Mississippi Today
Here’s what’s ruining college football, three minutes at a time
This may surprise you: On two of the past three weekends I have attended a high school game on Friday night and a college game on Saturday. And I am going to get right to the point.
The high school games were by far more enjoyable and entertaining.
Here's why:
There were a certain continuity and flow to the Friday night games. There weren't nearly as many stoppages. And the stoppages weren't nearly as long.
The high school players weren't as big or as gifted or as fast. But the games were better.
That's because the college games kept being interrupted by these men wearing a red cap and carrying a stick with a clock on it. We'll call them TV commercial enforcers, who would step out onto the field three or four times a quarter and essentially stop the game for three minutes that seemed more like 10. This happened so that TV could show several different commercials selling everything from cars, to beer, to soft drinks, to insurance. You name it.
Meanwhile, in the stands, people baked or broiled. Or, in my case, stewed.
The average Division I college football game lasts three hours, 22 minutes. Some stretch to four hours and longer. Meanwhile, Millsaps and Sewanee played a two-hour, 37-minute, 27-21 game last Saturday. The difference? No TV timeouts.
You don't notice it so much when you are at home, watching on TV, and use the three minutes to go fix a snack, or go get another beer, or go use the restroom. You sure as heck notice it when the restrooms are 50 yards and long lines away and the beer costs $10.
And we wonder why there are huge gaps where people used to sit in the stands at stadiums these days. And we wonder why fans leave the stadium in droves beginning about halftime. We wonder why the student sections are often nearly empty in the fourth quarter. Boredom is a terrible thing.
Here's the deal: In Division I college games these days, there are three TV timeouts in the first and third quarters, and four TV timeouts in the second and fourth quarters. They average about three minutes each. That's an awful lot of dead time. These timeouts are known officially as “media timeouts.” Trust me, they are TV timeouts. Sports writers despise them.
This won't change soon. In college football these days, it is all about feeding the beast, and all the beast will eat is money. In Mississippi, the head coach at Ole Miss makes $9 million a year, or approximately 74 times as much as the state's governor. Heck, the defensive coordinator at Ole Miss makes 16 times the annual salary of the governor. (No jokes about which one is more drastically overpaid.)
And that's just the start. There are 61 employees listed in the Ole Miss football directory. Besides the 10 full-time coaches allowed by the NCAA, there are a lead analyst, three senior analysts and six more analysts. That's a lot of analyzing. The head football strength and conditioning coach has four full-time assistants.
There are recruiters, lots of them, and assistant recruiters. And no, I am not picking on Ole Miss. This is everywhere at college football's top level. The Georgia football employee directory lists a “head performance chef.”
What's more, these programs at college football's highest level are in a never-ending facilities race. They are in a never-ending struggle to keep up with their conference mates.
And now we have name, image and likeness (NIL), which has raised the stakes still again. What used to be recruiting has become more like purchasing. College quarterbacks at the highest level have become millionaires. The left tackles who protect their blind side can't be that far behind. Ohio State wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr., quite possibly the best player in college football, reportedly makes $1.3 million for his various NIL deals in this, his junior season. Somebody's got to pay.
That somebody is TV. The SEC distributed $50 million to each of its member schools for the 2021-22 fiscal year. Most of that is TV money, which is why the guy with the red hat and the clock takes the field for three minutes at a time, 14 times a game, while thousands in the stands twiddle their thumbs.
This is coming from a guy who has spent, quite literally, a lifetime going to the games – games that used to last little over two hours and now often stretch to nearly twice that long. Too long. Too much dead time.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1968
MAY 11, 1968
The Poor People's Campaign arrived in Washington, D.C. A town called “Resurrection City” was erected as a tribute to the slain Martin Luther King Jr.
King had conceived the campaign, which was led by his successor at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph David Abernathy. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson reached out to young Black men wanting vengeance for King's assassination.
“Jackson sat them down and said, ‘This is just not the way, brothers. It's just not the way,”' recalled Lenneal Henderson, then a student at the University of California at Berkeley. “He went further and said, ‘Look, you've got to pledge to me and to yourself that when you go back to wherever you live, before the year is out, you're going to do two things to make a difference in your neighborhood.' It was an impressive moment of leadership.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Lawmakers may have to return to Capitol May 14 to override Gov. Tate Reeves’ potential vetoes
Legislators might not have much notice on whether they will be called back to the Mississippi Capitol for one final day of the 2024 session.
Speaker Jason White, who presides over the House, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, must decide in the coming days whether to reconvene the Legislature for one final day in the 2024 session on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Lawmakers left Jackson on May 4. But under the joint resolution passed during the final days of the session, legislators gave themselves the option to return on May 14 unless Hosemann and White “jointly determine that it is not necessary to reconvene.”
The reason for the possible return on Tuesday presumably is to give the Legislature the opportunity to take up and try to override any veto by Gov. Tate Reeves. The only problem is the final bills passed by the Legislature — more than 30 — are not due action by Reeves until Monday, May 13. And technically the governor has until midnight Monday to veto or sign the bills into law or allow them to become law without his signature.
Spokespeople for both Hosemann and White say the governor has committed to taking action on that final batch of bills by Monday at 5 p.m.
“The governor's office has assured us that we will receive final word on all bills by Monday at 5 p.m.,” a spokesperson for Hosemann said. “In the meantime, we are reminding senators of the possibility of return on Tuesday.”
A spokesperson for White said, “Both the House and Senate expect to have all bills returned from the governor before 5 p.m. on Monday. The lieutenant governor and speaker will then decide if there is a reason to come back on May 14.”
The governor has five days to act on bills after he receives them while legislators are in session, which technically they still are. The final batch of bills were ready for the governor's office one day before they were picked up by Reeves staff. If they had been picked up that day earlier, Reeves would have had to act on them by Saturday.
At times, the governor has avoided picking up the bills. For instance, reporters witnessed the legislative staff attempt to deliver a batch of bills to the governor's Capitol office one day last week, but Reeves' staff refused to accept the bills. They were picked up one day later by the governor's staff, though.
Among the bills due Monday is the massive bill that funds various projects throughout the state, such as tourism projects and infrastructure projects. In total, there are more than 325 such projects totaling more than $225 million in the bill.
In the past, the governor has vetoed some of those projects.
The governor already has taken action of multiple bills passed during the final days of the session.
He allowed a bill to strip some of the power of the Public Employees Retirement System Board to become law without his signature. The bill also committed to providing a 2-and-one-half percent increase in the amount governmental entities contribute to the public employee pension plan over a five year period.
A bill expanding the area within the Capitol Complex Improvement District, located in the city of Jackson, also became law without his signature. The CCID receives additional funding from the state for infrastructure projects. A state Capitol Police Force has primary law enforcement jurisdiction in the area.
The governor signed into law earlier this week legislation replacing the long-standing Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which has been the mechanism to send state funds to local schools for their basis operation.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 2007
MAY 10, 2007
An Alabama grand jury indicted former state trooper James Bonard Fowler for the Feb. 18, 1965, killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother from being beaten at Mack's Café.
At Jackson's funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. called him “a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.” As a society, he said, “we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.”
Authorities reopened the case after journalist John Fleming of the Anniston Star published an interview with Fowler in which he admitted, despite his claim of self-defense, that he had shot Jackson multiple times. And Fleming uncovered Fowler's killing of another Black man, Nathan Johnson. In 2010, Fowler pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to six months behind bars.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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