, ND, Florida State, Washington, etc, were all jobs where you retired or went to the NFL.
This is the first thing that I just don't even want to have to explain.
"So what's this 100$ charge I'm seeing every month to 'Montlake Futures'? Is that some new husky site subscription or something? Some kind of husky Fab Fit Fun box?"
"No, it's so we can pay this 18 year old edge rusher's dad so that 2027 will be special"