Cleaning out the Inbox

    The inbox hasn't been overflowing in recent weeks even though it has been a while since I have cleaned it, so consider this an effort to keep things in order and not too full.

The Athletic writes of the soon-to-be-defunct Longhorn Network from its controversial beginning to a quiet ending at the end of the 2024 spring sports season.

Originally envisioned as a joint network between Texas and Texas A&M, the Aggies turned down the offer to be involved and chose to join the SEC.

The other members of the Big 12 thought the network would give Texas an advantage but it didn't pan out to be the money maker that Texas and ESPN thought it could develop.

The Longhorn Network will be absorbed into the SEC Network next year when Texas (and Oklahoma) make their move from the Big 12 to the SEC.

The Athletic appears with two more articles from their series that listed several articles about college football's realignment and how it has affected different schools in various ways.

Arguably, and that is being very kind, the worst decision by a conference over the thirty years since the beginning of conference shuffling has been the Big Ten's selection of Rutgers to join their league.

The Athletic's article states that not only is Rutgers to the Big Ten the worst move in that time but that it is even worse than most fans believe that it is!

The Rutgers athletic department runs at massive financial losses each year, the football program has a conference winning percentage of under .200 since arriving in the conference, and they have finished last in the Director's Cup, a competition that measures a school's performance in all sports, in the league in four of the last six years and have never finished above tenth place.

Add to that. the flawed premise that started Rutgers's entry that they would deliver the New York City market hasn't paid off and it's easy to see why the Big Ten might feel that they didn't get what they paid for.

The final article compares the struggles of the four former Southwest Conference schools that didn't make the Big 12 cut when the SWC was raided out of business to those of the four remaining Pac 12 schools following their own conference defections.

The SWC "leftovers" (Houston, Rice, SMU, TCU) as the article calls them each have their own hard road since the dissolution, and learning from their experience could help California, Oregon State, Stanford, and Washington State as they prepare for their own decisions on their future beyond the PAC 12.

The New York Times writes that the final remaining living player of the Brooklyn Dodgers' famous "Boys of Summer" Carl Erskine was recently awarded the Buck O'Neil award from the Baseball Hall of Fame for lifetime humanitarian achievement.

The ninety-six-year-old Erskine threw two no-hitters for the Dodgers, won 122 games, and his fourteen strikeouts in game three of the 1953 World Series set a then-series record.

SpaceNews makes the case that the first manned mission in the eventual return to the moon should be a return to the original landing spot- The Sea of Tranquility.

The NASA plan is to make several landings near the South Pole of the moon but this argument states that the Tranquility location has a lower risk for the initial return and it would be an opportunity to see the effect of fifty lunar years on the remaining items left from the Apollo 11 mission, as well as securing the site as a historical site.

I don't think it has much of a chance of being selected but I can see the logic in the debate.