Throwing around a lot of the favorites like:

“Let’s get the sticks going!”
“Atta Boy!”
“Let your fielder work for you!”
“Any bag!”
“Here you go now kid!”

Any requests you’d like me to add? Still early in the game.

Noah Fant signed a 2 year, $21,000,000 contract with the Seattle Seahawks, including a $9,000,000 signing bonus

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Found him. His real name is Eric.

The Nasdaq Composite rose to an all-time high Friday, surpassing its 2021 record, as investors bet that megacap technology stocks were the best way to play slowing inflation and a coming artificial intelligence boom.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 1.1% to reach an all-time high, after recording a record-high close Thursday. The S&P 500 added 0.8% and also hit a new intraday high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 107 points, or around 0.3%.

Chipmaking giant Nvidia, which has led the tech rally by surging 260% over the last 12 months, was up another 3.5% Friday. Meta also jumped more than 2% for the day.
The Nasdaq was the last of the major U.S. stock benchmarks to reach a record close this year, when it achieved the milestone Thursday. Enthusiasm over AI has lifted mega-cap tech stocks – and the broader market – through 2023 and into this year. Slowing inflation, and the Federal Reserve’s ensuing pivot toward rate cuts forecasted for later in 2024, have also contributed the Nasdaq’s recovery from a difficult 2022.

On a weekly basis, the Nasdaq is up 1.7%, while the S&P 500, which also popped to a record close on Thursday, is tracking for a roughly 1% advance. This puts the two indexes on pace for their seventh positive week over the last eight. The 30-stock Dow is the laggard, down 0.1%.
Stocks gained even as troubled regional bank New York Community Bancorpdeclined 24% after the lender announced a leadership change and disclosed issues with its internal controls. The bank is already down more than 63% in 2024 with some investors concerned it is a sign of a wider real estate shakeout ahead.
Data released Thursday showed the personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy, the Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge, rose 0.4% in January, in line with expectations.

The 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame are expected to confirm on Friday a 14-team College Football Playoff field and updated revenue model starting in 2026, sources close to the negotiations tell CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd. Details on the 14-team CFP model will be decided at a later time, but the agreement clears the way for the CFP to agree to a contract extension with ESPN to broadcast the tournament.

The new revenue model will significantly benefit the Big Ten and SEC, launching them firmly ahead of the Big 12 and ACC moving forward. The new contract will pay the Big Ten and SEC 29% of the upcoming contract, sources tell Dodd, which works out to approximately $22 million per school. The ACC will receive 17% ($13-14 million per school) and the Big 12 will sit around 15% ($12 million per school). The numbers represent a raise across the board as all Power Five institutions receive approximately $5 million per school in the previous contract.

The ACC will receive a slightly higher payout in the next contract as the league has produced eight CFP semifinalists to only two in the continuing Big 12, according to ESPN. The proposed contract includes a "look-in" clause that allows the CFP to adjust payouts in 2028 based on performance, or if there is another round of realignment.

The Group of Five will split 9% of the contract, but the number may not be split evenly among the teams and five conferences. The independent schools will split 1%, while Notre Dame will get the bulk at around $12 million, according to multiple reports.

CFP Expansion to 14 Teams in 2026

I'm a die hard Hawkeye fan. Graduated from there, not a tavern Hawkeye fan.

But ISU is so fun to watch.

I still hate their fans though.

Saturday at 1 PM CT on ABC. Let the ratings bonanza begin.

GAME SCHEDULE
Thurs: UT Martin vs. Holy Cross (9 pm ET/8 pm CT) on ESPN2
Sat: UT Martin/Holy Cross vs. Iowa (2 pm ET/1 pm CT) on ABC | Princeton vs. West Virginia (5:30 pm ET/4:30 pm CT) on ESPN2

I’ve got two - the first is when someone shoots a gun forever without reloading. Come on.

The other is it seems everyone can hold their breath for a minute or two, while swimming wildly or fighting underwater. I’m lucky if I get 30 seconds sitting in my chair.

Whatcha got?

I'm going to be hosting a Twitter Spaces with one of our Kansas State beat writers, Kevin Fielder tomorrow evening. Plan is to hop on at 5:30 pm right now -- I'll let y'all know if that changes.

If anybody wants to hop in, you can head over to Twitter and be part of the conversation -- you can find me @eliotclough. Would love to have you. I'll drop the link here when we go live.

Otherwise, if you'd like to drop any questions for Kevin and I about the game (or anything Hawkeyes) feel free to add them here as well.

Hypothetical situation that you and your family needed a ride to the airport. Its about a 20 minute drive involving residential, highway, interstate roads. Driver shows up and it is Joe Biden and all of his dementia glory and confusion. Are you all getting in the car?

Keep in mind we are voting in a few months for him to be the leader of the free world.

Be honest

Blow out Houston in the conference championship and then get stuck in a really hard bracket.

Oh well.

The most likely end of this season is with no coaching changes. I also don't think there will be any transfers or returning seniors using their covid year. The roster before portal add(s) will look like the following:

Pt Sandfort
Brauns
Mulvey
Dix
Bowen
Freeman
Harding
Dembele
Pr Sandfort
Koch
Tadjo

That leaves the portal for addressing needs... What is the number one need to compliment the returners? Should Iowa "Crean" a player or two?

1. First time, long time. Hawkeye since birth.
2. Glad to live in a time where the best sport and best fanbase can follow and interact wherever we are.
3. Even though this is a "floor" season for us, lots to be grateful for.
4. Look forward to chopping it up with everyone.

Let the greatest sports week of the year begin.

Quinnipiac

Thirty-five percent of voters describe the state of the nation's economy these days as either excellent (6 percent) or good (29 percent), while 65 percent describe it as either not so good (28 percent) or poor (37 percent).

Nearly half of voters (47 percent) think the nation's economy is getting worse, 28 percent think it's staying about the same, and 23 percent think it's getting better.

A majority of voters (61 percent) describe their personal financial situation these days as either excellent (9 percent) or good (52 percent), while 38 percent describe it as either not so good (25 percent) or poor (13 percent).

Click to expand...

A solid majority of people say that they are doing well economically, but a larger majority believes the economy is performing poorly, with nearly half saying that it's getting worse.

This is similar to perceptions of public schools, with majorities believing the public schools in general are doing poorly, but their local school is doing well.

I guess it's not too difficult to convince people not to believe their own experience and swallow a different narrative.

A high school English teacher has been placed on leave after the St. Clair School District discovered she performs on the pornography website OnlyFans.
The 28-year-old teacher at St. Clair High School, Brianna Coppage, said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch that she was put on leave on Wednesday after being interviewed by two administrators. Her access to school email and other software has been revoked while the district investigates, she said.
“It was kind of always like this cloud hanging over my head, like I never knew when I would be discovered,” Coppage said. “Then, about two weeks ago, my husband and I were told that people were finding out about it. So I knew this day was coming.”

St. Clair is in Franklin County, about 55 miles southwest of St. Louis.
The school superintendent, Kyle Kruse, said in a statement that the district was “recently notified that an employee may have posted inappropriate media on one or more internet sites.”

“The district has engaged legal counsel to conduct a comprehensive investigation into this matter,” Kruse wrote. “Actions taken as a result of the investigation will be in accordance with board policy and with guidance from legal counsel.”

Coppage said she joined the direct-to-subscribers website OnlyFans over the summer to supplement her teaching salary.



She taught English to freshmen and sophomores and made about $42,000 last year, according to the Post-Dispatch public pay database. She said she’s earned an additional $8,000 to $10,000 per month performing on OnlyFans.
Coppage said she chose the site because its content is available only to subscribers and she thought it would help protect her identity.

She doesn’t know who notified the school district of her account, but she suspects it was after she and her husband appeared in a recent video alongside two other OnlyFans performers in St. Louis who have a substantial following.

“(The district says) they haven’t made a decision yet, but I’m just kind of putting the pieces together that I am not coming back,” Coppage said. “I’m very aware that I am probably never going to teach again, but that was kind of the risk I knew I was taking. I am sad about that. I do miss my students.”

Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.
That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.


Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.


“Immigration has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.”
Trump vs. Biden on immigration: 12 charts comparing U.S. border security
Yet immigration remains an intensely polarizing issue in American politics. Fresh survey data from Gallup showed Americans now cite immigration as the country’s top problem, surpassing inflation, the economy and issues with government. A record number of migrants have crossed the southern border since President Biden took office, with apprehensions topping 2 million for the second straight year in fiscal 2023, among the highest in U.S. history. Cities like New York, Chicago and Denver have struggled to keep up with busloads of immigrants sent from Texas who are overwhelming local shelters.



Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border to most migrants when crossings are particularly high. House Republican leadership called the legislation “dead on arrival,” which seemed all but guaranteed after former president Donald Trump came out strongly in opposition.
Opinion polls show that voters widely disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border, and Trump, who is closing in on the Republican nomination, is touting plans for aggressive deportation policies if he wins in November. Republicans have increasingly campaigned on the idea that immigrants have hurt the economy and taken Americans’ jobs. But the economic record largely shows the opposite.
There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented versus undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared to previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.



Whoever wins the election will take the helm of an economy that immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.
Senate GOP blocks border deal; future of Ukraine, Israel aid unclear
Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration. The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.
Alexander Santander, 49, is among those immigrants. Santander trekked for two months with his family, including two young children, from Venezuela to the Texas border last fall to seek asylum. He said it was a “very, very traumatic” journey that involved many nights sleeping on cardboard in the jungle.


For Santander, who is on humanitarian parole as he waits for his asylum case to be processed, the decision to uproot his life in Venezuela, where he worked as an operating room nurse, was difficult but necessary, he said. His family had faced years of food shortages and, more recently, threats for protesting the government.



“Thank God we made it here,” Santander, who now works in manufacturing in Denver, said in Spanish. “We have many more opportunities and already a better quality of life.”

Iowa’s state parks — visited by up to 16 million people a year — need more than $100 million in repairs for fixing leaking roofs and rotting shelters and updating sewage lagoons.



And many of these beloved public spaces aren’t accessible to people with disabilities. In some cases, it’s because the parks were built decades before federal accessibility standards were enacted. But even some new state park features are not fully accessible, a former state official said.


Despite the parks’ popularity and the needed repairs, Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Kayla Lyon did not ask the Iowa Legislature this year for any additional funding. The agency is responsible for Iowa’s state parks.




“My question is: What are the legislators actually being told?” asked David Downing, who served as an Iowa DNR executive officer and parks asset manager until his retirement in January. “We're in dire straits. Everybody is afraid to talk. Nobody wants to say a word because you'll get your head handed to you.”


One of Downing’s last tasks before retirement was to prepare a presentation for district staff in November about the state of infrastructure in Iowa’s 69 state parks and four forests. The Gazette obtained this report, which included the $100 million dollar estimate, and others through an open records request. Among deficiencies identified at Eastern Iowa parks are:

• Lake Macbride, near Solon, has two shelters with rotten support beams and, like many of Iowa’s state parks, has unpainted wood structures being damaged by carpenter bees.
• The beach concession building at Pleasant Creek Recreation Area, near Palo, should be replaced with a modern restroom and new lift station.
• Palisades-Kepler State Park, near Mount Vernon, has eight buildings without gutters and some damage from the 2020 derecho has not been repaired. Several sidewalks are cracked.
• The Boy Scout lodge at Wapsipinicon State Park, near Anamosa, has a hole in the roof covered with a sheet of plywood.

Downing reported health and safety risks — such as ungrounded electrical outlets and tripping hazards — as well as septic systems and sewage lagoons that need to be replaced. Many cabins, restrooms, shelters, fishing piers, grills and tables are not handicapped accessible, he reported.

Are parks required to be accessible?​

While historic state park buildings are not required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, indoor and outdoor amenities constructed or updated since March 2012 are supposed to meet regulations developed in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Justice.





“The 2010 standards really apply when making alterations,” said Molly Wuebker, founder and owner of Uncurbed, an access consulting firm based in Des Moines, and Iowa liaison for the Great Plains ADA Center. When a structure or amenity is altered, a portion of the project budget must be allocated to address accessibility, she said. “If you’re developing a new area, then everything would need to meet those 2010 ADA standards.”


That hasn’t always happened within Iowa’s state park system, Downing said. An example is the campground at Lake Manawa, near Council Bluffs, completed in 2021 at a cost of $3.3 million.


“It's beautiful,” Downing said. It’s also “short two ADA parking spots.”


Lawsuits in other states have resulted in outdoor recreation sites improving handicapped accessibility, Wuebker said.


“Usually those changes seem to be enforced after the problem has occurred,” she said. “What's really great when you have an organization that prioritizes this. We want to prevent a problem from even happening.”


Palisades-Kepler Park Ranger Lucas Wagner said Jan. 1 on the First Day Hike he hoped the Iowa DNR would be able to replace non-historic latrines that aren’t handicapped accessible. The pit latrine closest to the trailhead by the Cedar River is on a hill with no paved approach.


Another nearby latrine has a sidewalk, but it doesn’t reach all the way to the parking lot.


Replacing two latrines at Palisades would cost about $130,000, according to a 2019 list of 655 state park projects. These projects were given the highest score of AAA for how well they fit with Iowa DNR initiatives, return on investment and the severity of consequences if not done. But the old latrines remain.

I mean, if we're going to flood the board, we should at least flood it with the correct word, right?



bloodbath
noun
blood·bath ˈbləd-ˌbath -ˌbäth

1. a great slaughter
2. a notably fierce, violent, or destructive contest or struggle
3. a major economic disaster

To settle the bond for the lawsuit in his loss to E. Jean Carroll for raping her. Now by March 25th he's going to have to come up with $454 million dollars to settle the bond in the suit he lost against the state of New York for his financial fraud. What company in their right mind is going to promise him a half a billion $$ dollars? Can you say... fire sale on Trump properties? Accountability is a bitch Donnie.

What a lull in the calendar year.

Interesting that the women did even better than the men for some of these. I’m also a little surprised the Big12 didn’t do better but I don’t remember what other games were on at that same time.

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