Rooster: Ohio State Should Benefit from Jim Delany's Retirement
Rooster: Ohio State Should Benefit from Jim Delany's Retirement
JobsOhio flaunts losing a $1 billion Apple campus to Texas, boring career bureaucrat to deliver the State of the State, and more.
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BUCKEYE FANS SHOULD REJOICE AT JIM DELANY’S RETIREMENT
Jim Delany announced yesterday he will retire as Big Ten Commissioner when his contract expires in 2020. I applaud his efforts in riding the TV contract boom before any other conference saw the potential.
As an Ohio State fan, that’s where the praise ends.
Historic TV contracts fed the greed that led to the odious Scarlet Knights of Rutgers joining the fold. The Knights were damn near bankrupt, which is why most people with a pulse correctly predicted Rutgers would never come close to paying their fair share of the bills.
Serious Business People rebutted with how the math actually made sense due to New York City’s insatiable demand for Rutgers–Iowa basketball games.
Delany also treats the Rose Bowl like it’s still the Grandaddy of Them All in an era when the Rose ain’t even the Daddy.
The B1G’s highest-paid advocate deferred to a higher power when the Playoff Committee evicted the Midwest’s champion from the title hunt two years in a row.
The SEC commissioner would’ve hired a regiment of international hitmen to take hostages at NCAA headquarters if the South suffered such an indignity. Delany attended North Carolina and remains plagued by the Baby Boomer mindset, which means he’s content with an all-expenses-paid family vacation to Pasadena.
And the conference refuses to quit scheduling conference games a decade in advance, which is why the conference ordained in 2009 that Ohio State plays Penn State and Michigan in back-to-back weeks in the last two weeks of the 2019 season.
The SEC plays eight conference games and delays announcing conference schedules to protect prized ponies and ensure mediocre teams finish with an 8-4 record and a favorable bowl match-up.
Hopefully the next B1G commissioner has enough sense to mimic the SEC’s scheduling shenanigans that the CFP committee refuses to punish.
I’m not keen on watching Ohio State host Southwestern Missouri State in Week 12, yet that bloodbath would be more entertaining than the Buckeyes losing to Penn State the week before Ryan Day’s first trip to Ann Arbor. Or even worse, securing a come-from-behind double-OT victory in Columbus that saps the Buckeyes of the strength to finish the fourth quarter against the Wolverines in Jim Harbaugh’s Last Stand.
The Big Ten should afford Ohio State common courtesies. The Buckeyes do the most for the conference’s brand. Any Penn State or Michigan fan that wants to protest can point to their team’s last undisputed national title, and we’ll go from there.
HEARTWARMING: OHIO ALMOST LANDED A $1 BILLION APPLE CAMPUS
Hang the damn banners! Ohio finished No. 2 behind Austin, Texas, for a $1 billion Apple campus. As a consolation prize, we win nothing.
Bureaucrats behind the taxpayer=financed boondoggle that is JobsOhio couldn’t resist touting the failure as a success.
From Mark Williams of dispatch.com:
The state came in second to Austin, Texas, for a $1 billion campus for Apple, according to the new annual report from JobsOhio, the state’s economic development group.
“JobsOhio and its partners had been working actively with the leaders of Apple on a new job and capital investment commitment in Ohio,” the report said in a section that talked about projects in which Ohio came up short in 2018.
“Ultimately Apple chose Austin, Texas, with Ohio coming in second. This is significant, because historically, Ohio was rarely considered as a location. Going forward, Ohio will continue to compete for notable investments from global brands.”
The report didn’t say where Apple was looking in Ohio, and JobsOhio officials wouldn’t elaborate.
The Ohio location had to have been Columbus in part because in eight years former governor John Kasich never worked to give any city outside the 270 outer belt anything other than speeches.
If Apple did flirt with Columbus, mayor Andy Ginther and the Franklin County Democratic machine undoubtedly prostituted the city by seductively waiving tax abatements at a corporation with $230 billion on hand.
Meanwhile, the city’s public schools, that by the way didn’t desegregate until 1979, continue to fail students.
THE STATE OF THE STATE: NOT GREAT
The most boring public speaker in Ohio is also the governor, and tonight Mike DeWine will deliver his first state of the state speech. According to my sources, he’ll pretend to have nothing to do with the moribund state of affairs despite being in state office for all but four years since 1991.
Unless you’re one of the governor’s wealthy patrons, economic facts won’t align with whatever pro-business, pro-White Jesus message his consultants have written him.
From Randy Ludlow of dispatch.com:
For the first time since 2010, Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland’s last year in office, Ohio’s job growth in 2018 outpaced the national average. The state added 113,110 jobs during Kasich’s last year, the 2.03 percent growth ranking 16th in the nation, which had 1.79 percent growth, according to federal figures.
Ohio added about 567,000 jobs on Kasich’s watch from 2011 through last year, a growth rate nearly a fourth lower than the national average, placing the state 24th during those eight years.
While dropping from 4.9 percent a year earlier, Ohio’s unemployment rate of 4.6 percent remains among the worst in the nation, ranking 44th, and remains above the national rate of 3.9 percent. An estimated 265,000 Ohioans are without jobs, while employers continue to lament a lack of qualified candidates for openings. DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted want to address that with improved workforce-development programs.
The typical Ohioan continues to work for less money than many friends and relatives in other states, federal statistics show. Ohio’s average weekly wage grew 2.9 percent last year to $1,005; Ohioans’ pay ranked 24th and trailed the nation’s average wage (which grew by 3.7 percent) by $147 a week, or 15 percent.
I wish we’d stop letting politicians get away with raw job numbers. Jobs aren’t created equal. I’d be much more excited about 113,110 jobs that offer robust benefits and pay living wages than I would be about 113,110 minimum-wage jobs with no benefits.
WORKING FAMILIES CAUGHT IN CORPORATE MACHINATIONS
General Motors, apparently hellbent on never selling another car in Ohio, announced yesterday that it will idle its Lordstown plant on March 6—two days before originally planned.
The car conglomerate, on which taxpayers absorbed a $11.2 billion loss during the bailout five years ago, loves to tout offering affected workers jobs at plants hundreds of miles away from their current life.
Some workers jumped at the opportunity. Others hesitated about walking away from mortgage payments or separating their family to make ends meet.
From the Associated Press:
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds of workers at four General Motors plants slated to close by January are facing a painful choice: Take the company’s offer to work at another factory — possibly hundreds of miles away — even if that means leaving behind their families, their homes and everything they’ve built. Or stay and risk losing their high-paying jobs.
The automaker says nearly all of its blue-collar U.S. workers with jobs in jeopardy have work waiting for them. Many from the targeted factories in Michigan, Ohio and Maryland already have voluntarily transferred to plants in the Midwest and South, not wanting to take a chance.
Others are still agonizing over the decision, unsure whether to sell their homes or hang onto hopes that their plants might reopen.
…
Tiffany Davis feels the stress of it all both at home and at the lone elementary school in Lordstown where she teaches fifth grade.
The students know they will be saying goodbye to some of their classmates in a few months. That includes three out of the 18 in her class.
“They aren’t the spunky, lighthearted crew they were at the beginning of the year,” said Davis, 35.
Ohio refuses to fix the illegal system of public-school funding that unfairly places the onus on local property owners. The plant closing will inevitably trickle down to the operating budget at the local elementary.
Sadly, corporations winning and working families losing is nothing new in my 25 years of living in Ohio.
SOMEBODY SHOULD BE TRIED AT THE HAGUE FOR THIS
R.I.P. to legendary Ohio State campus-area bar Mama’s Pasta and Brew. I’m no longer naive enough to expect High Street to look exactly as it did when I thought going to bars was cool. Seeing an old friend body-bagged and scrapped for parts still hurts.
The worst part is Campus Partners, a legal cartel, will replace the dilapidated shack where I got splashed on cheap beer in college with a building that looks like every other building in the area.
Columbus residents love to live above a Chipotle, which means developers will make a killing because they don’t pay taxes. Great system we have.
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