Arkstfan

Regarding the AAC. If you preach P6 and inclusion, eventually the day arrives when fans are tired of hearing about it and never seeing it. Their anger is going to turn to the AD because he failed. Their president and AD for failing to get it done also. There is a reason why most smart business people adhere to the idea of under-promise and over-deliver. The AAC isn't going to be able to deliver so why build your marketing around something you have no control over and almost certainly cannot deliver? The Sun Belt? Right now there are two coaches I expect to see be the next to hit the coaching powerball. Neal Brown at Troy and Scott Satterfield at Appalachian State. Really good coaches. Blake Anderson at A-State? If he lays an egg this year he's toast, serious talk among people with actual money that just breaking .500 and making a bowl won't be sufficient to buy him another year. South Alabama made a good hire. Steve Campbell was very successful in the Southland and takes over a team that has managed some nice wins (Miss St and San Diego St) but has been plagued by an inconsistent offense. Campbell will fix that. Billy Napier at Louisiana may have been the best off-season hire, making real noise in recruiting. Figure three years max and he's off to big money.

They still have to sit a year unless they are a graduate transfer

Every year there are guys who get hurt early in the season and might be cleared medically to play in the final third of the season or the bowl game if the coaches really wanted them back but instead can't get medical clearance. I'm not sure that it isn't better to have that fiction take place because that guy ends up getting the chance to full heal and regain strength.

What is scary is when a guy completes his degree and wants to grad transfer and the coach can block him from getting a scholarship at his new school. Mike Gundy had a list of 40 schools that a grad transfer couldn't go to. I can understand blocking an intra-conference transfer or a non-conference you are scheduled to play. Can't remember where it was but there was a school in the Northeast that wouldn't give a guy a release to get a scholarship at any Division I. The coach can take a scholarship away if he needs to make roster space but players didn't have the ability to transfer without being blessed.

Everyone can play 12. At least 60% of schools will play 13 games. At least 15% will play 14. Going to 4 makes sense. The old rule was 3 and came from when 11 was the cap and around 36% played 12 games and less than 6% played 13 It gets the ratio closer to what it was when the old rule was adopted. As to enforcement. After every game or match, the schools send a participation report to the NCAA. Off the top of my head I can only think of two cases of bad participation reports. One was Tulsa claiming they sent more female track participants to meets than they actually had. Since Tulsa was at the minimum number of sports for FBS the NCAA in its sanction report said that they could have reclassified Tulsa football FCS or even drop them to Division II. Instead because they failed to meet the sport sponsorship requirement for that year they declared them ineligible for post-season in all sports. The other case was from the NAIA when someone noticed that scrubs who rarely got into games at home suddenly became really good players during road games for Arkansas-Pine Bluff. They were actually using players out of eligibility on the road and claiming they were the scrub players. Some of the older folks may remember when Dallas Carter had the big crime spree by players that a college coach asked the judge for leniency and promised that he'd keep them on the straight and narrow got chewed out in open court by the judge and cited his attitude as part of the reason the players thought they could do anything without any repercussions. That was UAPB's Archie "Gunslinger" Cooley. UAPB got a two year death penalty in football. Normally both schools in any game is tracking participation so if UTSA played Joe Freshman and didn't report it when they play UNT, someone would see the discrepancy.

I have my modem/router next to the TV and run an ethernet cable into my Roku TV. Learned that from seeing four iphones, four iPads, and a laptop or two all on wifi at the same time.

Four reasons for stutter. Insufficient processing power encoding Insufficient capacity going out. Insufficient bandwidth at the end user Insufficient processing power at the end user.

Once in awhile I'd get a stutter but I never had any serious problems other than occasional drops in resolution. But so far ESPN+ has been like watching MLB.tv except without MLB.tv's 60fps, the 60fps is just beautiful

They bought a very expensive technology firm, BAMtech and need to monetize the acquisition. They offer a game of the day from MLB and NHL and they are incorporating MLB.tv and NHL Game Center into ESPN+ as add-ons for an additional subscription. There are rumors that if the Fox sale goes through that they will sweeten the ESPN+ pot by making your local Fox regional available on ESPN+. If that happens then an ESPN+ subscriber in Dallas will have a way to watch the Rangers, Stars, and Mavericks without cable.

Oh absolutely. I can sit down with a good notebook and sketch out how Freeze, Malzahn, Harsin, and Anderson are all different offensively and defensively in what they do and how they approach recruiting and even how they run their practices. I can also outline how Harsin changed his offensive philosophy mid-season by elevating a Malzahn holdover to play calling to blend the styles and salvage the season. I'm more speaking in terms of Arkansas hiring Bielema which required a complete roster overhaul because none of Petrino's recruits fit what Bret was trying to do or how USM went from a young high energy staff in a spread offense to an older, another day at office staff, trying to whip people at the line to run between tackles.

No. Now it is probably true CUSA doesn't look like what it would have looked like had ECU, Tulane, and Tulsa left with the rest and that made things awkward but there is no magic wand to realign. There is no way you make La.Tech happy to be with ULM. There probably is no way to align UAB/USA/Troy into the same mix that the rest of the people in the conference are going yes we want our football team going to Alabama three times in two years or hoops playing three games there every year (well A-State would probably take it) Look at CUSA. When Bankowsky wanted to add ULL and A-State to push UAB to the east to cut their costs and give them more regional games, it was ODU and MTSU who were bellyaching that they didn't want to go 16 unless someone like James Madison was added. Getting UAB in their division wasn't a big enough reward for them. The Border and Skyline leagues didn't realign into something more sensible, schools bailed to start the WAC. When the WAC didn't make sense, schools bailed. When the Metro schools had trouble working together, they split and formed the Great Midwest. When the economics changed, they didn't just merge, they booted people. Sun Belt and CUSA aren't going to sit down and make a happy family. The only choices that are REALISTIC. 1. The two agree to form an LLC to sell their media rights jointly. 2. The two create a schedule alliance and instead of CUSA playing 8 league games in football, plays 6 or 7 and replaces a crossover game with some scheduling alliance game and does something similar in hoops. 3. People get really wild and agree to consolidate the two league offices to save costs and improve bidding leverage for bowls and tournaments. 4. A group of schools that aren't happy talk to another group that isn't happy and they defect to start their own conference. But no. There is no way to divvy the two into two conferences that will get enough buy-in to work.

But they then wen 7-6, 7-6, 8-5, 12-2 with Larry Fedora. USM won only 7 games in four of Bower's last six years. What got USM was the AD repudiated everything about the Fedora period. They scrapped the spread offense for a power attack. They hired a bunch of older guys for the staff and had a median coaching staff age that was nearly 10 years older than Fedora's staff and hired a guy with one losing season in Division II and two losing and one 6-6 in FCS. Fedora wasn't loyal to USM, he was loyal to advancing his career and brought USM along for the ride. It was the school rejecting everything Fedora did and represented that took them from 12-2 to 0-12 in a year. That is how I took what TIgreen01 was saying.

Showing games on ESPN and ESPN2 is a money grab by ESPN also, we are just used to it. I'm old enough to remember when we people were ANGRY that you had to have cable to watch a game, especially a bowl game. You are wrong that it is a worse ESPN3. I spent way too many hours watching ESPN3 and I've been watching ESPN+ since the Roku version rolled out. The switch to BAMTech has made a big improvement in streaming. MLS Live last year vs ESPN+? No question ESPN+ has been an improvement and there has been no change in production, it's the same feed from the RSN that it was last year. Now I'm not sure how exactly the CUSA deal is going to work, but the Sun Belt deal means we get more hoops (men and women), more volleyball, more women's soccer and more baseball (which I know isn't relevant here). For $50 a year I'm getting what was $80 a year from A-State and I'm getting rid of the $70 whatever I was spending on MLS. Save a $100 a year and get more stuff with a better stream? Take that deal every day. My understanding is that CUSA TV will survive and my fan side perspective is that's not great because it signals that there is still content the schools are unwilling to produce up to broadcast TV quality. I know what it looked like when ULM did non-broadcast quality stream in football or Troy did it in basketball and I felt they should have paid me since most local cable systems do a better job on high school sports. If subscribers watch CUSA content on ESPN+ that is good for CUSA because it will impact what ESPN will pay for CUSA content.

My 85 year old father uses Roku to stream games and he can't keep a laptop working for clicking on every damn we detected your computer is infected ad.

Nearly hit that one. If Fresno and Nevada hadn't blabbed to the MWC, BYU would have gone back.

Writer made predictions for 2020 in January of 2010. Some are amusing (Todd Dodge will get hired by Baylor) but a number of others hit well like Georgia Southern to Sun Belt and Charlotte and La.Tech to CUSA and Big East leaving the elites and taking Memphis. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/334329-25-predictions-about-fbs-college-football-circa-2020

The interesting thing to me was the MAC and Big 10 were advocates of December. SEC's position was they wanted it in November or late October.

https://www.si.com/vault/1975/12/22/616716/a-direct-bearing-on-the-bowls

Suffering from corrosion of poorly coated steel. Sounds like someone failed to inspect during construction and before accepting the work and most likely failed to do proper upkeep. The east side upper deck at AState is steel and was put up in 1991 or 1992. One support beam had to be replaced after about 12 years because the concrete footing broke and they just went ahead and replaced the beam at the same time. Nothing wrong with steel construction if you make sure the steel meets specs and you take care of it properly. There are plenty of steel stadiums that are 60-70 years old without having significant problems.

Sounds like Blake Anderson. That's almost verbatim of what he said after signing day.

Lucky thing JSU was on the road at Central Arkansas tonight. Could have been a major disaster.

Craig Thompson as a commissioner doesn't just think outside the box, he denies the box exists. But the more I think on it, I just can't see it making a great deal of sense for MWC to do anything other than add Gonzaga. The only way any larger would make sense would be if BYU were to return and that doesn't seem likely. If BYU came back, I could see inviting UTEP to round out to 14 and pushing Boise to the western division. Otherwise it really doesn't make much sense.

Maybe. We know what the Wichita State president was saying in the run up to getting an AAC invite (when they were still toying with adding football). His logic was it is getting harder and harder for non-P5 schools to get TV exposure and respect from poll voters and the selection committee and made no bones he thought Wichita State needed to join MWC or AAC to have better exposure and respect. Wichita clearly felt that but for football, MWC and AAC were peer schools. Gonzaga being a small Catholic school might believe that affiliating with large public universities is not in their best interest. I think that would be a mistake but I'm not getting paid six figures to be responsible for their best interests.

NCAA doesn't care. Their interest ends in football as soon as you show you have 8 FBS members playing all-sports (at least 12 sports) and in hoops ends as soon as you show you have at least 7 schools playing at least 12 sports in the conference. Most every conference has a rule saying that if you are a full member then any sport you offer where the conference offers a championship, you must play that sport in the conference. So if UNT adds baseball, you can't be an independent or an affiliate of the Southland. If Sun Belt started sponsoring women's swimming and diving again, UALR would have to move that sport out of the MoValley. If the MWC offered men's soccer, New Mexico would have to leave CUSA. Some conferences will also have a rule requiring any full member to sponsor certain specific sports.

Almost. You mean like how Notre Dame plays all sports except football in the ACC? The NCAA requires that if a conference wants to be treated as an FBS conference (ie. vote on FBS issues) that there must be 8 FBS schools playing all sports in the conference. The NCAA doesn't care where the 9th or 10th football member plays its other sports as long as there are 8 all sports football members. After Utah left MWC, BYU was going to play everything but football in the WAC but MWC raided WAC and left it on the verge of collapse. As a practical matter most conferences want all members to be all in unless they need a school in a sport to round out the numbers. If Texas wanted to go independent in football and wanted CUSA as its home for all other sports it wouldn't take long for CUSA to bless that move but if FAU announced they were joining AAC football only it wouldn't take long to kick them out of CUSA in other sports.