A quick-and-dirty 2023 Stanford football preview

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 31, 2023

College football is back! After a long offseason dominated by news of player transfers and the virtual dissolution of the once venerable Pac-12 Conference, teams are ready to take the field and play some games.

Stanford is one of several teams under new management. Former Sacramento State head coach (and former Cal quarterback) Troy Taylor has taken the reins after David Shaw’s resignation capped a dismal campaign in 2022, the second straight year in which the Cardinal compiled a 3-9 record. Taylor, who has brought in a completely new staff and added an unprecedented seven transfers, accumulated a 30-8 record in his first coaching stint, leading the Hornets to a 12-1 record and the team’s first-ever Football Championship Subdivision playoff quarterfinal berth last year. The last time the Cardinal brought in a coach with a deep FCS playoff run under his belt, good things happened. Let’s hope lightning can strike twice in this case.

Taylor and his staff seem to have recruited quite well, although it’s unclear how many meaningful snaps freshmen will be able to contribute this season. It’s also not clear how many players will stick around to develop in this new era of the transfer portal and potentially lucrative name, image and likeness (NIL) player contracts. A big problem is that no one knows for sure whether the Pac-12 rump — Stanford, Cal, Oregon State and Washington State — will attempt to rebuild the league, join or merge with another conference, or go their separate ways. (Stanford, Cal and former Pac-12 expansion target Southern Methodist University are believed to be candidates for admission to the Atlantic Coast Conference.)

Short takes: ‘Slow Horses’ season one, ‘Invasion’ season one and ‘Foundation’ season one

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 26, 2023

Author’s note: This post contains what I hope are relatively minor spoilers for Foundation. MEM

Slow Horses is a fun six-episode streaming television series based on Mick Herron’s novels about a group of underperforming British spies who have been consigned to a backwater office in London under the not-so-watchful eye of jaded Cold War veteran Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman).

The plot is set in motion when Slough House’s newest arrival, ambitious hotshot River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), starts wondering why he’s been tasked with surveilling a disgraced right-wing journalist. Cartwright soon stumbles into a plot involving the kidnapping of a foreign university student by right-wing extremists who may have links to Britain’s security apparatus.

Lamb is fond of ordering his charges to do nothing, but he’s spurred into action when one of his subordinates, the strangely capable Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), is shot and seriously wounded the same night as two other officers in his care end up accidentally killing a nighttime intruder at Slough House. With the kidnap victim facing a dawn execution deadline, Lamb tries to rally his remaining staff members into tracking the terrorists while eluding a cleanup squad that British intelligence has dispatched with a possible eye toward pinning the fast-developing fiasco on the “slow horses.”

America bakes and floods and burns as climate change asserts itself in the summer of 2023

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 16, 2023

I’ve spent early August bellyaching about the demise, or at least severe decline, of the Pac-12 Conference and, to a lesser extent, X, or the app formerly known as Twitter. But I think that the summer of 2023 will become better known as the time when most reasonable adults stopped being able to pretend that climate change was not going to affect their lives.

The season has been marred by at least three major weather events that have caused death and destruction in the U.S. alone. A heat wave extending from July into August has scorched much of the nation, claiming more than 100 victims. (The true toll is likely much higher and won’t be known definitively for weeks, or perhaps longer.) A slow-moving rainstorm inundated New York and Vermont in mid-July, killing at least two people. The storm washed out roads and railroad tracks and required emergency crews to perform more than 200 water rescues. The Associated Press reported that at least 4,000 homes and 800 businesses in Vermont sustained damage. And last week, a wildfire devastated the Hawaiian resort town of Lahaina in a fast-moving blaze that killed at least 99 people. The death toll made the event the state’s deadliest natural disaster in nearly 80 years and the nation’s deadliest fire since 87 died in “the Great Fire of 1910” in Idaho and Minnesota.

The parade of dire news seems worse than ever before. We aren’t just seeing polar bears stranded on ice floes. I dare say that easily half to two-thirds of Americans have experienced a string of extremely hot days. This summer, wide swaths of the United States have seen dramatic and often visible changes in air quality thanks to plumes of ash from a record-setting Canadian wildfire season. Some of the roads in New York State that were washed out by the July storm were near places I’ve lived. And images of blackened vehicles and gutted homes in Maui are heart-wrenching and difficult to ignore, even when only glimpsed in passing.

Two beloved institutions face mortal jeopardy: Twitter declines slowly, the Pac-12 suddenly as we navigate the summer of 2023

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 11, 2023

As the summer of 2023 marches forward grimly, a pair of widely beloved institutions have taken definitive turns for the worse.

In the college-sports industry, Pac-12 Conference commissioner George Kliavkoff fumbled TV broadcast-rights talks, opening the door this summer for six league members to bolt for the Big 10 and Big 12. It remains unclear whether the remaining four teams — Cal, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State — will form some kind of alliance with the Mountain West Conference or go their own ways. Whatever the case, even if the Pac-X somehow survives beyond July 31, 2024, it will be radically altered from the alliance of regionally and nationally respected universities that anchored West Coast college sports for more than a century.

A few days before the Pac-12 imploded, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced that the microblogging social network he purchased in October 2022 would be called X going forward. In a matter of days, the service’s famous, friendly chirping blue bird logo was replaced by a stark black-and-white letter. Messages on the service, once known as tweets, now appear to be called Xeets. Sharing another person’s tweets on your own timeline, formerly dubbed retweeting, now goes by the far more generic term reposting.

None of these developments are improvements.

These are the people and institutions most responsible for the death of the Pac-12 Conference

_{^{Photo illustration by Matthew E. Milliken. Original logo provided by the Pac-12 Conference.}} 

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 5, 2023

As the death of the Pac-12 Conference sinks in, I think it’s worth ranking the people and institutions who bear the most responsibility for the death of the self-styled Conference of Champions. Prepare to be angered and saddened as we review the rogues — and, in the case of two Big 12 figures, the competent leaders — who have imperiled college sports on the West Coast.

1. USC and UCLA (tie)

When word got out on June 30, 2022, that the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles were considering leaving the Pac-12 for the Big 10, I thought it was some kind of hoax. But as I found more and more tweets and news stories on the subject, I realized that this nightmare was in fact real: The L.A. schools, who anchored the biggest television market in the Pacific 12, were likely abandoning their longtime home in order to chase TV distribution money in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

That afternoon, I wished the Trojans and Bruins “decades of rubbing elbows with Rutgers and Maryland at the bottom of the Big 10 football standings.” I also cattily expressed the hope that fans of the defectors’ basketball teams enjoyed visiting the campuses of Minnesota and Penn State during the winter. I still steadfastly hold these positions.

Bidding farewell to the Pac-12, a conference that was too good to die but not good enough to live

_{^{Photo illustration by Matthew E. Milliken. Original logo provided by the Pac-12 Conference.}}

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 4, 2023

News broke today that Oregon and Washington were planning to join the Big 10 Conference. A subsequent report indicated that Arizona was making arrangements to go to the Big 12. The former move, which became official Friday evening, will boost the Big 10’s membership to 18 teams as of August 2024. Perhaps more importantly to lovers of West Coast collegiate sports, and West Coast collegiate football in particular, it reduces membership in what is currently the Pac-12 Conference to just seven teams — six if Arizona also leaves.

The development sounds the death knell for a sports league that had been in critical condition ever since the abrupt announcement on June 30, 2022, that USC and UCLA were bolting for the Big 10. The Pac-12’s prognosis took a decided turn for the worse just days ago, on July 26, when reports surfaced that Colorado would defect from the conference to rejoin its former circuit, the Big 12. That prognostication was borne out by a unanimous vote of the university’s governing board on the 27th.

The imminent departure of Oregon, Washington and/or Arizona spells the end for a circuit that first took shape as an alliance between Cal, Oregon, Oregon State (known at the time as Oregon Agricultural College) and Washington, who created the Pacific Coast Conference at a meeting on Dec. 2, 1915, in Portland, Ore. The group’s membership changed over the years, as did its moniker. The PCC gave way to the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU), which in turn became the Pacific-8 and then the Pac-10. The current and presumably final configuration began taking shape in 2010, with Colorado and Utah making an even dozen when they began competing in the Pac-12 in July 2011.