The SEC. It just means more.

[Jolly]

How good is your alma mater's football or basketball team?

[jon-nyc]

How many pull-ups can you do?

After such diversions I’m happy to get back to the thread.

[Jolly]

None, since they cracked my chest. How about you?

BTW, your old school's sports teams were that bad?

[jon-nyc]

To answer the question (I had to look it up) the basketball team is ranked #4, far above each and every SEC team. The football team sucks this year.

[jon-nyc]

Now can we talk about the weird incentives that derive from attaching professional sports leagues to colleges?

[Jolly]

In a true sense, they're not professionals. The athletes are not paid by the school to play. The schools can't even give them money for a pizza and a beer.

The best players have tended to play for schools that give them the best shots at a pro career. Media exposure, training facilities, nutrition, etc. Hence, the domination of the SEC

What has changed significantly is NIL money.

The question morphs...Is NIL the mark of a professional athlete?

[jon-nyc]

@Jolly said in The SEC. It just means more.:

None, since they cracked my chest. How about you?

Didn’t mean to dodge the question. I could more two years after they cracked my chest than two years before.

I would struggle to get to ten, 18 months ago, often times giving up around 6-7. Then I tore my rotator cuff in June of 2022 and have been afraid to try.

[89th]

It's annoying watching student athletes make announcements about "entering the transfer portal" so they can play for other schools. No more school loyalty. NIL lets the athletes make money, which shifts lots of the priorities/focus. Then you have conferences that no longer make geographic/logical sense. It's becoming quite the mess. They should keep things simple.

[Jolly]

They could have, but the schools got greedy, using an athlete's NIL to push merch.

Give Bush back his Heisman.

[Copper]

Drop the affiliation of football to colleges.

Just have a minor league, cut the schools out of the pay day.

[Jolly]

Problem is, at a SEC school, especially LSU, Alabama, etc., football pays for a lot of the other sports. Especially women's sports and more obscure men's sports (golf, anyone?). And at a LSU, football also pays for some academics.