Stanford's 50-Year NCAA Title Run; NFL's Antitrust Threat; NIL's Side Effect; The Pope vs. The President

Stanford's men's gymnastics team won the NCAA championship Saturday, its 11th national title and sixth in the last seven years, but it marked an astonishing accomplishment for the university.

Stanford now has won at least one NCAA team title for the last 50 years.

Think about that.

Every year for the past half century, since Stanford won the NCAA water polo championship in 1976 under Art Lambert, the Cardinal has taken home at least one national team championship.

The next best streak is: North Carolina...with seven.

Stanford is the nation's all-time leader in team championships with 138, followed by UCLA (126) and USC (115).

19 different Stanford teams (10 men, 9 women) have won NCAA team titles, led by women's tennis with 20, men's tennis (with 15, plus two more before the streak), men's gymnastics (11), men's water polo (11), women's swimming (11) and women's water polo (10).

Congrats to all the current and past Stanford coaches and athletes who put together this remarkable run.

NFL's Antitrust Threat: There's a lot of hubbub in Washington D.C. these days about the NFL's antitrust exemption, which allows the league to package the broadcasting rights of all of its teams and sell them collectively, rather than through individual deals.

From the NFL's standpoint, the exemption has worked to perfection. 

By pooling its media rights and implementing revenue sharing for all 32 teams, the NFL has been able to create and maintain a balanced, competitive league, rather than one where big-market teams--or the most popular teams--could sell their own rights, make the most money, afford the best players, and win the most games.

A league where the Green Bay Packers, in the nation's 68th largest media market, can compete successfully against the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams, teams in the nation's No. 1 and 2 markets.

At the same time, the league's media rights have increased astronomically, to an estimated $11 billion per year. NFL teams are all profitable before they sell one game ticket.

But in recent years, as the league has sold some of its broadcasting rights to streaming services, the games are no longer free and accessible to all fans. 

So the antitrust exemption, which was established through the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, is being reviewed by the Department of Justice. The question is whether the migration of games to platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix, which require a paid subscription, violates the exemption by limiting consumer access.

Over the years, centralizing rights to a handful of packages sold to broadcasters has kept the league easy for fans to follow. And the vast majority of games, 87% according to the league, still are carried on free over-the-air broadcast networks.

At this point, it seems unlikely that politicians in Washington, who have trouble agreeing on anything, would want to tangle with the NFL, although it's possible the exemption could be narrowed or modified.

As they say, stay tuned.

NIL $ Keeping Them in School: One interesting byproduct of the increasingly large NIL paychecks being given to top athletes in college football and basketball is that more players are being incentivized to stay in school and delay their pro careers.

Thanks to NIL, a number of college players, particularly quarterbacks, now earn more money than they would in the NFL on the rookie wage scale.

For instance, QB Trinidad Chambliss worked very hard to secure an extra year of eligibility at Ole Miss, where he will earn a reported $5 million this fall. As a projected second or third round pick, he would've pocketed about $2M in the NFL.

Recent NFL picks Will Howard and Riley Leonard both confirmed to The Athletic that they earned significantly more during their final seasons at Ohio State and Notre Dame than the $1.1M they got as NFL rookies from the Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts, respectively.

This type of info will never appear in the NCAA commercials about "student-athletes."

The Pope vs. the President: If you have the temerity to disagree with President Donald J Trump, you are immediately branded in his 2:30 a.m. Untruth Social tweets as "low IQ," a "stone cold loser," a "nut job," a "traitor", or all of the above. You also may be subject to a DOJ criminal investigation. And if the dustup continues, he will just make up stuff and attribute it to you.

Trump's latest target is Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, the spiritual leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. Since Leo spoke out against the Iran War, Trump and his idiot VP, J.D. Vance, have been lecturing the Pontiff on theology and his failure to understand the Iraq War. 

Then Trump, who clearly fashions himself as a Messiah, sent out an image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man. (He'd previously sent out memes of himself as the Pope and a king). The blowback on this was so overwhelming, even from right wing evangelists, that he deleted it.

Then Trump claimed he wasn't Christ in the image, but a doctor. 

No one believed that for a second.

Finally, having nowhere else to turn, he retreated to his familiar fallback position--lying. He claimed the Pope was in favor of Iran having a nuclear weapon, which is ludicrous. Pope Leo has repeatedly denounced nuclear weapons and called for countries in the world to abandon them.

The Pope responded to Trump's attacks by saying he had "no fear of the Trump administration." After the president threatened to destroy the Iranian civilization, the Pope sent a clear message to Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who's been trying to sell the absurd notion that the Iran conflict is some kind of a holy war.

“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters,” the Pope said.

“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

So far, the scoreboard reads something like this: Pope Leo 14, Trump 0.

As for the moronic Hegseth, last week at a prayer meeting at the Pentagon he quoted what he claimed was a Bible passage, but was actually a few lines from the movie Pulp Fiction.

You can't make this stuff up.