Random thoughts

[zipboy]

Some general thoughts.

1. I finally watched the tape of the Marshall game this week while on vacation. Greatest game that I ever saw. A few comments from ESPN stick out. They mentioned that JD has all the assistants take a sales training course. And JD is working with a Boston company to create an aptitude test for recruits similar to what the NFL does. This continues to show me that JD is an out of the box thinker who understands the bigger picture and will take us to the next level. Also, they mentioned that this year's offense had about 100 pass routes vs 20 in the past. We always talk about a more complex offense. And complex isn't always good, but this helped quanitify it for me.

2. The loss of Scooter and Gradowski was too much to overcome. We really need Miami and NIU to win this week. A legit crowd of 52K for the Motor City Bowl though speaks volumes.

3. On the other side, thanks for showing up Marshall. And a whopping 13K for the game. Nice comment earlier from one of the Marshall players that they were going to a much bigger bowl than what the MAC offers.

4. My last rant on Marshall - Check my old posts, I always have said favorable things about Marshall. They took the MAC to the next level. But the last 2 years, a lot of teams have caught up and some have passed them. Right now they are an upper level MAC team, win at home, split on the road. It's not like they got worse, everyone else just got better. From a support standpoint, they are still tops, but the gap is closing. When they joined the league, they averaged (my guess) in the mid 20's. Now they average in the high 20's. In that time, NIU has probably gone from 10K to 25K, BG has gone from 15K to 25K, Akron has gone from 9K to 15K, the league continues to grow. I wish them well, but it's comments like in #3 above that just tick me off.

5. Shocking, Hawaii won their bowl game in Hawaii. Wonder if the ratings were above a 0.2 share?

6. Nice win by BG last week. I would love to see Omar Jacobs and crew at the Rubber Bowl next year.