WoolyBully

Hmmmm...pre-season hype. Not very high, subjectively speaking. Vegas has the O/U @ 4.5, which - if it comes to fruition - would be winning 1/3 of our games. Very, very good coming of the abysmal previous four years. But it's still under .500. Excitement over a new coach, maybe to a degree, but I would prefer the term 'hopeful' more so than excited. I don't know that I'd rate this season's hype much above 5 on the above scale. The reason I say that is because if we look back at the level of hype associated with '01 and getting out of 1-AA play, then look at '05 playing the Big East schools, I think the hype level was greater for those sorts of milestones. As it is now, truthfully, similar to where we were in the '19-'20 transition: previous losing season, new coach. Seen this movie before. Hopefully they've changed the ending.

Hard to argue against that. We're in the football media bidness, not the best-n-brightest bidness. That office is down the hall past the atrium.

Very ChatGPTish.

I'll put you in for an award for doing your math homework, but there's a part of me that thinks perhaps my point was lost...or you chose to go a different route.

Or the Ohio State Band rendition...

A high school rendtion...

I'm in.

Thirty thousand voices , yes it would.

Hmmmm...I might.

C'mon! Why do you insist on wearing a helmet every time you ride?! Roll that throttle, man! You know you want to! Give in!

That would be great. The heavy lifting is to avoid copying something that's already in place by another school (e.g., Jump Around' at Wisconsin).

What a great article! Really drives home how a decision at x-time can come back to bite twenty or thirty years down the road! It seems reasonable to me that PSU would have anchored the media in the NE. And let's not forget, had this come to fruition, I can think of one particular school who would NOT have had a BE footprint.

Still doing some research, but I think this was the longest off-season in the history of USF football.

Problem is, "the long run' is a nebulous term. For a number of us, 'the long run' is not quite as distant on the horizon as it was in the way-back-when .

But they did make it quite clear that realignment was about dinero and survival in the NEW world of college football. They didn't try to spin it any other way.

Semper Gumby....always flexible.

Winning cures everything assessment this guy is hanging around the 4 to 5 neighborhood as well.

The clever boys at William Hill have started tying accounts to IP addresses of the phone being used, so, having an amigo log in with my userid & password (basically sharing a password) has come to an abrupt end. However, I'm sticking with my under on 4.5. Think about it this way, going from one win against a marginal team last year to winning one third of your games this year - with a nuevo jefe ...pretty dang good. It's not like every other team on the schedule stayed frozen in time from last year.

much like any photo of you is a picture of you when you were younger.

Well, maybe he did and the guys at the table simply said "un uh". All this talk about influence and connections...reminds me of that friend who is always pestering you to get him into the club, and you know - you know - that if you broach the subject, two things will happen. First - denied. Second - reflects badly on you. I'm just saying, that's what pops into my noggin every time someone brings up MK connections and getting us in the joint. This is one of those instances where you've got to be desired, not just submitting an application. It could be - just throwing it out there - that at this particular point in time we are, dare I say it, undesirable. Could be! Respectfully, Mohammed & Jugdish

This is just another tectonic shift in the continuing evolution of the not-quite-NFL football project. If there is some way to really break the chains of the NCAA (and all that Title IX business) and have a football entity that is truly the upper crust when it comes to NIL, facilities and media, that's what our end game is going to be. As always, there's a finite number of seats in the lifeboat, so some of you (and you know who you are) are going to get wet. Don't like it? Fine, don't watch it. 'Cause there is sufficient interest to put forth product and generate some revenue from the sports books. Are the SEC & B1G gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over the way things are developing? I don't think so. Maybe the clock has run out on our old 'college' football model. It worked for a couple of centuries, maybe time to go in another direction. Gotta remember, a lot of things happen on the planet that we don't really have a say in. I am afraid that the power consolidation is one of those things. It'd be nice to be included, or it'd be nice to compete in our sub-system (however that shakes out), but I think the chasm between haves and the have-nots is going to morph into something that doesn't resemble what we all knew as college football. Too much money to be made. And this is just the latest in a series of furniture rearrangements until we get the house looking just like we want.

Now, now! let us tread lightly.

You people are impossible to please. First, it's waiting for the SEC invite and the next it's fold the program, get into a better conference, go independent...it never ends!

Well, during the early days, football was the shiny object at USF. But let's not forget, it was always about onward and upward...IAA, I-A independent, Conference USA, Big East...see the progression. Always upward. There was no concern about being 'left out', because there was no consolidation effort for comparison. Just getting INTO CONFERENCE USA was huge, enormous deal. I don't remember anyone saying, 'Oh no! This is a mistake! We should have stayed I-AA and kept playing Drake and Valparaiso.". But, the clock has ticked since then and the name of the game is still onward and upward. Only this time around, there are gatekeepers with considerably more muscle. It's not 1997 anymore, it's a whole new ballgame. But...in the interest of fair play, I'll still leave the 'so what if we're in the AAC for twenty years' question out there. Are we still 'just happy to have a program'?