tpatten

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36yo men don't typically die of natural causes

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No idea on Aldon, but I'm now old enough to have seen friends of mine die in waves. First were the ones from poor judgement that happened at a young age. Next were the people with defects that they were born with. In the 40-early 50's it was people who abused drugs or alcohol at some time in their life.

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Was Micheal Sam on that same team? If so, that was a good team Defensive Line

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Yes. Michael Sam was a Freshman during Aldon's Sophomore season. Aldon left after Sophomore year for the NFL. Michael Sam was a backup to Aldon Smith and Jacquies Smith and played in 13 games his Freshman year.

Some of the best HS runners from Missouri I've known decided to go to Arkansas. But after living in Arkansas, I don't know where their athletes get good at running. Other than the parks, there's not a lot of good places to run. Most of the roads have little to no shoulder and have deep ditches.

I experienced the dot.com bubble beneficiaries change the California real estate market into bidding wars and then form corporations to buy up houses. People in California can leave if they get priced out. When people from Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas get priced out by the Californians, they don't have as many options where to go. In a way, the pay differential companies use to pay in California vs Tennessee can be a type of discrimination too if we really wanted to go there.

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Yeah I’m interested to know what concert and where in MS

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My guess since it's only 1 hour from his hometown:

The Southern Crown: A Night of Hip-Hop Royalty

My son didn't get into Texas, but he got into Vanderbilt. He turned down Arkansas right away even though it was 100% paid for. He decided between Mizzou and Texas A&M. With quite a few venture capitalists setting up in the areas between Dallas, Austin, and Houston, I thought Texas A&M might be the best option of all the schools. It has room to grow whereas University of Texas does not and it already has the companies hiring from there that have come out of California as well as the traditional NASA and oil companies.

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I'm a network architect now but went to school to be a veterinarian

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Opposite way around here. Did the Engineering. Did the IT. Now am Dentist. Had fun in all that. Dental is by far the easiest. I heard that A&M did away with their exotic veterinarian medicine. That's where I took sugar gliders when I got them in the 90s. Too bad, it was a great clinic but I guess the guy heading it retired.

On a side note, what if Google had been started at Texas A&M? It could have been. Before Google and Yahoo existed, my roommate who was getting his Masters then PhD at A&M would work on the side. He was Whataburger's first web hoster. He also did a few other companies. We stayed up waiting for GPS coordinates to become available in order to put up the first commercial map for Whataburger on the web. Same with credit cards for a wedding planner client. He had a server hosting free email addresses as soon as anyone else on the web. He had pretty much all the early stuff on the web as soon as it came out. I told him I'd quit school and be his sales man as well as help him with the programming, but he just wanted to get his PhD and teach. Other things he'd toy with for his thesis topics is AI and self-driving cars, but that wasn't anywhere close to coming to fruition.

When Google came out, we even talked about when IT companies would start trying to choose who became President and predicted 2020.

Don't worry, anytime Missouri does anything in sports, NCAA will have an investigation about something minor compared to what KU does and they'll stick a KU grad in there to help with the investigation. That'll kill the program for a couple years. Happened with the Detroit connection, Crudup, and the tutor scandals. Meanwhile, KU got away with an infraction that would have killed any non-blue blood program without any meaningful penalty.

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There has only ever been one tournament in Arkansas. I think we went to Seattle when we won the national championship and played the title game against Duke in Charlotte. You're not supposed to have a home court advantage.

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Nobody ever plays in their home campus and that wasn't the discussion. The real measure is how far they have to travel from campus, if they have a fan base at that location, and if the location is more favorable to the team they are playing. Fayetteville isn't located centrally in the state whereas Columbia is.

For instance, although Memphis is 10 minutes from the Arkansas border and there is a good fan base from Arkansas there, but it's still over 4.5 hours away from Fayetteville so I wouldn't count that if Arkansas was playing there. But I would count Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Kansas City depending on who they play which are shorter drives.

In total, Arkansas has played over 15 NCAA tournament games within driving distance of Fayetteville. No, it's not the same as the advantage North Carolina had when they played Arkansas 1.5 hours away from NC campus in a different state, but it was still within driving distance.

For Missouri, I would have counted Wichita as a game that was close enough to Columbia because of the larger fan base in Kansas City if Drake didn't have half their team and their coach from a much closer distance. Omaha was also a decent location even though it was a bit longer drive.

"On the other hand, while Sankey is thinking of expansion, some schools have threatened to leave the SEC. He even noted recently that several member schools are looking to leave the SEC and operate as an independent entity not affiliated with the NCAA"

SEC Commissioner Warns of ‘Messy’ Transition in Store for College Sports