The Big Ten is circulating an internal document that lays out what a 24-team College Football Playoff would look like, including the elimination of conference championship games, a 23+1 selection model and an additional weekend of on-campus CFP home games.
SCOTTSDALE -- Major League Baseball finalized rules for the first year of the automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system, which will debut on Opening Day this season. Among the latest tweaks, teams will always have at least one challenge in extra innings, even if they have used their two allotted challenges within the first nine innings.
The Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos on Thursday after the team was unable to make a deal to trade him. Castellanos then revealed he was benched last season after bringing beer into the dugout during a game.
Base coaches in Major League Baseball will have to remain in their respective coaches' boxes until the pitch is thrown after owners voted to enforce the rule Thursday at their annual meetings in Florida.
It was a tale of two halves as the California women's basketball team built a 16-point halftime lead but fought off a second-half Virginia surge to come away with a wire-to-wire 64-58 win at Haas Pavilion on Thursday night and has now won six of its last seven ACC contests. The Golden Bears (16-10, 7-6 ACC) held the Cavaliers (17-8, 9-5), who came into the game leading the ACC in assists (18.6 per game) to just 11 and well under their scoring average of 77.0 points per game. Cal was also able to hold Kymora Johnson, who came into the game ranked second in the conference in scoring (19.2) to just 10 points on the night.
Lihue, Hawai'i - California men's golf ended in a tie for 10th place at the end of the first day of the John A. Burns Invitational at the Ocean Course at Hokuala.
The Bears finished the first round shooting a three-over-par 283, and are currently two shots back of a tie for fourth place. Freshman Xihuan Chang and sophomore Ziqin Zhou led the Bears, each shooting a one-under-par 69, respectively. Both are tied for 14th place after day one.
BERKELEY – Due to an inclement weather forecast, the California baseball team has made the following changes to its opening-weekend schedule with Santa Clara.
California rugby heads to the desert this weekend for matches against Arizona and Grand Canyon. The Golden Bears will first play the Wildcats on Saturday at 1 p.m. MT / noon PT, before kicking off a President's Day matchup on Monday versus Grand Canyon at 12 p.m. MT / 11 a.m. PT.
The California track & field team will split into two groups this weekend, with the distance runners returning to Washington's Dempsey Indoor in Seattle for the Husky Classic and the rest heading east to the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada, for the Battle Born Classic.
The California women's golf team continues its 2026 spring season this week, heading to the Alice & John Wallace Classic in Palm Desert. Competition begins Saturday with the teams playing 18 holes each day.
The Golden Bears are one of 16 teams competing in the par-71, 6,108-yard course at Monterey Country Club.
California women's gymnastics (7-3, 3-1 ACC) will return to the Metroplex Challenge for the third consecutive year for quad meet on podium against No. 8 Georgia, No. 10 Stanford and No. 42 Air Force. The event will be held at the Fort Worth Convention Center in Fort Worth, Texas, with Cal set to compete at 5:15 p.m. PT. Fans can follow along with live results and watch the live stream on Meet Scores Online.
Was there a shoutout on W4C re wgym beating Clemson at Clemson- with Clemson being the school that stole (outbid?) the prior Cal coaches that helped raise up Cal wgym? So good to get that win.
Julia Bonaguidi spent most of last summer circumventing the globe as a member of the United States National Team program.
Between playing for the American senior team at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore and for the junior team at the World Junior Championships in Salvador, Brazil, Bonaguidi was only stateside for a few days from the beginning of July until the end of August.
i am generally not. i am a creature of habit though. i like to follow the same routines in terms of making coffee, cleaning sink kitchen before i start cooking, etc
i think these are all "this is way" type actions. maybe a hint of "bad things will happen if you dont stay on the path"
i also follow unverified claims about cooking that seem to align with my worldview. like "dont mix onions and garlic in Italian cooking" which i am sure SGBear or others could tell me is completely not true.
Bordering on superstition: I am always wary of the month of February, due to events in my personal history: suicide, heart attack, broken hip. All those events happened in a 2-year span from 1985 to 1987.
I always have a certain dread during February each year.
I feel like when I watch Cal basketball I'm sorta coaching them. I know that's a ridiculous thing to say, but I'm engaged at much more cerebral level than I am for football. (For as much football as I watch, I concede that I know nothing about it.) That semblance of participation in Cal basketball games seems to minimize my need for superstition.
Cal football, on the other hand, is something that's done to me. So I am resigned to my superstitions.
Why Is Black History Month Celebrated in February?
February is the birth month of two figures who loom large in the Black past: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (born February 12), who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and African American abolitionist, author, and orator Frederick Douglass (born February 14).
i was thinking about AI in the current era in the context of crossword puzzles.
i wonder how good it would be at something pretty complex like the NYT Crossword. if it was just a bunch of words, i am sure it would be great. however the NYT one (and i am sure others) have a lot of popular culture and references, as well as strange abbreviations, some slang, some twists and satire and mirth to it.
i am sure someone has tried. i am tempted to try to write a "solver." i wonder if
1 - you can just let it try to solve from an off the shelf model
2 - you need to feed it 100s of examples of past puzzles + all the worlds knowledge to train the model well enough
Same. Totally. I'm trying to make the turn (getting through the weekend and back to Monday) for the fourth straight weekend right now. That'd be a new record for me. Some Saturdays I don't stand a chance.
My nibling got an internship at NBC Studios in CT for the Olympics. They are working on coverage for the men's halfpipe today- if you watch, be thinking of all those behind the scenes too!
from the Daily Skimm (which is one of my few daily reads)
The Flip Heard 'Round the Rink
What's going on: Not long after US figure skater Ilia Malinin landed the first of two backflips at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, he went from “Quad God” to instant meme king (including many posts referencing the other Ilya). But there was much more to the story. Malinin was the first to legally backflip on one skate in the Olympics — shortly after the International Skating Union (ISU) allowed the trick for the first time in decades — but he wasn’t the first, period. The ISU banned Olympic backflips after American Terry Kubicka first landed one on two skates in 1976. Decades later, France’s Surya Bonaly made the move iconic anyway, landing this time on one blade. Bonaly’s flip functioned as protest, cementing her legacy, particularly as a Black woman in a sport long criticized for its lack of diversity. So, when Malinin, a white man, received widespread praise for Bonaly’s move? Eyebrows shot up.
I saw Scott Hamilton do his backflip many times, once in person, on the Olympic exhibition tour in 1980, after he won the gold. It was still not legal then, so he only did it in exhibition, and landed on two feet.
If we’re talking about Black figure skaters, we should remember Debbie Thomas 1988 bronze Olympic medalist, 10 years before Surya Bonaly.
I can't believe how much I enjoy snowboard cross because I'm typically an Olympics purist and I poo-poo the new sports. But I love the head-to-headedness of it and the fact that people can wipe out, take others out with them, and it's like "well, that's too bad." It's great television.
Just back and turned on the coverage. Luge is bad enough but now they’re showing skeleton. I wouldn’t go down that track feet first but head first is just crazy. Before I went out they showed biathlon. A runner I knew in Anchorage had been on the team at Lake Placid and was still a very good skier and was a good age group runner. I assume a good shot too.
I couple of weeks ago, I watched people practicing luge in the Lake Placid. You'd hear loud rumbling when they'd be approaching...then WOOOOOOOOOSH...they'd fly by in a blur. Like, you can barely make out the color. I couldn't believe how fast it feels in person.
They actually sell tickets to let normals like us do it, believe it or not. I think they don't start you all the way at the top, but still. Hard pass. HARD.
i think i would like to do this in a "constrained way"
it is a bit like skiing a slope that is too steep. i'd be willing to do it if it was a little less steep and work out the kinks before going on the hard ones
I did the six person bobsled for tourists a long time ago at Lake Placid. That felt reasonable in that there was an expert in control - it wasn't just up to my own navigation to keep myself alive. They started us halfway up, just below the nasty hairpin turn that would give the Olympians three Gs of gravitational force. It felt a little like a roller coaster, but you could also feel that you're not on a track.
Other Colleges
Big Ten details 24-team CFP plan with no league title games
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/47917988/big-ten-eyes-24-team-cfp-no-league-championship-games
The Big Ten is circulating an internal document that lays out what a 24-team College Football Playoff would look like, including the elimination of conference championship games, a 23+1 selection model and an additional weekend of on-campus CFP home games.
PRO
MLB unveils ABS challenge system guidelines for 2026 season
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47914496/mlb-unveils-abs-challenge-system-guidelines-2026-season
SCOTTSDALE -- Major League Baseball finalized rules for the first year of the automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system, which will debut on Opening Day this season. Among the latest tweaks, teams will always have at least one challenge in extra innings, even if they have used their two allotted challenges within the first nine innings.
ABS is better than full robo-ump.
Phillies release Castellanos, who admits bringing beer in dugout
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47910837/nick-castellanos-owed-20-million-released-phillies
The Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos on Thursday after the team was unable to make a deal to trade him. Castellanos then revealed he was benched last season after bringing beer into the dugout during a game.
To be fair, it was after he was removed from the game.
Still a big no-no, out of considerations for the team.
MLB owners vote in favor of enforcing rule to curb pitch tipping
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47908371/mlb-owners-vote-favor-enforcing-rule-curb-pitch-stealing
Base coaches in Major League Baseball will have to remain in their respective coaches' boxes until the pitch is thrown after owners voted to enforce the rule Thursday at their annual meetings in Florida.
Basically keeping the base coaches within the coaching box until the pitch is thrown.
Totally reasonable.
Dodgers pitchers and catchers report today! Though many already have been there for a couple of days.
CAL
[WBB] Cal Conquers The Cavaliers
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/womens-basketball-cal-conquers-the-cavaliers.aspx
It was a tale of two halves as the California women's basketball team built a 16-point halftime lead but fought off a second-half Virginia surge to come away with a wire-to-wire 64-58 win at Haas Pavilion on Thursday night and has now won six of its last seven ACC contests. The Golden Bears (16-10, 7-6 ACC) held the Cavaliers (17-8, 9-5), who came into the game leading the ACC in assists (18.6 per game) to just 11 and well under their scoring average of 77.0 points per game. Cal was also able to hold Kymora Johnson, who came into the game ranked second in the conference in scoring (19.2) to just 10 points on the night.
[MGOLF] Bears Tied For 10th After Day One of John A. Burns Intercollegiate
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/mens-golf-bears-tied-for-10th-after-day-one-of-john-a-burns-intercollegiate.aspx
Lihue, Hawai'i - California men's golf ended in a tie for 10th place at the end of the first day of the John A. Burns Invitational at the Ocean Course at Hokuala.
The Bears finished the first round shooting a three-over-par 283, and are currently two shots back of a tie for fourth place. Freshman Xihuan Chang and sophomore Ziqin Zhou led the Bears, each shooting a one-under-par 69, respectively. Both are tied for 14th place after day one.
[BASE] Baseball Announces Opening Weekend Schedule Change
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/baseball-announces-opening-weekend-schedule-change.aspx
BERKELEY – Due to an inclement weather forecast, the California baseball team has made the following changes to its opening-weekend schedule with Santa Clara.
[MTEN] Men's Tennis to Wrap Up Non-Conference Slate
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/mens-tennis-to-wrap-up-non-conference-slate.aspx
Who: California (5-5) at Saint Mary's (4-3) & vs. Pacific (3-2)
Where: at Saint Mary's College & Hellman Tennis Complex
When: Saturday, Feb. 14 - 10:30 a.m. & 3:30 p.m.
[RUGBY] Bears Journey Southwest
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/rugby-bears-journey-southwest.aspx
California rugby heads to the desert this weekend for matches against Arizona and Grand Canyon. The Golden Bears will first play the Wildcats on Saturday at 1 p.m. MT / noon PT, before kicking off a President's Day matchup on Monday versus Grand Canyon at 12 p.m. MT / 11 a.m. PT.
[T&F] Track & Field Travels To Seattle, Reno
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/track-field-travels-to-seattle-reno.aspx
The California track & field team will split into two groups this weekend, with the distance runners returning to Washington's Dempsey Indoor in Seattle for the Husky Classic and the rest heading east to the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada, for the Battle Born Classic.
[WGOLF] Bears Head To Alice & John Wallace Classic
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/womens-golf-bears-head-to-alice-john-wallace-classic.aspx
The California women's golf team continues its 2026 spring season this week, heading to the Alice & John Wallace Classic in Palm Desert. Competition begins Saturday with the teams playing 18 holes each day.
The Golden Bears are one of 16 teams competing in the par-71, 6,108-yard course at Monterey Country Club.
[WGYM] Cal Takes On Top-10 Opponents At Metroplex Challenge
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/womens-gymnastics-cal-takes-on-top-10-opponents-at-metroplex-challenge.aspx
California women's gymnastics (7-3, 3-1 ACC) will return to the Metroplex Challenge for the third consecutive year for quad meet on podium against No. 8 Georgia, No. 10 Stanford and No. 42 Air Force. The event will be held at the Fort Worth Convention Center in Fort Worth, Texas, with Cal set to compete at 5:15 p.m. PT. Fans can follow along with live results and watch the live stream on Meet Scores Online.
Was there a shoutout on W4C re wgym beating Clemson at Clemson- with Clemson being the school that stole (outbid?) the prior Cal coaches that helped raise up Cal wgym? So good to get that win.
[CAF] No Days Off
https://calbears.com/news/2026/2/12/cal-athletics-fund-no-days-off.aspx
Julia Bonaguidi spent most of last summer circumventing the globe as a member of the United States National Team program.
Between playing for the American senior team at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore and for the junior team at the World Junior Championships in Salvador, Brazil, Bonaguidi was only stateside for a few days from the beginning of July until the end of August.
"Julia Bonaguidi spent most of last summer circumventing the globe as a member of the United States National Team program."
Interesting word choice to use circumvent instead of circumnavigate..
That is all.
I think I’d also like to circumvent the globe, especially these days. Where do I sign up?
"I wanna leave the world! Lemme off!"
Scrolled by too quickly I guess.
we have one already
Go bears was said
Oski Disciple did the needful
Superstitions
one of the best Stevie Wonder songs. in fact probably the best.
the guitar opening is beyond compare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CFuCYNx-1g
i am generally not. i am a creature of habit though. i like to follow the same routines in terms of making coffee, cleaning sink kitchen before i start cooking, etc
i think these are all "this is way" type actions. maybe a hint of "bad things will happen if you dont stay on the path"
i also follow unverified claims about cooking that seem to align with my worldview. like "dont mix onions and garlic in Italian cooking" which i am sure SGBear or others could tell me is completely not true.
wait, aren't onions and garlic like, one of the most fundamental combinations? Italians disagree?
right. that is what i always thought too until i heard this thing.
Habit is not superstition. Though, I will concede that superstition could be expressed as habit.
Bordering on superstition: I am always wary of the month of February, due to events in my personal history: suicide, heart attack, broken hip. All those events happened in a 2-year span from 1985 to 1987.
I always have a certain dread during February each year.
Triskaidekaphobia is an extreme superstition; a fear of the number 13.
If you have that fear, please send to me your $1 bills as it is littered with representations of the number 13.
I am also generally not superstitious, but there's a notable exception: Cal football.
I am highly superstitious when it comes to Cal football. Lord knows we can't leave any stone unturned. I will try anything and will take no chances.
For me, that superstition also spills over into Cal basketball. Probably all Cal sports.
I feel like when I watch Cal basketball I'm sorta coaching them. I know that's a ridiculous thing to say, but I'm engaged at much more cerebral level than I am for football. (For as much football as I watch, I concede that I know nothing about it.) That semblance of participation in Cal basketball games seems to minimize my need for superstition.
Cal football, on the other hand, is something that's done to me. So I am resigned to my superstitions.
This is an uncommonly realistic approach to take with Cal FB. Refreshing.
Abe Lincoln .. from yesterday
Why Is Black History Month Celebrated in February?
February is the birth month of two figures who loom large in the Black past: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (born February 12), who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and African American abolitionist, author, and orator Frederick Douglass (born February 14).
this is originally what i had in mind for yesterday except i went skiing.
the Abe Lincoln connection would have been my guess but not a very well informed or confident one
YIL (yesterday i learned)
was a clue in the NYT Crossword. someone clever must have picked an obscure Lincoln trivia fact for his birthday
It is said that Lincoln so appreciated the poem that he “carried Poe around on the Circuit—read and loved ‘The Raven’—repeated it over & over.”
i was thinking about AI in the current era in the context of crossword puzzles.
i wonder how good it would be at something pretty complex like the NYT Crossword. if it was just a bunch of words, i am sure it would be great. however the NYT one (and i am sure others) have a lot of popular culture and references, as well as strange abbreviations, some slang, some twists and satire and mirth to it.
i am sure someone has tried. i am tempted to try to write a "solver." i wonder if
1 - you can just let it try to solve from an off the shelf model
2 - you need to feed it 100s of examples of past puzzles + all the worlds knowledge to train the model well enough
I do the NYT crossword most days (well, most weekdays) and it's all for the mirth.
Sat used to be nearly impossible for me. turns out that it is just practice.
Same. Totally. I'm trying to make the turn (getting through the weekend and back to Monday) for the fourth straight weekend right now. That'd be a new record for me. Some Saturdays I don't stand a chance.
Cal
Go Bears!!!
Olympics
My nibling got an internship at NBC Studios in CT for the Olympics. They are working on coverage for the men's halfpipe today- if you watch, be thinking of all those behind the scenes too!
so cool. must be fun thing to be involved with
I had to look up what nibling means.
Everything you wanted to know about curling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p60I9LNHNxg&t=100s&pp=ygUPY3VybGluZyBwaHlzaWNz
from the Daily Skimm (which is one of my few daily reads)
The Flip Heard 'Round the Rink
What's going on: Not long after US figure skater Ilia Malinin landed the first of two backflips at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, he went from “Quad God” to instant meme king (including many posts referencing the other Ilya). But there was much more to the story. Malinin was the first to legally backflip on one skate in the Olympics — shortly after the International Skating Union (ISU) allowed the trick for the first time in decades — but he wasn’t the first, period. The ISU banned Olympic backflips after American Terry Kubicka first landed one on two skates in 1976. Decades later, France’s Surya Bonaly made the move iconic anyway, landing this time on one blade. Bonaly’s flip functioned as protest, cementing her legacy, particularly as a Black woman in a sport long criticized for its lack of diversity. So, when Malinin, a white man, received widespread praise for Bonaly’s move? Eyebrows shot up.
or maybe #blackhistorymonth ?
I saw Scott Hamilton do his backflip many times, once in person, on the Olympic exhibition tour in 1980, after he won the gold. It was still not legal then, so he only did it in exhibition, and landed on two feet.
If we’re talking about Black figure skaters, we should remember Debbie Thomas 1988 bronze Olympic medalist, 10 years before Surya Bonaly.
https://adultsskatetoo.com/blogs/adults-skate-too/figure-skating-backflip-olympics-2026-bonaly-malinin?srsltid=AfmBOorS8HJywkCCKtVK2pSk9XOwbJBDAe0U8ZkOIPR-Pk72DgynbYJ5#:~:text=Skaters%20like%20Scott%20Hamilton%20(1984,starting%20with%20the%202024%2D2025%20season.
https://www.tiktok.com/@themegandaily/video/7604685055880973582
https://chiquesport.com/blogs/guides/famous-black-figure-skaters?srsltid=AfmBOop-Dhehv13i6Ww1DAZfevGD0x7HyIdRDFMtGKfofzUyAKl3Pe6o
But Debbie Thomas was a Furdie...
She’s had a rough life since those days.
I can't believe how much I enjoy snowboard cross because I'm typically an Olympics purist and I poo-poo the new sports. But I love the head-to-headedness of it and the fact that people can wipe out, take others out with them, and it's like "well, that's too bad." It's great television.
Sorta like short track speed skating. Hang in the back, let the top guy wipe out 2 nnd 3 and you win the race.
the should have giant q-tips to bash each other with. why not just go all in on the gladiator-style chariot race??!!
Combine American Gladiators and Short Track speed skating!
If FOX had the Olympics instead of NBC...
the white people would have the weapons and chase the immigrants
Just back and turned on the coverage. Luge is bad enough but now they’re showing skeleton. I wouldn’t go down that track feet first but head first is just crazy. Before I went out they showed biathlon. A runner I knew in Anchorage had been on the team at Lake Placid and was still a very good skier and was a good age group runner. I assume a good shot too.
I loved watching the luge relay teams last night. Some of them hit 80 mph, amazing.
It's the double luge that gets me-- you can barely see the bottom rider at all, so crazy to stack like that, and stay stacked while hurtling down ice!
and the 2 middle people in the 4 man bobsled. what are they good for other than extra weight to go fast all while hoping the other 2 do their job
I couple of weeks ago, I watched people practicing luge in the Lake Placid. You'd hear loud rumbling when they'd be approaching...then WOOOOOOOOOSH...they'd fly by in a blur. Like, you can barely make out the color. I couldn't believe how fast it feels in person.
They actually sell tickets to let normals like us do it, believe it or not. I think they don't start you all the way at the top, but still. Hard pass. HARD.
i think i would like to do this in a "constrained way"
it is a bit like skiing a slope that is too steep. i'd be willing to do it if it was a little less steep and work out the kinks before going on the hard ones
I did the six person bobsled for tourists a long time ago at Lake Placid. That felt reasonable in that there was an expert in control - it wasn't just up to my own navigation to keep myself alive. They started us halfway up, just below the nasty hairpin turn that would give the Olympians three Gs of gravitational force. It felt a little like a roller coaster, but you could also feel that you're not on a track.
DBD Logistics
late start today. i was dealing some black cats and broken mirrors
how are your ladders?