Montlake Futures Interview - KJR/Softy
Comments
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I transcribed it the other day…
WE WANT MORE OF YOUR MONEY
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It's not like @Joey is driving a brand new fucking bus down to Husky Stadium.
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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.
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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.
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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.
