Cool Hand Lucroy

Quietly, Georgia is one of the worst power conference hoops programs in the country. If I were a head coach, it might be last on my list. Good mid-major jobs are much preferred.

Patrick, are you at all worried about ending up in Dayton? I would be very surprised if that happened (that's likely the 11- or 12-seed line), but, in a committee process, weird stuff can happen. Would be interested in pro-MU take. I feel like it's only like a 5-10% chance that happens, but lots of bubble-ish teams are playing well right now.

Get ready for the griping from players that lose out, like when Braun won RoY over Tulowitzki by 2 points, to go from eye roll moments to actual anger because the stakes have been raised. Winner gets the service time bonus the loser is left in the cold. Under this system, though, the 2nd place player would at least get bonus pool $$$. I agree with you, really. It's weird and flawed. But if you played well enough to be in that conversation, you probably earned cash you wouldn't have previously, and the higher minimum salary is good, I think.

Creighton winning is better for the Big East...I think Marquette was in the 8-9 either way. Honestly, I'd rather be an 11 than an 8, so if Marquette becomes a 10, not the worst thing. I agree on the open tourney. Gonzaga feels like the best team, but there's about 8 teams I'd give realistic shots.

From a Brewers perspective: Any increased economic unfairness is offset by increase to 12-team postseason, methinks. Randomness still rules October, and now you only have to beat 9 teams in your league to make it. In the NL, it's really just the Dodgers who've shown a willingness to push the CBT regularly. I don't see that changing (maybe the Mets spend more?). It's still a matter of can we compete in the Central and be consistently better than the Colorados, San Diegos and Washingtons of the world. From a global baseball perspective: I think the players did about as well as they could've. Performance bonuses, believe it or not, are not something unions usually like, so credit to MLBPA for recognizing the results-based business is uniquely suited to that and giving young players pay bumps. The minimum salary is a nice increase too. I still think the owners have a ton of leverage under the current system, and this doesn't really change that. We may well be here in five years all over again. Baseball, as a sport, is holding onto a revenue system that really tilts toward management. Bad circs. Players did best they could under them. I don't like the no shift rule change next year. It just seems like a cheap way to get desired results. I'll get over it, but I just fundamentally disagree with making the game less fluid. Pitch clock is great. Universal DH I'll live with, recognizing that it's necessary and can be fun while missing the strategy of the old way. Bigger bases great. Glad to see the weird pandemic gimmicks gone. As I said, expanded postseason awesome for Brewers. I'm with the players on the international draft. The owners want one because it gives them cheaper, lower risk access to talent, and that's bad for a lot of Latin American players. I also don't think a draft would change or alleviate concerns about corruption, cheating, or nefarious scouting. Maybe that's me. As someone else said, pour some lighter fluid on that hot stove! Baseball fandom is morally complex, but so's everything. Go Brewers. Let's have a fun summer.

Just asking, if they get an eight seed, they would play a 1 in the second round. Is there a potential one-seed that you think Marquette matches up best with? If they were a 7, is there a two you would like to see? I think of the potential #1 seeds, probably Kansas is the best matchup for them and Gonzaga probably the worst. Obviously teams are #1 seeds for a reason so there isn't a great answer to that question. Right now ESPN has Marquette as a 7. As far as 2's, i'd love a chance to take out Duke as a 2, but I think Kentucky is probably Marquette's best potential opponent. (I think UW is a 2, and Marquette will not play them in the first 2 rounds since they played in the regular season). Yeah, the committee is supposed to avoid regular season rematches until the Sweet 16, but it has happened before, right? I don't think that's as hard and fast a rule as "BYU can't play Sunday" or even "don't match two teams from the same conference. in round 1." I would imagine UW is in Milwaukee, and MU can't play there, though, so that probably solves that.

Well, Lamont Paris just gave us a wild ending with Chattanooga. Furman was on the verge of their first tourney in 40 years, and a 35-footer just ripped their guts out. Feel for that team, which has been good lately but just can't get over the hump. Paris' team will have a shot to win a game. They're good. Experienced and tough and top-65ish at KenPom. Dangerous 13 seed probably.

The Garden is going to be nuts this week. The Big East is just the best. All basketball, and tons of rabid fan bases. I think Providence is the most fun team in the country. I'm also feeling Marquette getting hot. They just seem like the right team to drive people crazy out of conference.

Supposedly ankle sprain for Davis. Could a been lots worse.

The season hinged on Davis' injury the second it happened. Him not coming back to the bench feels like a bad sign. Hope I'm wrong. Injuries do impact seeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the Badgers land at 5 or 6 should Davis prove unable to go. Should be getting some word soon. Losing is a bummer, but really, I don't think it matters one bit in the long run if Davis is healthy (or if he's not).

Davis out with lower body injury. Thought I saw him jogging a little in the tunnel, so hoping for precautionary.

Badgers look sluggish. Biggest issue obviously that foul on Davis...looked ugly. Hope he is okay. It would be beyond sad if Nebraska costs this team a chance to make a deep run. Edit: looked like medical staff was giving Johnny's dad an update. Saw him give thumbs up. Looked okay. My guess is Davis is in concussion protocol/getting a facial X-ray. Looked like broken nose is possibility. 10 days from NCAA tourney, both of those not great outcomes...but not like a busted knee either in terms of his ability to play and play well.

Houston Baptist and McNese nearly hit the over on 300 tonight. In 4OTs. March is the best. Even horrible teams play awesome games.

I thought I'd start a separate thank you thread as BF net undergoes changes. I am looking forward to seeing how the site moves forward and appreciate Brock's transparency and time in terms of announcing the shift in ownership. Here, though, I just want to say thank you Brian and everyone involved in the last what? 20 years of Brewers' baseball? Through all kinds of bad teams, a cathartic renaissance, a fun rebuild, and now a sustained period of contention, this has been my favorite place to talk baseball. More than that, it's become my favorite place on the internet period. I always look forward to the board's reaction to Bucks, Packers, Badgers, and yeah, international soccer news. All of the people involved really did build a place featuring good discussion and also often really good writing. Some of y'all could write for Fangraphs, and having this place has been a real gift. So. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Mods. I know y'all brought a lot of joy to people's daily lives, and I know it took a lot of often unseen work. Thanks.

Floors and caps only work with a defined share of revenues. Based on the initial offer from the owners there was no clear idea where the players share of Revenue would be based on an artificially low floor that allowed the current revenue sharing among owners to continue. The NBA and NFL use those methods (cap/floor) to make sure they are allocating the correct amount from Revenues to players salaries. If baseball owners wanted long-term labor peace they would come up with a way to guarantee a revenue split with the MLBPA. Unfortunately, the owners want to squeeze every dime from the players. I've said this for months, but there will continue to be long-term labor fights/shutdowns/strikes as long as the owners don't want to commit to a split of revenues with the players. Every agreement is a battle between the two sides to tweak the variables to try and get a little more for them and the fans sit and wait for the pigs to feed at the trough. But I guess that's why I'll never be a billionaire as I don't treat every negotiation as how can I win and the other side loses, because it appears win-win is just not in their DNA. This seems exactly right to me. Within the current MLB system (which is bad), the players seem to be acting more in their rational self-interest whereas the owners are acting, to me, in ways that are much more narrowly self-interested, and will cancel games to preserve a massive power gap. That's not to say the union is just and virtuous. Just that the system makes true change nearly impossible. For radical change to work, owners have to agree to much more league regulation of payroll and a fixed system ensuring equitable revenue distribution to the players. There aren't 23 votes for that, and I think a lot of the union's misplaced priorities stem from that fact.

Seconded. Two good pods from them this week. The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that this is about owners trying to squeeze every dollar they can. And the reality is it's probably small-market owners being the most ruthless, and, even as a Brewer fan, I think that's bad. I get that we're all prone to buying arguments about "competitive balance." Baseball is economically unfair. That sucks. The reality, though, is it's going to stay fundamentally unfair, and that's because of TV money. Other than straight-up NFL-style revenue sharing, the system is going to be 98% tilted to New York, LA, and, to an extent Chicago. And haggling over the CBT (and moving almost zero on it) is just a way to say "we're fine with 98% unfair but 98.1%? NO!" I think that's especially troubling because Mark A, for example, did not buy the Brewers to maximize year over year profit. If he did, he's not nearly as smart as we give him credit for. I like Mark A, mind you. He's the right owner for this team. But (and I'm not singling him out) this lockout, at this point, is about small-market owners trying to hit that nearly impossible window of perennial contention and profitability when every smart owner in a city like Pittsburgh knows that getting both is a top 5% outcome at best. These guys know analytics well enough to know this stuff isn't moving the needle for them. They know they buy these teams for occasional yearly dividends but mostly for prestige, fun, adrenaline, and the massive asset appreciation. And yet here they are, haggling over literal pennies on the dollar. The argument that these teams are a business defeats itself. Anyone who buys the Reds expecting to be both competitive and year-to-year rich bought into the wrong industry. It's like the equivalent of buying a Sun Belt football team. You signed the deal knowing the system was tilted toward big money teams. Deal with it or change it, but at this point you're just being greedy. Let me be clear. I wish baseball was more economically fair. But none of these proposals make a dent in that. It's like, yeah we'd all be technically safer by a tiny bit if we were still wiping down groceries, but it just isn't worth the effort, anxiety, and knock-on effects because the benefit is trivial. I'd rather watch a more equitable product in terms of owners/players because a more market-balanced league ain't happening.

Yeah, Oakland is a good program (though have struggled to win lately--Kampe is just an institution who schedules big noncon games in a good market) and Northern Kentucky seems like they've dumped lots of resources into hoops. I just don't think any team in that league has the history UWM and GB do. Maybe Cleveland St. But who else in that league has won a tourney game recently? Youngstown is horrible (and is FCS football-first). IUPUI whatever. IPFW beat Indiana in regular play once. In GB's case, flirting with football just seems like a bad move. You're never going to win as big as you will in men's basketball if you're an NCAA tourney regular. That's the lesson Creighton, Xavier, Dayton, etc. learned. Heck, Valpo is still dining out on Bryce Drew. Dumping athletic resources into hoops just seems like the smart move. The good news is it just takes the right coach. You're one Steve Proehm or TJ Otzelberger or Chris Beard or Niko Medved away. Hard to predict who will be the one to replicate that success, but with the basketball quality across Wisconsin (look at the WIAC), gotta think there's someone there.

Yeah, DePaul's been feisty at home. Agree with where you are. Marquette shouldn't be worried, but win v. Saint John's. That means you can only take one more L, and it probably locks you up.

That's no true. Liberty (owner's of the Braves) are a public company and the most recent years profit was released recently. I believe svuemrules summarized the numbers earlier in this thread (IIRC). I believe the the number of $43M profit (ABITDA?) per year was mentioned as an average team profit (extrapolating from the known numbers). I saw that. And that's good. It's also 1/30 teams. And what about the league office? I think the point stand in terms of ownership hypocrisy. We see 100 percent of the players' financials and about 3% of the owners.

I guess I will just never understand why anybody thinks it their business what the clubs bottom line is. I would be totally fine with not knowing what each players salary is as well. Honestly, we don’t need to know that at all. I, personally, only look at the players salaries and team payroll to come up with ideas on trade ideas and free agent possibilities. I will never ever begrudge anybody for the money they earn through a salary or through business profits. The more the clubs profit, the better for everyone involved. When the owners are saying "the players are asking too much; we can't afford it," the burden is on them. It's not that I feel entitled to know their profits. It's that they get to throw all the shade they want at player salaries with no expectation that they provide evidence and no worries about any competition. They could open up the books tomorrow if they wanted. They won't because, this way, they get all the benefit. The owners have literally made it our business by arguing they can't afford what the players are asking and then not even making the barest effort to show anyone it's true. You can't have it both ways. You want to keep income private, fine. But then don't cry poor.

Watching GB and Milwaukee struggle so much has been weird the last few years. That league is there for the taking. Both those places need some sort of reevaluation.

I think the union has some misplaced priorities. I think the union made a bad deal last time and is undoubtedly bitter about it. I think the union hates Rob Manfred a whole lot and doesn't want to do anything that looks like a win for him. Fine. But let's please not forget that nobody knows how the owners are doing financially, and we have data on every contract every player's ever signed. When one side has to disclose exactly how much they're making and the other can blatantly lie about how "owning a baseball team brings no more profit than average stock market gains" (as Manfred did), you've got a bad, bad system that's totally lopsided and unfair. Playing the public against the highest earners in an industry (why should these cushy college professors make 125k? why do those GM workers leave the floor the second it hits 5 and make 40 dollars/hour? etc etc etc) is a tried-and-true management tactic that's designed to distract from how much CEOs and university presidents are pulling (mostly to play golf and "delegate," honestly) and happens to work especially well when labor's making millions. If the owners open up the books and show me why their plan's legit, then okay. But, until then, I'm pretty contemptuous of them. It's a fundamentally dishonest game they're playing.

Hard has to be favorite for national COY. Maybe Tommy Lloyd and Ed Cooley have a case, but wow. Pretty lucky win, but that doesn't make it feel any less good. Beat Nebraska and finish.

Nebraska is suddenly very, very hot (just won at OSU), so that finale looks like a lot less of a gimme. Win tonight and you hang a banner no matter what, though.

I mean, Manfred calling a press conference to bully pulpit spin this tells you what you need to know. If there was a deal anywhere close, why would you antagonize your bargaining partner? This is all about power moves, and the union rightfully resents it at this point. Of course, the union also has very little leverage right now. The owners will miss games to avoid making a deal, and that's that. I feel like we've reached mutually assured destruction. Both sides seem like they'd rather blow up the system than be perceived to give anything. Does a really bad media cycle change that? I don't know. Maybe. But it's clear to me that, right now, these sides hate each other and are totally bought in to doing everything possible to avoid substantive agreement for fear of letting the other side claim PR victory. We've reached two-party politics point, basically. It would not surprise me if all this extended bargaining was a show designed to allow them to say they tried.