Arkstfan

I disagree with the commissioner that we are moving to an eight conference universe. I believe we are moving to a nine or ten conference universe. As I've stated on NCAABBS Sun Belt board, the middle class is disappearing in college football. Look at how the MWC, CUSA, and WAC raids have gone. The elite programs that made up the middle class are mostly gone. Those who remain are left in conferences with lower budget, lower supported schools than exisited in 2004 or even in 2010. The people who did best in the Great Depression or our current great recession are those who had cash on hand and little debt. The AD at FAU was quoted after ASU hired Malzahn as saying Sun Belt schools have been smart in the coaching hires because the contracts offered have been consistent with what we can make in ticket sales. Look at Memphis. They hired a TCU coordinator for $100,000 to $250,000 a year more than ASU is paying Malzahn, drew fewer fans than ASU last year and they are slashing all season ticket packages $50 to $150. The "rich" TV deal CUSA signed with Fox? Works out to $580,000 per school and was signed when Orlando, Dallas, and the better supported school in Houston were in the league. The chasing of TV dollars is like what is happening in boardrooms of failing companies. Slash your core business and dump it to cling to the one steady revenue stream that in the long run won't exist without the core business. Go research the budgets of FBS schools. Whether its Texas or Texas Tech league revenue (which is only partially TV, it also includes NCAA, bowl, league championships, and sponsorships) is generally a third or less of operating income. The core revenue stream in college is ticket sales, donations, and sponsorships. The new Big East and the Alliance are chasing TV dollars and BCS dollars mostly at the expense of playing regionally relevant schools. The problem UNT and Arkansas State share is that we lack a really close school that we can have a rivalry with that helps fuel donations and tickets. Swapping the Sun Belt label for the CUSA label doesn't resolve any of our problems if CUSA doesn't have those regionally relevant opponents. They are ignoring their core business. I tend to believe that if you take care of selling tickets, soliciting donations and sponsorships that the TV part of the picture will take care of itself. You should never make a move solely because of TV. The intelligent conference asks first, "Does this school fit with us in their goals, aspirations, focus, and profile?". The second question should be, "Does adding this institution help anyone in the league sell more tickets and to develop a rivalry?". Look at TAMU. Back in the 80's LSU and TAMU had a short-run series that was extremely popular and Arkansas has a long history with them. Mizzou and Arkansas are a perfect fit though not as currently hobbled up in their division structure. You focus on growing the 70% of your business, not the 30%, especially if growing the 30% is at the cost of the 70%. Rick Pitino has already said he will not comply with a Big East mandate to schedule the football only schools for a total of four games a year for each football only because Boise and San Diego are too far for the program to deal with. How is San Diego State going to help SMU or Rutgers sell more tickets and generate more fan interest? How is a championship game against Nevada and the occasional cross-over basketball game against them going to help East Carolina sell more tickets and spur interest in their corner of North Carolina? Commissioner Waters thinks the Big East will collapse and the fallout will trickle into the Alliance and some into the Sun Belt. I disagree. I think the Big XII will take Louisville and someone else, probably South Florida but maybe Cincinnati or Rutgers. Memphis would be a very long shot. When that happens I have my doubts that the basketball schools will agree to add any more full members. If the ACC were to come back in and take two more, I'd wager heavily they will not agree to take any more football schools to get back to eight full football members. The likely outcome in my opinion is that what is left of the Big East other than Boise State and San Diego State may finally see the light and approach the best CUSA programs and maybe Temple, maybe UMass, maybe a Sun Belt school or two and form a new conference that leaves UTEP, Tulane, Rice, UAB, maybe Tulsa out of the mix. The western schools will take UTEP, Boise State, San Diego State, and maybe USU and San Jose, maybe NMSU (not likely thanks to UTEP and New Mexico) and do their own thing. The Sun Belt will pick up Rice, UAB, Tulane and if available Tulsa. Might take La.Tech or UTSA or TexSt. and we will have the five wealthy leagues. We will have a new eastern/southeastern league to replace CUSA/Big East and a MWC sort of conference and there will be some schools left in the cold like NMSU and Idaho. This post has been promoted to an article

GoDaddy.com requires 7,500. Beef O'Brady requires I think 5,000. Believe New Orleans requires even less.

The WAC has until July 1, 2014 to have added an additional football playing school. I don't think UNT is changing its mind about joining. Why would Montana, UC-Davis, Sac State, Cal Poly, Portland, Lamar, Sam Houston change their answer when the general situation in FBS paints the WAC's future as even more dim than when UTSA and TxSt joined?

I'm not sure a playoff is in our best interest. A playoff reverses the pressure for larger leagues. What happens if Alabama and 8 of their closest friends conclude they are better off in a smaller league to compete for a playoff spot? MAC no longer makes sense to have 14, makes more sense to find a couple teams and split. A playoff also makes what has been mythical pressure to reduce the size of FBS actual real pressure. In an 8 or 9 league universe in the current system we are better off. Still going to get crap PR but we will get better recognition.

Gus might walk in 2 years. But he is four hours from his home town. He now lives minutes from some of his closest friends. He is provided a massive house in an exclusive golf neighborhood he has no car expense for himself or his wife. He and his wife said long before this came up that they do not want to live in a large metro area. His contract includes incentives based on donations weighted with highest rewards for donations from people who have never donated. My sources say he can be at a million before the contract is up if he has success. ASU boosters are providing 85% of his salary. Given state of the program there may be significant salary growth potential.

Six

I was fully for Chico until I saw the Malzahn story had legs. Wild day

Having been working on this since the first leaks, I can give you some of the background. There are only three names in coaching the average non-fan in Arkansas knows. Petrino, Houston Nutt, and Gus Malzahn. Malzahn utterly dominanted in high school. At Shiloh Christian he won two state titles for the classification and they ended up playing up a class because schools in their assigned conference refused to play them after several years of repeated beatings. He then moved to Springdale in the highest classification. His last year they outscored opponents 664–118 and won the state title game 54–20. He was named offensive coordinator at Arkansas for the next season. Nutt didn't like his offense and as the season wore on Nutt began over-riding more and more of his play calls. The Hogs dropped their final three games to finish 10-4. Malzahn quit and took a cut in pay to be offensive coordinator at Tulsa. Terrible time for ArkSt as Tulsa began killing us in recruiting in west and central Arkansas. Tulsa became the first team in NCAA history to have a 5,000-yard passer, a 1,000-yard rusher and three 1,000-yard receivers in a single season. They finished 1st in offense his first year and his second year they were second in the nation in scoring... ALL-TIME, not that season but in the history of I-A football. First year at Auburn broke the Auburn single season total offense record previously set by the undefeated 2004 team. 2010 Auburn gained Newton and a national title. From what I was told Chizik has been insisting on a stronger running game and over-riding play calls leading to a strained relationship (38th in rushing near the bottom in passing this year). The relationship broke last week. Malzahn called Freeze and Freeze encouraged him to apply giving him full details on support, committment, recruiting, facilities, and roster. Malzahn called Arkansas State, expressed interest and named his price. ASU raised the money in short-order.

I don't think it would make that big of a difference. Depending on which power rating you look at UNT is either ahead of 4 Sun Belt and 4 CUSA schools or 4 Sun Belt and 3 CUSA.

Ah the great community debate, right up with Vandy "Some day you'll work for us" chant as they drop another SEC game. Maybe someone can find a classy 1950's joke book and throw in some inbreeding and chickens in the yards jokes and be careful to not post the Asian or African-American jokes. I know ASU used enough players to fill three squads of defense and offense in the game, but don't have a beef with trying to keep a defensive streak alive. It's not like doing a planned celebration after a touchdown or something. UNT is a great school. Us dumb backward hillbillies that ain't got no learnin' knew enough to hire a really good conductor for our orchestra, at least I assume he is good since UNT hired him to be a professor. I reckon if'n you city slickers ever has chance to get up our way you might want to go check out Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, it will merely be the premier museum of American art and we didn't even have to break out the colorin' books.

According to ESPN, the WAC is worst conference, followed by the MAC. http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/30401/sec-passes-big-12-again-in-rankings The very reason that the WAC called UNT back when (and several times since) was that there is no pool of schools in their natural region wishing to join FBS. I figured it up earlier. The Sun Belt could lose eight, maybe even nine schools and carry on as a 10 team football league just drawing from the nearbv WAC schools and various FCS that have approved a move or that have inquired if the Sun Belt would have a slot for them should they choose to move forward with a move and that's not counting schools like Idaho and San Jose State that could be left homeless or schools like James Madison and Old Dominion who have made less overt efforts toward becoming FBS schools. What the Sun Belt desperately needs at this point is for ULL and ASU to finish the year with the only loss being the loser of the ASU-ULL game. At least one maybe both of the pair would finish ranked with 10 or 11 total wins and a bowl win.

Any plan based on the NCAA approving more games is a bad plan. They are giving serious consideration to cutting the regular season in football back to 11 games and have given a do not pass recommendation for conferences without a title game to have a inter-conference title game (vote hasn't been taken that I've seen). The Alliance is simply the stupidest idea ever put forth. If it goes forward in the manner they have suggested CUSA and MWC lose their seats on the NCAA Board of Directors and each "division" has to play a full round robin within the division to get a title game without having to apply for a waiver. I suspect a large part of their idea was to use the "it's a new conference" argument to tear up their TV contracts and start over but C-USA's is only a few months old and they've just lost their three largest TV markets and MWC has just lost their two biggest national brands.

Pfft. I worked in Shreveport from Aug 2010 to April 2011 and I made a conscious effort to keep up with how much Tech stuff I saw. If there are any supporters in Shreveport damn few of them care enough to buy a bumper sticker, car flag, magnet or license plate. I see more Arkansas State stuff each day in Little Rock than I saw Tech in a week in Shreveport and I've got a shorter drive to work in Little Rock than I had from where I lived in Bossier. I don't claim ASU has a great presence in Little Rock, in fact I complain frequently about the poor TV and newspaper coverage but it's still better than the coverage Tech gets in Shreveport. Ruston is 50 miles closer to Shreveport than Jonesboro is to Little Rock but you would guess the opposite driving around Shreveport and Little Rock.

A top running back vs ??? 10 returning defensive starters? A junior QB with loads of experience blowing up the school record book? Three receivers with 5 TD's and another who transferred in who was a 4 star? There are no objective facts to support the idea UNT entered this season with talent equalling ASU or ULL. UNT got almost the same yards against ASU as last year, but ASU is more experienced on defense from last year and plays a more aggressive scheme. ASU now has two years in Freeze's offense and he was hired four weeks before spring drills last year when offensive coordinator Clay Helton quit late to go to USC.

UCF has been ranked once. They had to go 11-3 to do it. Tulsa had to go 10-3. The problem isn't the media and the Sun Belt, the problem is not producing 10 and 11 game winners. When we have an 11-2 or 10-3 team not ranked, I'll worry that we have a problem compared to say CUSA.

Not as long as your memory is good enough to recall that in games determined by 21 or more it is 4-2 ASU lead. Largest margin of victory in the series was 56 at someone's Homecoming.

As I stated in a thread a few days back, Arkansas State placed more players on the pre-season all Sun Belt team voted by the coaches as well as unofficial media teams. ASU returned ten starters on defense. Tonight was junior QB Ryan Aplin's 23rd start and his 29th appearance as a QB for ASU. We returned three receivers who had 5 TD catches a piece last year. Not only were the tools in place for Freeze, he had a year on campus as the offensive coordinator and knew which assistants were worth keeping and who needed to be let go. You just can't expect the coaching change at UNT to have the same impact as the change at ASU. As for the "it's the freaking Sun Belt" argument. Was Dickey the best coach in the Sun Belt 2001-2004 or did he have the best horses? One league loss in that span. That last Sun Belt champion UNT team was rated 102 in the nation by Sagarin. ASU is 57, ULL 81 and FIU 89. After the ASU game, UNT is rated 126 and would have been a 5 point dog to the 2004 edition of the Mean Green and a one point dog to the 2001 edition. I'm not a Sagarin fan but it is useful for these sorts of comparisons.

I wouldn't say entirely revamped staff. The offensive staff from last year is mostly in place. We did clean house on defense. The attitude is worlds better.

MTSU holds the Sun Belt record for tickets sold to the New Orleans Bowl.

Yet we have a basketball tourney where the #1 seed gets the same dollars for showing up as the last team in. Of course #1 usually ends up making a lot more because they end up playing more than one game.

They have two FBS transfers on their current roster and both are placekickers.

Anything I suppose could happen. I don't think they are in the hunt though unless #1 Charlotte remains pokey about getting football going. #2 ECU stays. They have been wailing for years about needing a team in their region.

Rick, I'd agree that its simply a matter of ASU and ULL having hired a better coach this year than UNT did and not attribute it to recruiting, because that makes my school look better. Back in 2003 Harry was complaining to me that Dickey had let recruiting fall apart and until this class I heard near annual complaints from him about players ASU was getting in the Metroplex that UNT wasn't. I don't track recruiting so I take his word for it. By objective measures, Arkansas State has placed more kids on the all-conference teams than UNT. ASU has had a player drafted by the NFL each of the past five drafts, UNT hasn't had a player drafted since 2004. ULL has had two taken since the last UNT player. Maybe ASU and ULL are doing well because we all have equal talent and those two guys are doing a better coaching job. Maybe way back when UNT did some bad recruiting and has a hard time recovering because UNT hasn't won more than three games any of the past six seasons. If people think UNT has the talent to contend for the Sun Belt title this year, that's their opinion and they are free to have it. Just not sure what that opinion is based on other than the ever deadly score comparison game.

ESPN reserves the right to pick games and times 8 days out in its contracts. From observation, they seem to generally announce 13 days out with the SEC.