Big 12 Coaches Split on West Virginia's Outlook in 2025
Welcome to The Shotgun/Throwdown, your daily West Virginia sports roundup (that we didn't already talk about in another article) with some sophomoric humor and daily distractions thrown in for good measure. And if there's something we missed, be sure to talk about it in the comments.
Unreasonable Doubt — A WVU Basketball Podcast: Filling the Gaps (w/ EerSports' Andrew Corbett) | The Smoking Musket
After some Braydon Hawthorne thoughts, Andrew Corbett (@andrewwcorbett_ on X) from EersSports.com joins the podcast to discuss what he thinks will happen with the commits that haven't been officially announced by WVU, who's his favorite player on the roster that WVU has officially announced, what needs should be filled with the remaining roster spots, and more!
FOOTBALL
Anonymous Big 12 coaches tell Athlon what they think about WVU | EerSports
On the outside, the projections aren't great. Observers know what Rich Rodriguez does inside the walls will tell the story.
Advertisement
ChatGPT is in love with WVU Football in 2025 | EerSports
EerSports checked in to ChatGPT and asked the AI feature to simulate WVU's 2025 football season. The exact entry was, "Create a simulation of the 2025 season for WVU Football, giving a game-by-game breakdown with statistics, and using this depth chart for guidance." Everything you see below here is exactly what ChatGPT spit out after that request - errors and all.
BASEBALL
Sabins must decide between top starting pitchers, but expresses confidence in Kirn and Kartsonas | WV MetroNews
Nine members of West Virginia's 2023 baseball roster remain with the program today, eight of which have played in the 2025 campaign. Two years removed from a season-ending loss at Kentucky, the Mountaineers get their first crack against the Wildcats since that 10-0 defeat come noon Friday in the opening game of the Clemson Regional at Doug Kingsmore Stadium.
GBN Podcast: NCAA Tournament Clemson Regional preview | Gold and Blue Nation
On the latest edition of The Gold and Blue Nation Podcast, presented by Mountain State Oral and Facial Surgery, hosts Nick Farrell and Ryan Decker break down all four teams in the Clemson Regional. They dive into the stats that tell the story of each team's season, and talk potential weaknesses for every opponent West Virginia could face.
Advertisement
WVU ATHLETICS
Six Mountaineers Continue Postseason at NCAA East First Rounds | West Virginia University Athletics
The West Virginia University track and field team continues post season competition with the NCAA East First Rounds on May 28-31 at Visit Jax Track at Hodges Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. The Mountaineers are scheduled to begin competition in Jacksonville today, beginning with the first rounds of the women's 800 meters at 7:50 p.m. ET, followed by the 10,000-meter semifinals at 9:10 p.m.
Are We Ready To Call Geno Smith A "Top 10" QB? | Raider Ramble
Offseason chatter is in full swing but some folks are already calling Raiders quarterback Geno Smith a top 10 player for his position.
Advertisement
Maxx Crosby shuts the door on Shedeur Sanders talk with major Geno Smith praise | Just Blog Baby
Raiders DE Maxx Crosby praised QB Geno Smith when asked about the team passing on Browns QB Shedeur Sanders in the 2025 NFL Draft.
Promising Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback makes big changes for second season | PennLive
Beanie Bishop has re-worked his body to stay the starting slot cornerback.
'He's Here To Take My Spot': Beanie Bishop Not Letting Guard Down Following Steelers' Slot CB Additions | Steelers Depot
Pittsburgh Steelers second-year CB Beanie Bishop Jr. is leaving nothing up to chance, knowing his job is always under threat.
JJ Quinerly seeing limited action in early Dallas Wings schedule | Blue Gold News
West Virginia alum JJ Quinerly hasn't gotten a lot of run early in her WNBA career, but she did score five points in just more than four minutes of action in the Dallas Wings' 109-87 win over the Connecticut Sun on Tuesday evening. The game marked the Wings' first win of the year after opening the season with four consecutive losses.
Advertisement
Alek Manoah's visit to Blue Jays a reminder that help is on horizon | Sportsnet.ca
John Schneider spotted Alek Manoah coming just at the last second, and the six-foot-six, 285-pound right-hander offered his manager a big bear hug. Manoah, who's with the team for its weekend series in Florida, represents just what the Blue Jays are missing — a fifth starter to slot into the rotation.
Former WVU coach Josh Eilert lands a new job | Blue Gold News
Former Mountaineer men's basketball coach Josh Eilert has a new job, as Wichita State has announced his hiring as an assistant coach for the Shockers.
Big 12's decision to drop to 18 games goes beyond injuries | ESPN
Another college basketball season in the books means another offseason to reset, recruit and reassess the growing needs of the game. Following a yearlong experiment with a 20-game conference schedule, the Big 12 announced its intention to return to 18 games for the upcoming season.
Advertisement
Why the Big 12's Fight Over College Football Playoff Format Could Reshape the Sport | Heartland College Sports
'We're going to war.' That quote from a Big 12 athletic director, delivered in response to the SEC and Big Ten's push for a self-serving College Football Playoff format, sounds dramatic. Maybe even reckless. But at this point in the sport's evolution—or rather, de-evolution—it might be the only sane response left for those still trying to preserve the last threads of competitive integrity in college football.
SEC's Sankey: A lot of factors support including bowls in CFP | ESPN
Despite the roaring success of first-round home games in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey on Wednesday said a lot of factors support the continued inclusion of the major bowls in the next iteration of the CFP.
Oklahoma State beats Virginia for 12th NCAA men's golf title | ESPN
Eric Lee beat Josh Duangmanee 2 up to give Oklahoma State its 12th NCAA men's golf title and first in eight years, with the Cowboys beating Virginia 4-1 on Wednesday at La Costa.
Baylor football player Alex Foster, 18, dies following shooting | ESPN
Baylor defensive lineman Alex Foster, 18, died early Wednesday after he was found with multiple gunshot wounds in a car in his hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, the Washington County Coroner's Office said.
Have any tips, suggestions or requests for what you want to see in The Shotgun/Throwdown? Don't hesitate to leave a comment below or contact us on social media.
Advertisement
Follow us!
Twitter: @smokingmusket
Facebook: The Smoking Musket
More from smokingmusket.com:
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Business Insider
34 minutes ago
- Business Insider
The AI future is already here
In March, Shopify 's CEO told his managers he was implementing a new rule: Before asking for more head count, they had to prove that AI couldn't do the job as well as a human would. A few weeks later, Duolingo 's CEO announced a similar decree and went even further — saying the company would gradually phase out contractors and replace them with AI. The announcements matched what I've been hearing in my own conversations with employers: Because of AI, they are hiring less than before. When I first started reporting on ChatGPT's impact on the labor market, I thought it would take many years for AI to meaningfully reshape the job landscape. But in recent months, I've found myself wondering if the AI revolution has already arrived. To answer that question, I asked Revelio Labs, an analytics provider that aggregates huge reams of workforce data from across the internet, to see if it could tell which jobs are already being replaced by AI. Not in some hypothetical future, but right now — today. Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, started by looking at the job descriptions in online postings and identifying the listed responsibilities that AI can already perform or augment. She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%. After further analysis, she reached a startling conclusion: The vast majority of the drop took place because companies are hiring fewer people in roles that AI can do. Next, Munyikwa segmented all the occupations into three buckets: those with a lot of AI-doable tasks (high-exposure roles), those with relatively few AI-doable tasks (low-exposure roles), and those in between. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, she found, there has been a decline in job openings across the board. But the hiring downturn has been steeper for high-exposure roles (31%) than for low-exposure roles (25%). In short, jobs that AI can perform are disappearing from job boards faster than those that AI can't handle. Which jobs have the most exposure to AI? Those that handle a lot of tech functions: database administrators, IT specialists, information security, and data engineers. The jobs with the lowest exposure to AI, by contrast, are in-person roles like restaurant managers, foremen, and mechanics. This isn't the first analysis to show the early impact of AI on the labor market. In 2023, a group of researchers at Washington University and New York University homed in on a set of professionals who are particularly vulnerable: freelancers in writing-related occupations. After the introduction of ChatGPT, the number of jobs in those fields dropped by 2% on the freelancing platform Upwork — and monthly earnings declined by 5.2%. "In the short term," the researchers wrote, "generative AI reduces overall demand for knowledge workers of all types." At Revelio Labs, Munyikwa is careful about expanding on the implications of her own findings. It's unclear, she says, if AI in its current iteration is actually capable of doing all the white-collar work that employers think it can. It could be that CEOs at companies like Shopify and Duolingo will wake up one day and discover that hiring less for AI-exposed roles was a bad move. Will it affect the quality of the work or the creativity of employees — and, ultimately, the bottom line? The answer will determine how enduring the AI hiring standstill will prove to be in the years ahead. Some companies already appear to be doing an about-face on their AI optimism. Last year, the fintech company Klarna boasted that its investment in artificial intelligence had enabled it to put a freeze on human hiring. An AI assistant, it reported, was doing "the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents." But in recent months, Klarna has changed its tune. It has started hiring human agents again, acknowledging that its AI-driven cost-cutting push led to "lower quality." "It's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg. "Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us." Will there be more chastened Siemiatkowskis in the months and years ahead? I'm not betting on it. All across tech, chief executives share an almost religious fervor to have fewer employees around — employees who complain and get demotivated and need breaks in all the ways AI doesn't. At the same time, the AI tools at our disposal are getting better and better every month, enabling companies to shed employees. As long as that's the case, I'm not sure white-collar occupations face an optimistic future. Even Siemiatkowski still says he expects to reduce his workforce by another 500 through attrition in the coming year. And when Klarna's technology improves enough, he predicts, he'll be able to downsize at an even faster pace. Asked when that point will come, he replied: "I think it's very likely within 12 months."


Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Why Human Skills Beat Qualifications In The Age Of AI
Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize how we work, making mundane tasks more efficient and slashing the cost of many back-office jobs. But there's a dark side associated with this efficiency and progress - the loss of those people skills that set one individual apart from another, those human qualities that engage others with your business and how you do things. These are often the essence of your business brand and the 'glue' that gets employees and customers to stick. A woman addressing staff in a private meeting Think about the pre-Internet days when we might use a paper map to navigate a car journey. After a few trips, the human brain would begin to understand where the roads were and build a mental picture of the route. With generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, that work is done for us so we lose the muscle memory of building up that picture. It's the same in the workplace - when employees are producing the same output for a task because they're all using the same tool, there is no differentiation and no reason to see your business as unique. This is why it's an important shift that more and more companies are looking at skills over traditional qualifications. According to a global survey by hiring platform Indeed, 67% of jobseekers and 51% of hiring managers believe that skills and on-the-job experience carry more weight than someone's qualifications or job titles. Skills-based hiring prioritizes these personal qualities such as communication and engagement skills over whether someone attended a certain university, for example, or they might favour someone who had acquired transferable experience volunteering while their peers were at university. Of course there will be industries where an academic qualification is essential, but our knowledge-based economy will need people who can set themselves apart with human qualities. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Work report spells this out - alongside digital skills and data literacy, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility are rising in importance. From a recruitment perspective, this means not setting up processes that rule people out based on non-essential criteria. In practice, this could mean removing the requirement for a degree or reducing the number of years' experience needed (and in some countries, it's unlawful to ask for these anyway). Look for ways that candidates can demonstrate qualities such as resilience and adaptability through the questions you ask or assessments you set. Why is this important? While AI can reduce the cost of doing business, this should not be the ultimate goal. Take customer support - a role that is increasingly being taken over by chatbots or other AI tools. Although these bots can handle basic questions and troubleshooting, customers with more complex issues will always value the more nuanced input and critical thinking of a human employee. Or if your business is in the creative industry and responsible for producing written communications, the team that can create something innovative and different from others is the one that will stand out in selection over one that has asked a generative AI tool to write its pitch. From a brand perspective, focusing on skills-based hiring and human qualities over algorithms could be more valuable in the long term. Of course, qualifications offer a measurement or benchmark by which we can compare people. But there are other approaches we can use in the recruitment process that can gauge if people have achieved in different ways. Perhaps they have excelled in a sport and are effective within a team, for example, or their previous experience and career trajectory in their career shows them to be a successful client advocate, even when they don't have the same level of qualification as another candidate. As with AI, we cannot rely on qualifications alone to secure the right path forward for the business - it's about the whole person, the whole 'problem' we're trying to solve for customers, and the multiple qualities that make an effective team that will deliver on targets. Ultimately, leaders need to build a business that is adaptable and resilient in a fast-changing market. Although AI tools can support employees to get up to speed quickly with some aspects of their role (it can generate drafts for those who struggle with blank page, or help people to communicate in other languages for example), they cannot replace someone who can create an engaging first impression, alternative way to solve a problem, or put themselves in someone else's shoes. As markets change, quick-thinking and empathetic humans can adapt quickly, contributing to sustainable business growth in the long term.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Here's how Uber's product chief uses AI at work — and one tool he's going to use next
Uber's product chief said he uses AI to summarize lengthy reports and do research before launches. Sachin Kansal uses ChatGPT and Gemini to understand Uber's performance in overseas markets. He plans to add Google's NotebookLM to his AI suite. Uber's chief product officer has one AI tool on his to-do list. In an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" released on Sunday, Uber's product chief, Sachin Kansal, shared two ways he is using AI for his everyday tasks at the ride-hailing giant and how he plans to add NotebookLM to his AI suite. Kansal joined Uber eight years ago as its director of product management after working at cybersecurity and taxi startups. He became Uber's product chief last year. Kansal said he uses OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to summarize long reports. "Some of these reports, they're 50 to 100 pages long," he said. "I will never have the time to read them." He said he uses the chatbots to acquaint himself with what's happening and how riders are feeling in Uber's various markets, such as South Africa, Brazil, and Korea. The CPO said his second use case is treating AI like a research assistant, because some large language models now offer a deep research feature. Kansal gave a recent example of when his team was thinking about a new driver feature. He asked ChatGPT's deep research mode about what drivers may think of the add-on. "It's an amazing research assistant and it's absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team with some really, really good ideas," the CPO said. In April, Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said that not enough of his 30,000-odd employees are using AI. He said learning to work with AI agents to code is "going to be an absolute necessity at Uber within a year." Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. On the podcast, Kansal also highlighted NotebookLM, Google Lab's research and note-taking tool, which is especially helpful for interacting with documents. He said he doesn't use the product yet, but wants to. "I know a lot of people who have started using it, and that is the next thing that I'm going to use," he said. "Just to be able to build an audio podcast based on a bunch of information that you can consume. I think that's awesome," he added. Kansal was referring to the "Audio Overview" feature, which summarizes uploaded content in the form of two AIs having a voice discussion. NotebookLM was launched in mid-2023 and has quickly become a must-have tool for researchers and AI enthusiasts. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former director of AI and OpenAI cofounder, is among those who have praised the tool and its podcast feature. "It's possible that NotebookLM podcast episode generation is touching on a whole new territory of highly compelling LLM product formats," he said in a September post on X. "Feels reminiscent of ChatGPT. Maybe I'm overreacting." Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data