GP1

EA is right, but his reasoning is wrong. The reason UofA needs to play a better schedule is to bring in more money. I could really care less about SOS or RPI, to me all of that stuff is BS. What I am extremely concerned about are the small crowds that show up at the JAR to see them play Malone AND St. Francis, or whatever pile of crap they scheduled. One of those games a year is enough.EA is correct about one thing. UofA should be the odds on favorite to win the MAC this year. It has become a very good program. 25 wins with their schedule should not be an unreasonable expectation. They are good enough that we can stop holding the program's hand through the "building process" they have gone through and treat them like big boys now. I think they can perform well in ATM games and they should start to play them. Screw all the rankings.

I suppose it's a good thing your name neither starts with Tom or end with Wistrcill.Why is everyone so afraid of such a small percent of both ooc games and overall games being played as ATM games? I'm not scared of what the other teams have or how the Zips might perform. It has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with generating revenue for the Athletic Department.

Gary Waters didn't even need to pull back the curtain at the convo last week. Attendance: 5105Thanks ZW. OSU is having trouble filling 50% of the seats at their home arena this season. There is no advantage to Zips for playing games at the Q, except for the MAC tournament. I'm fine with that. Then what we need to do is schedule 2-3 ATM games a year and not worry about the home-home.

To be perfectly honest, I am not nearly the fan of pro football that I used to be. The process has been gradual over the years, but I can remember a time in my life when watching an NFL game was a fun event for me. What it has turned into now is a struggle for me to watch a commercial-fest with sporadic periods of football sprinkled in between.Do you guys realize the name Zips was from a sponsorship of a local rubber producer? We should all be careful to think that sports has not always been about money. It has.

Here is how this statement should read."The Big Ten hasn't officially contacted us at this time, but we're always trying to improve ourprogram. If that means building it through suicide, we are happy to go there."

This is an ATM game for UNCG. The game is being played at Greensboro Coliseum which seats 20,000. My guess is 18,000 of those fans will be rooting for WF. I'm sure UofA could get a home game like this if they were willing to play it in Cleveland.

I don't have a problem with the name of our stadium.As far as it being classy, InfoCision made a large part of their money in religious fundraising scaring little old ladies into giving $25 at a time and pocketing almost all of that money. We gladly took the money from a not so classy business. Let's not kid ourselves about where that money came from.

That's because Roethlisberger is slowed down by the weight of his two Super Bowl rings and his MAC Championship ring.I can't believe my Steelers playoffs hopes partly rest on Charlie actually being able to win a game this week. It's funny how things come around.....and depressing.

Maybe not as a starter, but certainly as a back-up. Charlie is proof of it.Think about it. If you were an NFL General Manager and you were thinking about your back-up situation, what would you want? The two things I want would be ability and experience. Most back-up QBs don't have the ability or they wouldn't be a back-up. Charlie doesn't have the ability. Most rarely get in a game let along start a game. Charlie has at least started a number of games so he does have the experience. I really believe that is worth something and Charlie will be around for five more years because of it.

I agree to an extent. Do you need to play larger schools? yes you do, but you have to avoid "payday games" unless it is an home-home series.You have created a situation where we will never play larger schools because the big boys don't need to play home-home. This reasoning has become the program's "escape hatch" for their bad schedule. There are schools more than willing to travel to the ATM 2-3 times a year and until the MBB team proves it can generate more income with the current schedule, I don't think it is unreasonable to ask them to step up to the ATM 2-3 times a year. This team is good enough not to fall on their face in a game like this. Heck, they might just win one.If by home-home you mean at their place and then at The Gund, I would agree. The truth is big teams don't come to the JAR because they can't rake in the money they can at home.

I didn't see the game, but I don't need to in order to know Charlie is sorry.

Does anyone know if they are planning on a special teams coordinater?I'd love for the Zips to dip into their bottomless pit of money and get one. In reality, there is not bottomless pit of money and they can barely afford to pay competitive salaries to their head coach let alone their assistants. There will be no special team coordinator.

The Great GP1 has been making this point for a few years now and it is on the money. If anyone is sensitive about hearing any criticism about the current state of Ohio high school football, please stop reading this post now.I belive the current population in Ohio is at least not expanding as rapidly as other parts of the country. It's simple demographics. As populations grow, the possibility of generating D-IA players is expanded. The Big 12, PAC 10 and SEC are great conferences because they have a larger population of high school athletes to draw from. In addition, the good teams in those conferences tend to be in warm weather states. I know nobody wants to believe it, but high school boys decisions are influenced in part by girls...I know that's hard to believe. When they can see girls in Florida in January in shorts and t-shirts, it makes for a lot better visual than girls in Columbus in parkas.tOSU is now bringing in what I consider to be "The Best of the Rest". After the tier one conferences get the majority of the best players from around the country, tOSU/Big Ten is left to select the remainder. A lot of those kids are from Ohio. The problem is not many kids from Ohio are "impact players". tOSU gets high rankings in recruiting because of players of secondary importance....linemen. If a kid from Ohio is really good and really wants to compete at the top level of college football most weeks, tOSU is not the place to go. Look no further than the kid who just won the Heisman Trophy. While not from Ohio, he is a midwest kid from Michigan who drove by a lot of Big Ten schools to play in one of the top three conferences and the competition that brings. tOSU isn't in decline because there are NO good players...they are in decline because Ohio simply isn't producing enough good players to make them competitive nationally. The other thing hurting the Big Ten is the style of football. It's just plain borring. No good player with his eyes on the NFL would go to a Big Ten school where they plough into the line time and again. tOSU is the Big Ten champion and they have a QB who throws sidearm and the nicest thing anyone can say about him would be, "He throws the ball in the general direction of the receiver". Why would a kid good enough to play on Sundays go to tOSU and play with that stiff. There is zero opportunity to showcase your talents. I know that type of thinking offends a lot on this board, but it's not 1950 anymore and high school kids do think about going to the NFL if they have the ability.I don't want to make it seem like I'm picking on tOSU too bad, because it is a midwest/Big Ten problem. They serve as a good example of the problem though. Keep in mind, tOSU lost to a 1-5 Purdue, the fifth place PAC 10 team at home in USC and they could have easily lost to NAVY. Freaking Navy for crying out loud. The bottom line is Tressel has the very best of teams in a second tier conference and they are still an average team who wouldn't compete very well in a top tier conference. The lack of talent is killing tOSU, the Big Ten and the MAC. There is no other way to slice it.One more display of the lack of ability in the midwest/Ohio will be on display at the Sugar Bowl this year. Cincy could have lot to Pitt. I saw Pitt play yesterday and they could have lost to UNC. UNC is a joke. Cincy is going to get steamrolled by UF at the Sugar Bowl. The talent level will be overwhelming.

All really good points.As far as Marshall, Leftwich's team his last year at Marshall would have kicked the crap out of that Marshall team yesterday.

I like what I see in this article. Three things stand out to me as a positive sign.1. He likes what he sees on film as far as the talent. So do a lot of us.2. He is planning new schemes with the new coaches. New scheme = good.3. Spring practice is delayed so the schemes can be better thought out and the players have more time in the weight room.Translation. The talent is there....the bodies need development before the scheme can be implemented because he knows size matters and they players aren't big enough yet. This guy expects to win sooner rather than later and sees the exising talent can deliver wins. I think he is right.To the players...get ready for a brutal winter training.To the strength and conditioning coach.....make sure the waste baskets are plenty empty because there is going to be a lot of thowing up.

I'm getting ready to go watch Pitt play UNC later this afternoon and the Marshall vs. ECU bowl game from when Leftwich played is on ESPN Classic. It was one of the all time great bowl games. I can't help but think...What in the heck has happened to the MAC? From the period when Pennington started until Roethlisberger left Miami, the MAC champion would have had a shot of beating either Pitt or UNC in the Car Care Bowl. That is not the case today.One of the worst things to happen to MAC football was the exit of Marshall to CUSA (it has been bad for Marshall also, but that's another topic). The old saying is, "A rising tide lifts all ships". Marshall was a winner before coming to the MAC and they remained a winner in the conference. Being as good as they were, the other MAC schools were forced to improve their programs talent levels to keep up. Miami, Toledo and WMU just to name a few were much better teams than they are today. Heck, Miami had a Top 10 finish Roethlisberger's final season. With the exit of Marshall, the tide was lowered and so has the quality of the MAC. A lot of MAC schools had actually caught up to Marshall in quality and were beating them. If my memory serves me correctly, UofA won 2 of the last 3 outings against Marshall.Another problem I think the MAC has is there is a loss of focus on winning in exchange for a focus on "building" things. Marshall, Miami, WMU and Toledo had worse facilities than they do today and their teams were better then than now. They had better players then than they do today with better facilities. Is the focus on "building" really the key or should be key be focusing on winning and getting winners in your program? When you focus on "building", you can more easily excuse away losing by lumping it into some odd idea that in the long run the losing will pay off because you are "building". Think about it....in 99% of the cases you can't have a child without having sex....you can't have a winner without winning. In this holiday season, I would ask for winning to be the priority of the conference and not an immaculate conception of "building" to transform it into a winner.

The first MAC bowl game is today. If the MAC is going to win one this year, this could be one of the games they pull off. I don't see that happening though. OU only put up 10 on CMU in the MAC Championship and their QB is a joke. Getting an early lead and keeping the game in their style of play, which is a running game, is their only hope. Marshall will win, but isn't impressive in doing so and the game will not be as close as the score indicates.Marshall 24OU 10

You are very close. A large part of the problem is people around Akron really aren't aware of what a really good school UofA has become so they think it is still the high school on the hill. Specifically, the Law School typically has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates of graduates passing the bar exam on the first try.I'd be really interested in knowing what the average time laps has been since the average person in Summit County actually walked on campus. I know people who live in the city who probably haven't walked on campus in 20 years.

The ooc schedule the year above doesn't seem to be all that more easy than the one we play now. Given we have better facilities in the form of the fieldhouse, more money to throw at the program and campus is better, I wouldn't say our schedule has "grown" much over the years. We certainly don't seem to be "building" a better schedule. In fact, we seem to be in around the same position. Potential conference champion in a bad conference, weak ooc schedule and good coach with good players (although the players as a group are much better today).In all seriousness, the landscape of college basketball and college athletics in general have changed drastically over the past 20+ years. It's hard to compare with the time laps between the two periods.

In their time honored tradition of incompetency, Can't has lost their 1960 time capsule reported in the ABJ this morning.In the third to the last paragraph, the words "haven't yielded any clues" appear. Doesn't this describe the average Can't graduate/student/administrator/professor?

You're probably right about catching his eye. However, proving a negative is very difficult and until the Zips put a string of big wins together, the interest level will remain low.When anyone goes to buy a product, they tend to look at the entire product to see if it appeals to them. What are the Zips selling besides the team in blue and gold? Well, the other team is one of them. The game day experience is another. The concessions are another. The MAC is another. One of the problems the Zips have with selling tickets is they are good, but they surround themselves with bad products so people don't buy the whole package. The other teams, as a whole, aren't worth buying. The seats at the JAG, specifically the benches, are the stuff that puts chiropractors' children through college. The food at the JAR is bad. The MAC is bad. How many of you would buy a Hickory Farms gift package with summer sausage, dried cranberries, wheat thins, granola and tofu? Not many...the summer sausage looks great, but the rest just isn't worth the purchase. The Zips basketball team is like the summer sausage. On a cold winter day, the idea of it is appealing until you look in the package and see the cranberries, etc. You could still get 3,300 sausage loving fans to buy the box for the sausage alone (at a discount), you just probably aren't going to pick up the Joe Akron crowd interested in sauage, cheese, honey mustard and crackers.The ABJ argument. If the Zips were getting 3,300 fans per game a few years ago with little ABJ coverage and they are still averaging the same amount today with more ABJ coverage, how important is the ABJ? Everything about the Zips is better than it was a few years ago including the ABJ coverage AND Plain Dealer coverage. It kind of makes someone with an open mind think that maybe the theory that ABJ covering the Zips more would expand attendance was wrong. I used to believe it, but this makes me think I may have been wrong.

I would. I think our relationship with the local schools is good enough. In the past, all we get from local high school coaches in NE Ohio is pissing and moaning when we will not give a scholarship to one of their DII players. We don't need to pay someone sixty thousand a year for that.Yep. They bitch and moan if Akron doesn't offer, then if their guy gets a bigger offer, they turn on Akron as the little school.And that's why we need to hire somebody who can explain that to the high school coaches. Somebody who can change how it works.We can hire this guy right after we dip into our bottomless pit of money and hire a special teams coordinator. We could send out a mass mailer to all coaches saying UofA is not running a welfare agency for talentless kids and save a Hell of a lot more money than hiring a someone to do this. What the heck would we call the position.....Recruiting Coordinator of Whiners?Most coaches in high school know if their players are good enough or not. The problem is the parents. We don't need to pay someone to explain to the coaches what they already know. The problem is this. A lot of high school coaches are, either formally or informally, partly evaluated on how many players they get scholarships for to D-1A schools so they press coaches for scholarships. Their motivation is different than ours. They don't care if the Zips suck or not because their kid isn't good enough to make them a winner.All the Zips coaches need to do is have an adult conversation with these guys telling them their player isn't good enough to play D-1A football.

Thanks for the view into reality. Shouldn't we also know when the games are so people buying tickets know whether or not they will be available to attend the games before they purchase the tickets.

I would. I think our relationship with the local schools is good enough. In the past, all we get from local high school coaches in NE Ohio is pissing and moaning when we will not give a scholarship to one of their DII players. We don't need to pay someone sixty thousand a year for that.

Being the magnanimous GP1 and Steelers fan, I forgot offer a heartfelt congratulations to the Browns for their victory over the Steelers. It was a bad game in a bad season for the Steelers (although they are still in the playoff hunt somehow). It was a good game in a typical season for the Browns. I hope the Browns continue the same success they had this season again next year. Again, congratulations.