Georgia Coach Pays His Staff From His Own Pocket

ESPN.COM’s DAWGNATION blog has reported that the University of Georgia and its football coach Mark Richt have been disciplined by the NCAA for violating NCAA rules for–get this–paying his coaching staff out of his own pocket.

Coach Richt received news that 10 members of his staff would not receive 2010 bowl bonuses due to the university being effected “difficult economic conditions.”  In response, Coach Richt made the dubious decision to honor his staff by writing checks in the amount of $10,842, $10,000, $6,150, $15,227, and $15,337.50 to five of his coaches.  He also stepped out of NCAA bounds by paying $6,000 to a fired coach who needed money to get by between gigs.  The other four check totals were not disclosed. As of 2009, Coach Richt was reported to be making $3.096 million per year.

While some college athletic scandals give warrant to the call for more stringent policing (See Ohio State, Penn State, Syracuse, USC), other scandals cause observers to shake their heads in confusion of the violation at hand (See Baylor, Georgia).

I understand that Coach Richt’s actions violate some rule in the NCAA handbook (Georgia admitted that Richt cleared the actions through the proper leadership channels), but his crime seems to be nothing more than a leader taking care of his staff in the midst of a down economy.  Richt makes $3 million a year and paid somewhere between $62,000 and $100,000 in bonuses to his team members.   For those doing the math, that is somewhere between 6% and 10% of his yearly salary–the equivalent of what Richt puts in the offering plate on Sundays.

Coach Richt is certainly guilty of breaking NCAA guidelines (although it should be noted that he cleared his intentions with the University of Georgia before writing the checks).  But Coach Richt is also guilty of good leadership and maintaining a semblance of honor and respectability.  This is likely the reason that the NCAA gave him the equivalent of a light slap on the hand, which if you think about it was probably palm-to-palm in the form of a High Five.

In The USA We Build SOME Things to Last

My twitter feed yesterday provided an interesting social commentary on values in 21st century America.  The first thing I read was a post about the terrible tornado activity in the southeastern US. Apparently, folks in Alabama built a college football stadium that was sturdy enough to withstand the tornados, and were thankful for the near miss.

The next tweet asked the question, “What’d you do with your wedding dress post-split?” The author laments the hard feelings of the past failed relationship and is also quite hopeful of his current relationship.  Nonetheless, he is honest about his concern that there is never any certainty as to whether his romantic relationships will go the distance.

As I read both of these posts I observed that it could be argued that in the US we build some things to last, like football stadiums. Other things, like marriages, we do not appear to be as intentional about construction and planning ahead.

Great Commentary On Discipline and Parenting

LZ Granderson, ESPN and CNN Columnist, wrote a great piece about parenting entitled, Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps.

Granderson, who moonlights as an ESPN columnist, summarizes his perspective in the following sentance:

The way I see it, my son can go to therapy later if my strict rules have scarred him. But I have peace knowing he’ll be able to afford therapy as an adult because I didn’t allow him to wear or do whatever he wanted as a kid.

Dawson Trotman on Discipleship

All over the world, men and women are reaching their neighbors for Christ. They are not ‘Super-Christians,’ but simply those who have believed the Gospel, learned how to feed themselves on the Word of God, and been encouraged to pass it on to someone else. Some of us have gotten no further than “Jerusalem” with our witness (Acts 1:8). Some have not even witnessed at home. May God help us feed our own soul daily with the Word, live it before others as we speak it with the authority of God’s messengers…and then train our “babes” in Christ to follow Him!

Dawson Trotman, The Navigators Log, Log 76—April 1959, Be a “Normal” Christian

Go Wherever You See Wreckage

This is a repost from an article that I wrote for The Gospel Coalition earlier this week.

My Sunday school teacher once talked about “Christians” vs. “The World” and demonstrated his point by asking a high school senior to stand on a chair and a seventh grader to stand beside the chair. The seventh grader’s task was to try to pull the senior off of the chair. The seventh grader won each battle. My teacher later explained the parable by telling us that that chair represented “being a Christian,” while the ground represented “the world.” Christians were cautioned against trying to pull someone up onto the chair because, as he said, “It is easier for the world to pull us down than for us to pull the world up.” This analogy became a blanket illustration for a practice of avoiding movies rated PG and above, listening to secular music, cussing, drinking beer, and attending high school parties. Subtly, this analogy became the working worldview for how I approached life, culture, and ministry.

Not coincidentally, most of the folks in my Sunday school class also grew up with the chair illustration as their default worldview. Even the ones who lived pagan college years still held to this worldview. They knew that the world is bad and that Christians should not be a part of it. Out of honor, many decided to check out of Christianity. What I came to realize is that the primary struggle for the folks in my Sunday school class is not obedience to God, but how to share the gospel with “people who will pull me down.” They were asking for a helpful paradigm for thinking about Christianity and culture.

You can read mere here.

California’s New Pot Law in 2011

The Californian Legislature rang in the new year by inching one step closer to legalizing Marijuana.  SB 1449 makes the possession of one ounce of marijuana an infraction with a penalty of a $100 fine.

For all you math majors out there, this puts the cost of pot into a linear equation (y = mx + b): The cost of the pot itself is your x, the m refers to one ounce and thus will always be 1x, and the y is your fixed cost, at $100 dollars.

So whenever you are considering scoring some weed, make sure to do your math before you get blitzed. Take the cost per ounce that the illegal drug dealer is charging, multiply it by 1 ounce, and then add $100 dollars to account for the new “slap on the hand” fine and you should have your drug fix accounted for in your budget.

Now, if only marijuana wasn’t scientifically linked to decreased math skills…

Jesus and Christmas

This was a funny quote from Jim Gaffigan:

Ever wonder what people got Jesus for Christmas? It’s like, “Oh great, socks. You know I’m dying for your sins right? Yeah, but thanks for the socks! They’ll go great with my sandals. What am I, German?