GP1

I wouldn't say they have given up. Maybe they made a rational choice. I would say that with games at OSU and Auburn they probably met their budgetary "goals" for the upcoming 21-22 school year. Why blow money trying to convince people to come to Tuesday night games in November? Or, try to convince people to come to their only home ooc game against.... what's that teams name again? Or trying to sell another 1-3 start with two games being complete blow outs. There will be a cleaning of the house with a new AD. Is the fact that the MAC is Hell bent on destroying their football programs going to change? Probably not. I would say that what goes on in the MAC offices is sinister, but I don't think the leadership of the MAC is smart enough to be sinister. The ADs on the other hand.... they are just sinister enough in their resume development to destroy the schools they work for while blaming the MAC offices.

A school can come by a national ranking in a lot of different ways: easy schedule, name recognition (ie: Michigan), lazy journalists voting lazily, top team in a G5 conference, media darling, etc. It is true that Cincy is a good program (great G5 program...currently) with an excellent coach. Take that same program and drop them in a P5 conference and they are .500 at best. Let's take a TCU for example. They were a much better program when they jumped to the Big 12 than Cincy is right now. They are something like 58-44 since joining the Big 12. The luster is completely off of the program and their buffoonish coach. Some day Texas will get their act together and as Texas AM continues to expand their recruiting possibilities with their entrance into the SEC, TCU stands a better chance of becoming a cautionary tale rather than a beacon of hope. There are a handful of G5 schools like Cincy. The rest of the G5 schools need to decide if they want to remain on the current track to nowhere or go on another track and force the handful of really good G5 schools decide where they really want to be. The current direction of college football tells us G5 schools should really look at another track.

How come? Because we participate in a league that is not interested in competing at the highest level. BYU is a unique institution that has a history of competing at the highest levels. Boise State is a cute story, but put them in the PAC12 and they are .500 team. We are inferior to almost every P5 school. To pretend differently is delusional. It doesn't mean we can't be really good at our own level. Cincinnati is another good story. They are their coach leaving away from being very average again. If the P5 schools break away on their own, Cincinnati, Boise State and BYU will have tough decisions to make. I don't think anyone would want them. They bring no value to a P5 conference.

Burt Reynolds" performance as ex-jock who played football while in prison was enjoyable and fun to watch. Adam Sandler's performance as ex-jock who played football while in prison made you wish you were in prison to avoid having to watch it.

Will he be playing the part of Paul Crewe?.... I couldn't resist.....

You should never hate to say the truth. If we cannot admit the truth, we can never solve problems. You use the word "consistently". It's the correct word. I have grown to be much less interested in the odd win every few years against the likes of Northwestern, Syracuse or Pittsburgh than I am more interested in consistent winning, watching good football, going to bowl games, making the MAC Championship and winning the MAC. This thread is about our schedule. Our OOC schedule is not set up for us to develop a winning program. It is set up for us to hoard money and pad the athletic director's resume. Being competitive is not a consideration. It's as if they took the famous quote from Apollo 13, "Failure is not an option." and turned it into "Failure is our only option. Aim it straight towards the sun and go full thrusters.". If we have learned anything about college football, it is that the more you win, the more you win. It is no accident Clemson, OSU and Alabama are in the invitational tournament every year. Are the OOC schedules for these teams set up for them to compete or win? Have a look at them. There is little risk in their OOC scheduling. The only real threat to any of these teams is the first Clemson game against Georgia in Charlotte. Georgia is like Oregon...big name that never comes through in big games. I want the Zips to be consistently competitive against not only the MAC schools, but schools like UNCC, Utah State, North Texas State, Appalachian State, etc. Let's get good where we can get consistently competitive. Our current schedule is a distraction from that.

He should. He has to be 30 years old by now.

Name a MAC school that could consistently compete against the likes of Auburn and OSU in the same season. NC State was awesome. I was there. I also remember getting beaten badly by CMU the following week. G5 schools need to stop giving espn credit for being more important than it is. Recent years have produced cratering viewership and ratings for the network. The MAC has been getting a lot of espn exposure though....Tuesday and Wednesday night games starting at 8 PM in front of empty stadiums. That is the type of exposure we need to avoid like the plague. Why the Conference has prostituted itself like this is a complete mystery to me. The revenues shouldn't be that hard to make-up elsewhere. There is not a scenario in which even a Cincinnati playing the likes of Auburn and OSU in the same season is good exposure for their program. These two schools aren't like the terrible UCLA program they beat two years in a row recently. They are national championship contenders dripping with future NFL players. Our ooc schedule next year is a loser on multiple levels. First, we are going to get destroyed by OSU and Auburn unless these schools absolutely call off the dogs against an undertalented MAC school with a coach who would rather be somewhere else. Second, one of the opponents is so obscure I can't even think of their name as I didn't know they had a football team. Lastly, Temple...I'll leave it at that... Winning, and a lot of winning, brings exposure. If we can't at least win, the only exposure we are going to get is negative. We need to stop finding ways to lose in the name of exposure or money. It simply isn't working. Are there any adults in the room when these decisions are made?

You live and die with three point shooting. This was the story of the game. The Zips played well overall, but only shot 25% from 3 point range. If that was their yearly average, they would rank at the bottom of college basketball with Chicago State. Buffalo is a tough team. The Zips had their chances early in the game with a lot of relatively open 3 point looks and didn't convert. In fact, many missed badly to the point you have to wonder if tournament fatigue was taking over. To beat team like Buffalo you need a complete 40 minute game and the Zips fell short.

Kansas is a big job?

Yikes. One seven win season preceded by a two, two win seasons and a 3-1 record in a fluke of a season. Maybe they "seem" to be improving, but the jury isn't even in the deliberation room yet.

I understand it's the conference. The conference is wrong. It isn't easy money. It's destructive money that is destroying the league and the member schools. It's an extremely small amount of money compared to what the taxpayers could pay for. The espn deal amounts to approximately $833,000 per school. There are 8.4 mill people in ohio of taxpaying age. An extra $10 per person would be the cost to taxpayers to make up the difference. It's not like it would be impossible to watch a Zips game. Almost every college football game is on line. Espn viewership is actually in steep decline. This contract is not as valuable as it may appear. The value is actually in decline for the schools in many ways. Make the taxpayers pay for Mac athletics and give out free tickets to taxpayers for one Mac athletics event a year. The budget of Ohio is roughly $64 BILLION per year. The Mac athletics budgets are a drop in the bucket. The espn revenues are even less. It should be treated as a service provided by the state because that's what it actually is. Give the citizens what they are already paying for.

Agree. NE Ohioans love group behaviors more than other parts of the country. People are closely tied together. They love football. It's cultural. People are looking for things to do and things to do together. Put a decent product on the field and capitalize on this cultural behavior. Start with Summit Co. and work out from there. There are four groups of people UofA should be attracting to games: students, alumni, fans and the general community (people who are not one of the first 3). The football is never going to be perfect. It never is in the MAC. The experience is what people want and that is what will attract the lost fans and community. There is no reason for a fan to go to a poopy Tuesday night game and if that person isn't going to go, the person from the general community sure as poop isn't going to go. The MAC is committing suicide with these games and for the life of me I can't figure out why....OK, that's not true. It's because ADs are padding their resumes with this stupidity. IT NEEDS TO STOP!!!!!. The money simply isn't worth it and if that means G5 schools have to move to some other type of division, then so be it.

More of what is becoming obviously bad for college football, the annual invitational tournament (it isn't a playoff), is the last thing college football needs.

Or, with any luck, G5 schools will come to their senses and do something different. The times are right for big change. Will we continue down the same road?..... Probably.

I remember consistently bigger crowds and better football at the Rubber Bowl. It really isn't that hard.

Questions I would ask candidates are: 1. Plop the ooc schedule in front of the candidate for football. Is this the type of schedule that makes the program successful? 2. You will have influence at a conference level. What would you say your fellow athletic directors about the weeknight ESPN games? 3. How would you make football games more appealing to the students, alumni, fans and greater Akron community? These should be very easy questions to answer. If the candidate blathers on about the money with the first two questions, walk away. Chasing money is destroying the league.

It is a great OOC schedule. The NW game stands out to me. If that is a Saturday game, the weekend could set up really nicely for OU Alumni. That weekend the Cubs play a weekend series against their arch rival St. Louis at Wrigley and there is a Friday afternoon game. My guess is OU could pull off an alumni weekend in the greater Chicago area. If you have never been there, NW has a really cool, old...and I mean old, stadium. The luckiest woman in the world, Mrs. GP1, graduated from Miami. A few years ago, they played Notre Dame and had an alumni weekend in Chicago that included a Friday afternoon Cubs game. On Saturday, the group took a private train to South Bend for the game. It was a really neat thing to do.

Pro: Funny when someone accidentally gets shot in the groin area. Con: Reminder that humans will fight for anything that is free and if those cannons shot out jars of free cancer cells, humans would fight for them.

You got that right. It's a better program than Akron. In every way, Akron should be the better program. What do they do differently? 1. They have an AD who isn't very bright, but doesn't make catastrophic decisions. 2. They play at a day and time that is convenient for students, alumni, fans and the general community to attend. With the exception of one week 1 game in the past two years, every regular season game has been on Saturday. 3. Even in difficult financial times, uncc promotes the positive accomplishments of their students, faculty and staff. 4. Oh, they put an ok product on the field. Nothing great, but you don't want to vomit watching them. Other than these three things, Akron is equal or better than them in every way. Akron has a clean/better stadium, decent tailgating if you choose, good seating and clean bathrooms. It is almost impossible to be this bad, but "making the impossible, possible" should be our tag line. We are the only football program that could take that tag line and make it a negative statement.

For crying out loud, how old is Katie?

Dambrot was a great coach for Akron. Groce is a better coach. Groce wouldn't be stupid enough to coach at Duquesne. It is one of the many graveyards of coaches in college basketball along with places like St. Bonaventure.

I had a lifetime of the "building process" years ago. You are right. If a coach isn't winning after 3 years, he never will.

Seems like we are always in a total rebuild.

You're on to something here. There is a saying in sailing that goes like this...."The faster you go, the faster you go." When a sail is lifted and fills with air, the boat begins to move. It's a whole physics thing, but the movement of the boat causes other accelerating pressures on the sail that causes the boat to go faster. You go faster because you are going faster. This is not infinite. The teams you mention win because they win. The more they win, the more they win. The more they win at this point, the more they solidify their positions at the tops of their conferences and the college football world because they get the best players. What does this have to do with recruiting? Imagine being a 5 star defensive line recruit and the coach from Indiana comes to your home and tells you, you will immediately be the best defensive lineman on the team the coming fall. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? How could this story get better for the kid? The OSU/Clemson/Alabama coach comes to your home and tells you that you will have significant playing time in the fall. In addition, there will be another 5 star defensive lineman next to you on the defensive line and a 5 star linebacker right behind you. Unlike Indiana, where you will get double teamed every play, you will never get double teamed at OSU/C/Al and you will make a ton of tackles, win conference championships, compete for national championships and produce a ton of plays that will be on video and shipped off to NFL teams before the draft making you a high round draft pick after your JR year. That's how they win. Not the sailing, but the rest of the ideas above I heard listening to Rick Neuheisel on ESPNU Radio. He is worth listening to during college football season because he is just so freaking smart. He is a kind of "lens of clarity" about all things college football that makes you more informed but less enamored by the sport because he lays things out as they really are and not, as fans, the way we want them to be.