Arkstfan

They spend. They had a good run and clearly will spend to get another run.

Fresno won 9 last year, 10 in 2022 and won the MWC, 10 in 2021. If that ain't good enough they ain't finding 8 teams. Colorado State gets a pass over down years because they spend.

I’m a skeptic regarding UTSA

I think the fact that Air Force and UNLV weren't in the first round tells us a lot about what they have in mind. They know they can get their special status back. If you build a league that is the frontrunner for the 5th champion spot in the CFP, you are in a good spot. Pac didn't grab the UNLV market, they didn't grab the national tv interest in Air Force. They are hunting schools who can win OOC games and be playoff contenders. They'll come hard after Memphis and Tulane and whomever else they think helps but they aren't looking for academic peers, geography, or markets. They want winners and they want schools willing to overspend to be good. Will the pitch work? Who knows. If not they will grab up UNLV and Air Force and maybe Nevada and whoever is flavor of the day. Think they really have their mind set on 8-10 teams who look like contenders.

I have a theory about what Pac-6 is doing. Don't think they are giving a lot of consideration to whether someone is an academic peer, geographically compatible, or bring a large market. My gut instinct is the pitch is this: We get the teams that make this conference the frontrunner for the 5th auto bid. You aren't going to recover the special status but you make the Pac-6 into the Pac-8, 9, or 10 and go to the playoff four out of five or five out of five years, the media is going to treat you as one of the serious leagues. If you are making the playoff, your tv value arrives right there because you might not be a big boy but you are a bigger boy than MWC, AAC, Sun Belt, MAC, CUSA. If they were market chasing, UNLV and Air Force are automatics. I think Tulane and Memphis are the top targets for 7 and 8. They might be on the UTSA rising star bandwagon for 9. But really think their hope is to skim contenders off and get them in the Pac and focus on getting in the big boy playoff every year.

Taking a break from writing a piece on this very subject. I don't think it's going to be what so many expect simply because nothing says the current framework has to remain.

Main is reason, unless you've got a really big NIL budget you have to develop some freshmen. AState brought in a Colorado QB and turned my stomach listening to him on a podcast talking about how NIL was going to give him a nest egg to get married to his long-time girlfriend after the season. Knew we had thrown that money in a hole. When guys see the finish line and understand there's no NFL contract waiting, they are likely to want the cash and make sure they can still walk straight and add and subtract when football ends.

Kentucky just had to back off a football player they really wanted because he didn't have enough transferrable hours. Both the NCAA and NAIA will dock you for taking a transfer who doesn't meet your requirements for regular transfers. It is the one place where athletes are treated exactly like other students. People whiz and moan about the higher NCAA admission standards for athletes. Out of 134 schools in FBS only about 5 will unconditionally admit a regular student who only meets the NCAA initial eligibility standard. Liberty, ULM, Jacksonville State, and I think Sam Houston. Not looked at Delaware. The NAIA has the right rule. If kid meets the standard applied for unconditional admission at your school, he's eligible. If he doesn't he's got to sit a year and pass like 24 hours with a 2.0 GPA or better.

I disagree. NIL pricing right now is nuts. AState ended up dropping $80,000 on a Colorado QB transfer who played two games and went 0-2 in those games. True freshman went 6-5. Held off some NIL bids to get him into the portal and he's back, basically because his family thinks he can score a much better deal after starting a full year. His number one backup will be a true freshman. You only have so much money to spend and using a money ball philosophy the best buys are offensive linemen, linebackers and strong safeties. So you either get cheap transfers who are cheap for a reason or you sign freshmen and develop them to play the skill positions. Every year a bit over 20% of the people eligible to play football run out of eligibility. Someone has to take freshmen and develop them. A-State has brought in freshman kickers the last two seasons because of the expectation the starting kicker was going to get bought. So he went this year and we will face him at Michigan. A-State can't pay six figures for a placekicker, say we possibly lose eight points over the season, we can't afford to pay $25,000 per point to make up the difference and as the UFL has shown, there are good kickers out there. I 100% believe modern roster building has to include a lot of portal activity but you still have to patch the holes by developing freshmen unless you've got a massive budget and even then the P2 are spending on high school players they project as big contributors. Way I see it, the big losers are jucos. Why would spend much on juco OL when I can get an Ole Miss castoff for just a bit more and they've faced better competition? I'd rather take a WR from Incarnate Word than Blinn because the Incarnate Word kid is getting just as many snaps but playing better competition.

Every generation believes what they grew up is the how it is. Well it isn't and never has been, whole thing is always evolving. Used to be we had 180 schools playing Division I football and a dozen bowl games and depending on where you lived, you might not even get to watch four or five of those games unless your local TV station agreed to carry the Mizlou broadcast. Used to be the only NCAA requirement for a student-athlete to be eligible was that they be enrolled full time. It was the conferences, many with in excess of 20 schools set rules like had to meet some standard of academic progress, the conferences determined what a scholarship could cover and should not. The conferences determined the maximum scholarships that could be awarded. Sure this was back when Montana and Idaho were in what is now the Pacific-2 but it happened. Well things are changing. The Big Ten and SEC have just almost collected every high TV value school in the nation. They are in a crack over litigation about their agreement to cap compensation rather than allowing the market to determine value. It sounds like they are offering to commit something like $15 million to $20 million per school to compensate athletes. Maybe they lump it all up on the stars, maybe they just pass it out to everyone on the roster. If they spread it to everyone then making the 105 roster at Texas might be worth $50,000 a year to a walk-on. That's before NIL money. Right now there's no real money in Big Ten and SEC saying abracadabra AAC, MAC, Sun Belt, MWC, CUSA go away into another division. No right now the benefit is for them to remain FBS and say see it's a free market, we aren't monopolizing it because those leagues have bowl agreements and tv deals and they can play their way into the CFP. We are complying with antitrust laws.

Let's say 12 teams. That's 11 games. What is going to produce more straight revenue before considering expenses? 11 bowl games with 22 G5 teams or 11 tournament games involving 12 G5 teams? I think the tournament. Instead of playin for 11 trophies, you are playing for one. Half the teams you see playing this Saturday are playing next Saturday and you start recognizing players and coaches and get more engaged. So I think replacing 11 bowl games with 12 game tournament is likely to produce more money while costing less to put on because the participants own the stadium, at least until the final, half the teams aren't traveling. The ones that travel are staying one or two days instead of four. You've got no need for a local ticket selling person in each bowl town, the home team does the hustling to sell tickets. Lower cost more drama. It's made for TV. I was looking at old AState schedules. 1975, 76, 77, 78, 79 we didn't play any traditional "P5" teams (had a game with Cincinnati in there). Looked at y'all and Memphis and USM and other than USM going Bama nearly every year, there just weren't many go to this place, get a check, go home games, most games against the power programs were depending on the school home/home, 2 for 1, 3 for 1, 4 for 1 deals. Oddly the "buy games" I found poking around (clicked a link by accident) was LSU bought a game against WAC member Utah and bought a home game against Pac-8 member Oregon State. When the money got crazy, selling a game to generate revenue became the norm, it just didn't used to be the norm and even an old fart like me had forgotten. The normal buy games you find in that era were things like Tulsa going to Arkansas every year or when A-State was playing in Memphis all the time, you hop on the bus day of the game, play and go home type deals. We may be heading that direction, not because we choose to live within our capacity to self-generate revenue but because TV is going to squeeze Big Ten and SEC for more conference games and more big non-conference games to get that next bump in money. If you get to the point they won't play, I like our chances outdrawing UFL, besides we pay better.

Some musings. First, G5 realignment for efficiency? HAHAHAHA yeah that's been bandied around and ain't no one ever bit on it. I'm very happy with what Sun Belt West looks like, odds are a shuffle gives me something I don't like especially since every let's draw a pretty conference on map nerd out there is convinced Arkansas State belongs in a Texas alignment when its basically same distance to Atlanta as Denton and there's a LOT of schools closer than UNT, the closest G5 in Texas. Now as to a playoff. To quote former Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters when someone asked him if the flavor of the day G5 consortium idea would work, "You only need one network to love you." If you can get CBS, Fox, NBC, or even ABC/ESPN on board to go all-in and carry the bulk of this tournament on over-the-air TV on Saturdays, then it's going to deliver better audiences than virtually every G5 v G5 bowl game that ever existed. Bundling a 7 game or 11 game or even 15 game tournament is going to be more efficient and more marketable than TV rights to a bunch of single game bowls and same for sponsorships. Financially it is more cost effective to send Toledo to Jonesboro on Friday to play Saturday than to send A-State and Toledo both to Montgomery and make them both spend four nights there. You will sell more tickets presumably to UNT hosting Utah State in Denton than you likely sell for the same game in Tucson or Albuquerque. The finances start making sense fairly easily. Here's the critical element to me. Third Saturday in December has long been G5 Bowl-a-Palooza on TV, that's now first weekend of the CFP with one game Friday and three on Saturday. If ESPN bothers to put any bowls that day, they get swamped and they are probably on ESPN2 or ESPNU. Fourth Saturday is likely to be flooded with games like the Liberty Bowl and Alamo Bowl P4 vs P4 games. Again if G5 get that slot, it's probably ESPN2 or ESPNU. Maybe get to play bowl games the Saturday after New Years but the competition isn't just NFL, it's NFL playoff football. The likely outcome is the Texas Twister Tyler Texas Bowl pitting AAC #6 and MAC #3 is going to be played a 2pm on Tuesday before Christmas or such. G5 is likely getting shifted to more weeknight bowl games and maybe more weekday games during work hours. If that's what's coming down the pike, then fine. Find me a network that will commit to Saturday over-the-air broadcasts in addition to cable channel broadcasts during the four Saturdays that CFP isn't playing. Probably best scenario is play one week, take a week off then play the next two in consecutive weeks in a 7 game format. No rocket science involved, top team from each G5 (so four champs plus whomever from the league getting a CFP berth) and three at-large based on whatever arbitrary and senseless ranking one cooks up or if 12 then 7 at-large. Bowls pretty much fade out and coaches getting laurels for 6-6 and 7-5 not so much any more.

Interesting. UALR started as a juco run by Little Rock school district. When the schools got closed as part of the Central High crisis, the district spun it off as a private school so it could stay open. UA-Fort Smith (Division II) was created as a juco by Fort Smith School district before getting its own charter and board as WestArk. Only ones I know of that started by local school districts

Well they aren't going Big XII unless it's a backfill. They will probably be sour about the league losing its big money producers and align with Stanford and Cal trying to block any expansion candidate while holding out for a raid of Big Ten, or SEC or Big 12.

Some Memphis folks think the Tigers would pass on Pac-2 offer. Seems pretty clear Florida State and Clemson are going to leave with just the exit date and cost to be worked out. If they leave seems likely UNC and UVA would leave too. Memphis would be the best candidate to pull up that doesn’t have baggage of an in-state school whining about not elevating them.