Sly Fox

I don't have a number but ODU is the major school in a Top-50 media market where most casual fans follow UVa & VT and there are a couple of HBCU FCS schools. But bringing back FBS football to the Hampton Roads area has been a huge success at the box office and for the school as a whole. They retrofitted an old stadium to get things going and are already upgrading their place left & right to meet the demand. It will be tough to maintain this buzz for an extended period of time. But their honeymoon has lasted longer than most expected. Wood Selig is their AD and is a colorful guy who keeps getting mentioned for high profile AD gigs at P5 schools. As a fellow school in Virginia, we play them in most every sport and their facilities are top notch. Both mens & womens hoops have traditionally been their focus until football came back to town in the past few years.

ODU football didn't even exist 10 years ago. They are just completing transition from a startup FCS school to FBS. Much like UNT, they sit right in the midst of a recruiting hotbed and other schools want access. And if you are using Texas Southern & Nicholls State as your points of reference for FCS, you are misguided. Sam or SFA would be better barometers here in Texas. Incarnate Word is an FCS startup and Abilene Christian is transitioning up to FCS from DII.

Yeah, our chancellor has his JD from the University of Virginia and not his PhD unlike all of our other folks in significant academic positions. That doesn't seem to be a huge deal for most folks. But some in academia would consider it significant. He doesn't dabble in academic affairs but has led an education institution built on revenue streams that has become the financial envy of most of the academic world. He's primarily an administrator and not an educator. There is no denying that theories of origins are a big point of contention for many. We use the same textbooks you guys use but view it from a different worldview. Outside of origins, which is a tiny slice of the educational experience, you wouldn't be able to distinguish any of our science classes from anybody else's.

We have the facilities, funds and fanbase to join any FBS league. We have been the obvious candidate for the Sun Belt the past couple of years. But the Sun Belt presidents can't get over the idea of being in a league with a school started by Jerry Falwell. Nevermind the fact that he has been dead for years. We are the only thing standing between them and a CCG. Their resistance appears to weakening and it is not crazy talk that we could be invited before June 1. Here are some of our facilities. Keep in mind that we have cash on hand for a major football stadium expansion to push us near 30k. We're just waiting for an FBS invitation to break ground on the visitor side tower that we will be a bit larger than the one you see below. But we're rather proud of it right now in its 19k setup after our 2010 expansion: We just made some tweaks to our basketball arena. But for better or worse, it is essentially a duplicate of the Ferrell Center down in Waco: We have a really strong new baseball stadium that is befitting the Top-25 program that we have built: And we even just built this sweet softball stadium opening this month where Dr. Dot Richardson coaches our squad:

Yeah. Just call in and ask him a Liberty-related question and listen to him get fired up. And NDSU is an extreme anomaly. They would have won most of the G5 leagues the past couple of seasons. They are an FBS school trapped in North Dakota with no league to join.

Love the concept of cheaper seats for the FCS games. At Liberty, we have a fairly large alumni base in the Metroplex and Texas in general. We could probably get some of them off their duffs to show up at discounted prices. We got Baylor in 2017 and they don't need to discount tickets anymore.

Liberty alum who lives here in Texas checking in. Not surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on here over the Flames coming to Apogee. Anytime any school schedules down it makes the fanbase grumble. We get it. A couple of notes in regard to our appearance in 2016 in Denton. Fort Worth native Turner Gill is indeed our head coach as noted earlier in the thread. Some of you guys may remember that he started his coaching career at UNT and actually picked up a degree or two in the process. This is a game he really wanted to get on our schedule. Not only is it a homecoming for him, but we recruit Texas fairly hard under his staff. We should bring a capable squad to Apogee in 2016 assuming that Coach Gill doesn't get hired away if we have a another nice FCS run this fall. We're a perennial Top 25 FCS team who has given some of the P5 schools some serious scares in recent years. For instance, we led UNC in the 4th quarter this past fall in Chapel Hill. I'm not implying that anyone at UNT should be scared of us ... just that we are not a Nicholls State. As for the crack about this being a conference game by the time it arrives, I laughed with you guys. I certainly hope we are at least in a transitional year up to FBS but that is just me being optimistic at this point. Just so you know, CUSA officials have had a great deal of contact with us in the past 18 months duing the realignment process. Our mens basketball program is historically bad right now so I think the odds of us being invited to your league in the next year or so are minute at best. But by most indications, the religious aspect of our school hasn't proven to be the barrier with your league that it has with your old Sun Belt brethren. And much of our school's reputation is based on decades old caricatures that have nothing to do with who we are today. Incidentally, we are the largest Christian university in the world even though we have roughly half the residential enrollment you guys enjoy.