CFB Playoffs – Its a Grass Roots Movement. – What We Need

As much as I appreciate all the feedback about how to perfect a playoff system, the perfect system is not what is going to create change.  The perfect system won’t be needed until we have the levers of change.
The tipping point that drives the current BCS system out of business won’t come from a perfect playoff system. It won’t come by reminding University Presidents that they are not maximizing the financial opportunity available to their schools and conferences. It won’t come from going to  legislatures and Congress and pushing them to take action.
It won’t come from any of these elements because every stakeholder is already well aware of each and every one of these issues. They have heard them all and they have practiced their responses to them.  I have no doubt it bothers them to no end to hear continuous criticism on the subject.
There is no point in repeating what has been well chronicled with an expectation that minds will be changed.
What all of us with an interest in this subject have got to do is ask questions rather than give answers.  Rather than telling University Presidents/Chancellors and Conference Commissioners what they should do, we need to ask them about things they would like to do.
The thing about education in this country is that no individual or group on any level is proclaiming that a college or university education is perfect. No one is claiming that it is perfectly priced. No one is claiming that there isn’t a long list of  wonderful ideas that each President /Chancellor has on their wish list that would make their institution far, far better.
What we need to find out is what those hopes, dreams and ideas of the schools leadership are. From those, we need to find some that we can all rally around .
Bottomline is that we need to be able to identify those aspirations that an enlightened leader can say “if you can show us how we can accomplish this goal(s) through the increased financial support a playoff system would provide, then I have no choice but to support this new system”
Then its up to me and the people I am working with to figure out how to make it work.
In some respects this may come across as a stretch, and even corny, but the more people I talk to , the more obvious it is that the BCS  is about power. And the one thing that trumps the power someone has today, is the opportunity of power on a bigger playing field.  Having a meaningful impact on the future of education is a far greater legacy and base of power for the head of a major university than having control over which bowl a team plays in.
So rather than posting your ideas on what a playoff structure might look like, tell me what you think the goals of your school’s administration are. Ask your school President what he/she dreams of for your school and would they trade their influence over bowl games to be able to support that goal for your school.
IMHO, thats the trade off that can get the ball rolling. Kill em with love and support. See if we can put them in a position to succeed like they have never imagined. Lets see what happens.

let me know what you think
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Starting the Process – College Football Playoffs

Again, I want to be very clear to everyone. This is going to be a long, long and difficult and expensive process. There is a lot of power on the side of the incumbents. Which of course , as anyone who really knows me will tell you, is exactly the type of challenge I like to undertake. I may not win all of them, but there is quite a bit of satisfaction in taking on Goliath. This undertaking is no different. Win or lose (and i hate to lose) , it will be worth the journey.
I wanted to post the first update here on my blog, but going forward I will post them on facebook on this page. Why ? Because when people “like” the page I can communicate with them in the future. I don’t have a direct means of communicating from the blog. I can only “broadcast” my thoughts.  The Facebook page allows me to post, respond to user posts and allows others to post their thoughts as well. Plus, I can pop the HDNet name and logo in there and get a shameless plug in for our network.
So on the the first order of business – our first roadblock.
Believe it or not among the hundreds of emails I got from everyone from those of you with playoff plans, to lobbying firms to Athletic Directors of major schools to those looking to volunteer to help to alums volunteering with withhold or donate more to help the cause, I also received this :
“Dear Mr. Cuban:
My advise is, don’t waste your money.  There are three perfected alternatives to the BCS.  I own one, a guy with CBS owns another
and a guy in Arizona owns the third.  By that, I don’t mean the screw-ball ideas you see on the internet, but actual branded
properties.
I am represented by a major law firm in Washington D.C., as are other stake holders.  The problems are insurmountable
and too many to delineate here
****Im leaving out some of his comments on why he thinks the playoffs wont work in order to get to the important stuff ******
*** Here is the “meat” of his email:
You should also consider that the playoffs are already owned by someone, as in, the patent for resolving the FBS championship by  way of a playoff was issued long ago.  It’s called a method patent, so be careful not to infringe it.
Anyway, if you want to know who owns assets in this field, let me know.  I can put you in touch with one of my attorneys who can let you know what you’re in for.  It’s much more complex that it’s commonly understood to be.
>>>> Regards,
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ddf

There you have it. In this great country of ours some one thinks they can patent a solution to this problem. Mind you, they aren’t saying they can do anything about it. They are not saying they even tried. Nor are they saying they are going to try to solve this problem and invest time and money. They are merely saying that they got the patent office to approve their idea and if anyone  wants to try to solve this problem they have to go through them and their high powered patent attorneys.
The President of the United States wants a playoff system, and so does almost every college football fan, but forgettaboutit because there is a method patent on it.
This obviously is a symptom of a much bigger problem in this country where people who have no intention of solving a problem or building a business but want to get paid by those that do,  leverage the courts as patent trolls in order to extort money. If you talk to anyone in the technology industry they will tell you that Patent Trolls are creating far more cost and uncertainty in doing business than any tax code could ever.
Maybe this effort to create a playoff system for college football can also solve a huge problem that is hampering the economy and adding to the unemployment rate as companies keep money in the bank to fight patent trolls and pay ever increasing insurance rates instead of hiring people. Am I sure this is happening ? Absolutely because we are facing the same issue in two of my companies. We continuously get sued by various patent trolls and spend money on lawyers and insurance rather than hiring new people or giving raises. And I hate it.
Sorry to get off on a tangent and back on my soapbox, but getting this email really hit a nerve and it gives me even more motivation !
Keep the emails coming.  If you know of any Conference Commissioners or personnel, college football coaches, any university Athletic Directors, Asst ADs, University or College Presidents, major donors or any other stakeholders, encourage them to email me as well. I am in the information gathering and learning stage and want as much information and feedback as I can get.  The challenge is not what the playoffs might look like. The challenge is what are the parameters or incentives that would make  each conference and/or school  gladly become part of a playoff system.
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Am I Living the Google Lifestyle ?

As I installed my Logitech Google TV box I checked my email, I mean GMail,  on my G2 Slide. Someone needed some info, so I pulled up the information from a file stored on Google Docs using my browser of choice, Chrome.
Then it occurred to me. I’m surrounded by Google and for the most part, I like it.
It took the G2 Slide, with Android and a decent keyboard to finally dump my Sidekick. I can’t type quite as fast on it as I did on my Sidekick but the features and apps make me just as, if not more productive than I was with the sidekick. The phone works. Its fast. It rarely freezes.. It has great integration with T-Mobile. I like the apps and the Google Market for Android has more than enough apps for what I want to do and more importantly continues to add more apps for the things I didnt know I wanted to do until I played around in the Market Place.
Just as importantly, it does a great job of running the Sling Player. I love me some Sling Box. Can’t live without it. Not running it is a deal killer. It runs it well.
On the PC front, I have an HP desktop at home and use the new Mac Air, which truth be told I love as well.  Perfect Size.  Battery and sleep mode made it a keeper. I’m not a fan of Safari. No particular reason not to like it. No particular reason to like it. So I don’t use it.  I had been a fan of Firefox since it came out.  Live Bookmarks to read RSS headlines works the way i work. I can get through more data quicker than using a Reader. Unfortunately, firefox freezes too much. It just goes out to lunch far too often.
For some unknown reason for which im not going to search for a solution because its inconceivable that it doesn’t work, Firefox has a hard time loading GMail. Who knows why. Whether or not its me or the software is irrelevant. If you don’t work with GMail or you don’t recognize the problem of a load fail and offer a solution, I’m done with you. I’m sure at some level it has to do with something I’ve done with the configuration of Firefox, but I don’t have time to deal with it. This is something that should never be a problem.
Which lead me to Chrome. I have always had Chrome installed on all of my PCs for when Firefox slowed or froze. It was my backup. When I ran into the problems with GMail , it became my primary browser. Its fast. It works. It has extensions. It syncs. Sold.
Which leads us to GMail. It works. I like the threading. Its fast. I have 2 Terabytes of additional storage that I buy from Google  so any file is no problem.  No more  having to prune file sizes or worry about disk capacity which was a huge problem when I used Outlook. I think I have been using GMail 3 or 4 years now , and it hasn’t ever given me a problem (save the random outages which are livable).  I like the labeling. I like the filters. I have used Imap to import most of my old Outlook. Which is probably the worst part of using GMail. It’s a pain in the ass to take 20 years of Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and other random email files and get them into GMail using IMAP.  If anyone has a better solution , please let me know. Or better yet, can someone at Google please come up with an import from those files? Then I would never have to buy a copy of Outlook again. I’m guessing that would please Larry, Eric and Sergey to no end. Hopefully someone is putting some of their 20pct time (or whatever the percentage is now ) to work on this opportunity.

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Digital Picture Frame

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team At today's Digital Picture Frame of the U.S. House of Representatives, we provided the following Testimony of Google Inc. before the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, and the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations Committee on International Relations, United States House of Representatives February 15, 2006 Elliot Schrage Vice President, Global Communications and Digital Photo Albums Public Affairs, Google Inc. My name is Elliot Schrage and I am the vice president for global communications and public affairs at Google. My role is to help shape and explain the decisions Google makes as a company in its efforts to provide global access to information as quickly, conveniently, usefully, and comprehensively as possible.
I'm here today to answer any and all questions you might have about how we are attempting to do business in China. I certainly don't – my colleagues certainly don't – expect everyone to agree with our decision to launch a new service inside this challenging, complex, promising market. I hope my testimony will help explain how we came to our decision, what we're seeking to accomplish, and how we’re seeking to accomplish it.
Introduction
At the outset, I want to acknowledge what I hope is obvious:Digital Photo Album Figuring out how to deal with China has been a difficult exercise for Google. The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship – something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. Despite that, we made a decision to launch a new product for China – Google.cn – that respects the content restrictions imposed by Chinese laws and regulations. Understandably, many are puzzled or upset by our decision. But our decision was based on a judgment that Google.cn will make a meaningful – though imperfect – contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.
Until a few weeks ago, Google has been serving Chinese Internet users the same way we serve all Internet users worldwide since the company was founded in 1999. Though we had no operations or employees in China, we were fashion boots able to provide a Chinese-language version of Google.com that, thanks to the global nature of the Internet, could easily be reached by users inside China. In 2002, we started to learn that Google was sporadically unavailable to Chinese users. In the fall of that year, we awoke one morning to emails from Google users in China informing us that our service was completely unavailable. We faced a choice at that point: hold fast to our commitment to free speech (and risk a long-term cut-off from our Chinese users), or compromise our principles by entering the Chinese market directly and subjecting ourselves to Chinese laws and regulations. We stood by our principles, which turned out to be a good choice, as access to Google.com was largely restored within about two weeks.
However, we soon discovered new problems. Many queries, especially politically sensitive sexy boots queries, were not making it through to Google’s servers. And access became often slow and unreliable, meaning that our service in China was not something we felt proud of. Even though we weren’t doing any self-censorship, our results were being filtered anyway, and our service was being actively degraded on top of that. Indeed, at some times users were even being redirected to local Chinese search engines Nevertheless, we continued to offer our service from outside China while other Internet companies were entering China and building operations there.
A bit more than a year ago, we decided to take a serious look at China and re-assess whether our approach there was the best strategy. We spent a lot of time talking to Chinese Internet experts and users, scholars and academics inside and outside China, respected “China hands,” human rights groups and activists, government officials, business leaders, as well as our own Chinese employees. From those discussions, we reached the conclusion that perhaps we had been taking the snow boots wrong path. Our search results were being filtered; our service was being crippled; our users were flocking to local Chinese alternatives; and, ultimately, Chinese Internet users had less access to information than they would have had.
Let me dig a bit deeper into the analytic framework we developed for China. Google’s objective is to make the world’s information accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It is a mission that expresses two fundamental commitments:
(a) First, our business commitment to satisfy the interests of users, and by doing so to build a leading company in a highly competitive industry; and
(b) Second, our policy conviction that expanding access to information to anyone who wants it will make our world a better, more informed, and freer place.
Some governments impose restrictions that make winter boots our mission difficult to achieve, and this is what we have encountered in China. In such a situation, we have to add to the balance a third fundamental commitment: