Tom Quinlin

Proud daddy of 3, proud husband of 1. ND Class of '02 - Go Irish!

[Sports Patriot @SportsPatriotUS]

I’m going to say this as calmly as possible:

Watching Caitlin Clark in the WNBA has become genuinely hard to stomach.

Not because she struggles sometimes. Not because she makes mistakes. Not because she gets criticized. That comes with being great.

It’s hard to stomach because it has become obvious that the league, the officials, the media, the players, and even her own organization have all decided that the most important thing is not letting Caitlin Clark become too big.

And that is insane.

This league was handed the most marketable, electric, revenue-generating player women’s basketball has ever seen, and instead of building around the moment, too many people seem obsessed with humbling her.

She gets fouled. Held. Hit. Cheap-shotted. Mocked. Targeted. Then when she reacts like a normal competitor, suddenly everyone wants to analyze her attitude.

No.

Her attitude is not the story.

The story is that a generational player is being treated like a problem by the very league she helped drag into mainstream relevance.

This reminds me of the worst kind of youth coach... the one who sees a special player, feels threatened by her talent, and slowly drains the joy out of her in the name of “teaching humility.”

That is what this looks like.

The freedom she played with at Iowa is disappearing. The fire is still there, but the joy looks damaged. The confidence looks weighed down. She looks like someone constantly fighting the refs, opponents, narratives, coaching decisions, jealousy, and a league culture that should be protecting its golden opportunity instead of resenting it.

And let’s be honest: Stephanie White has not helped.

Benching Caitlin Clark randomly when she is controlling the game tempo, or having your best shooter off the floor in critical game ending minutes when a victory is within reach is basketball malpractice. Limiting her rhythm, downplaying her greatness, benching momentum, and treating her like just another piece instead of the engine is absurd.

You do not take a player who changed the economics of your sport and manage her like you’re afraid her greatness might offend the room.

Nike deserves criticism too. Other players get signature shoes rolled out with urgency, while the biggest draw in women’s basketball is somehow still waiting on that signature shoe. That is not confusing. That is revealing.

Fans are not stupid.

They see the fouls.
They see the double standards.
They see the jealousy.
They see the media resentment.
They see the league benefiting from her popularity while refusing to fully embrace her.
And here is the part the WNBA better understand quickly:
People are not tuning in to watch Caitlin Clark be humbled.
They are tuning in to watch Caitlin Clark be great.
If she walked away tomorrow, the fans would follow her. The sponsors would follow her. The energy would follow her. The high salaries and the charter jets would follow her. And the league would be forced to confront the uncomfortable truth it keeps trying to avoid:

Caitlin Clark did not need the WNBA nearly as much as the WNBA needed Caitlin Clark.

At some point, her family, her agent, and her team need to ask a hard question:

How much longer do you let a league profit from her while allowing the culture around her to beat the spirit out of her?

Because from the outside looking in, this does not look like normal adversity anymore. It looks like abuse.

It looks like a league trying to break the very player who made millions of people care.

https://t.co/AAxFrO46Z4

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@Dook_Johnson @Kenlovehoops @Moses1277 Yeah I’ve seen cheap shots and flops … ENTIRELY BY A TEAM WEARING BLUE

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@Dook_Johnson @Kenlovehoops @Moses1277 Have you even watched the games though?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

How it is supposed to be

[JD Flynn @jdflynn]

buddy, I was writing 10 page papers without having read the book.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@CFBGuy999 1998 Michigan or the 2005 USC Bush Push (except of course the ending)

[Based Bandita @BasedBandita]

I’ve been going to the same local coffee shop we have here every morning since I was 16. They have by far some of the best coffee. I’ve been going there since I was 16. I’ve watched it change hands 3X now, and the 3rd owner turns out to be a hardcore leftist.

And I know that because nobody on the right has stickers on their cars and in their stores that say, “I prefer ICE in my coffee!” In addition, he hired only rainbow mafia employees and has a “trans daughter.”

The owner and I converse every morning. It’s always nice, pleasant conversation and has been that way for 2.5+ years.

I just now thought about something. Myself KNOWING this, I still set it aside and support his business, and mind my own. However, if he and his employees EVER found out I am a Trump supporter, they’d likely spit in my coffee, vandalize my car, and tell me to never come back to their coffee shop again.

This is why when we say, “we are not the same,” we mean it. We are not the same. And I know there are many of you out there in this exact position.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Everyone should unequivocally condemn the government-imposed racial discrimination Obama is pushing!

Obama makes three errors in one post, all of them philosophical.

First, the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The purpose of the Constitution is to protect individual rights from the majority, not to ensure "equal participation in our democracy." The Founders designed the system specifically to prevent what Obama is demanding: unlimited majority rule.

Second, "protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach" sounds correct until you examine the premise. Rights belong to individuals, not groups. The moment you define rights by racial group membership, you have adopted the same collectivist framework that produced the discrimination you claim to oppose. Jim Crow categorized people by race and assigned rights accordingly. Modern voting rights activism does the same thing with different beneficiaries. Both are collectivism.

Third, gerrymandering is a problem created entirely by the system Obama wants to preserve: a political structure where the drawing of district lines determines outcomes. His solution is not to fix the structure. It is to ensure his side draws the lines.

The government must treat every citizen equally before the law. Everyone should reject Obama's framing entirely. He is not defending individual rights.

He is defending group power, while using the language of rights to make collectivism sound like liberty.

[Dakota Buchmann @buchmannDak]

I was curious where our tax dollars go so I went to the official treasury webpage to see. Let’s assume that the average tax payer in America makes about $60,000 annually, and pays about $9,500 in Federal Income Tax. Actual values will vary, this assumes you are filing single and have no deductions. Lets assume you are the average taxpayer

That means 15.8% of your income goes to the government. If you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week; About 6 and a half are used to pay taxes. That is almost a full workday per week, just for taxes. If you work 48 weeks a year, you work about 38 days just to pay your taxes. If you were to put aside all your money for taxes, starting January 1st, you would not pocket any money until end of February beginning of March

Social Security and Income Security make a combined 32% of Federal Spending. That’s $3,040 a year spent paying the unemployed and going into the pit that is social security. Or about 13 days of hard work. Medicare and ‘Health’ make a combined 28% of Federal Spending. Thats $2,660 that the average taxpayer spends on someone else’s ‘health insurance’ every year. That would be 11 days of hard work. Net Interest makes up 14% of Federal Spending. That is $1,330 that you pay to help pay off the governments debt every year. That is about 6 days of hard work.

At least 74% of your taxes or about $7,040 are spent on other people or paying off the governments debt who have done nothing to earn this money. The only exception is social security, partially, you will maybe get it back. You have to live to that age and can’t really give it to anyone if you die before that.

Keep in mind, the Boston Tea Party was over about a 6% tax.

(where a pound of tea costed about 4 shillings and the tax was 3 pence a pound, there are 12 pence in a shilling)

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

THIS

[Clay Wells @claybwells10]

College football made its rise as the second most popular sport in North America by scheduling meaningful regional games across the country on network television from Labor Day until Thanksgiving, followed by conference championships and then a series of inter-conference neutral site matchups, culminating in a national championship pitting the top two unbeaten or one-loss teams, all centered around New Years Day.

In the past decade the networks have fully and completely killed the regionality of the sport, diminished the “every week matters” notion of the regular season, rendered conference championship games meaningless (and likely soon to be obsolete), gutted bowl season to a series of glorified exhibitions played by the remains of the hurricanes that are the draft and the transfer portal to the point where the bowl mascot is a bigger draw than the game itself, and transformed the championship from one game between the two top teams to 3 games between the four best team to a month long tournament between some of the best teams and some of the most deserving teams and some teams who won their G5 conferences. Conference champions sit for a month while teams that they beat or teams that didn’t even play get a tune up game at home against an overmatched G5 team. Then on MLK Day, weeks after the penultimate game of the season is played and in the height of basketball and NFL playoff season, a championship game is played.

But it’s not enough! Now we have to add another round so that we can squeeze more teams into the tournament so that one extra loss won’t hurt so that we can make a bigger deal of a November game between 3 loss teams so that we can make more money so that we can pay universities like Stanford out more money so that the can afford to ship players and personnel to Coral Gables and Dallas and Chestnut Hill and Louisville and pay their players to maybe stay for a full season unless they don’t want to in which case there is nothing that can be done and the university is out a couple of million dollars. All the while the coaches making well into the 8 figures can stand behind a podium saying they still don’t have enough and that they need more to compete and recruit these players who may actually play but who knows? But we as fans have to donate to the NIL collective in addition to ticket fees and athletic department donations — much of which now goes toward capital projects to decrease stadium capacity, price out the common fan, and make the corporate execs who couldn’t care less about the game more comfortable. And once we are priced out we can pay the ever increasing fees of streaming platforms just to watch the games at home.

It’s depressing to acknowledge that it’s not if but when college football won’t be a fabric of American culture, but if we continue down this path of radical overhaul to pander to the networks and give a middle finger to the fans, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@soudipop @RonMFlores @SethDavisHoops Brian here, casually ignoring the fact that essentially every major university’s athletic budget is in the red, flowing those debts onto tax payers and students

“But but but that’s because other non revenue sports are stealing it!”

Title IX is still a thing

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

Hahahahaha

Funny, but also very sad and sobering

[Sasquatch Unfiltered @sasquatchvlogtv]

These people can vote btw...

[AB @AB84]

Tomorrow is Monday. We’re walking into a good week, no excuses, no bad energy, just good news upon good news.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@damanistrasner @haslametrics Yeah and most peoples entire “job” isn’t built on making money from loyal fans either.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

Truth

[NIL 𝘯𝘰𝘵 NLI @NILnotNLI]

Hey, what would happen if there were no such thing as fake NIL or NCAA athlete revenue-sharing?
​
Before you answer this hypothetical:

• ​Any program caught paying under the table would trigger automatic postseason ineligibility for all the school's teams.

• ​The NBA & NFL would not be changing their draft eligibility rules.

• ​No viable minor league would suddenly rise up to fill the void.
​
Would college sports end? Would they no longer be fun? Would the Championship tournaments lose their magic?
​
The answer is: No, life would go on.

And more importantly, the industry would stop holding students, universities and taxpayers financially hostage.

Now, the certain self-serving grifters in the college sports landscape would love to try to continue brainwashing you into believing that if you don't fork over millions to unproven kids, the NCAA world would implode.
​
The fact is that it wouldn't.

College students who participate in certain sports would still be deified on campus. They would still receive a world-class experience for absolutely free.

And, they'd still be able to pursue millions in legitimate, market-driven NIL. So, those certain self-serving grifters would still get their cut.

And the games would go on.

[Jake Lundahl @LundahlHorses]

Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work.

In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them.

He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them.

Absolute legend.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@TomGrothJr @tonidevelin Dissolve the entire college sports model then. I would INFINITELY rather pay scholarships for Olympic sports than somehow find a way to make an 18 year old kid wealthy

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@TomGrothJr @tonidevelin Better idea … stop paying them, let the top 1000 strike against the system if they so choose, and then let the second 1000 kids play for the price of a scholarship and stipend, and profit off of their NAME IMAGE AND LIKENESS if they so choose

[Mr704 @Mr704intheQC]

So the excuses for paying college players with state tax dollars are:

1-govt already spends money on stupid things, why not one more.
2-sports drive economic activity (even though sports aren’t why the university exits)
3-I want to win so I don’t care

Yup none of those are convincing reasons to allow it.

[Tom Quinlin @tquinnd]

@AR_Never_Yield @SethOnHoops Let these foolish players rot in the portal and bring in HS kids