re: Kansas over Virginia Schools

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Texas, Missouri, A&M, and OU are here.

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Eh, frick all that.

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VT football is valued at $455 million, while Kansas hoops $191 million. So it is a fair question.

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I'm not saying these figures have no conversational value, because I believe they do.

But it's like when we read about On3's NIL valuation for players. Or Zillow's value for a home.

The true test of market value is the price it's bought and sold for, or how much someone is actually willing to compensate another person.

No one is purchasing the Virginia Tech football program, nor the KU basketball program, nor their athletic departments as a whole. Maybe that happens at some point with some kind of deal for private equity groups, but it's going to have hair all over it, and will be a huge Rubicon moment for college athletics in general.

Until there's some kind of actual market test for these values people are throwing out there, they don't have a lot of legitimacy as far as I'm concerned, other than as someone's opinion that then drives conversation for the rest of us. And there is a value in that. Just not one of actually determining how much a program is worth in dollars.

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Corn doesn’t watch TV.

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If anyone doubts we are living in a simulation drive through kansas on I70. You pass the same fricking corn field and farm every 3.5 miles.

Good point.

You Texas people just don’t understand the SEC and you never will.

So this doesn't have anything to do with football, but it is about the University of Kansas, and it's one of my favorite stories that deserves to be told, so I'm going to tell it.

A man named Clyde Tombaugh grew in the early 1900s on a farm in rural Kansas. He had an early fascination with the stars, going so far as to build his own telescopes following the instructions in the back of Scientific American magazines.

While he was a bit of a child prodigy, unfortunately for him when it came time to go to college it was the beginning of The Great Depression. His family lost everything in the Dust Bowl. He tried to apply for jobs at various telescopes around the world, but they all required a college degree.

But there was one private telescope in Flagstaff Arizona called the Lowell Observatory (named after the owner, Percival Lowell) that would offer him a job. So as a teenager he took the graveyard shift monitoring the telescope looking at vast stretches of sky and taking nightly photographs.

In 1930 Tombaugh found indications of an undiscovered planet. On March 13, 1930 the discovery of Pluto was announced. After this Tombaugh became world famous, especially in the field of astronomy.

A couple of years later he had the resources to obtain his undergraduate degree, and he chose his state college, the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

On his first day of class in Introduction to Astronomy, his name caught the eye of his professor.

"Are you the Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto?" Sheepishly, Clyde admitted he was. The professor immediately announced he was kicking him out of his class. "You cannot be taking my intro to astronomy class." But why, Clyde asked? All I want to do is learn!

"Because if there's any discussion, I cannot possibly be arguing with the discoverer of Pluto in my intro to astronomy course. I'll give you an A, you can get the credits for the class, and you can enroll in one of my advanced classes, but I absolutely cannot have you in this class."

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You Texas people just don’t understand the SEC and you never will.

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I don't want to. "You don't understand what it's like to be raised uneducated in back breaking poverty." You are correct, sir.

But I do understand organizational behavior, and how the world works. You scraped together enough to buy your cousin's outdated computer on your sharecropper wages, and now you think your worldview is how the rest of the world is going to act.

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go Kansas.

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This is the worst idea I've ever read

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I don't want to. "You don't understand what it's like to be raised uneducated in back breaking poverty." You are correct, sir.

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Texas poverty rate is above three SEC states

That part y'all get just fine