Moving the Stanford game to Australia wasn't done to make a boatload of needed cash - there is no boatload. It wasn't done to increase national exposure - the home game almost certainly would have been on national TV anyway. It obviously wasn't done with the intent of increasing local interest in Rice Football and enticing more fans to HRS. It wasn't even done just to give us a better shot at winning this one game - making Stanford go 2 time zones east (studies have shown the effects) AND play in Houston heat & humidity was our best shot at an equalizing factor.
An opportunity arose to do something unique and nice for the players and we took it because it won't cost us extra. End of story. Which is fine but let's not kid ourselves about it being part of a new dawn for Rice Athletics. Moving the Stanford game to Australia was not in service of any grand plan.
There is no grand plan.
Our "plan," such as it is, is to compete at this lower level, graduate players, not violate NCAA rules, and garner lots of all-academic awards (all of which we were already doing anyway) while being somewhat more professional and businesslike in the areas of marketing, ticket sales, sponsorships, etc., which, you know, hooray for that. But all that is going to do is keep us up with the Joneses here in CUSA. We are not aspiring to anything greater.
Oh, sure, if an upward conference move were to magically drop into our lap we'd say yes, but we are not actively going after one, "strategically positioning ourselves," or anything of the sort. And so it's not going to happen. Unless we start doing far more than we're currently doing, the next move will be down or lateral: you can take that to the bank. The plan *for Karlgaard* appears to be to put just enough positive bullet points on his resume (managed rebranding! raised revenue! made presentation to Big XII!) so that he can move onward and upward before it becomes clear there is no real plan for us to do likewise.
Quote:Get into a regional conference. If the B12 doesn't want Rice, then build something new in this area with current West members and select Sun Belt members. Play regional teams at Rice Stadium. At least advocate for a revised scheduling model in CUSA that emphasizes divisional play in everything.
A tighter regional conference of Rice, UTEP, UTSA, UNT, Texas State, Arkansas State, LTU, ULL, etc. would indeed probably result in marginally increased attendance at Rice events . . . by out-of-town fans. It does nothing to solve Rice's fundamental conundrum - we are a highly selective
national university with students and alumni from all across the country and world who do not now nor will they ever give two flips about competing against open-admission non-flagship public colleges. Swapping out MTSU, Old Dominion, F[I/A]U, etc. for Texas State, Arkansas State, etc. does not move the needle
for Rice. People can rail at that as elitist, disrespectful to other CUSA members, out of touch with reality given our past ignorance of the need to cultivate revenue, etc., and once they've gotten that virtue signaling out of their system, we'll be right back here where we started, trying to deal with immutable human nature. What do you think would happen to athletics at Stanford if they were dropped into a conference of San Jose State, Fresno State, etc.? You cannot force feed Rice people a diet of lower-profile opponents and make them like it, doesn't matter whether the schools are instate/1 state away or 5-6 states away.
Quote:Bring friends to the games and be sure to show them a great time.
I wouldn't take my enemies to most of our games, much less my friends, because our level is too embarrassing. I'm sorry, but Rice Athletics is going to have to deal with this fundamental fact. Since graduating 25 years ago, I've always lived in either DFW or Illinois, and I'm pretty sure at least a majority of Rice alumni live outside of Houston. Therefore coming back to campus requires not-insignificant effort and expense for most alumni; heck, even if you live in West U, going to any Rice event is certainly not a given with family obligations, work, etc. - the point is that anyone, local or not, has to make an effort to attend and so has to calculate whether it is worth the while. What has made the cut in my personal calculus has been our Omaha appearances, all our bowl games except Hawaii, and away games at Air Force, Baylor, Oklahoma, Tulsa, Michigan State, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, LSU, Army, Notre Dame, and Texas (multiple times), and that is not even counting "local" (for me) games at places like SMU, TCU, and Northwestern. I planned to go to Stanford last year until they moved it to Thanksgiving, and I'll probably go to Pitt this year. I have come back to Houston to watch us play Navy, Tulsa, UH, and SMU in football (might have come back for Stanford had it not been moved to Sydney), and Baylor at Reckling and the super regional vs. ULL at the Dome. So pretty clearly I am not shy about making the effort.
But I simply am never going to make the effort to come back to Rice to watch us play some generic regular season contest against Directional U, no matter the sport and no matter how nicely we spruce up our facilities, or even how good we happen to be in any given season. You can dismiss this as the rantings of one idiosyncratically elitist alum, or you can look at the actual butts in seats at any of our home CUSA games, even when our record has been good, and draw your own conclusions about what Rice people will make the effort to get to. It is what it is.
The only raise interest/raise revenue tactic that is going to work with Rice people - which, after all, is the constituency Rice Athletics should be focused on courting, not fans of other, closer schools - is giving them meaningful, big-time opponents or the concrete prospect thereof. I see 3 possible paths, all of which would require major leadership and significantly increased investment from the University:
1. Football independence with as many P5 and/or peer-type institutions (the academies, private academic schools) on the schedule as possible.
2. Drop football and emulate the University of Denver approach: pour resources into competing for national championships in all the non-football sports (including adding sports like soccer, lacrosse, hockey).
3. Inspire Rice people to support the currently unpalatable status quo by showing us specifically how, where, and when our support is expected to pay off in the return of meaningful, big-time competition to Rice on a regular basis. Explicitly tell this is what we have to suck it up and live with for a
temporary period to try and move up, and be open and proactive about trying to do so.
But in true Rice fashion we are currently employing only the "suck it up and live with it" part.
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If I were AD, my goal would be to get into the AAC
