Taxes are too low

Welcome to Football Friday (A Baseball Newsletter). Click the button to subscribe so you can get this delivered to your email where I can see if you opened it and determine whether or not you are a good friend or a fraud. Today Football Friday is about basketball though, sort of.

The University of Indiana’s basketball program is, as they say in the biz, a bit past it’s prime.

The once storied program that was famous for winning National Championships in the 80’s with one of the most detestable coaches in history and sharing a name with a very good movie has fallen on hard times recently. After firing Tom Crean and his meme face in 2017, the Hoosiers have not been back to the NCAA tourney and even though the name Archie Miller sounds exactly like the type of coach that would succeed in a basketball program at Indiana, he did not. In fact, earlier this week, Indiana fired Archie Miller after his third season ended in disappointment.

Indiana basketball has a few major contemporaries in college athletics right now, a former gold standard program that has been unable to replicate it’s success in nearly four decades. Nebraska and Miami football are similar, USC baseball is another. The problem isn’t necessarily that Indiana is mediocre now, it’s that the success so long ago created a “culture of winning” that is still holding the program back. They can’t try new things or rebuild from the stakes because the fan base believes only in winning. Not that Archie Miller’s problem was trying new things it’s just that sometimes you have to accept the program has to stop acting like a perennial contender.

The biggest problem with Miller’s firing is that it came with a buyout of $10 million. College coaches are smart, or at least their agents are, it seems like every single coach now has a clause that if they’re getting fired they still get paid. The chasm of compensation between coaches, athletic directors, administrators, and the players is never better represented than in these buyouts. It protects Miller from something like a new Athletic Director or administrator just not having good vibes, but it illustrates that there’s money, seven figures worth of it, it’s just not going to anyone actually on the floor.

That’s a point, but not the point I’m trying to make though. The real fucked up part of this whole thing comes in the next tweet…

One guy cared so much about getting Archie Miller out of town he coughed up $10 million dollars to do it. Which makes one think, first and foremost, that person really hated Archie Miller and second, taxes are way too fucking low.

Every day we’re hearing something about some Yacht Shoes Dipshit spending an amount of money nobody you know will ever even see in their lifetime on something incredibly stupid. Lately, the NFT (Non-Fungible Token ) craze has taken hold with things like NBA Top Shots and it has many people spending like $100 and then some moron spending like $2 million. Before NFTs it was Bitcoin or Wall Street Bets, for the past 50 years it’s been art. The problem isn’t that things are worth money it’s that there are a shrinking amount of people who hold enough of it that they can tell Archie Miller to fuck off or buy a highlight of Nikola Jokic dunking and still go about their day. It’s preposterous!

I’ve long held the opinion that people don’t truly understand how MUCH these people have. Because, if they did, they wouldn’t put up with it the way we do. Numbers get so big that once one million becomes 10 or 20 million we just lump it all together as a lot of money. Which is fine, that is true! It’s a lot of money. But someone having 10 million dollars to their name total is pretty rich, someone having 10 million they can just spend on firing a coach they don’t like is disgustingly rich.

Breaking it down, you could probably live close to the rest of your life if you were given 2 million dollars right now. 50,000 a year in expenses for 40 years. That doesn’t even take into account you could basically just invest half immediately and live off dividends for another, what, 20 years. All for 2 million. Archie Miller just got five times that. But Archie shouldn’t draw our anger. The person who could just give away five times that just to get rid of Archie should.

If you consider that 2 million bucks for a second and how it alone would basically allow you to do whatever the hell you wanted immediately. Consider that in the time it’s taken you to read this, Jeff Bezos has probably made nearly half that. Consider that by the time you get done with work today, Elon Musk will have made nearly 300 million dollars. But those are just the two richest men in the world so how about we consider that the booster who gave Archie Miller $10m to go coach at like Stanford will likely make that back before you even sniff 1/10th of it. That’s how little that amount of money means to them, they think about $10m the way we think about buying a car or an extension on the house.

The argument against this is that they, quote, earned, end quote that money. Not to dive into Marxism or the labor theory of value but go to hell with that shit. This is an argument based in the idea that these are regular people with regular values making regular purchasing decisions, which we can clearly see they are not. I don’t care who you are, if you have 10 milly to fire someone you should not be allowed to spend that 10 million dollars anywhere. That 10 million should automatically go to roads or something. When you hit your bank account info on the little screen it should have a pop up that says “it looks like you’re about to use enough money to cure poverty in your city on buying something really stupid, we decided to stop that.”

I’m sorry, I tend not to care if you earned that money. You earned it on the back of other’s value, more than that you earned it on the back of a society allowing you the infrastructure to pursue commerce. Society isn’t built by individuals with power, it’s built by people and collaboration. And if you have $10m to tell Archie Miller to fuck off, you’re not collaborating with anything but your own ego. If you value money so little to give it to a guy you don’t even like, then why not give it to some people that see the value of it? Taxes are too low if you have so much money left over after buying things that matter that you can self fund your little alma mater’s basketball program so that you have something to fly your private jet to and brag about to your friends.

This has been talkin’ society.

Depressing Rockies factoid of the week

ZiPS projects the Rockies to have zero hitters currently under contract be above league average by 2023. That line reads like something you’d read in CNBC or a science magazine except instead of the Rockies it would read like “economist projects economy to have zero good companies” or “scientist says climate change still very bad”.

The Rockies are in a holding pattern right now but I would expect they trade Trevor Story, Jon Gray, Kyle Freeland, anyone else of value to try and rebuild the roster in a different way by the end of July. Of course, even if they DON’T do that, the team is going to be extremely bad. This ZiPS projection basically says if the Rockies stand pat and Story leaves the team, they will be possibly the worst team in baseball in 2023.

The Rockies constructed an unsustainable roster. We knew that when we saw the stat that outside of their top 3 WAR earners, they were a NEGATIVE WAR team somehow. But, to see it stare at you in the face like this is a little jarring. If I thought Jeff Bridich could feel shame, I would hope he’d be ashamed by that.

Things I liked this week:

 This lady that has tried to stowaway on planes 22 times - This 69 (nice) year old woman has now been caught trying to sneak onto planes illegally 22 times in the last 8 years. First off, you have to love that type of dedication. Second, why? I’m sure there’s some kind of mental thing here that I don’t understand but why is this the crime? This last time, she left the police station with an ankle bracelet, drove immediately to O’Hare and got arrested. What is driving this woman to do this? I’m fascinated by both the failure and the dedication.

Drew Magary’s ode to the finish line of the pandemic - I think we’ve seen our fair amount of shit head takes over the past year that it’s nice when someone reminds you that there’s an optimistic view that isn’t reckless. Magary lays it out that the pandemic is on it’s last legs, just a year after it began. We are a different, broken country but we have emerged. It’s ok to feel good about that. It’s ok to be hopeful.

Was England embarrassing this week?

I hate the English.

Very dumb island of weirdos that got lucky enough not to have been invaded since the Roman Empire. Don’t care for them!

This section will outline if England was embarrassing this week, and this week the answer is Yes.

A mayor has been punished for letting people kiss in his pub

The story itself isn’t that embarrassing, the US has had probably the same amount of dumb scandals over the past year of the pandemic. But, what the hell is he wearing?

Now, I have my own qualms with how America adores their elected officials like celebrities. But what the hell?

What is wrong with England?

Why do all of their elected officials dress up in these necklaces and silly hats? Is it to make them feel dumb or regret running for office?

It’s extremely silly. What is England doing? Embarrassing.

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