Bigger and BoulderDeion and the state of college sports, Weekend Whats, Feel Good Friday.Deion Sanders is the biggest thing to hit Boulder since Mork landed from Ork. It started with his "I'm coming" welcome speech to the players from last year's Colorado Buffaloes football team. The speech, like everything he does, was recorded. It went viral. So has nearly every moment since. Only ten scholarship players from that 1-11 Buffaloes team are still on this year's team, but like the rest of us, those former players are probably watching what has happened since they left. Everyone watches Deion Sanders because Deion Sanders is everywhere, from social media to 60 Minutes, and he's turned the school's Boulder-based team into the greatest show in America. They're also undefeated. In some ways, what Deion Sanders has achieved in a matter of months is representative of all that's wrong in college football—the money, the TV deals, the near complete separation between the athletic departments and the schools they supposedly represent. But Deion didn't create that system. He's just become, almost overnight, the best at exploiting it. How will it all turn out? All I know for sure is that everyone will be watching. It's always Prime time. "Since 2020, when he skipped the assistant ranks altogether to become head coach at Jackson State University, an historically Black college in Mississippi, Sanders has become the most ubiquitous and polarizing figure in college football. He is the avatar for a tumultuous and money-soaked era in the sport, where players hop between schools in pursuit of marketing deals and colleges switch conferences in search of more lucrative TV contracts. With the same game-changing speed he showed as a player, Sanders has rewritten the playbook for success, using his celebrity, social media savvy and old-school charisma to attract attention and talent to whatever sideline he roams." BusinessWeek (Gift Article) on the man who rocked Boulder: Deion Sanders Is Writing College Football’s New Playbook. 2Where the Turnpikes Are Paved With GoldGuys, the Justice Department is, like, totally weaponized... against criminals. "Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey." NYT (Gift Article): Menendez Accused of Brazen Bribery Plot, Taking Cash and Gold. "In exchange for all those actions, the indictment said, the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other valuable things." 3Class WarDoor window covers. Whiteboard safe rooms. Bullet-resistant windows that double as emergency exits. Auto-locking doors. Want to understand just how crazy America's gun problem is? Visit a school. Instead of changing gun laws, we're changing them. The American classroom is changing. 4Weekend WhatsWhat to Watch: You Are So Not Invited to My Bar Mitzvah on Netflix is like a throwback to the afterschool specials my proofer RD and I used to enjoy over a bowl of Apple Jacks. And I mean that in a good way. So pour everyone in the family a bowl of sugary cereal and check out this family flick that basically includes everyone in Adam Sandler's family. 5Extra, ExtraPurge Pricing: A recent study "used economic models to show that if grocery retailers used dynamic pricing to adjust prices for perishable foods based on how long they’ve been on the shelves, retailers would likely dramatically curb food waste." Surge pricing isn't the only part of dynamic pricing. Supermarket Food Waste Is a Big Problem. Is Dynamic Pricing the Solution? (When I was a kid, my friends and I used to frequent a place called the Day Old Bakery. It had Hostess Fruit Pies, Cupcakes, and Twinkies. It could have been called the Decade Old Bakery, and the products would still have tasted fresh.) 6Feel Good Friday"A two-year-old girl who walked away from her home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula alongside two family dogs was found in the woods hours later sleeping on the smaller dog like a furry pillow." (This one hits close to home as I use my two Beagles as armrests while typing NextDraft.) Get a copy of my 📕, Please Scream Inside Your Heart, or grab a 👕 in the Store. |