The Inevitablility of College Football's Pending Upheaval

 It's now just a question of when, not if. As West Virginia University Athletic Director Oliver Luck said, "it's a fait accompli." The day is now in sight when the college football "haves" will pick up the ball and walk away from the "have nots".
 During the so-called BCS era the football factories were increasingly forced to include schools from non-BCS conferences like the Mountain West in the national championship discussion. Schools like Boise State and Utah repeatedly ruined the BCS dance by appearing, and then again by winning against teams that they should not be able to compete against.
 With the end of the Bowl Championship Series as we know it ad a true college football playoff on the horizon, a new day is dawning. Even if the college football playoff isn't fully matured yet it is still mature enough to be able to tell the massive dollars that it will generate. This time around there won't be any sharing with the have-not's of the world. It's estimated by many that ESPN will pay out at least $500 million dollars to televise the college football playoffs in their current configuration. When the playoff expands from four teams to eight teams expect that amount to double as well.
 With so much money on the line the football factories realize that they are in the drivers seat to maximize their share of the pie. In order to do this there will have to be a divorce from the have-nots. What does this entail? Well, for starters it means that college football programs that have legitimate aims to try and compete at the highest level need to sequester themselves from those that do not. I've identified 72 teams that all have a few key things in common. Although there is great disparity even among this group of 72, these are programs that have the ability maximize the value of big-time college football. What are these qualities? Name recognition, participation in a BCS conference or the demonstrated ability to compete in one had they been afforded that opportunity, merchandising & licensing appeal, stadium and facilities, fan support and quality of program. Not every school among these 72 starts out every year expecting to win the national championship. It merely aims to identify the programs that are committed to pursue big-time college football and can demonstrate that desire. By satisfying that requirement they will contribute to the highest possible quality of the product that gets placed on the field.
 The 72 teams would be divided into six divisions each consisting of twelve teams each. Those teams would play a rotating group of nine games against the other teams in their division. Additionally they would play two games against a rotating group from the other regional conferences. It will take years to rotate through but eventually every team in the big-boy group will play every other. Finally, each team will have the ability to choose one historic rivalry to preserve each year.
 You've no doubt noticed that the big-boy club is totally self-contained. The proposed schedule allows only for these teams to play other members of the Elite 72. No FCS warm-up games against Sam Houston State and no playing San Jose State and claiming that they are a Division 1 team and that your strength of schedule shouldn't suffer as a result of playing them. In order to maximize the value to television audiences this practice would have to end. The country will tune in to watch LSU play Kentucky in their opener. That game has some appeal and value. Is it a marquee matchup? No. Kentucky and LSU are miles apart as programs. However, Kentucky has enough cache, enough following and enough talent as a member of the Elite 72 that this is a real game with real risk to a major contender like LSU and a serious opportunity for Kentucky to show that it can rise up and beat one of the marquee names in the Elite 72. Conversely, no one cares about LSU opening against Troy. The fans will pack Tiger Stadium simply because they've been football starved since the previous February and are hungry to see their Bayou Bengals play.....against anyone. But can you really expect ESPN or anyone else to pay out big money to televise a game that will be over before the end of the first quarter? No. Remember, the possible $1 billion price tag we talk about earlier is just for the seven games that comprise the playoff. Additional money would be on the line to televise the games of the regular season.
 Is this a completely fair method? Of course not. There is no way to have every team play an equal schedule each year. There will be years when one of the teams in your conference that you skip is the odds-on favorite to win the conference title. That may ease your path one year and cloud it the next. Additionally, there are years when schools are just better than they are in others. Would it stink to have played a historically poor Kansas team four years ago when they were very, very good? Sure. Those things will happen regardless of what anyone tries to do.
 However, if your team doesn't win one of the six spots in the playoff that go to each regional conference champion you still might have the chance to win one of the two at-large spots that brings the field to eight.
 Here's how staggering the money could possibly get. Although it's highly unlikely that any one network could or would be able to bid on televising all of the regular season like they could the playoffs, the money spent would would still be enormous. As it stands now, college football broadcasts rake in about $1.1 billion in television revenues right now. That number could easily jump to $2 billion just to televise the much more appealing games from the Elite 72.

Regular Season Payout   ( $2 Billion)

NCAA or Governing Entity      $200,000,000
Each Elite 72 Team                   $25,000,000


Eight Team College Football Playoff


NCAA or Governing Entity      $100,000,000
Each Elite 72 Team                   $9,000,000
Teams Finishing 3-8                  $25,000,000
Runner Up                                 $40,000,000
National Champion                   $60,000,000


The eventual national champion could receive $94 million. Even the team that theoretically finishes dead last in the Elite 72 would still receive $34 million. That is roughly equal to what the highest conferences such as the Big 10 and SEC now payout.
I've listed my Elite 72 teams below along with suggested regional affiliations. I do not pretend that they are perfectly balanced.

1.California

2.Stanford

3.Arizona

4.Arizona State

5.Washington

6.Washington State

7.Oregon

8.Baylor

9.Colorado

10.Utah

11.Nebraska

12.Illinois

13.Purdue

14.Indiana

15.West Virginia

16.Oklahoma

17.Texas Tech

18.TCU

19.Oklahoma State

20.Minnesota

21.Oregon State

22.Northwestern

23.Iowa State

24.Kansas

25.Kansas State

26.UCLA

27.USC

28.Texas

29.Wisconsin

30.Michigan State

31.Michigan

32.Penn State

33.Ohio State

34.Louisville

35.Boise 

36.Cincinnati

37.Notre Dame

38.BYU

39.Connecticut

40.Boston College

41.Iowa

42.Rutgers

43.Maryland

44.LSU

45.Alabama

46.Ole Miss

47.Mississippi State

48.Auburn

49.Georgia

50.Florida

51.Arkansas

52.Missouri

53.Texas A&M

54.South Carolina

55.Tennessee

56.Vanderbilt

57.Kentucky

58.Virginia Tech

59.Virginia

60.FSU

61.Clemson

62.Duke

63.Wake Forest

64.North Carolina

65.North Carolina State

66.Pitt

67.Syracuse

68.Georgia Tech

69.Miami

70.South Florida

71.Nevada

72.Houston

Below are twelve additional teams that I believe have merit and should receive consideration. There could be a few schools that decide that they want to bow out of the Elite 72 and return to a more academic standing. Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest and Stanford all could potentially fall into this category.

73.East Carolina

74.Fresno

75.Wyoming

76.New Mexico

77.Utah State

78.Colorado State

79.Memphis

80.Marshall

81.UNLV

82.Rice

83.SMU

84.UTEP

PACIFIC

Washington
Washington State
Oregon
Oregon State
Cal
Stanford
UCLA
USC
Nevada
Arizona
Arizona State
Boise

DEEP SOUTH

Miami
Florida
Florida State
South Florida
Georgia
Georgia Tech
Alabama
Auburn
South Carolina
Clemson
Mississippi
Mississippi State

MID-ATLANTIC

Penn State
West Virginia
Syracuse
Pitt
Boston College
Maryland
Rutgers
Virginia Tech
Virginia
North Carolina
North Carolina State
Connecticut

MIDWEST

Ohio State
Michigan
Michigan State
Tennessee
Kentucky
Vanderbilt
Louisville
Duke
Wake Forest
Notre Dame
Cincinnati
Northwestern

PLAINS

Colorado
Nebraska
Utah
BYU
Missouri
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Purdue
Indiana
Illinois
Iowa
Iowa State

SOUTHWESTERN

Texas
Texas Tech
TCU
Baylor
Texas A&M
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Houston
LSU
Arkansas
Kansas
Kansas State

WorkSpeak & Corporate Buzzwords

 Quite a few years back I heard someone give a presentation where they proffered that a particular course of action wasn't advisable because "major demographic sub-groupings would be negatively impacted." I sat back in my chair and tried to fight my way through the sheer stench of silliness that had just been stated. Someone got a Roget's Thesaurus as a gift recently, I remember thinking. The speaker's intent was to let the group know that a lot of people would be affected if the plans under discussion went forward. But that wasn't all he was trying to say. He also wanted everyone in the room to know that he knew big words and wasn't afraid to use them.
 If you've been in a group meeting at your place of employment in the last handful of years you've no doubt encountered the phenomenon of "WorkSpeak". WorkSpeak is the fairly recent addition to the American corporate landscape whereby corporate climbers accomplish a duality of purpose when addressing a group. The group can be a group of subordinates, peers or high-level executives. The first purpose remains unchanged from presentations of fifty or seventy-five years ago in boardrooms and hotel ballrooms around this country. Information that is relevant to some common topic to all workers needs to be imparted and someone has to impart it. A presentation has to be given to enlighten all present as to the new policy, the new procedure or the latest quarterly results. The secondary purpose is where we'll focus and where the change has occurred.
 Gone are the days when a presentation would be given and the CEO of the company would exclaim, "You know, Gibson did a great job presenting the quarterly results. He seems to be a smart one. Let's keep an eye on him for the future." In today's economic climate a climber can't wait for his or her turn to shine in a group environment. He or she has to carpe diem and do it fast. This has given rise to a new language -WorkSpeak. Since WorkSpeak serves a purpose all the way up the company ladder it can't be stopped. It's meant to convey a secondary message to your audience while you are simultaneously conveying the first. The message changes slightly depending on who is doing the talking but the purpose is still the same.
 If you're a "C" level executive and you're speaking to a room full of well, anyone that works for your company, you need to convey your unspoken message to them. You can't simply tell them that you're an extremely important personage in the world of business, a man to be reckoned with, that in the hours that your mind is still while sleeping the world is worse off because of it. You can't come out and say that you're a big hitter that goes to meetings in India and Japan, that you're a global juggernaut whose opinion is courted by thousands. You want to tell them that you fly fist class to Mumbai and stay in hotel suites that have three bedrooms even though you're traveling alone. So you write pensive posts to the company blog or global e-mail distribution list from 37,000 feet to keep the little people informed of the important work you're doing and hope they get the message. But you need more. WorkSpeak provides the self-important executive with selected buzzwords that will convey his lofty status to his audience without him having to come right out and declare it. The thought process goes something like this; "Wow, our CEO uses words and phrases that I and my peer group don't understand and are not part of our daily vernacular. He must have learned those whilst cavorting with other captains of industry. We are truly in the presence of a brilliant and important man." Message received.
 But WorkSpeak can't be the sole province of high-level executives. Climbers climb and WorkSpeak is far too valuable a tool to be wasted on those who've already arrived. If you're a junior executive or a mid-level manager who is gunning to be the youngest VP or SVP or C in company history you too can utilize the magic of WorkSpeak. Although the message from a Regional VP to the masses sounds similar to that of a C level executive, the message is altered slightly. What the hearer should get from the presentation is this; "I'm going places. This position is a stepping stone on my way to the top. I'm already being invited to participate in meeting with the big bosses and I regularly rub shoulders with them. As a result of my close association and grooming for greatness I have learned these buzzwords that all important people know and use. You should respect me and probably try to hitch your wagon to me while it's still sitting still."
 The message is a little bit different when a junior person is presenting to a group of more senior people but obviously the words remain the same. "I'm a climber. I've been watching you. I have a laptop computer and I've Googled the buzzwords that you use in order to discern their meaning. Now I'm going to use them in my presentation to you so that you'll understand that I'm dialed in. Using these buzzwords instead of other, possibly monosyllabic words is my way of giving you the wink and nod that I'm your guy. I'm willing to be your minion and make doing your bidding my life's work. I am malleable and impressionable and will do nearly anything to get to the top."
 With that backdrop in mind let's take a look at some of the most commonly used WorkSpeak words and phrases. I probably don't need to tell you that more are being added all the time.

Influencer - an influencer is someone who works at an organization that is currently either a customer or a prospect for your organization. They don't have any money and they don't have any authority to buy anything but they seem to like you and you enjoy taking him or her to lunch. In order to keep from having your expense reports rejected for spending money on people who can't say yes and can't say no, a new term is needed to make these people seem more important than they really are. Influencer.


Stakeholder - you desperately want to believe that the people that you're trying to sell your products to need you just as badly as you need them. They don't. There are other companies that offer pretty much the same products and services that you do despite collateral and white papers written by your Marketing and Product Management people to the contrary. It's called competition. In order to convince yourself and others in your company that they need you as much as you need them a new term is created that implies that everyone involved in the process has an equal share invested in the process and that no one is in the catbird's seat. Stakeholder.

Glide Path - this aviation term is most often used by higher level executives. It's supposed to convey the slow, sure, smooth descent of a project to completion much like the highly controlled landing of a large aircraft. The pilot calculates the path of descent and knows when to bring the plane down in altitude at specific increments to touch down with the runway at the the best possible time to insure a smooth landing. The implication here is that the C level is portraying himself in the role of the confident, sure-handed pilot bringing the big project in just as he'd envisioned. If you imagine that the executive picked up this metaphor during his frequent trips jetting here and there that's perfectly okay with him. It's important to note that terms like wind shear, water landing, May-day and controlled crash have never been adopted into WorkSpeak.


Circle Back - it's just not good enough to tell someone that you'll follow up at a later time or call them back with an answer when you get one. Clearly another phrase was needed to convey this.

Reach Out - same as above. Saying that you called or emailed someone simply isn't good enough. You actually extended your arms and attempted to bring this person into your bosom for a loving embrace. They haven't called you back yet.

Metrics - because statistics just isn;t good enough.


Optics - so the CEO got caught canoodling with the seventeen year old babysitter that's eight years younger than his daughter. Poor optics just sounds less troublesome than "our leader is a nasty old pervert who's most likely going to jail and divorce court, not necessarily in that order. The stock price has dropped by a third in less than a week and Geraldo Rivera has built a tent outside the building."


Disruptive - we fell asleep at the switch and got caught with our pants down. Our company was flat-footed and our competitor has launched an updated product that's better, faster and cheaper than ours. Product testers will extoll the wonderful new features of this product and customers will write reviews on Yelp saying how much better it is than the old one. We're going to buy a bunch of advertising saying that their product isn't any good and that our competitor rushed this new launch to market. Yep, we planned it this way all along.

Individual Contributor - you work here. You are at the very bottom of the food chain and no one takes orders from you.

Empower - we are open-minded and progressive. We are modern. We are decentralized. We give our entry level managers authority to make major decisions. We grant interviews to magazine reporters to discuss our forward-thinking, unconventional work culture. We don't have titles here. Everyone is equal. We have a day-care center and a gym. Our IT people ride their bicycles directly into the building and park them beside their desk. We don't demand a set work schedule. We hire the best and trust them to complete their assignments as professionals. We don't conduct performance reviews and we have a masseuse and a yoga instructor on campus. Oh yes, and we call our building a campus. We also serve vegan food in the cafeteria. The minute we have a bad quarter all of this secular humanist crap will go out the window and we'll re-org and fire a third of our workforce in a week. Including the masseuse and yoga instructor.


Early Adopter - we've reduced the number of programmers and code writers by a third in a re-org. Thankfully we have a few really stupid customers who will find all of the bugs and defects in our software for us.

Thought Leader - in spite of the fact that we feel threatened by actual smart people and get rid of them whenever we can because we're afraid that they'll expose how inept we are and possibly take our job we still have a few who have managed to remain employed. If a customer asks a question we shove them out in the lion's den. This does not sound like something from 1984. This does not sound like something from 1984. This does not sound like something from 1984.



Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.

This article is the intellectual  property of The Erudite Aardvark, which reserves all rights to the content. It may not be copied or re-transmitted in any fashion without the express, written permission of the owner.

Is Mankind Reaching the Singularity of Warfare?

(In this blog article for the Erudite Aardvark, Stephen Walker discusses part of the premise and background for his upcoming thriller Rubicon.)

My parents grew up in a very different world than I did. My son and my daughter have grown up in a world much different and much more frightening than the one I grew up in. as well. The small towns in West Virginia where my parents lived had one telephone and it was located at the coal company general store. When you wanted to talk to someone you went to see them if they lived close by and you wrote them a letter if they didn’t. As a young man my father and his four brothers ate a breakfast every morning that was cooked on a stove heated with wood. His mother got up routinely at four AM to start a fire in the coal fireplace and to get a fire going in the stove so that coffee could be put on to percolate. The five brothers all went to school where first graders and twelfth graders were located in the same building, as was everyone in between. The bus stop was about three miles from their house, and while, no, it was not uphill both ways as the tired old adage goes, it was a long walk both to and from the spot to catch the bus for the thirty minute ride to the schoolhouse.

My father fought in World War II. His favorite shows to watch on television now are those that talk about the battles and the strategies and personalities that shaped the outcome of that war. His concept of warfare is that of large bodies of infantry and armor, seizing and defending against the seizure of important cities, bridges, crossroads or terrain features. War meant carpet bombing of cities, massive artillery bombardment of targeted areas, lots of casualties and lots of displaced civilians with no place to go to escape the carnage.

That was less than seventy years ago. My father has difficulty understanding the concept of a tank that can drive fifty miles an hour and shoot on the move with a better than ninety per cent hit probability with each shot, much less a stealth aircraft that can fly halfway around the world and deliver as much destructive power as two hundred B-17’s did in 1944 with almost one hundred per cent certainty of the target being hit at the precise spot that it’s supposed to be and without anyone ever knowing the aircraft was there until things on the ground started blowing up. He also has difficulty comprehending why anyone would send a text message to another person when you can just dial them on the phone. My folks have call waiting but refuse to use it and they have had cordless phones provided to them but refuse to walk further from the base than the six feet or so that a cord would stretch. There are some things that technology just can’t overcome.

 Since the end of World War II American strategic military doctrine has been to envision, fund, design, manufacture, deploy and utilize the most technologically sophisticated machines and weapons systems in the world. For more than fifty years that proved to be a sound strategy. The nations of the so-called Warsaw Pact may have had three times the number of fighter aircraft and five times the number of tanks as the NATO allies did, but when your aircraft and your tanks can destroy your enemy’s on a ration ten to one or twenty to one you don’t need massive numbers. 

In 1990-1991 I was at Fort Benning, GA as a young infantry officer during the buildup to the Gulf War. One day on a land navigation exercise my radioman and I came across three young Rangers in the middle of nowhere on the sprawling base. One was seated on the ground with a second one kneeling at his side. The first soldier had a map spread across his lap, a pencil in his hand and an opaque plastic square in his mouth that had the very outer edges trimmed off with scissors. The second man was looking over his shoulder with a pencil and pad of paper in one hand and the lanyard of his compass in the other. Anyone reading this who has ever served in an infantry unit will instantly recognize the little object I’m referring to with the useless artillery mils trimmed off. The third soldier was standing about five feet away from them with a small black device up to his eyes. It looked similar to a pair of opera glasses or miniature binoculars with a short antenna coming out of the top. We approached the three soldiers and inquired what they were doing. They explained that the Ranger battalion that they were a part of (the 3rd) was testing a new piece of equipment utilizing something called Global Positioning Satellites, or GPS. They put this device up to their eyes, clicked a button and it would give them a six digit grid coordinate generated from the triangulation calculations of multiple military satellites in orbit. Six digits only got you to within one hundred meters of accuracy but it was still mind blowing. We couldn’t believe what we had seen. That was only twenty years or so ago. In that short period of time I went from never knowing of this technology’s existence to not being able to get more than twenty miles from my home without employing it.

There is no doubt that we are living in a time of unprecedented change. It’s not just the change itself but the pace of change. Our lives have all sped up without us even realizing it. Technological advancement is now coming so fast that we can’t keep up with it. The pace of technological change with regard to military and intelligence matters is also moving so quickly that nations can no longer keep pace with the rate of change. That was the initial backdrop for writing this book.

I’ve read several articles about The Singularity but learned most of the little I know from the Raymond Kurzweil book The Singularity is Near. You may have read it as well. The singularity is the as yet undefined point in time when artificial intelligence will become so robust that it will surpass the ability of human beings to keep pace with it. Although Kurzweil doesn’t spend a great deal of time ruminating on the potential negative consequences of the Singularity many view it as a Faustian scenario where the servant becomes the master. It is not my intention to make a statement one way or another on this question. I firmly believe that technological capability is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It simply is. When put to use for good, technological innovation is wonderful. When used to harm innocent people it can be and often is nightmarish. It’s really more a question of who possesses the capability in question and what is done with it rather than the capability itself.

I set out to pose the question of what would happen if the world were to reach what I call the sW, the Singularity of Warfare. To the best of my knowledge this is not a term that presently exists outside of my imagination. Although the characters in the book discuss the sW as if it’s a known quantity I do not believe that it exists. The sW would be the point at which the pace of technological change outstrips various nation’s military ability to adopt it. There is an inherent dilemma in this technological rush; nations that are large and wealthy enough to invest billions of dollars into weapons of war and espionage are usually too big to effectively implement that technology quickly enough to employ it in a meaningful way. For example, a few years ago the Army decided to replace its aging but effective self-propelled artillery piece, the Paladin, with a new all-weather, all-terrain model known as the Crusader. After spending several billion dollars on the project the Army realized that advances in artillery technology (not a field exactly known for high-tech advancement) would make the Crusader obsolete before it was ever fielded to the first unit. That project was then turned into the NLOS Cannon project. The NLOS took advantage of a better understanding of high-strength polymers to use a non-metallic but still very durable tread. It also utilizes advancements in alloy technology to provide a barrel that is steel alloy blend that strips hundreds of pounds from the weight of the overall platform. Advancements in the speed with which mathematical calculations can be made by the units’ CPU combined with laser precision-milled parts allow for a reliable automatic loading system which can fire projectiles into the air in rapid succession at varying angles so that they impact at precisely the same time on their targets. 

Between the active duty military and the National Guard there are somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred  Paladins in existence right now that would need to be replaced. By the time that the project moves from design to full implementation more than ten years will have passed. Just as it did with the Crusader system, this NLOS Cannon will be rendered obsolete by a lighter, faster, more fuel-efficient and more lethal model before it’s ever fielded. In this example I’ve used a relatively low-tech vehicle (literally, a vehicle) to illustrate the point. This scenario is magnified exponentially when you begin to discuss high-tech items such as fighter aircraft, drones, satellites and surveillance systems.

The flip side of the discussion is that a numerically small military force like that of South Africa, Denmark or New Zealand wouldn’t face the troubles associated with replacing large numbers of equipment. They don’t have large numbers of equipment. They would be able to field and use such advanced equipment in a relatively short period of time. However, they don’t possess the billions of dollars needed to research, test and develop super high-tech weaponry on their own. They can’t be players in that game. That dilemma really gave me the overall premise for the book. The only groups that could capitalize and stay abreast of this surge in technological advancement would be a very small but very highly trained and specialized group that was also very well funded. It wouldn’t matter to a great degree what nation they came from, only that they had the available funding and the desire to participate. That allowed me to create the fictional Doctrine of Oligarchical Warfare, whereby a small group like the one described above could possess the power and ability to project it like a nation-state. The Doctrine of Oligarchical Warfare gets its name from the fictional book by Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s 1984, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.  In fact, you’ll find many references to 1984 sprinkled throughout the book. In my opinion it’s one of the greatest works of literature ever written. In the book the group is a privately funded operation in some regards not unlike many contract security providers that exist today.

As is pointed out in the book, this doctrine is not something on the horizon of possibility. Although the written doctrine is a creation of my imagination it is quite real. From October 2001 until December 2001, less than one hundred members of the US Army Special Forces, supported from a relatively small number of aircraft from the Navy and the Air Force, were able to decimate the Taliban in Afghanistan militarily and destabilize them politically. Yes, they had help from the Northern Alliance, but those militias had fought each other with neither possessing the ability to completely destroy the other for decades. With a handful of men, they accomplished in two months what more than one hundred thousand Soviet soldiers couldn’t accomplish in ten years.

If a small group can project military power like a nation-state, what would happen if they were empowered with access to the greatest collection of electronic intelligence and data-mining in the world? They would then have the ability to use their strike prowess to act preemptively against any group or country that was perceived to be a threat, sort of an inter-national Minority Report. Many policy analysts feel that this is realistically the only way that terrorism can truly be defeated. The intelligence gathering is used to find and identify anyone and anything that might be involved in the proliferation of terrorism; training camps, universities, madrases, military facilities, mosques, charitable groups, banks, weapons dealers, scientists and even government heads of state and high ranking officials themselves. Once the players can be identified, direct action can be taken and people or groups who are believed to have even the ability to act contrary to another nation or groups interests or who are suspected of having ill motive toward that country are eliminated before they can develop into a full fledged threat. While the technological creations described in this book are figments of my imagination, the technology behind each of them is very, very real. For the most part, they could be employed without leaving any discernible  trace of who or what government had used them. Of course, in our scenario no government actually is involved. The Rubicon team, functioning much like a terrorist cell themselves would, isn’t beholden to any one nation for its operating base and doesn’t rely on any nation’s air force for transport. The Rubicon operatives move about within the framework of international corporate travel or they simply hide in plain sight by flying commercially like everyone else, including terrorists. As is the case with real-world espionage and with terrorists sometimes as well, they often hide behind front organizations or develop covers that can withstand fairly tight scrutiny. Is adopting the same tactics that terrorists use to defeat terrorists playing by the rules? If one side in a conflict refuses to limit itself to any rules of conduct, does the other side in that conflict have any obligation to restrain itself? By resorting to the tactics of your enemy do you then become your enemy? These are tough questions.

The premise of the book is to explore the perils of runaway technological advancement, and to explore what might happen if the desire to employ this technological advancement faster than your enemies can could allow a small group of highly trained and well-funded operators to become a de facto world power. The pace of technological change is now so swift that there are only a handful of major players in the game. None of these player nations involved can afford to hold back, or even to stop and examine what kind of Pandora’s Box they may be opening by forging ahead with unbridled military application of technology. This also allowed me to write about how the actions of a handful of pivotal men throughout the last several decades set the stage for a race to acquire this technological superiority that could instantly make any nation an elite power in the world.

Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.

This article is the intellectual  property of The Erudite Aardvark, which reserves all rights to the content. It may not be copied or re-transmitted in any fashion without the express, written permission of the owner.

Five Sure Signs that Your Sales Job is in Danger

 When things begin to go south at American corporations, many fingers get pointed in many directions. Usually the first and longest finger gets pointed toward the sales organization. This is a familiar refrain to anyone who has been in sales or has been employed in sales, sales management, sales support or sales operations. The CEO's phone blows up with calls from shareholders demanding to know why their dividend checks are smaller than are accustomed to. They insinuate that if this continues they may need to find a Chief Executive Officer who can deliver the elevated stock price to keep the dividend checks stable. He call his Chief Operations Officer.
 Things aren't looking good. The quarter just passed was dismal and the quarter just prior to that wasn't quite up to par either. You know that the fastest, sure-fire way to get the shareholders off your back is to increase sales. When you increase sales, you increase profits. Increased profits means happy shareholders. Happy shareholders means no one threatening your five year stock-option payout. Telling your shareholders that times are tough and that they may need to get used to getting by with less is not the path to continued access to the executive underground parking space and elevator you've become so fond of. Questions would be asked. Why didn't you see this coming? Why didn't you diversify? Why didn't you modernize? Why didn't you acquire other companies to quickly open up other revenue paths? Why haven't we globalized our business strategy?
 The COO picks up the phone and dials Senior Vice President of Sales, who in turn schedules a Thursday-Sunday retreat at The Greenbrier with all of the Regional Vice President's to discuss what the issues are that are keeping the company from performing as it once had. The Senior VP wants to know so he can report back to the CEO & COO that he's identified the problem and is on top of correcting it. He knows that the problem can't lie with the Regional VP's. He hired each one of them himself, even bringing a couple of them over from the firm he was with before. If they were the problem it would actually be an indictment of the Senior VP's ability to pick strong leaders to push the company along and lead the sales effort.
 The Regional VP's are unanimous in their analysis of the problem of falling sales numbers. The problem isn't with the Regional Directors that report to the Regional Vice Presidents. Those men and women were put into their positions by the Regional VP's themselves. They had been successful front line sales managers with long track records of success. It can't be them that are causing the problem. The real issue they say, is due to the fact that the people who the Regional Directors hired to replace them have made poor choices in hiring. In other words, the Regional Sales Managers that report to the Regional Directors lack the ability to hire top quality sales people. They've put people in front of the company's best customers who don't have the ability to sell them more of the company's products or to convince their competitors customers to do business with our company instead. In order to bolster their assertion that it's the company's front line sales people who are ultimately blame they solicit kindred spirits from elsewhere in the company. The Director of Human Resources affirms that the dropoff in sales isn't because the company doesn't offer a competitive salary and benefits package or that the compensation plan has been "tweaked" each year. Such a statement as that would mean that Human Resources shared in the culpability of the company's poor performance. Additionally, the Director of Training & Development adds that the poor performance certainly isn't attributable to deficiencies in the training program for its sales people. Despite the fact that the former six week comprehensive sales training course has now been reduced to a three day meet and greet, class photo, IT credentialing seminar, HR forms presentation and workshop on the new book on sales philosophy and process that the company's CEO wrote, the training and on boarding  for new hires has never been better. HR and Training both corroborate the Regional Director's assessment; it's the sales people's fault.
 And after all, don't they deserve the blame? They show up at the office when they want to, work from home when they want to, get to travel to other cities and stay in hotels and eat out and go on exotic trips to Aruba and Cabo San Lucas and St. Barts. They make way too much money and all they really do is go out and talk to people and ask them a few questions.
 So how do you recognize when this has happened at your company? Well, thankfully there are some telltale sign to look for.

1. Are the sales people in your organization treated as pariah's and outcasts?

This is a prime indicator. In a healthy organization, sales is recognized as the hunting arm of the company that goes out and brings in the dollars that fund everything else that goes on. If the sales representatives and front line sales managers in your company suddenly feel like second-class citizens, you probably are. All companies walk in the shadows of the leadership. If the executives in the company believe that their sales people are overpaid, coddled renegades and rogues the rest of the organization will follow suit. It doesn't take long for the poison to circulate through the veins of the organization and infect the whole company with an us vs. them mentality. Ask yourself this question; Who has the most clout in my company? The SVP of Finance? The SVP of Legal? The SVP of Human Resources? Or the SVP of Sales? If it's anyone but the SVP of Sales you have a problem.

2. Has the company microscope been taken off the shelf?

Metrics. That's the buzzword of the underperforming company. Not that all companies don't have benchmarks and use statistical data to measure their year over year success. They do. What I'm referring to here is the microscopic measurement of every aspect of the sales cycle. Does every phone call to every customer get logged in ACT or Gold Mine or SalesForce? Is there a recap required to every voicemail left? Do you have to log a four page debrief for every sales call you made? Do you have graphs and charts and dashboards that show how each sales rep measures up in number of voicemail messages left on Wednesdays as compared to the company mean and year over year data from 2010? It didn't use to be like this in the old days, you say? No, it probably didn't. But if it's like this where you work then chances are the scenario above, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof has occurred. The executive team wants tangible proof to show shareholders that they are doing something to remedy the situation, taking action and seizing the bull by the horns. What does he tell them? That he's had an All Hands On Deck conference call and asked everyone to bear down and try harder and that they all agreed? No. The CEO needs data. He or She needs charts, graphs and spreadsheets. He or she needs to show that he or she is man (or woman) of action, that a top to bottom investigation has been conducted, a scapegoat has been identified and that the scapegoats have been placed on a Performance Improvement Plan. They have signed a document attesting to their underperformance, promising to work harder and agreeing to a strict set of monitoring by management and HR, including regular conference calls and field ride-alongs.

3. Has Your Communication With Your Supervisor Suddenly Become Email-centric?

It's not difficult to understand that sales people, and sales managers by extension, are verbal creatures. They like to talk. They are good at talking. They make their living by talking to people. So what is to be made of it when your normally gregarious sales manager starts communicating with you predominantly via email? You can probably figure that he or she has been told to. Email provides advantages over a phone or an in person conversation. You can always deny that you said something when the contents of a conversation are discussed. No one can deny that an email was written or that it contains what it contains. Chances are that if your sales manager has recently switched to an email-centric brand of communicating with you, it's not by his or her choice. Human Resources has most likely instructed the manager to carefully document all discussions with you in the even that they need to be reproduced. What are they doing this for? In all likelihood they are preparing to terminate you or a entire group including you, or they are at least planning on firing a sub-group of your peers. Most likely, if you're getting the email treatment you're in the mix somewhere. Human Resources doesn't exist to protect the employee from the company. It exists to protect the company from the employee. In other words, they want to be absolutely certain that they've put it in writing that you've had a certifiable history of underperformance and that you've been warned on multiple occasions about it and that they've made efforts to assist you in addressing the performance deficiency. That way when you take your notes and emails to a plaintiffs attorney and tell him or her that you suspect that you've been fired because of your race, sex or age, they can show that it was because of your performance. At least it appears that way.
 Another sure fire sign is if the phone calls that you do have with your supervisor become memorialized in an email to you soon after the call. If this is the case your Human Resources department has instructed your supervisor to write down the points of discussion on the call and then email it to you for "your review." Of course, the email is not for your review at all. It's to set the narrative for what took place on the call. If you don't write back and dispute that various things were or were not said during the call then the memorialization stands as a pretty strong testament to what took place. Most employees don't like to take an adversarial position with their supervisor, so this is a very effective tool.


4. Is HR Attending Your Meetings?

If your organization is like most, you will have probably have a quarterly or at least bi-annual meeting of your team. If the attendees at these gatherings have classically been just your supervisor and the team members you might find it odd when your boss announces that you have a "special guest" this quarter; Kate from HR. Should you find it odd that Kate has flown all the way from the company headquarters in Dallas to your little meeting in Atlanta? Yes, you should. Kate will probably give a five or six minute presentation on why you shouldn't use racial epithets or stereotypes in jokes or speech at work. Realizing that this isn't 1972, you become suspicious of why she's really there. You probably should be. Chances are that one or more of your team are being considered for termination and Kate is there to report back on what kind of corporate citizens she's found among your group.


5. Expenses

 Way back at the beginning of the article our CEO picked up his phone and put in a call to the Chief Operations Officer that set off the string of events that we've just discussed. That was a grave mistake. The first call he should have made was to the Chief Financial Officer, the CFO. (We are assuming that the CEO didn't have the hutzpah to tell his shareholders that the company was holding its own in a tough competitive and economic environment and if they really thought they could do better they should let him know ASAP because there are many other companies out there that need real leaders at the top who aren't afraid to be plain spoken and straight talking and that he could have his resignation written in less than fifteen minutes if needed. There are precious few of these CEO's out there any longer) The call to the CFO should have included the admonition to go to a corporate-wide moratorium on non-sales related travel and a top down review of how sales related travel could be reduced by 20-25% for the rest of the year.
 Let's say that the company has a profit margin of 10%. If they're really fortunate they might have a margin of 20%. If they're in an elite class they might have a margin of 30%. So by looking like a man of action and rattling the corporate cage to increase sales, our CEO really isn't doing much to improve the situation. If sales go up by $1 million dollars you've really only added $100,000-$300,000  to the top line. However, if he'd cut expenses like that retreat at The Greenbrier in favor a conference call or video conference he would realize 100% of the savings from the bottom line. Cutting expenses isn't a very sexy way to assert your leadership. It's better to be known as the guy who can move the sales needle rather than the guy who can make you profitable through cost-cutting.
 If your expenses reports are being nit-picked like never before you can bet that there is a good reason behind it. The company is probably is deep Kim-chi and cutbacks are being seriously considered. If you're seeing the effects, your department and your job is probably being considered for elimination. Let's face it. If it comes between canceling their own four day retreat at The Greenbrier or sacrificing you and four or five of your buddies, what do you really think they're going to do?


It's not all bad news, though. If you see some or all of these things happening at your company you always have the ultimate action in your own hands. You can update your resume, start interviewing and jump off of the sinking ship before any of the wharf rats even realize that you're gone.




Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.

This article is the intellectual  property of The Erudite Aardvark, which reserves all rights to the content. It may not be copied or re-transmitted in any fashion without the express, written permission of the owner.

Johnny Football and the Crossroads of Amateur Athletics

 At this point it's just under three weeks until the Aggies of Texas A&M take the field to begin their 2013 season. Like many college football teams, they are unsure who will be under center when they take the field on August 31st against Rice. The difference between the Aggies and those other teams is that they never anticipated their particular brand of uncertainty. While other teams lost their signal caller to the NFL draft or to graduation, theirs is of a different sort. When freshman sensation Johnny Manziel took over last year after Ryan Tannehill left for the Miami Dolphins of the NFL, fans weren't sure what to expect. They soon found out. Manziel was nothing short of magical in leading the Aggies to a very successful 11-2 season. A&M won the Cotton Bowl with a big game versus Oklahoma and Manziel walked away with the Heisman Trophy.
 With that wonderful backdrop expectations for 2013 were sky-high in College Station. But now just a few weeks before the start of the season things have taken a dark turn. Manziel has found himself at the center of an argument that has been brewing for at least twenty-five years in amateur athletics. ESPN has reported that Manziel took money in exchange for signing helmets and other sports memorabilia. Although no one seems to have actually seen any money exchange hands, the NCAA is investigating and the Manziel family has hired an attorney to represent them in the matter.
 Did Johnny Football take money for signing the autographs? We don't know yet. The NCAA will plod along, bank accounts will be checked for withdrawals and deposits and they will eventually come to a conclusion. Texas A&M will have a choice to make. Do they play Manziel and hope that he's cleared? If they do they risk vacating their wins and leaving themselves open to further NCAA sanctions. If they don't they risk playing a season in the toughest conference in college football without their best player. They can probably beat Rice on August 31st and Sam Houston State the following week without Manziel. It's the rest of the season that's in question. On September 14th Alabama comes calling, looking for revenge from last years loss to the Aggies in Tuscaloosa. And the schedule doesn't get a whole lot easier from there. Although they don't face anyone of the caliber of 'Bama (there is no one else of the caliber of 'Bama) they do face road games against Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss and Mizzou and home games with Auburn, Mississippi State and Vandy.
 However, no matter what happens to the eligibility of Johnny Manziel or the football fortunes of the Aggie nation this year there arises a much bigger question. Is it fair for the NCAA, universities themselves and licensing entities to make money off of the name of a college athlete while they make nothing themselves?
 It's here where we have to leave the particular case of Manziel behind and focus on the larger issue. If Manziel has been found to be in violation of existing rules and it can be proven that he took money in exchange for his autograph he deserves to lose his eligibility. He would knowingly have violated existing NCAA by-laws. Fair or unfair, they were the rules that were currently in place when the events in question happened. However, whether Manziel plays what would clearly be his final season in College Station or not is immaterial. He's indicated that he isn't particularly happy there and since he was redshirted he would have satisfied the requisite three year span between high school and professional football. Whether he's ready or not both emotionally and mentally to face NFL defenses he will almost certainly declare himself eligible for the draft. So no matter what happens in this case the real impact will come from the firestorm that it's caused with regard to the amateur status of players and their ability to earn money for their efforts on behalf of the universities that they play for.
 Let's examine for a moment why the amateur status even exists in college athletics. In the early part of the twentieth century very few people were college educated. The vast majority were men. The vast majority of those men were from families who could afford to pay for them to be schooled and for room and board and books. These were mostly the elite of society, the blue bloods. College was itself a fraternity. If one played a sport and was interested in continuing to play that sport it would have been unseemly to have accepted money to play it. That would have amounted to taking a part-time job, something that the majority of society men wouldn't have wanted to appear to do. As a result, the college sports team was born. Young men could represent their school, play the sport that they loved to play and compete against other young men from nearby colleges to uphold the honor and athletic prowess of their institution. There was a stigma against professional athletics at that time. Although America loved baseball and celebrated heroes like Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby and Christy Matthewson, playing baseball professionally and riding trains around the eastern half of the country was not something that most Ivy League young men were encouraged to do. Baseball players were loud, crude, rowdy men that came largely from lower class backgrounds. In golf, Bobby Jones chose to keep his amateur status rather than sully his reputation by turning professional and playing for money.
 Over the last thirty years or so things have changed dramatically in college athletics and in America in general. There is no longer any stigma attached to professional athletics. Indeed, it's really just the opposite. Professional athletes are at least equal to, and in many cases above movie stars and TV stars in terms of popularity and marketability. There is also no stigma attached to making money from almost any source any longer. You served as a juror in a salacious, high-profile case? No one blames you for being unseemly when you sign a seven figure book deal three days after the verdict is read. Need a little free publicity? Make a sex tape and then make sure that it gets "accidentally" leaked to the media. Are you an attractive young lady who needs money to fund your college education? Hire yourself out as a companion to lonely older men. Not an escort, mind you. Just a companion. Has the money from your reality show pregnancy of eight babies run low? Make an adult movie and hawk it with appearances on the talk show circuit. The point here is really just that society doesn't look down on the ways that people decide to make money the way that it did forty years ago, much less one hundred years ago.
 So maybe it's time to re-adjust our thinking when it comes to paying college athletes. What would be wrong with providing the young men (it would only be the revenue producing sports that could do this, so right now that's football and men's basketball)? Many of those who are opposed to paying college athletes like to point out that they are getting a free education out of the deal. While that is correct we've got to realize that it's not really all that valuable to a substantial segment of those who are participating in big-time college football. The only way that free tuition, books, room and board becomes a valued commodity is if a particular kid would go to college somewhere anyway. For a lot of these young men that is simply not the case. The sole reason that many attend college is to be able to be eligible to play football. If this is the case then the free college education isn't really worth much. For the kid who grew up loving Auburn football but isn't quite good enough to play at that level, a athletic scholarship to play at Appalachian State is an excellent deal. He's not going to play professionally, so for four years he exchanges his ability to play at that level for a free education and when he enters the job market in four years he benefits because he doesn't have fifty or sixty thousand dollars in debt facing him from day one.
Imagine this scenario; the NCAA sets up five division. The Division Two and Division Three would not look much different than they do right now. The three division at the top though, would undergo some fairly dramatic changes. At the top you'd have the Football First, Football Last, Football Always, Football Factory Division. These are the seventy-five to eighty-five schools that actually make money from their football programs, play in the major conferences like the Big 10, Big XII, SEC, ACC, PAC 12 or are named Notre Dame or BYU, sell out their games, make a ripple in the TV ratings water and sell serious dollars in apparel and merchandising. There may be a few more intrepid schools such as Boise, Nevada, East Carolina or Louisiana Tech that decide to join and there may be a few schools such as Vandy or Northwestern that decide not to fish in the deepest end of the pond. The next tier on the ladder would be a true amateur college experience, much like the one that we pretend that we have now. This would enable schools that don't have the resources to compete or pay for top-level prospects to still field competitive teams comprised of kids that are legitimately interested in playing college football and earning a college degree. The third tier is more or less like the Football Championship Subdivision now.
 These schools would compete only with other schools in the Football Factory Division. They would pay players a stipend of $10,000 or $15,000 per year plus allow them to attend classes or live in the athletic dormitory and eat in the cafeteria just like they do at present. If the player chose not to attend classes and work toward a degree that would be his choice. Additionally, the player would be free to sign with an agent out of high school. That agent would be able to negotiate with the university for a percentage of the jersey sales directly attributable to him after signing his letter of intent. If you're Jadaveon Clowney and you're the #1 high school pick in America, you have one more thing to consider when signing with a team to play college football. If you're the Florida Gators or Clemson Tigers or Georgia Bulldogs you may have to sweeten the pot and give Clowney a larger share of the apparel licensing in order to lure him to your school because you know he's a heavy lean to South Carolina. The money would be invested by the agent on behalf of the player. A player like Clowney, a sure fire top ten NFL draft pick probably wouldn't be concerned by the potential loss of money over leaving the Gamecocks after his junior season. The NFL money would more than make up for it. However, if you're a three star kid who had only two or three offers out of high school who has worked hard to add weight or get faster and may get a shot at the NFL as a third or fourth round pick that jersey money might be enough to make you stay for a senior season. Is it crass commercialization of college athletics? Yes. Without a doubt. However, anyone who truly believes that college football (or basketball either) is an amateur sport is fooling themselves. The television rights to broadcast the games of just the major former BCS conferences is just north of $1 billion. That doesn't include things like re-braodcast and tier three rights.
 The landscape of college athletics is changing. The conference realignment that has caused tectonic shifts in age-old rivalries over the past few years isn't over. The current playoff system to replace the BCS will no doubt be expanded. The money is just too great for that not to be the case. Would paying the players in these high profile programs $10,000 or $15,000 take the corruption completely out of college football? No. There will always be boosters with hundred dollar handshakes and offers of under the table money. However, it might reduce it to a considerable degree. If the agents, who are now part of the problem, suddenly become part of the solution because they've now got something tangible to protect the booster problem might begin to go away. Would an agent want to risk what could amount to several hundred thousand dollars in licensing money over a few hundred dollars from a booster? Of course not. The agent would want to protect his future investment and would rightly have a high level of influence over the player. The player is getting perhaps a thousand or twelve hundred dollars per month in addition to having no living expenses so they would be less apt to risk the loss of their eligibility and their claim to their licensing fees over a few hundred dollars from a booster.
 We need to stop pretending that we're still living in 1922. There are literally billions of dollars being thrown around and the only people who don't derive any immediate benefit from it are the very young men who make the whole thing possible. Create a pay for play system that gives the players a stake in the game, separate the football factories from the other institutions who don't want be involved in the monetization of the sport, put the ball on the tee and let's get on with it. Whether Johnny Manziel ever plays another down of college football or not, we may have him to thank for being the straw catalyst that finally broke the pretend camel's back.


Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.

This article is the intellectual  property of The Erudite Aardvark, which reserves all rights to the content. It may not be copied or re-transmitted in any fashion without the express, written permission of the owner.