[Hank 91]

I realize that any complaints from me, as a Stanford fan, will ring a bit hollow -- kind of like the Red Sox complaining about how much the Yankees spend -- but here goes. Not all schools have someone like Phil Knight or John Arrillaga or Boone Pickens. Can you imagine poor Mike Riley trying to recruit the top kids in Oregon? Say these kids have already taken a visit to Eugene, then Riley walks them through the OSU facilities. I'm struggling to come up with a suitable analogy, but nothing seems to come close. To say that this gives Oregon a recruiting advantage would obviously be a vast understatement. NFL locker rooms don't look like this.

So what's to be done? I still don't think it's time to pay players,  but I do think it's time to limit the donations a program can accept. Also, it would be interesting to know how the Oregon students and non-football-focused alumni feel about this. How to the student dorms, libraries, and research facilities compare to this football Taj Mahal? That's the big question, I think.

[Hank 91]

I realize that any complaints from me, as a Stanford fan, will ring a bit hollow -- kind of like the Red Sox complaining about how much the Yankees spend -- but here goes. Not all schools have someone like Phil Knight or John Arrillaga or Boone Pickens. Can you imagine poor Mike Riley trying to recruit the top kids in Oregon? Say these kids have already taken a visit to Eugene, then Riley walks them through the OSU facilities. I'm struggling to come up with a suitable analogy, but nothing seems to come close. To say that this gives Oregon a recruiting advantage would obviously be a vast understatement. NFL locker rooms don't look like this.

So what's to be done? I still don't think it's time to pay players,  but I do think it's time to limit the donations a program can accept. Also, it would be interesting to know how the Oregon students and non-football-focused alumni feel about this. How to the student dorms, libraries, and research facilities compare to this football Taj Mahal? That's the big question, I think.