oldguystudent

On an unrelated note, CMJ, are you aware of Statsheet? Unbelievable amount of archive information I had no idea was available for "mid-major" teams. Down to graphic representation of individual player impact in a given season. I looked up a certain game in 1999 involving North Texas and can see really detailed information about an individual game.

You're all super serious basketball fan though. I don't know that the average joe in the stands could do that. I can only name one winner because my team lost to them in the opening round that year. Yeah, my unnamed team who went 15-1 in conference, 25-5 overall, 41 RPI, and didn't get a bid. Call it bad attitude if you must, but at-large bids just aren't coming this year.

This is true over time, but not this year. The conference tourney winner is hoping for a 14 seed. That's not at-large territory for the tourney runner-up. Also true. Quick. Without googling. Who won last year's NIT? I do think it's funny that all the conference realignment banter goes on in the football thread when at present, it's basketball that is in serious need of a scheduling upgrade. Beat up on the SWAC and the Belt year after year after year, and it's still win or go home with a possible NIT consolation prize.

Bottom line. Regular season once again rendered completely meaningless. Win conference tourney or go home.

I noticed that Las Vegas has been wiped off the map. I guess the casinos finally got beat, they rolled up shop and went home?

I kept having to look at the URL because I thought I was reading an article from the Onion. As for the old system shutting out teams from the big bowls, I give you the 1984 season. BYU handed Michigan its 6th loss in the Holiday Bowl and took the #1 ranking from both the AP and Coaches polls. That event in and of itself led the big money conferences to circle the wagons. They simply were NOT going to let such a small school grab the national spotlight like that ever again. If they follow through with their blatant bluff and returned to the old bowl system, the BYUs of the world could rise once again and embarrass the heck out of the big boys and their big money swagger. Mark it. They will NOT return to the old affiliated bowl system.

And by this argument, which is not far from current reality, conferences like the Sun Belt and MAC have no business calling themselves FBS conferences.

I don't follow the NFL, but lets assume for the sake of argument that year after year, top to bottom, the NFC East is light years ahead of the NFC West. Should the West division champion, at 9-7, then be denied a spot in the playoffs because the East has three teams at 11-5 or better? If so, then there should only be one division of 32 teams in the entire NFL with the top 2 playing in the Super Bowl, and one giant mega-conference of 120 teams in college with God knows who playing for whatever.

I didn't even notice Long Beach's Blair Field up there. When Long Beach makes the post season, they almost ALWAYS host. As a bonus, since that stadium isn't on campus, they are one of the rare college baseball facilities that sells beer in the stands. (Louisville has them beat on this one though. They have free admission and dollar beer nights in their joint)

Just as a benchmark, Sunbelt baseball stadiums: South Alabama (Pretty nice digs. They put some effort into the place) Ark. St (Not good when this is the only pic available) UALR (First view, I thought it was a softball field) FAU Different view (For a pretty decent program, I honestly expected something more.) FIU (This little thumbnail seems to be the only thing available) ULala (No frills, but looks pretty good) MUTS (Now this place looks like a great place to watch a game) Troy (Decent. Could host. Expansion seating planned.) WKU(Tough to tell. Not many pics available for this place) Anyhoo, going down this list, South Alabama and MUTS look to be the class of the conference in baseball facilities. Any kind of financial and architectural effort whatsoever would put UNT right up there. The baseball stadiums get a lot better as you move up in conference. Rice Baylor And the crown jewel of them all, LSU.

So if next year, UNT goes to whatever crappy bowl is up in Detroit, you won't watch it? That's about the most meaningless bowl game that comes to mind without looking at the list. As it is, even the New Orleans bowl is kinda' bunk to me. The Sunbelt champion against some other conference's third/fourth place team? Is that how things really match up? There are two factors keeping us from a playoff: 1) You can pry the power and the money and the monopoly out of the AQ's cold, dead hands. 2) How do you compensate the now defunct 25-30 bowl games that were once profitable for the entities hosting them? (although certainly not necessarily profitable for the schools playing in them)

You want to start with a minimum capacity of 3,000, even if average attendance is 1,000 for regular season games. Believe me on this point. Grass berms contributing to that capacity don't count either. It needs to be fixed, assignable seating.

Wouldn't surprise me a bit to someday learn that Mack Brown was lobbying for an exemption to bowl eligibility.

Agree. There are severe disadvantages to throwing in a rag tag temporary bleacher ballpark. Every OOC game will be on the road, you will NEVER host in the post season, and it reallly hurts recruiting. Somehow, the west coast gets away with crappy stadiums, but in Texas, you need to put up a proper stadium with at least 3,000 seats, permanent restrooms, and really nice dugouts. TCU's joint isn't nearly as nice as Baylor, but it's enough to keep the afloat on the national baseball scene, and it's good enough to host in the post season. Otherwise, unless the team starts to attract 7,000+ to every game (an extreme rarity reserved for SEC teams), there's not much reason to build something like the Box at LSU.

Just getting the fan base at large excited about the future of UNT athletics, sir.

Fire Johnny Jones! (If we don't call for his head after each win, the streak DOES stop, right?)

Is that UNT's reflection I see in Ark St's rear view mirror? No? Didn't think so.

I looked this up. In day-to-day life, there are bars in the expensive hotels and special liquor shops that you have to have some permit to enter. For the world cup, they're apparently setting up some special fan drinking zones. It is, however, illegal to be intoxicated in public in Qatar. Let's see how well that one goes over.

Some useful sites to whet your appetite: Boyd's World -- College baseball stat heaven run by Boyd Nation, a Miss St. alum, and the source of my data for my stats presentation in 2009. Rivals -- National coverage of college baseball run by Austin resident (And I believe A&M alum) Kendall Rogers. Very active message board consisting mostly of west coast player parents and hard core SEC fans. College Baseball Today -- Very quirky blog with national coverage by a somewhat insane, borderline alcoholic guy named Eric Sorenson who literally grew up in the stands of Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha because his parents didn't want to deal with him, so they'd drop him off there every day for two weeks each year. Some of the best photos and analysis of the game available anywhere. D1Baseball -- The motherload. Current scores, standings, schedules, rankings, and historical information for everything in the universe related to college baseball. It's updated live during the season. It's run by one guy. I'll try to look up his name to give due credit as it escapes me right now. At present, the college baseball community is pretty small and close-knit. All of the guys above cooperate with each other in providing the best, up-to-date information. They're all easily accessible online and in person. Another great facet of college baseball is that it's super easy to get face-to-face conversations with legendary coaches. Imagine being able to just walk up to Nick Saban after a game and asking if he wants to go grab a beer. Yeah, that's what college baseball is like. The coaching fraternity has a lot of great coaches with common ancestry, so even when they're bitter rivals on the field, they're very close friends off the field. A big one started with Augie Garrido of Texas who begat George Horton of Oregon who begat Dave Serrano of Fullerton who is friends with Mike Gillespie who came up under Rod Dedeaux. All of these guys will look back to Wally Kincaid of Cerritos College as the patriarch of it all. There's a whole crop of current assistants under these guys waiting to take the reigns.

Oh, and just a general primer for those who may not be too familiar with college baseball: Baseball typically runs four games a week. There are three-game weekend series, which like football, typically start OOC or in tournaments early in the season, and against conference teams later in the season. The fourth game is a mid-week game, usually on Tuesday, that is ALWAYS considered OOC even if the teams are in the same conference. Really good teams have three legit starts with #1 going on Friday night through #3 on Sunday. Mediocre teams start running into depth problems on Sunday. If you look at box scores, this is why you'll see Friday games coming in at 6-5 with Sunday games at 22-15. There really isn't such a thing as a Tuesday starter. You'll typically see a lot of experimentation going on with feeling out new pitchers for future potential and putting in younger position players. These games do count come selection Sunday and they do count for RPI, but for teams who know they're going to the post season (pretty much winning teams from the big six), these games are opportunity for younger players to get much needed experience should their services be required in the post season. Some conferences have a tournament and some don't. The Sun Belt does with the winner receiving the auto-bid to the post season. Unlike basketball, though, the Sun Belt got three bids to the tournament last year, so a random throw of the dice is not nearly as likely to destroy the body of work over a great regular season. College ball uses metal bats. Many were accusing certain SEC and Big XII schools of "rolling" composite bats to make them perform better. If you were to watch SEC games over the past several years, it looked more like a session at the driving range than a baseball game. Safety concerns have led to new bat standards beginning this year. While the bats are still metal, they are designed to perform like wood. Reports from fall practice are that home runs are waaaay down. We speculate a new era of small ball in college baseball with an eventual move to wood bats once and for all (although bat manufacturer endorsement checks going directly into coaches' pockets slow this considerably). That's all I can think of right now for the basics. Any questions? Edit: The regular season has a uniform start date in the middle of February now (southern schools used to start in January). The regular season is 56 games long with two exceptions. If you play an inter-team scrimmage in the fall, it counts against your game limit. On the other hand, if you make a road trip to play Hawaii, you can play up to four games that don't count against the limit, thereby raising your regular season game limit to 60 games. The post season is 64 teams divided into 16 regionals of four teams each. The four teams play a double elimination format tournament until one team is left standing. Then, the regional winners are paired up in super-regionals (the sweet 16). They play a best 2 out of 3 series with the winner advancing to the world series in Omaha. Omaha is split into two 4-team brackets that play a double elimination format. The winner of each bracket meet in the championship for a best 2 of 3 series to declare the champion. Up until Omaha, all post season games are hosted on campus. The #1 seeds in the regionals typically host. Among those there are 8 national seeds. They typically host the super-regionals, assuming they make it through their regional.

Baseball is a sport in which that is actually possible. Oregon kicked the crap out of baseball last year in only its second season. It takes facilities and a coach who knows what the hell he's doing. Oregon hired George Horton, who would be waaaaay out of UNT's price range, but then UAB got Ron Polk, legendary Miss St. coach for FREE! In this area of the country, there is a shite ton of talent in both players and coaches, and a lot of the older coaches will work for next to nothing just to keep themselves on the field and active. It's also pretty easy to build an immediate OOC schedule that ramps up RPI. Here, series and/or weekday games against Texas, TCU, Arkansas, Baylor, LSU, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St., Dallas Baptist, Oral Roberts, Southern Miss, A&M would all be really easy to set up. For some of those (except LSU who NEVER leaves home for OOC games), with adequate facilities in Denton, a home and home is by no means out of the equation. TCU would probably do a four game home and home weekday series no problem.. And let me tell you, I've been to several Big XII and SEC schools for baseball, and they are an experience. Smaller scale than football, but much more knowledgeable and less douchey fanbases. Even TCU, with a much smaller joint than the big boys, is a fun way to spend a weekend. I recommend checking out the series against Fullerton this spring to get a feel for college ball. That will match two national powers against each other in an early season weekend series that will have big RPI implications come selection time. Edit: The big six conferences in baseball are SEC (far and away the biggest, baddest, most funded conference in baseball), and in not particular order, PAC-10, Big XII, Big West, ACC and CUSA. The Sun Belt is #7, although having seen a couple belt teams play down in Baylor, my honest assessment is that there is a significant talent drop-off at present. However, look at the geography of those schools and think of the opportunity for UNT to take on all comers and make something of itself quickly.

We've been crunching a lot of numbers out west because Cal announced that it is dropping baseball after this coming season. The numbers that keep popping up are around $1.2 million of present day dollars to keep the program running. A Sun Belt baseball coach probably isn't making much over $175,000 if that. Baseball coaches don't make as much as football or basketball by a long shot. LSU is far and away the highest funded baseball program in the nation, and their head coach, Paul Mainieri, makes $625,000. The prominent coaches in the Big West are pushing not quite $300,000. So you've got 11.7 scholarships and travel as pretty much the only expenses. Probably costs less than basketball, all things told.

Not sure, but check this out from Eric Sorenson's College Baseball Today Blog -- 50 Cool Things About the 2010 Season

An excellent point. I do worry a little though. Will we start to see eagle wings on the sleeves? Painted forests on the turf?

Yeah, it took me a little while to find that. Most of the Title IX searches I did ended with very bent explanations in favor of one side or the other(It's great/bad for women/men!). In prong 2, what is the underrepresented sex? Is that by enrollment or athletic participation? Prong three is interesting because it can be substantiated by online survey. So what do they do? Send out surveys to incoming freshman and ask if they're interesting in playing sports then allocate scholarship money based on the percentage of positive responses? Bottom line, we're getting a baseball team at some point in my lifetime, right?