On transfer portal, LIV golf, Casey at bat, Kevin Love and Darius Miles — no, not that one
Oregon State running back Damien Martinez is the first collegiate brand ambassador for Steven Jackson’s apparel line called “OBS” (Courtesy OSU sports communications)
Updated 1/18/2023 10:25 PM
Sports subjects on my mind this week …
• The window for the first NCAA transfer portal period closes Wednesday, with the final transfer availability set for April 15-30.
Oregon State’s two collectives — Dam Nation, run by Kyle Bjornstad and Dick Oldfield, and Giant Killers, headed by Scott Sanders — have done no outside recruiting. Work they’ve done so far has been focused on taking care of current Beaver athletes and helping to ensure they don’t lose them to other schools.
They’ve already lost one player to the transfer portal, Omar Speights. I figured the first-team All-Pac-12 linebacker was headed to the NFL after his junior year. Evidently not.
A year ago, Speights — a Philadelphia native who attended Crescent Valley High as a senior — got offers to transfer from Penn State and Pittsburgh. Sanders, Speights’ head coach at Crescent Valley, has not talked to him since he declared for the transfer portal, but he has a good idea about what happened.
“No doubt about it, he was poached,” Sanders says. “I think he is headed for the SEC. It might be Alabama.”
Or perhaps Texas A&M, which this week offered a scholarship. The Aggies were 5-7 overall and 2-6 in SEC play in 2022, one of the nation’s biggest disappointments.
Another top Oregon State player is being taken care of. Running back Damien Martinez, the Pac-12 Offensive Freshman of the Year, has hooked up with former Beaver and NFL running back great Steven Jackson. Jackson has started a new apparel line called “OBS” (Original Barber School), and Martinez is his first collegiate brand ambassador. Dam Nation has also announced a collaboration with Jackson.
“Steven is official ambassador for Dam Nation,” Bjornstad says. “He also has exclusive design and manufacturer rights of Dam Nation merchandise that will go to our members. Damien will wear the gear, promote the gear. Steven is already starting to mentor Damian. They are both running backs, but it is much more than that.
“We want to branch this out to other Oregon State student-athletes. Steven wants to build this into other sports; having both male and female (athletes) is very important. This is the tip of the iceberg. We are going to grow this thing. It is going to be pretty cool.”
The two collectives are working together. Though Dam Nation calls itself “the preferred collective” of OSU athletics, they will divide the list of athletes and each collective will get its share.
“We talked about that,” Sanders says. “I’ve had great conversations with Kyle. We’re not in competition. It is all for the greater good, to help keep Oregon State in the mix for being competitive.”
Sanders and Bjornstad both say Oregon State’s biggest name coming from the transfer portal, Clemson quarterback and Bellflower, Calif. native DJ Uiagalelei, is not here to claim a financial bounty.
The Uiagalelei family “didn’t ask for anything,” Sanders says. “They believe in Jonathan Smith and (offensive coordinator) Brian Lindgren. DJ was wanting to get back to the West Coast and get in front of a coach who can make him better.”
Bjornstad and Oldfield have met with Uiagalelei.
“Now that he is here, we have gotten to know him a little bit and look forward to working with him,” Bjornstad says.
Bjornstad says Dam Nation’s work with OSU athletes “is going extremely well.”
“We’ve had many conversations. Can’t share names,” he says. “The premise of what we are doing is taking care of our locker room, making sure (the athletes) are getting authentic opportunities, and it comes down to being loyal to Oregon State.
“Once (the first transfer portal window) closes, that’s when you’re going to see a lot of activity coming out of Dam Nation and NIL deals. We want to be fiscally responsible, but we want to make sure (the athletes) get taken care of.”
•
The controversial LIV Golf Tour will not return to Oregon in 2023.
LIV, which made one of its four U.S. stops at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in North Plains last year, will have three tournaments this year — in Tucson, Tulsa, Okla., and Sulphur Springs, W. Va.
David McDonald is co-founder and operating partner of Escalante Golf, which has owned Pumpkin Ridge since 2015. Last year, two of the U.S. events on the LIV Tour were Escalante properties.
Escalante owns The Gallery, the Tucson course where the LIV tournament will be played in March.
I interviewed McDonald for a website story on Jeff Sanders, but at the end asked him about the LIV tournament staged last July at Pumpkin Ridge.
“The event was phenomenal,” McDonald said. “Tremendous execution. With due respect, the narrative has been as negative as it possibly could be because LIV is a disrupter to the PGA Tour. LIV did an amazing job putting on a great event in Portland. For whatever reason, they chose not to come back this year.”
With due respect, the Saudi Arabia-financed tour has offended a lot of people in its year-plus of existence. Saudi Arabia is one of the worst, if not the worst, countries on human rights and human trafficking. As chronicled by The Oregonian, the Saudi government has routinely worked to help its citizens get away from criminal charges in the U.S., including at least a couple of cases in Oregon.
I asked McDonald if it bothered him to be doing business with a tour funded by Saudi Arabia.
“Not at all,” he said. “Not at all.”
Escalante scored a nice sum of money for playing host to LIV at Pumpkin Ridge last summer.
For some, it would seem, principle doesn’t much matter.
•
Former Oregon State baseball coach Pat Casey serves on the advisory board of “Diamond Allegiance,” a foundation that helps families afford the costs on summer camps and travel ball
During his 24 seasons as head baseball coach at Oregon State, Pat Casey didn’t often attend the annual American Baseball Coaches Association national convention. Well, he had to go three times, to deliver a speech as the coach of the defending national champions.
Since he retired from coaching in 2018, however, Casey has gone several times — as a member of the advisory board for Diamond Allegiance, which meets during the convention. The ABCA convention was held last week in Nashville.
Diamond Allegiance is a foundation which, as its website proclaims, “is committed to advancing the Travel Ball ecosystem by creating better value for players, parents, coaches and organizations.”
“It’s a chance to assist kids who can’t afford to go to camps and play travel ball,” Casey says. “We’ve developed a cost-savings program designed to help parents with flights, hotels, food and incidentals. A lot of families are spending $15,000 a year to follow their kid and watch him play summer ball.”
Among those on the advisory board with Casey are coaches Kevin O’Sullivan from Florida, Eric Bakich of Clemson and Tracy Smith of Michigan.
Diamond Allegiance hosted a dinner at Nashville. Casey spoke to the players and talked about development and what it takes to be a Division I baseball player.
•
Now a special assistant to OSU athletic director Scott Barnes, Casey is helping baseball coach Mitch Canham with a $6.5-million fund-raising projected to build and indoor batting facility in back of centerfield at Goss Stadium.
“We’re hoping to break ground after this season and have it ready in 2024,” Casey says. “It’s really going to be nice.”
•
I watched Kevin Love play what I’m sure was the first scoreless game in Moda Center during his 15-year NBA career last week when the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Trail Blazers 119-113.
The Lake Oswego native missed four shots from the field and had six rebounds in 15 minutes off the bench.
A year ago, in his first reserve role since his second NBA season, Love averaged 13.6 points and 7.2 rebounds and was runner-up for Sixth Man of the Year.
This season has been different. Again coming off the bench, Love is averaging 20.7 minutes, on pace for a career low. He is averaging 8.9 points and 7.2 rebounds — not bad — but is shooting only .393, which would be a career low for a full season.
Asked about Love before the game, Cavs coach J.B. Bickerstaff said the things a coach is supposed to say.
“Kevin’s role has been a little different this year,” Bickerstaff said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to fit in there. He has done a great job of keeping the consistency of his approach and his relationship with his teammates — being a leader and kind of a big brother to those guys.
“They have so much respect for all the things he has accomplished. They are always following, they are always listening, they are always asking him questions, and he is always been willing to share that. And to go out and lay it on the line as well.”
Bickerstaff said he had a long conversation with Love during the offseason about what his role would be this season.
“We talked about what the role would look like, how we would respect and treat him and allow him to be a part of the rotation,” Bickerstaff said. “His minutes were going to be dictated on performance. It wasn’t just going to be playing a guy because we think we should. If Kevin was helping the team win, he was going to run with those minutes. He embraced that role.”
Maybe, but lately, he has not been productive. Over his past seven games, Love has averaged 5.2 points on 12-for-48 shooting. In Portland, he didn’t look overly interested in the game, and Bickerstaff stuck with other players down the stretch of a close contest.
Love’s career accomplishments are unparalleled for an Oregon native — Naismith National Player of the Year at Lake Oswego High, Pac-12 Player of the Year as a freshman at UCLA, a five-time NBA All-Star, a two-time All-NBA second-team selection, an NBA champion, an Olympic and World champion.
Love turns 35 in September. This year, the 6-8 forward is making just shy of $29 million, the final year of a four-year, $120 contract signed in 2019. His next contract — and he will get one — will be for a fraction of that. Still, not a bad way to earn a living.
•
Remember former Oregon State athletic director Todd Stansbury? If not, it’s no surprise. Stansbury, now 61, was a behind-the-scenes AD for a decade (2003-12) and then AD for 15 months in 2015 and ’16 before leaving to take the Georgia Tech AD job.
In September, Georgia Tech fired Stansbury, but he has already gotten another job, as deputy AD at North Carolina State.
•
You might have noticed the report — Alabama basketball player Darius Miles, 21, is one of two suspects charged with capital murder in Tuscaloosa.
Hmmm. Darius Miles, now 43, played 2 1/2 of his seven NBA with the Trail Blazers. The ages match up. Could Darius be the son of the Darius we used to know?
“He is not,” writes Alabama associate director of athletic communications Steven Gonzalez in a response to my email.
Last I heard, the elder Miles — who filed for bankruptcy in 2016 — was co-hosting a podcast with former teammate Quentin Richardson entitled, appropriately, “Knuckleheads.”
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