In February 2012, the campus stood on the verge of capturing a $60 million grant from the Simons Foundation to launch a theory of computing institute. Its competition, several elite East Coast private universities, equated the problems facing the campus with a death spiral. Why, they wanted to know, would the foundation consider giving such a large sum of money to a campus that in a decade would be a shadow of itself?

Having been posed the question, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau gulped as he sat across a table from the foundation’s decision-makers. Completely unprepared for such an assessment, he paused for a full 30 seconds before unleashing a 30-minute lecture on the ongoing vitality of UC Berkeley.

“I told them everything,” he said in an interview last week. “I told them about our public character, I told them about our comprehensive excellence, I told them about our financial aid strategy.”

UC Berkeley’s proposal, which drew from a variety of fields, including molecular and computational biology, and incorporated the star power of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, won the grant, beating out top-flight private universities like Harvard and MIT.

This triumph is emblematic of the excellence UC Berkeley has achieved under the leadership of Birgeneau, who is stepping down this summer. Worldwide rankings place it among the top universities on the globe, it has maintained its status as the premier public institution in the United States and its faculty members and students continue to win the most prestigious awards academia offers.

But the success has come at a cost, to both UC Berkeley itself and the University of California as a whole. For many, the path charted by Birgeneau through the state’s disinvestment has threatened the fabric of the UC system and alienated members of the campus community. To some, it has gone so far as to jeopardize the very idea of the public university.

Because of its stature, UC Berkeley has a unique ability among the UC schools to generate revenue through fundraising, private partnerships and nonresident tuition dollars. In a two-day strategic planning meeting shortly after he took office in 2004, Birgeneau decided to capitalize on this advantage in order to maintain what he calls the campus’s “comprehensive excellence.”

But this strategy — a mixture of increased lobbying for federal research grants, a drastically expanded private fundraising enterprise and a sharp increase in out-of-state students that yielded unprecedented nonstate revenue for the campus — favored UC Berkeley ahead of the rest of the system. By leveraging UC Berkeley’s brand, Birgeneau set the campus apart from the other nine UC campuses.

“(Fundraising) is campus-driven: You’re always counting on the allegiances and often the heartstrings of the donors,” said David Blinder, who spearheaded fundraising efforts as the campus’s associate vice chancellor of university relations and vice president of the UC Berkeley Foundation. “Their affiliations are to the campus rather than to the broad, amorphous thing that is the University of California.”

In the last fiscal year alone, the campus has raised $408 million through programs like the Campaign for Berkeley.

UC Berkeley’s prestige gives it a leg up on the fundraising competition, and Birgeneau has not shied from exploiting this advantage — a policy with which Birgeneau, who says he values the Master Plan’s multitiered structure, sees no problem.

“Ultimately, the responsibility of the UC Berkeley chancellor is to ensure that Berkeley continues to set the standard for public education nationally and internationally,” Birgeneau said. “My first responsibility is to ensure that … California has at least one public institution that is as good as the very best private institutions and sets the standard for the world.”

Birgeneau further articulated his vision of UC Berkeley’s primacy in a 2012 white paper he co-authored that called for many decision-making functions to be devolved from the central Office of the President to individual campuses. Although he said the proposal was not intended to give UC Berkeley or any other campus special status, it strained the unity of the 10-campus UC system. Among many controversial points, the paper’s proposal to create decision-making boards specific to each campus opened the door to differential tuition between campuses — a proposal that was shelved by the university’s 2010 Commission on the Future due to concerns it would irreparably destroy the system’s nine undergraduate campuses’ equal-footing relationship.

In addition to being a coalition of campuses, the UC system is also a coalition of undergraduate and graduate institutions. At UC Berkeley, the relationship between undergraduate and graduate programs has struggled — and in some cases, this relationship has been severed almost completely.

In the face of state disinvestment, graduate programs have ratcheted up tuition rates and subtly pivoted away from the campus. Combined living and tuition expenses at the UC Berkeley School of Law now top $72,000 for California residents, placing it in the neighborhood of its private peers. Meanwhile, graduate programs in the sciences have increasingly looked to sponsored projects as a way to obtain research money.

“All of the attention in access has tended be on undergraduate education,” said Judson King, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley.

In pursuit of financial security, the campus’s graduate programs have emulated the operations of their counterparts at schools like the University of Virginia. Virginia’s Darden School of Business, for example, has relied largely on tuition and fees to finance itself self-sufficiently for more than a decade.

“What a lot of places are doing is selectively quasi-privatizing certain schools, like law and graduate business schools,” said University of Virginia professor David Breneman, an expert in the economics and financing of higher education. “But they don’t like to talk — UVA doesn’t like to talk about anything but it being a public university — but we’re moving away from the meaning that it’s largely publicly financed.”

Instead, the reliance on student fees and donations has meant that graduate programs have come to look more like privately financed arms of a public university.

In order to demonstrate to donors that he was serious about maintaining UC Berkeley’s comprehensive excellence, Birgeneau fully committed the campus to his alternative funding push.

“First and foremost, it was important for our constituents to have the confidence that nobody was going to be retreating from Berkeley’s standards,” said Blinder, who left the campus for a similar position at The Scripps Research Institute this year.

But the focus on money created an atmosphere in which Birgeneau spent so much time away from UC Berkeley pursuing additional revenue that students and faculty members alike came to see him as aloof from the needs of the campus community. The tension came to a head during Birgeneau’s controversial handling of the November 2011 Occupy protests — an episode he said he regrets — when many in the faculty called for a no-confidence vote in his leadership.

Other policies also created conflict on campus. Operational Excellence, a cost-saving initiative that Blinder credited with demonstrating the campus’s commitment to financial efficiency to donors, often became a target for its layoffs that campus workers perceived disproportionately affected nonsenior management roles.

Increased admission rates of nonresident students became an equally frequent focus of campus dialogue. During protests, activists decried the immediate effects of the out-of-state influx while analysts considered the policy myopic. A recent paper co-authored by professors Bradley Curs of the University of Missouri and Ozan Jaquette of the University of Arizona found that increased enrollment of nonresidents at public research universities, including UC Berkeley, has limited socioeconomic and ethnic diversity.

“It undermines the university’s long-term case that it is a public university and needs public support,” said Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, who called the pursuit of nonresident students “expedient revenue-hunting.” “These things represent short-term solutions to long-term systemic problems that need to be worked through.”

All these policies and decisions, and the reactions to them, are manifestations of the fundamental tension that underlies Birgeneau’s term as chancellor. His nine years in California Hall have been at some level a prolonged dialogue on what it means to be a public university.

On the one hand, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education founded the UC system on the public ideal, according to which the population of the state invested in the education of its younger generations. This is the ideal that many faculty members and students aspire to and the principle that has guided the movement against state disinvestment of the past four years.

But as the state disinvested from the UC system regardless and UC Berkeley began raising money from other sources, Birgeneau has sought to maintain what he calls the “public character” of the university.

“Saying it’s a public university means it is available and accessible to all residents of the state depending only on their having the academic qualifications for admission,” King said. “The idea of public education is that it is available without regard to personal or family (financial) resources.”

By this metric, Birgeneau claims to have preserved public character. Although middle-income enrollment has decreased 9 percentage points from 2000 to 2010, 38 percent of UC Berkeley’s student body receives Pell Grants, and in December 2011, the campus implemented the Middle Class Access Plan, which caps parent contribution toward undergraduate education for students with family incomes of between $80,000 to $140,000.

Birgeneau’s appointment in January as the leader of the Lincoln Project — a three-year initiative organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences aimed at defining the future of public higher education — affords him a platform from which he can continue exploring higher education reform, this time on a national level. Though his methods have at times been controversial, his peers in public higher education refer to the successes of the campus during his tenure as the “Berkeley Miracle.”

Endorsing his work at UC Berkeley, the academy wrote in a press release announcing the move that Birgeneau “has launched initiatives at UC Berkeley that are the models for public colleges and universities elsewhere.”

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo and Curan Mehra at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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I wrote these words on Monday while watching the news of the Boston Marathon bombing unfold. As the headlines grew from “Explosion at Boston Marathon” to “Two Bombs Explode at Boston Marathon” to “Two Dead from Bombing at Boston Marathon,” I found myself lost in those awkward speculations. It was the only place I could occupy, because I am geographically as far removed from home as those hypotheticals are from reality.

I should clarify: I do not call Boston home. I grew up in northern New England, a two-and-a-half hour drive up three of the four interstates that exist north of Massachusetts. But for many of us up there, we take the Hub as our own. The Red Sox are referred to as “we,” as in, “We lost yesterday,” or “Why on Earth did we trade for Joel Hanrahan, he lost us the game yesterday.” The same goes for the Patriots, although we prefer not to say “we” when we let Wes Welker walk to Denver. Then we say “they.”

All of us have spent time in Boston, often because of sports. I have been going to Red Sox games since I was 7. I remember that August night like it was yesterday: After a long rain delay, my dad and I moved down to seats just behind the Sox dugout, where we listened to Flash Gordon’s pitches crackle through the freshly washed air and watched Nomar’s 10th-inning walk-off wink into the night behind the Green Monster’s klieg lights. I’m not the only one who has a story like that.

Those sports memories, though, aren’t the only things pulling us back to Boston. We all have friends or family who live and work in the city. So when we hear about something like the bombing, it wrenches us out of whatever far-flung location we happen to find ourselves in and puts us in this limbo where we desperately want to be there but simply cannot.

We begin to check in with those people. Facebook mercifully updates us that our friends are safe. Texts trickle in, although sometimes they make you queasy as they comfort. My childhood friend, who works in Boston and was enjoying the Patriots Day revelry, texted me, “We’re all good down here. I was within a couple blocks when it happened, but got home okay.”

The time between the announcement of deaths and the announcement of the names of the dead is the worst. Even though we know there is a minuscule chance that a friend might be among the three, I, at least, constantly checked updates until I knew everyone I know was safe. This breeds a strange, irreconcilable emotion though: I feel an intense sadness upon reading those names but also the guilt of having heaved a small sigh of relief when I did not recognize any of them.

But the best part of this is that no one has a monopoly on the feelings that accompany a tragedy like this. I feel one degree removed from the bombing because I am 3,000 miles away. Someone who is 3,000 miles away and doesn’t know anyone there might feel two.

But the emotion that pours out of that other person is no less intense or less valid than the feelings I feel. Reading the messages of support from my two worlds displaced a little of that afternoon’s pervasive sadness. Despite the day’s events, I could not help but smile as I watched the East and West coasts converge to rally behind our city.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @jordan_bl.

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The same goes for American broadcasters. They may walk the walk, but they will never talk the talk. Joe Buck somehow has a following, and the lovers of March Madness claim the supremacy of Gus Johnson, with his passionate bellowings about the great buzzer beaters of the tourney. But neither of these men are fit to hold a microphone for the greatest announcer of them all, the inimitable, bombastic Ray Hudson.

Ray Hudson — man, myth, legend — was born in Gateshead, England, and played for Newcastle United. He has been calling soccer games for almost a decade now. In his nine years in the booth, he has developed a talent for equaling even the most beautiful of the beautiful game’s moments with his grandiose descriptions. This might sound like a bad thing — Shouldn’t a commentator should enhance a game, not overshadow it? — but trust me: Ray Hudson only makes your viewing experience more enjoyable.

BeIN Sport is Ray’s current home, where he gets to call each league game played by his favorite team to watch, Barcelona. (He once declared of the Blaugrana, “If there was no Barcelona, why would you get out of bed in the morning?) He also gets to spend his days ogling Lionel Messi, the runaway best player in the world and Hudson’s undisputed man crush. (Ray on Messi’s play: “He could make an onion cry,” and “They should name a constellation in the heavens after Lionel Messi.”)

Ray drops a dozen pearls every ninety minutes. They range from hilarious to bizarrely hilarious to uncut genius and have inspired such scrutiny and curiosity that one soccer radio show has a recurring segment called, “What Were You Thinking, Ray Hudson?”

Hilarious: “Victor again does his impersonation of the Exxon and spills it.”

Bizarrely hilarious: “Real Madrid’s defense stretched out like spandex on Miami beach and Casillas is left naked!”

Uncut genius: “He’s braver than a matador in high heels and a pink tutu!”

He’s so great that there’s a Twitter feed that live tweets his games and a tumblr devoted to his poetry.

For those depressed by the dour Buck calling your baseball games, switch over to the excitable and occasionally incoherent Hudson, who sometimes sounds like he downed a dozen Red Bulls before the game. After one particularly loud yelp in 2011, he apologized to his audience, saying, “Excuse me for being excited people, but we’ve just witnessed a goal that would wake up a catatonic!”

Ray is something of a renaissance man, equating particularly fine plays with the sculptures of Bernini and breaking down the mass-energy equivalence for football fans — “E equals mc squared, and M stands for Messi!”

Most importantly, Ray is a man of sports, and sports alone. The only thing he hates more than the celebrity shots TV cameras take during games is when his co-commentator Phil Schoen starts talking about the celebrities himself. Once, Phil dared to bring up Tom Cruise during a Real Madrid game, prompting an epic, populist outburst from Ray: “Will you stop talking about tennis players and stupid Hollywood actors Phil! It’s the gladiators out there, man! Not tennis players. Tom Cruise… If he smelled a soccer jockstrap he’d faint dead away.”

Fox Soccer, please hire him to do the World Cup.

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This comes as a surprise to no one, except perhaps the campus’ braintrust that devised the scheme in the first place. Going forward, they still contend that, with some tweaks, ticket sales will pick up and pay for the majority of the project. But looking at the numbers — as of Dec. 31, the campus has received pledges for only $151.3 million worth of seats and collected just $43 million— it is hard to be as optimistic. And from a student’s perspective, it is a downright frightening position to be in when I consider how UC administrators have wriggled their way out of other holes they themselves have dug.

Take, for example, the $60 tuition surcharge the UC Board of Regents will likely renew on Thursday. That money does not go to student services or faculty salaries. It pays the damages stemming from a lawsuit brought after an epic UC screwup. Students are now paying out of pocket for mistakes made by university administrators a decade ago.

Or consider the proposed solutions to the university’s current Student Health Insurance Program quagmire. Over the past few years, the UC Office of the President coerced the university’s campuses to join the program, promising lower rates and increased stability for all parties. Instead, through some staggeringly bungled accounting and planning, the fund now has a $57 million deficit. Dramatically raising student payments into the plan is being considered as a possible fix.

Or just look at the years of consistent tuition increases, one of which was expressly committed to paying for employee pensions. This problem arose because UC administrators, in concert with state leaders, decided to stop paying into the UC’s pension plan in 1990. Two decades later, students are left to pick up the pieces.

On campus, the majority of another capital project is already funded by students. Of the $223 million required to reconstruct Lower Sproul Plaza, students must pony up $124 million. Apparently, students at public universities are now expected to pay for their facilities themselves.

This is all not to suggest that the Memorial Stadium situation mirrors these other instances outlined above. But parallels between them exist — namely, administrators’ overestimations, outright mistakes and stated plans have led to students funding more of a public university’s operations than they should. So when we consider the current Memorial Stadium mire, is it really that hard to imagine that 10 or 20 years down the road students will pick up the tab?

The campus will immediately come out and say this will never happen. And it likely will not for many years. But this administration’s own record allows for this possibility. Not only has it already shown a willingness to allow students to fund capital projects, but it has also already used student fees to fund athletic department expenditures.

So as the Endowment Seating Program sputters along over the next decade, continually missing its fundraising targets along the way, pay attention to where the administration is looking for money. It might have its eye on your wallet.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @jordan_bl.

The post The Lombardo Trophy: Are students Memorial Stadium’s eventual saviors? appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In fact, no one saw the most important dunk of Saturday’s game. That’s because it didn’t occur during the game. It happened well before tipoff, when the Beavers were warming up.

When Oregon State was practicing its layups — you know, that drill that every team from the NBA to elementary school does where one line shoots and the other line rebounds — freshman forward Olaf Schaftenaar dared to dunk. The referees promptly hit Schaftenaar, a Dutchman making his first career start for the Beavers, with a technical foul, giving the Bears two shots from the charity stripe to start the game. Allen Crabbe made one of the free throws — the final margin of Cal’s 60-59 victory.

According to the NCAA rulebook’s Section 6, Article 1, Subsection e, a player “dunking or attempting to dunk a dead ball before or during the game, or during any intermission” shall be assessed a technical foul. Disregarding the vagueness of the language — are balls used for practice drills dead balls? I wouldn’t have thought the ball came alive until the game started — this is monumentally stupid. Dunking is part of the game of basketball. Warming up before the game is supposed to prepare you for playing basketball. So if players can’t practice dunking, then they can’t practice all aspects of the game they are about to play.

This is like an umpire preemptively calling a batter out for hitting a home run during batting practice or a judge assessing a golfer penalty strokes for drilling a hole-in-one during a practice round. Notice that neither of those are currently part of the NCAA’s rulebook.

Imagine the scene: You are a freshman international student who left home just a few months ago to travel more than 5,000 miles to play the sport you love. Filled with adrenaline after getting the nod for your very first start, you do what all athletes wish they could do: dunk the basketball. You do it, and two hours later, you realize that you may have cost your team the game. In an organization full of bizarre and baffling rules, this just might be the silliest.

Before closing, a quick note to the NCAA about its rulebook: It stipulates (in Section 4, Article 1) that for men’s games, at least one referee must be on the floor 30 minutes before the game starts. For women’s games, at least one official must be on the floor only 15 minutes before tipoff. Why the discrepancy? Women only need half as much supervision as men? I would love to see Brittany Griner throw one down 20 minutes before gametime and get away with it while Olaf stews.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @jordan_bl.

The post The Lombardo Trophy: NCAA should reverse slam dunk rule appeared first on The Daily Californian.

For those of you living under a rock — and even then, I doubt you cave dwellers have not heard about this; I am sure ESPN, Grantland, Deadspin and the rest have at least a few subterranean channels — Cal coach Mike Montgomery gave a two-handed push to the chest of star guard Allen Crabbe during the low point of Cal’s game against USC on Sunday. It wasn’t a particularly vicious heave ho; Crabbe fell backward just a shade.

That it went viral nationally is no surprise. A coach should never lay a hand on his players, period, and he should be held accountable for his actions. (Personally, I favor something along the lines of a fine. It’s harsher than the reprimands issued by Cal and the Pac-12 but takes into account the remorse Montgomery has shown in the days after the incident.)

The sports media is right to highlight these incidents. It is also right to condemn Montgomery’s actions. If proper scrutiny is applied to situations such as these, they will decrease in frequency.

But there is one voice among these that does not belong. On Monday, state Sen. Leland Yee, whose only direct relationship to the incident is being a Cal alum, called for Cal administrators to suspend Montgomery. Not only that, but Yee — who worked as a psychologist prior to his election — did it with a level of sanctimony achievable only by politicians: “As a psychologist, I can assure the university and Coach Montgomery that physically pushing a student-athlete does nothing to motivate them.”

Yee’s intentions may be honorable, but let’s face it: No one gives a flying fruit bat if he’s got a degree in psychology. Armchair diagnosing the situation does nothing but diminish his voice to a petty whine (which is unfortunate, because beneath the shrill self-righteousness, he does raise an important point about the double standard the university is applying to Montgomery). Regardless, Yee has styled himself a crusader for the people and intends to hold the university accountable.

So Yee has continued to splash his words across social media and local media outlets four days after the incident, disregarding all the while that no one has been looking to him for guidance. The vehemence and style with which he pushed his message reeks of camera-grabbing. Who’s running for Secretary of State again?

Yee clearly considers the university account­able to him. (In an interview Wednesday, his Chief of Staff Adam Keigwin said, “Anything that tarnishes (the) legacy of the UC he wants to clean up… (The Cal athletics teams) are accountable to the Legislature, they are accountable to the taxpayers, they are accountable to the students.” I also remember quite vividly an interview I conducted with him almost two years ago in which he declared that the Legislature, as “the voice of the people,” can ask whatever it wants of the university whether it is given “one penny or a billion dollars.”)

But if this is true, then perhaps he has forgotten the flip side of that relationship: He is also accountable to me, a student of this university.

I count on him to fight for an appropriate level of funding for UC Berkeley and the rest of the UC campuses. That has not happened, despite his best efforts. So I, for one, would much prefer it if he channeled all his energy into the job tax dollars pay him to do rather than spouting pablum no one cares to hear.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org.

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But on Feb. 4, the university and Tedford settled the remaining three years of his contract. The maximum amount the university can now owe Tedford is $5.55 million — not pocket change, for sure, but around Cal every $1.35 million counts.

On the surface, the settlement looks like a good move. Decreasing Cal’s maximum liability by almost $1.5 million seems like smart business. But because of other terms included in the settlement, it is possible that the university could end up paying Tedford more under the settlement than it would have under his original contract.

Tedford’s original contract stipulated that, should he be fired and subsequently find employment as either a college head coach or a NFL head or assistant coach, the university would decrease its payout to Tedford by the total amount he earns at his new job. But under the settlement, this term has changed. Now, the university will only be able to reduce its payment to Tedford if he earns more than $1.5 million annually at his new job, and it will only be able to reduce its payments by $150,000 plus half of the amount he earns over that $1.5 million — in short, far less than the university would have been able to reduce its payments under the original contract.

The university is gambling twice in this settlement. First, it is hedging that Tedford will not be able to find a job as an NFL head or assistant coach or as a head coach at another college in the next three years (the only way it can reduce its payments to Tedford). Given the way that Tedford’s career ended here, that’s not entirely unreasonable. If this pays off, the university will save $1.35 million from what it previously owed him.

That being said, Tedford isn’t exactly unemployable. While a NFL head coaching gig is almost certainly out of the picture, it’s not hard to imagine a lesser college team or an NFL team hiring a guy who at Cal won 82 games and two Pac-10 Coach of the Year awards and as Oregon’s offensive coordinator engineered a high-powered Ducks offense that won 38 games in four seasons. If Tedford does find a job like that, the university could end up paying out significantly more money than if it had not settled.

Second, the university is basically betting that, if he is to land one of those jobs, Tedford will not earn that $1.35 million over the next three years. But if he lands a gig as an NFL assistant, who can sometimes earn over $1 million, or a college head coach — the average college head coach earned $1.64 million in 2012, according to USA Today — there’s not a chance he won’t earn less than that. Bobby Petrino, who was as disgraced as coaches come just 10 months ago and has won 10 fewer games than Tedford as a college coach, now earns $850,000 as the head coach of Western Kentucky, a mediocre team from the Sun Belt conference. Tedford right now measures up favorably to Petrino, so there’s no reason to think he shouldn’t be able to earn something comparable.

In sum, the new terms included in the settlement could hurt the university not once but twice. Not only would the university not be able to decrease its payments by the total amount of Tedford’s new contract, but it might not be able to reduce its payments at all if that contract is worth less than $1.5 million. Given what other coaches earn, it’s possible that the university will end up paying more money to Tedford under the settlement than it would have under his original contract.

To give a concrete hypothetical: Tedford is hired tomorrow as the University of Tennessee’s head coach at a salary of $2 million per year. Under the old contract, the university would owe Tedford only $900,000 (the $6.9 million originally owed to him minus the money he earns at Tennessee). Under the new contract, the university would owe him $4.65 million (the $5.55 million now owed to him minus $750,000 — the three year total of half the difference between his salary and the $1.5 million threshold — and the extra $150,000). This is unlikely, but it illustrates the gamble Cal is making here.

The post The Lombardo Trophy: Gambling with a settlement appeared first on The Daily Californian.

But Crabbe and Co. should hold off putting on their dancing shoes just yet. While the two victories certainly won’t keep Cal from competing in the tournament, so doubtful was Cal’s participation a week ago that they don’t come anywhere close to ensuring it — even the win over a top-10 team.

Neither Sports Illustrated nor ESPN have included Cal in their bracket projections, including the play-in games. ESPN didn’t even include the Bears in its bubble watch column. SI did, but given the grudging tone — “OK, fine. We’ll add the Golden Bears.” — you wonder if Mike Montgomery hadn’t broken into SI’s offices and waved bamboo shoots in the author’s direction.

Cal’s RPI seems to put it right on the cusp. The NCAA’s Feb. 4 RPI rankings put the Bears at No. 70, the eighth-highest ranked team in the Pac-12. It sits just behind a glut of their conference foes: Arizona St. (No. 63), Stanford (No. 67), and Washington (No. 69). Cal already lost to Washington but games remain against both Arizona St. and Stanford (to which Cal also lost earlier in the season). If Cal wins these games, plus the rest of its conference slate against lower-ranked teams, it might stand a chance of leapfrogging two or maybe all of that group.

Even if Cal does that, it would still stand as the fifth or sixth ranked team in the conference. Given the Pac-12’s middling status this year, that might not be enough. The Pac-12 is currently the sixth-ranked conference in the country by RPI; each of the last three years, the conference ranked sixth by RPI (The ACC last year, the SEC for the 2010-11 season, and the Big Ten for the 2009-10 season) has earned five NCAA tournament bids. To be assured one of those slots, realistically Cal needs to also upset two or three of its higher-ranked conference opponents (Arizona away, UCLA at home, Oregon away, and Colorado at home).

Other advanced metrics systems confirm Cal’s mediocre standing compared to its Pac-12 brethren. By Basketball Reference’s Simple Rating System, Cal is the sixth-best team in the league. Same by Pomeroy’s pythagorean rankings. This fact, combined with the overwhelmingly negative eye-test assessments Cal is receiving from the major bracket watch pundits, definitely leaves Cal looking in from the outside at the NCAA tournament.

Compounding this is the Bear’s dismal out-of-conference performance. Cal played four marquee non-conference games — Wisconsin (RPI No. 41) away, UNLV (No. 19) at home, Creighton (No. 28) at home, and Harvard (No. 87) at home — and lost them all. Of those losses, the Harvard one hurts Cal the most. Not only will Harvard’s poor rankings drag the Bears down further, the defeat also came against a team that has become an East Coast media darling over the last few years, which will increase the loss’ weight in the NCAA selection committee’s mind. Overall, the perception that the Bears can’t win outside the relatively weak Pac-12 will greatly hurt Cal’s chances.

It all adds up to whether Cal can earn enough wins down the stretch to counterbalance its poor performance so far this season. Of the nine left, Cal will need to take at least seven, if not eight, of them. That includes victories over at least two of Arizona, Oregon, UCLA, and Colorado. Easier said than done.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org.

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In reality, though, the practices outlined by the 1999 act had been the norm for years; financial institutions openly flouted Glass-Steagall’s rules and rarely, if ever, faced repercussions. Upon the 1999 act’s passage, Sen. Phil Gramm underscored the need to change existing law because “it made about as much sense to continue to impose (it) on people as it did to ask a man to wear the same clothes he did when he was a child.”

Fast forward 14 years, and change the government to the NCAA. On Jan. 19, its Board of Directors “streamlined” its rulebook for recruiting. Among the changes: the elimination of restrictions on methods of communication with recruits, the elimination of restrictions on sending printed materials to recruits and the removal of the limit on the number of coaches who can recruit off campus at any one time.

The changes codify recruiting transgressions the NCAA currently only halfheartedly attempts to police; allegations of impropriety are rampant, yet it penalizes only a fraction of the accused. When announcing the changes, NCAA President Mark Emmert declared, “These new rules represent noteworthy progress toward what can only be described as more common sense rules that allow schools more discretion in decision-making.”

Here, the NCAA, much like the U.S. government in the late ’90s and early 2000s, has decided that it is much easier to change laws than to enforce them. And much as the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to a bonanza for the banks, so too will college coaches reap the benefits of unfettered access to the rich field of recruits. Both decisions invoked common sense. But who exactly is this common sense designed to benefit? Those in power or those who will be subject to the advances of the until-recently restrained powers?

It doesn’t take tarot cards to see who comes out on top in this. Millions of U.S. citizens placed their trust in the newly formed megabanks like Citigroup and Bank of America but were ultimately betrayed.

Colleges, of course, can’t destroy personal savings in the same way as a bank. But let’s not forget that universities offer a similar fundamental promise. Invest in us, they say, and we’ll give you something better in a couple years.

So college coaches and their support staffs will now be able to prey indiscriminately on every high school kid with half a chance of making their roster. Top recruits will receive literally hundreds of text and Facebook messages every week. No one disputes that this will lead to chaos — except, of course, the clods at the NCAA, who probably think “A Modest Proposal” was a serious plan. Which might actually be true, because this rule change will consume more than a few teenagers.

College athletics administrations have been skating around the edges of the rules of the current system for years. It won’t take recruiters long to start pushing the boundaries yet again. So the real question becomes not, “How will this play out?” but, “How long will it take for things to fall apart?” Which presents another lesson the NCAA could learn from the financial sector’s collapse: The U.S. government has spent recent years restrengthening the laws it once neglected to enforce. Why would the NCAA want to go through that process when it could simply administer its rules from the beginning?

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org.

The post The Lombardo Trophy: Deconstructing the NCAA’s “common sense” appeared first on The Daily Californian.

My second experience came in my junior year of high school with the father of one of my oldest childhood friends. Shoveling frozen dirt onto his coffin wasn’t the hardest part of the day we buried him. It was watching my friend’s blank, bewildered face as he said that he didn’t know how he would dress up anymore because his father had always tied his tie.

My third experience came just before finals during freshman year, when my dad and mom explained why one of my old high school teachers had stopped writing. It was strange, because his letters, full as they were of his jokes, knowledge and challenges — “The brilliant mind must constantly be honed to the finest edge,” he once told me, equal parts earnest and serious, and he always did his part — never lost their edge, right up to the end. I didn’t come to terms with it until two months later at a campsite in South Africa, where I cried when my dad told me sometimes we just don’t know why.

My fourth experience with suicide did not involve a mentor, a friend or even an acquaintance. Because I did not know he existed before his death on May 8, 2012, Henry Treadway falling from a Unit 2 residence hall window should not have affected me the way it did. Yet it felt like a physical blow. His apparent suicide ripped the scar tissue off the two-year-old tragedy of my teacher.

I learned that suicide rocks me like no other form of passing. That someone deemed himself unworthy of the world in which we live cuts in an intensely personal way. When it is a friend, it hurts exponentially more. But degrees of separation do not diminish the pain entirely. Each occurrence of suicide, however distant, brings the emotions I felt those first times straight to the surface.

One, of course, is grief. Death saddens, except when appropriate. Suicide is never appropriate.

Another is anger. Suicide is a selfish act. It is undertaken for the satisfaction of the self, at complete disregard for others. Those others, the family and friends, colleagues and community members, are left with nothing but a body to bury and a complete absence of joy, as if it were all interred along with the corpse. Only guilt remains.

The guilt overwhelms and suffocates. When my high school teacher died, I constantly ran through what I could have done to keep him alive. A phone call. Another letter. Perhaps a national team jersey, like the one he gave me for my trip to the World Cup. I ran through the same list six months after his death when I spoke at his remembrance. This train of thought, and the guilt accompanying it, resurfaces every time I hear about a suicide; hence the intensity of my reaction to Treadway’s death. I know now that I will never achieve closure. A friend telling you that he no longer wants to be around is a wound from which you never recover.

Macabre and emotional as this may be, it is important to delineate openly and unsparingly so that we can adequately address the suicide that occurred just one month ago. Or, should I say, suicide hoax. Or, should I say — who knows?

On the evening of Dec. 3, whispers floated of another UC Berkeley suicide, this time by the moderator of the UC Berkeley Compliments Facebook page. I felt the same way I did after Treadway’s death. Apparently, and to their credit, others did as well: An outpouring of support occurred online, and the ASUC quickly arranged a memorial service. It seemed our community would deal with it as well as we dealt with Treadway’s death.

But suddenly, organizers canceled the memorial. The Daily Cal could not confirm the suicide. The campus could not. Nor could the ASUC. An anonymous poster on the UC Berkeley Compliments page — one can only assume a friend of the allegedly dead girl — adopted a defiant and defensive tone to defend the privacy of said girl. Then everyone left for winter break, and the entire subject has since disappeared from campus dialogue.

This must change. Something so traumatic cannot exist in perpetuity under this fog. If it is a hoax, let it be named as such. If it is not, then let us know what happened so that we may celebrate her life properly. This is not a call for public humiliation, either way, but for closure — a closure, as I have learned already, that will never be complete.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org.

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