Joe Santoro
Sports Fodder:
The team formerly known as the Oakland Athletics is clearly not taking West Sacramento by storm.
The Athletics, or whatever they are calling themselves these days, have played nine games in their new Sutter Health Park home and have yet to sell every ticket to a single game. Their top attendance in the 14,000-capacity Triple-A ballpark has been 12,119 for an 18-3 loss in the season opener to the Chicago Cubs. The attendance for the next eight home games has ranged from 9,018 to 10,553, with an average crowd of 10,048.
That's not how you get a major league franchise to scrap its plans to move to Las Vegas in three years and declare West Sacramento its permanent home. It you can't sell out even one game in a 14,000-seat stadium against three fairly attractive opponents (Cubs, New York Mets, San Diego Padres), well, you can forget about ever attracting a major league team to move to your city.
Nobody wants to watch the Oakland A's, West Sacramento A's or just plain old Athletics no matter where they play. It's a team without a true fan base. The only time they showed up in respectable numbers last season in Oakland was to yell at the owner.
But don't blame the fans, either in Oakland or, now, throughout Northern California. The A's are gouging fans with their ticket prices this year, demanding $66 or more for most seats, with many over $100. You can sit on a tiny grass hill down the right field line for $32 but you better come equipped with walking sticks and blankets. And if you have the $250-$425 or so for your family of four to buy an actual seat (it cost $220 a ticket to sit in the Solon Club), well, let's just say it's not such a pleasant experience sitting in a crammed Triple-A ballpark with 9,000-plus fans squeezed in knee-to-knee and shoulder-to-shoulder, as Reno Aces fans know all too well.
The biggest factor, though, is probably the A's themselves. The casual baseball fan likely can't name one single player on the roster. Even most so-called A's fans start to get stumped after naming Mason Miller, Lawrence Butler and Brent Rooker. Most baseball fans east of Denver likely couldn't even name those three. The A's are, without a doubt, the least-loved team in major league baseball.
This is how you get a major league franchise to leave their home of nearly 60 years and choose to play three seasons in a minor league park before moving to a permanent home. It's a permanent home, by the way, that is acting like it isn't supposed to build a major league stadium sometime between now and the start of the 2028 season.
If the A's can only manage to sell 10,048 tickets to the first nine games in West Sacramento, how many are they going to see when the temperature hits triple digits and stays there for two or three months? Yes, the attendance will get a nice bump and a ton of sellouts when the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees come to town, even if they raise the ticket prices to $300-plus per seat.
But that isn't a model for building a true fan base. It's just a way to bilk rich people out of their petty cash.
Good luck, Las Vegas. This is what you are getting in three years. Maybe.
•••
The Nevada Wolf Pack is just roughly four months away from opening its season at Penn State.
The Pack will no doubt leave Happy Valley with a 30-point loss on Aug. 30, an 0-1 record and the knowledge they made 100,000-plus fans in Central Pennsylvania giddy with delight. None of those fans, of course, will know that the Wolf Pack doesn't call Las Vegas home but that's OK. The Pack, after all, will come home with $1.45 million for their troubles, black and blue marks, pulled muscles and fractured egos along with their 0-1 record, so it will all be worth it.
Penn State finished 13-3 last year and advanced to the College Football Playoff semifinals. They beat Boise State 31-14 in the quarterfinals. They were ranked in the Top 10 all last season. The Pack hasn't even been in the Top 10 of the Mountain West since 2021. So, yes this is the ultimate bake sale game to raise funds for Nevada football. It's just that instead of selling muffins, cakes and pies, the Pack is selling out its athletes.
Don't be alarmed. This is what mid-major football programs do to their athletes. Everybody in college sports these days is just trying to make as much money off each other as possible. The coaches are just in Nevada to build their careers so they can move to a bigger program with more zeroes on their paychecks. It's the same for the players. The programs as a whole throw their athletes and coaches to the wolves for a huge payday at the other end of the country.
Oh, sure, it's in the name of giving them an opportunity to see real football up close, an opportunity to play on one of college football's hallowed grounds. It's sort of like giving them a spring break vacation to an exotic beach. The catch, though, is that at this beach they have to go in the water and fight off man-eating sharks with their bare hands.
So what if somebody loses an arm or a leg? They get a ton of photos and memories to tell their friends and family about and the university gets $1.45 million to help pay their coaching staff the following year. It's college football's circle of life.
The only losers are the fans who have to watch their teams lose by 30 on opening day.
•••
The 2025 season, though, will get much easier for the Pack survivors who actually come home in one piece after their visit to Not-So-Happy-For-the-Visitors Valley.
The Wolf Pack's remaining 11 games this year will all be winnable, even an Oct. 25 date with Boise State at Mackay Stadium. Now, of course, nobody knows exactly what will be winnable in late April for a Wolf Pack team in the fall that has won just seven games over the last three seasons combined. Anything is possible for a program that has been one of the worst in all of college football the last three years.
But there has to be more than four or five wins hidden in a schedule that includes Sacramento State, Middle Tennessee, San Diego State, Boise State, San Jose State and UNLV at home and road trips to Western Kentucky, Fresno State, New Mexico, Utah State and Wyoming.
Right?
The Pack should be 2-1 going into a game at Western Kentucky on Sept. 20 after beating Sac State and Middle Tennessee at Mackay Stadium. Why can't they win home games against a Big Sky team and a team that went 3-9 in Conference USA?
Fresno State was just 6-7 last year. Utah State was 4-8. New Mexico was just 5-7, San Diego State and Wyoming just 3-9. Boise was 12-2 but they are going to be minus running back Ashton Jeanty, the guy who seemingly carried the ball on practically all of their plays last year. UNLV was 11-3 but their head coach (Barry Odom) is now at Purdue (where he may never have another winning season).
After Penn State, we could be looking at the easiest, most Pack-friendly football schedule in Nevada history. Coach Jeff Choate has obviously been reading Chris Ault's handbook on How to Build a Winning Program.
Step No. 1: Play mediocre and bad teams. Step No 2: Always refer to step No. 1.
Another two, three or four-win season will be completely unacceptable.
•••
Another Wolf Pack men's basketball player, one you likely never heard of, has jumped into the transfer portal.
Yuto Yamanouchi-Williams, who basically lives in the portal every spring and summer (he's spent a season at Portland, Lamar and Nevada in his first three years of college basketball), is back on the internet looking for a new job.
YYW, as we will refer to him from here on out to save keystrokes and prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, was an intriguing player. Why he chose to redshirt this past season at Nevada after playing 40 games combined at Lamar and Portland the previous two seasons, never made much sense. The 6-10, 230-pound YYM certainly could have helped the Pack this season. He averaged 7.4 points and 6.5 rebounds a game over his first two seasons in limited minutes.
This is a guy who had six double-doubles for Lamar in 2022-23, including a 14-point, 19-rebound performance against Southeast Louisiana and 18 and 11 against Texas A&M-Commerce. He had 17 points for Portland against Santa Clara in 2023-24. That same season he also had 14 points against Saint Mary's, 15 against San Diego and 10 rebounds against Pacific.
But YYM doesn't stay in the same place for long. He was raised in Japan and played his senior season of high school basketball in Los Angeles at Ribet Academy. His next team, one that will no doubt be paying him much more NIL money than he was getting at Nevada, will be his fourth in college basketball and he still has two seasons of eligibility remaining.
•••
The national media is finally opening its eyes to the evils of NIL and the transfer portal, The latest topic of false anger the national media is yelling about is Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava. Iamaleava recently sat out the Vols’ spring game because he wanted a NIL raise to $4 million a year, up from his current $2.4 million a year.
Iamaleava is now in the transfer portal after Tennessee told him it wouldn't pay him $4 million a year.
The poor kid.
This is what happens when you open the door and let slimy boosters into college sports. Boosters are just adults who have been fortunate in life to earn a comfortable living but still want to live like they are 21 years old and back in a frat house on the weekends. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it. Boosters, though, should not be running college sports. But that is exactly what is happening now out in the open for all to see.
Why would a quarterback like Iamaleava, who is average by any stat you can dream of, think he has the right to demand $4 million a year to play college football? He was just 213-of-334 for 2,616 yards, 19 touchdowns and five interceptions last year in his first year as a starter. He ran for just 358 yards on 109 carries. Iamaleava was then 14-of-31 for 104 yards against Ohio State in the College Football Playoff. He's good. He is nowhere near great and probably never will be.
But some slimy, poacher booster this offseason obviously told him he's worth $4 million a year and now Tennessee is looking for a new quarterback. Isn't college sports wholesome, pure and wonderful?
But don't blame the athlete. If you thought you could get $4 million a year (and obviously some slimy poacher told him so this offseason) wouldn't you ask for it?
The problem, of course, is that nobody is in charge. Nobody is bold enough to make rules. Everybody (coaches, players, athletic directors) is making tons of money, and nobody is brave enough to admit the sport is broken and dirty. Coaches aren't even in charge of their own programs anymore. The boosters are running things.
Nevada, of course, doesn't really have this sort of problem. Well, not on that sort of level at least. The Pack, to be sure, wishes it had that sort of problem. It wishes it had enough deep-pocketed, slimy boosters who could flood the program with money and run things. But Nevada is among the majority of FBS schools that take the leftovers and castoffs and tries to build a new team from scratch every summer while the big boys fight over championships and million-dollar quarterbacks.
A program like Nevada will never win anything of importance ever again. And, no, a Mountain West championship and a spot in the Hawaii Bowl is not important.