It's been a boring week, so let's make fun of a writer at Oregon State! Why? Because we can! And let's do it Fire Joe style.
This little number was written by a Jenna Santelli, a sports writer for Oregon State's newspaper, the Daily Barometer. Take it away, Jenna!
This proposed stadium is going to have it all: a state-of-the-art video board, picnic tables, and between 4,000-5,000 seats. It is also going to have nice locker rooms for both home and away teams.
Oh no! How dare our beloved university build a better stadium? If only we knew it would hurt the feelings of the poor abused Oregon State fans. Just when they thought they had something to be proud of. I guess no one told the University of Oregon that you had to become successful before you built a nice stadium.
To take a quote from the press release, "The hiring of two-time National Coach of the Year and 2004 College World Series manager George Horton provided immediate credibility and demonstrated the school's aspirations to field a national-caliber program from the outset."
This begins a theme constant through the article: talking about a topic of no relation to the point of the article. But let's look at the bias: "Two-time National Coach of the year." That phrase is bound to upset any Beaver fan.
But in all seriousness, you have to be very biased or stupid to ignore the fact that the above statement is 100% true. Let's go step by step so that Jenna and OSU fans can keep up.
- Oregon begins a new baseball program. Program does not have any credibility.
- Oregon hires one of the top coaches in the country.
- Oregon, through the spending of a large amount of money and an influx of coaching ability, instantly becomes "credible" (which also means "believable"--credible might be too big a word) as a program. This also demonstrated the "school's aspirations."
Um, yes. If you remove "swinging the swing" from that sentence, you could apply it to almost any situation in life.
How does this relate to a stadium? Oh yeah, it doesn't at all.
The first cogent thought of the article. And I agree. Two stellar teams will be great for the state of Oregon.
You would expect a guarantee like that to be backed up with facts, especially when published for all to read (and mock). However, you would be wrong.
I personally think LSU's proposal gives fans, players and the athletic department much more bang for its buck. For one, LSU has a well-established baseball program. Even when Oregon did have a baseball program before cutting it in 1981, they never had a program like LSU's.
While Oregon will offer all new state-of-the-art stadiums, it doesn't have two national championships under its belt like Oregon State does, nor does it have the best coach in college baseball. All Oregon will have is one costly stadium, some good recruits for the 2009 season and a costly coach.
Besides the fact that the last three paragraphs had no point, let me point out the obvious. Prepare yourself to be astounded by this truth...
Are you ready?
Oregon is not LSU.
Reading all this makes me feel like I have the flu again. My body feels achy, my head is pounding and I feel sick to my stomach. I feel there should some kind of spending cap like there is for the NBA, NFL and MLB.
Here's a question: if Oregon has the donors and money, why shouldn't they build the stadium they want? This article is so bad that it doesn't even mention the actual reasons that the basketball arena shouldn't be built. U of O has given enough reasons for you to dislike the building of the arena, but at this point, you sound like a bitter 5 year old that didn't get its way.
And as for a spending cap, someone should tell that to the Dallas Cowboys, who are spending $1 billion on their new stadium. The fact is, spending caps are set on a per stadium basis when the spending is done in government dollars. Oregon will most likely be using state-backed bonds, which will be paid back in full. If Oregon were using public funding to build the stadium, the state/county/city would set a spending limit. That is not the case.
At this point, I assume Jenna ran out of actual material on baseball, and instead decided to remind everyone that Oregon State is going winless this year in the Pac-10.
What an astute observation. What would we do without bitter OSU students pointing this out to us? And despite the obvious fact that "money doesn't buy success," it should not shock anyone that the most successful athletic programs have the largest budgets.
And to you, Jenna, please work on your writing skills. Good luck with that.
Let's run through that sequence again, shall we?
- Oregon is building a new stadium.
- Oregon is already talking up their team, those bastards.
- But Oregon State has won 2 national titles! And last year they beat Oregon's new coach in the CWS.
- And LSU is better than Oregon too!
- Those hippies from Eugene are building a new basketball stadium too, with all the money they have. I feel sick, because Oregon has money and spends it.
- Sure, the Ducks spend money, but do they win? Not every year.
- Have fun paying for stuff, wins matter.