You can pick two positions for Iowa to prioritize in the portal. Who would you like them to go after, and why?

Are you in his corner, or do you want a regime change? Take a side, I wanna know the temperature of the best fanbase in the world.

Any Big Ten or nationally relevant questions I will post here:

Erik: Is ........is the Big Ten a one-bid league?

Kendall Rogers: It's probably Nebraska and that's it unless someone gets hot or someone wins the Big Ten Tournament. Man.....on a side note, just took a gander, and Iowa is now seventh in the league with an RPI of 127. That's just mind-blowing and frankly mystifying.

================================

Andrew H: Does the weekend series loss to Rutgers take Nebraska out of the hosting conversation? Still think they are a tournament team, but not host material anymore.

Kendall Rogers: I do not. Nebraska put together a solid non-conference resume and is still 16 in the RPI. That's right in the thick of the hosting mix, it just means there's a lot less margin for error moving forward, especially with how iffy the rest of the Big Ten is right now.

=================================

MK: Is RPI in college baseball what NET is in college basketball? Should it be relied on or not is what I am curious to understand?

Joe Healy: It's a more primitive version of the NET. College basketball actually did away with RPI in favor of the NET. The gripe about the RPI (which I agree with, by the way) is that it's overly simplistic and takes too few factors into account. It's also fairly easily manipulated. At this point, there are certain programs that have more or less unlocked the perfect RPI scheduling formula. Kudos to them for that because it's the metric that the sport uses, but I've never liked the idea that scheduling correctly has an outsized level of importance.

=================================

Pete: How important is that RPI number as opposed to season records especially with the RPI issues out west? Would a team that wins 32-35 games with a RPI around 45 be more likely to get an at-large bid than a team that wins 40 games but has an RPI around 75?

Joe Healy: Yes, with that wide a delta in RPI, the edge would go to the team with 32-35 wins and a 45 RPI. If the RPI delta closes to 45 vs. 50 or 55, maaaaaaybe it's a different conversation. That said, for better or worse, you're never going to go broke betting on RPI being the determining factor in most Field of 64 discussions.

=================================

MK: Interesting your take on RPI, but wouldn't scheduling correctly be critical for a program like Indiana State otherwise they would (and are already) being criticized for not having a quality schedule (FYI 5-1 against Big Ten teams)?

Joe Healy: Yes, good point. I do like that the RPI kind of allows a roadmap for teams like Indiana State to find their way to at-large bids that might not otherwise be available, but generally speaking, I would like to see college baseball move on to something more sophisticated than the RPI.

=================================

Aaron: Lots of talk in other sports about expanding thir respective postseason tournaments. What are your thoughts on possibly adding a team to each regional and the host getting a bye? Or something along those lines?

Kendall Rogers: I like the idea of adding 4-6 teams to the baseball postseason, but I would not go beyond that. I feel like baseball typically has about 3-4 teams that you look at it and go man, they should've been in the tournament. That list is never 6-7 deep. I don't want our tournament being diluted by teams who have no business being there.

The Fever don't draft Clark at #1.

It would be the ultimate troll job after all these reports about WNBA franchises preparing for Fever games, and networks picking up as many Fever games as possible.



.......and then they draft someone else.

I would laugh.

Oh of course I know they're taking her........but I would laugh.

Link: D1Baseball

1. Texas A&M (32-4)
2. Arkansas (30-5)
3. Kentucky (30-5)
4. Tennessee (30-6)
5. Oregon State (29-5)
6. Clemson (29-6)
7. Duke (26-10)
8. Florida State (30-5)
9. East Carolina (27-8)
10. Virginia (28-8)
11. North Carolina (29-7)
12. Wake Forest (24-11)
13. Vanderbilt (26-10)
14. Louisiana-Lafayette (28-9)
15. Oklahoma State (25-11)
16. Oregon (25-10)
17. UC-Irvine (25-7)
18. Alabama (24-12)
19. Coastal Carolina (24-11)
20. South Carolina (25-11)
21. Arizona (21-13)
22. West Virginia (22-13)
23. Virginia Tech (23-10)
24. Georgia (27-9)
25. Dallas Baptist (26-8)

Dropped Out
Central Florida (#17), Mississippi State (#22), Nebraska (#23), Florida (#24)

===============================

Link: Perfect Game

1. Texas A&M (32-4)
2. Arkansas (30-5)
3. Tennessee (30-6)
4. Oregon State (29-5)
5. Clemson (28-6)
6. Florida State (30-5)
7. Kentucky (30-5)
8. Duke (26-10)
9. Virginia (28-8)
10. North Carolina (29-7)
11. East Carolina (27-8)
12. Vanderbilt (26-10)
13. Wake Forest (24-11)
14. Indiana State (27-7)
15. Oklahoma State (25-11)
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (28-9)
17. Alabama (24-12)
18. UC-Irvine (25-7)
19. Arizona (21-13)
20. Dallas Baptist (26-8)
21. West Virginia (22-13)
22. Coastal Carolina (24-11)
23. Oregon (25-10)
24. Virginia Tech (23-10)
25. Lamar (29-6)

Also Considered
Georgia, Northeastern, Portland, South Carolina, UC-Santa Barbara

Dropped Out
Florida, Central Florida, Mississippi State, Nebraska

===============================

Link: Baseball America

1. Texas A&M (32-4)
2. Arkansas (30-5)
3. Tennessee (30-6)
4. Clemson (29-6)
5. Florida State (30-5)
6. Duke (26-10)
7. Kentucky (30-5)
8. Oregon State (29-5)
9. Virginia (27-8)
10. East Carolina (28-7)
11. North Carolina (29-7)
12. Alabama (24-12)
13. Vanderbilt (26-10)
14. Wake Forest (24-11)
15. UC-Irvine (25-7)
16. Oregon (25-10)
17. Oklahoma State (25-11)
18. West Virginia (22-13)
19. South Carolina (25-11)
20. Louisiana-Lafayette (28-9)
21. Coastal Carolina (24-11)
22. North Carolina State (20-13)
23. Dallas Baptist (26-8)
24. Lamar (29-6)
25. Oklahoma (21-14)

===============================

Link: USA Today Coaches Poll

1. Texas A&M (22) (32-4)
2. Arkansas (7) (30-5)
3. Tennessee (1) (30-6)
4. Oregon State (29-5)
5. Kentucky (1) (30-5)
6. Clemson (29-6)
7. Florida State (30-5)
8. Virginia (28-8)
9. Duke (26-10)
10. East Carolina (27-8)
11. North Carolina (29-7)
12. Vanderbilt (26-10)
13. Wake Forest (24-11)
14. Alabama (24-12)
15. Louisiana-Lafayette (28-9)
16. UC-Irvine (25-7)
17. Oklahoma State (25-11)
18. Oregon (25-10)
19. Dallas Baptist (26-8)
20. Coastal Carolina (24-11)
21. South Carolina (25-11)
22. Virginia Tech (23-10)
23. Georgia (27-9)
24. West Virginia (22-13)
25. Indiana State (27-7)

Others Receiving Votes
Arizona, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Mississippi State, Florida, North Carolina State, Lamar, Texas Tech, Northeastern, UC-Santa Barbara, Central Florida, Campbell, Utah, Creighton, Georgetown, Georgia Tech

Dropped Out
Florida (#18), Central Florida (#19), Nebraska (#21), Mississippi State (#23)

===============================

Link: NCBWA

1. Texas A&M (32-4)
2. Tennessee (30-6)
3. Arkansas (30-5)
4. Kentucky (30-5)
5. Oregon State (29-5)
6. Clemson (29-6)
7. Florida State (30-5)
8. Duke (26-10)
9. East Carolina (27-8)
10. Virginia (28-8)
11. North Carolina (29-7)
12. Wake Forest (24-11)
13. Vanderbilt (26-10)
14. Oregon (25-10)
15. Alabama (24-12)
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (28-9)
17. Oklahoma State (25-11)
18. UC-Irvine (25-7)
19. Coastal Carolina (24-11)
20. South Carolina (25-11)
21. Dallas Baptist (26-8)
22. Indiana State (27-7)
23. Virginia Tech (23-10)
24. Georgia (27-9)
25. Arizona (21-13)

Others Receiving Votes (listed alphabetically)
Bethune-Cookman, Campbell, Central Florida, Creighton, Fresno State, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Jackson State, James Madison, Kansas State, Lamar, Louisiana Tech, Louisville, LSU, Maryland, Mississippi State, Nebraska, North Carolina State, Northeastern, Oklahoma, Purdue, Rutgers, San Diego, St. John's, Samford, Southern Mississippi, TCu, Texas, Texas Tech, UC-San Diego, UC-Santa Barbara, Utah, West Virginia, Western Kentucky, William & Mary

Dropped Out
Central Florida (#16), Nebraska (#20), Mississippi State (#23), Florida (#24), LSU (#25)

===============================

Link: NCAA RPI

1. Clemson
2. Texas A&M
3. Florida State
4. Kentucky
5. North Carolina
6. Arkansas
7. Tennessee
8. Indiana State
9. Virginia
10. Wake Forest
11. Georgia
12. East Carolina
13. Oregon State
14. Central Florida
15. South Carolina
16. Nebraska
17. Vanderbilt
18. Alabama
19. Oklahoma
20. UC-Santa Barbara
21. UC-Irvine
22. Coastal Carolina
23. Oklahoma State
24. Dallas Baptist
25. Duke
-------------------------------
44. Ohio State
45. Rutgers
52. Maryland
69. Illinois
70. Indiana
71. Purdue
103. Michigan
108. Northwestern
118. Michigan State
127. Iowa
143. Minnesota
151. Penn State

Maybe they just wanted to see them perform without shirts on?

Who knew he had pipes?

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It appears below that 5 of NW's first 7 games are at home. Why doesnt NW just play some of those games at Miami of OH (not that far of a drive for NW fans), Eastern Ill , Indiana and Wisconsin at those opponent's stadiums. Those four statdiums will be empty anyway, more NW fans can get in rather than at their puny practice field, the NW opponent's fans will show up to increase ticket sales, NW can do a 50-50 cut with their opponent on tickets and parking.

I know NW doesnt have a big fanbase at their home games but maybe 10,000 will travel otherwise they wont see many games in person. I bet their opponents' fans would love to watch the game at their own stadium.

Would this work?

Which piano man did it best?

Tougher than using a firearm, but it happens. There are sickos everywhere.

The father of an Australian man who went on a deadly stabbing spree at a busy Sydney shopping mall on Saturday has a theory as to why the attack targeted women while mostly avoiding men.

On Saturday, Joel Cauchi was identified as the assailant who carried out a knife attack in the Westfield Bondi Junction mall near world-famous Bondi Beach, leaving six people dead and more than a dozen injured. Police ruled out terrorism and said Cauchi had a history of mental illness.

The killer's father, Andrew Cauchi, however, said he knew why his son, who suffered from schizophrenia, had targeted women. He blamed his son's frustration at not having a girlfriend.

"Because he wanted a girlfriend, and he’s got no social skills, and he was frustrated out of his brain," the 76-year-old told reporters outside his home in Toowoomba in Queensland state, an area approximately 540 miles from the New South Wales border with Sydney.

The only male killed was Faraz Tahir, 30, a Pakistani refugee who worked as a security guard at the mall. Tahir was not armed.

The five other deceased victims were women. Webb said most of the 12 surviving victims were also women.

Noah grew up in Oswego, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.


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Does it throw anyone else off in the first half of the movie when the Jerry Reed song is "West bound and down, 18 wheels a rolling..."

It gets better. He is also making the same $101,000 donation to the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis.








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MIAMI (Gray News) - A 36-year-old man was arrested after allegedly killing his roommate during an argument over $1, authorities said.

Miami Police responded to the apartment building early Friday morning after receiving a call about a possible fight, WPLG reported.

When officers arrived, Brandon Carlos Grant was lying on the sidewalk outside the building with blood on his gray hoodie.

Inside the apartment, authorities found Grant’s roommate “unresponsive on his knees leaning on a couch,” WPLG reported.

Police said Grant waived his Miranda rights and told investigators that he ‘became enraged’ when the victim wouldn’t give him a $1.

Grant said that the victim asked him to stop “because he was going to kill him,’ according to authorities.

The victim was pronounced dead on the scene.

Officials said the victim appeared to have suffered blunt force trauma on his face.

Grant was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Willie released a look at Iowa's future on MatScouts. What does everyone think of his projections, needs and potential targets?

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a moderate Democrat who has often been at odds with the Biden administration over energy policy, offered rare praise for the president Monday amid high levels of energy production.

“I want to congratulate President Biden for the record-breaking energy production we are seeing in America today. The United States is producing more oil, gas and renewable energy than ever before,” Manchin wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

Presidential policies generally have a limited impact on U.S. oil production, but because most of the drilling in the U.S. occurs on private lands and is done by private companies, market forces are typically the biggest driver of American fossil fuel production.

Manchin, in his opinion piece, touted energy legislation passed during the administration, specifically the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

The former included investments in the electric grid and bolstered a program to speed the approval process for energy projects; the latter provided tax credits for renewables and alternative energy sources — and required the administration to continue oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters if they want to produce renewables there.

Manchin wrote in his piece that the administration should be touting the carbon-free energy and the high oil and gas production — which has reached record levels in recent months.

“It seems some of the president’s radical advisers in the White House are so worried about angering climate activists that they refuse to speak up about these accomplishments,” he wrote.

The oil and gas boom is a tough issue for Biden because part of his base — the environmental left — does not support increasing U.S. production. But his opponents often blast his energy policies as not doing enough to promote oil and gas, so touting high production levels could blunt some of that criticism.

The writing comes as Manchin has sought to push the administration to tack further to the right on energy issues, and has been an opponent of Biden’s policies like the recent pause on some approvals for new natural gas export projects. Manchin has also repeatedly blasted the administration’s interpretation of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits as overly broad.

U.S. job growth was strong last month, and the unemployment rate fell slightly.

U.S. employers added a seasonally adjusted 303,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department reported on Friday, significantly more than the 200,000 economists expected. The unemployment rate slipped to 3.8%, versus February’s 3.9%, in line with expectations.

The Federal Reserve is mandated to keep employment as strong as possible while keeping inflation under control. Balancing those objectives has put the central bank in a difficult position as it mulls cutting interest rates this year: Cut too soon, or by too much, and inflation could heat back up all over again. Wait too long, and the strain of high rates could damage the job market, pushing the economy into a recession.
The labor market has continued to add jobs over the past year despite high interest rates. At the same time, the unemployment rate has drifted up and wage gains have cooled. In March of last year, the unemployment rate was 3.5%.
Those dynamics have defied the conventional wisdom that, for inflation to cool, job creation would need to dramatically slow down.
Lately many economists and even Fed officials have come to believe that, in part as a result of immigration, the supply of available workers has increased. If that is right, the number of jobs can grow faster.
Supply alone isn’t enough to generate job gains, however; there has to be demand. At the moment, it still looks as if there is plenty of that. Layoff activity remains low, and the number of unfilled jobs is high, with the Labor Department reporting earlier this week that there were 8.8 million job openings as of the end of February. The job-opening rate, or openings as a share of filled and unfilled positions, was 5.3%. That has fallen over the past year, but in prepandemic 2019—a period of strength for the job market—that ratio averaged 4.5%.
But the share of people quitting their jobseach month has fallen to prepandemic levels, which indicates that the intensity with which businesses were hiring away workers from each other has subsided. Moreover, the private-sector job market has been drawing most of its strength from just two broad sectors—private education and healthcare, and leisure and hospitality.
Economists at Bank of America call those sectors “high touch.” Much of the work must be done in person, and a lot of it—such as waiting tables or working in a hospice—entails face-to-face interactions.
High-touch employment fell sharply when the pandemic hit, and even now, four years later, appears low. Relative to the trend during the five years before the pandemic, there are some two million fewer jobs in those sectors than might have been expected.
This raises a question, points out Bank of America economist Michael Gapen. “Should we expect employment in those sectors to return to their prior trend line? Or are there structural reasons to think maybe the employment gap will not close and therefore this catch-up effect could finish sooner?” he said.
He thinks the answer might be mixed. Lately, employment growth in leisure and hospitality has moderated. One reason why is that for some of those employers, business is still down—think restaurants near offices where many people are still working from home a few days a week. Another is that some businesses adopted practices when labor became short that probably won’t get undone. Lots of restaurants, for example, introduced QR codes in place of paper menus, allowing customers to place orders with their phones rather than waitstaff.
But for private education and healthcare, the story could be different. The loss of jobs these areas experienced when the pandemic hit was truly exceptional: Other than in 2020, employment in the sector has experienced near constant growth over the 85 years of available data. Moreover, the healthcare needs of an aging U.S. population will probably only grow. The sector is still about a million jobs short of its old trend. If that gap continues to narrow, as Gapen expects it will, it could help bolster job growth into next year.
Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

It appears he has had detainers on four different booking dates.

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Does he do anything now other than appear on stuff and explain to whoever he’s talking to about how big numbers are or odds are or space is?

The last 50 times I’ve see him he’s saying something along the lines of, “If you poured salt onto this table and colored one of the grains pink and one blue, the odds that that pink grain and blue grain landing within an inch of each other is the same odds as a person getting struck by lightning in a place lightning only strikes three times a year while on a roller coaster.”

Why do I need to know these things?

When I read a recent news article by my Post colleagues headlined “Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine,” my thoughts naturally turned to another election in which another Republican presidential candidate was widely reported to have a “secret plan” to end another war. Richard M. Nixon did not actually make that claim himself about the Vietnam War during the 1968 campaign. Instead, he made a vague promise to “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific” and let voters imagine he knew how do that.


Nixon’s strategy, as it turned out, consisted of going to Moscow and Beijing to win over North Vietnam’s principal allies, while dropping hints that he was a “madman” who was willing to use nuclear weapons if Hanoi did not stop fighting. To further increase the pressure on Hanoi, he stepped up bombing of North Vietnam and invaded Cambodia to clear out communist sanctuaries.
None of Nixon’s machinations produced what he promised: “peace with honor.” In 1973, he signed a peace treaty that pulled all remaining U.S. forces out of South Vietnam but allowed North Vietnam to keep between 140,000 and 300,000 of its own troops in the south. A little more than two years later, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. The south’s fall demonstrated, for neither the first nor the last time, that the surest way to end any war is for one side to win and the other to lose.


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That brings us to the “very stable genius” and his current plans to end the war in Ukraine. If elected again, Trump claims he would end the war in 24 hours, but he has been cagey about how he would pull off this miraculous feat, supposedly so that he could maintain his flexibility to negotiate.


Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, proclaimed after meeting with Trump last month that the former president’s formula was simple and cynical: “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”
Trump aides told The Post that Orban’s statement, which sounded entirely plausible to me, was “false,” even though Trump has not publicly contradicted it. The aides explained that the presumptive GOP nominee’s actual plan is to push for “Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas border region to Russia” in return for an end to the Russian invasion.



If that is Trump’s plan, it is more preposterous than anything Nixon ever contemplated during the Vietnam War. It displays a witches’ brew of arrogance, ignorance and defeatism.
Start with the arrogance: Trump regards himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker despite a long track record, going back at least to 1990 and his first casino bankruptcy, indicating the opposite. As president, he was very good at abrogating treaties — including the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal — but not very successful at negotiating new ones. He announced the Abraham Accords but did not personally negotiate them, as Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords, and he renamed the North American Free Trade Agreement rather than truly renegotiating it. His summits with Kim Jong Un did not produce North Korean denuclearization; Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction program is considerably more advanced now than it was when Trump and Kim met in Singapore in 2018.
Of greatest relevance to the conflict in Ukraine was Trump’s ill-fated attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan. His 2020 deal with the Taliban was as one-sided as Nixon’s Paris peace accords with the North Vietnamese: Trump’s negotiators agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops within 14 months and free 5,000 Taliban prisoners. In return, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorists. The Taliban was not required to stop fighting or reconcile with the Afghan government.

What do you recommend for brand/line? For as much shit Hokas get here they look highly reviewed. So are on cloud 5s. Not looking for this to be fashion I wear out, just the most comfortable and supportive for walks. Tia.

I think it’s finally time. My hair line has receded enough that there just isn’t any way to keep a respectable haircut going.

Had a couple questions for those that shave/buzz their heads. I haven’t decided if I want to go with a short stubble length or a full on shiny globe.

For those of you that employ either of these options, I’m wondering what great trimming tools you’ve found. How often do you have to maintain your dome? Is this a move that just makes life easier? Any must do’s? Must not do’s?

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.