(10-18-2018 09:38 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-18-2018 05:00 PM)Antarius Wrote:  

(10-18-2018 04:43 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-18-2018 12:13 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  

(10-17-2018 12:33 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  A bit different perspective here, but remember when Scott Frost was everyone's darling last year for his unofficial "national championship" at UCF? Now, at Nebraska, he's having a heck of a time even getting the motor started. And that's a program with a storied history and its own, real National Championships, plural. Sure, it's different for them now in the Big 10 (a mistake so far), but isn't a guy better off staying at a G5 if he can get them to the Access Bowl more often than not? I guess the money's quite a bit better, so there's that, but I'm speaking strictly about coaching opportunity once you have built up a G5 into a solid year after year winner/contender/P5 spoiler:
link: (see the middle of article) http://www.espn.com/college-football/sto...tic-week-7
That's what I always (and sometimes still) saw/see as Rice's true potential: a consistent G5 winner, on the cusp of moving up (if that's even still possible anymore) but a headache of a opponent and a more-often-than-not Access Bowl threat. Of course, we'd have to get there if the first place, but as long as the admin was comfortable paying something reasonably close to an alternative P5 bottom dweller salary, why leave once you've built it? TCU's not a great example, but TCU and mostly Boise show it's not so bad to be king of the smaller pond(s). (I'm Not talking about lower divisions like FCS, D-II or D-III.)
Thoughts?

You answered your own question with "the money's quite a bit better." Astronomically better. P5 schools are getting tens of millions per year in TV revenue, G5 schools tiny fractions of that. No G5 school, coach, fan, what have you, would rationally choose to stay G5 over P5 if they had a choice.
To the extent you were just talking about coaching, Scott Frost will be fine at Nebraska and really, the likelihood is that Nebraska and UCF will be in the same number of NY6 bowls this year anyway (all UCF's toughest games are yet to come and they just barely beat a mediocre Memphis). If Frost fails at Nebraska and he's fired in a few years, he'll walk away with more money than he would have made in triple the time at UCF, and he could go right back to another top-tier G5 job if not a lower-tier P5. If Bloomgren manages to merit P5 interest in a few years, he would be an idiot not to grab the opportunity. The salaries are higher, the money flowing into the programs makes sustained success easier to achieve, the bar for success is lower, etc.
Going back to the schools'/fans' perspectives, having a relatively slim shot at the access bowl doesn't come close to making up for all the other yawning differences between even the lowliest P5s and the top G5s. A G5 school does get a decent reward for making the access bowl but I believe a healthy chunk of it has to turned over to the conference to be divvied up so that payout doesn't really end up altering the calculus. And you only get that if you finish #1 out of the 65 or so G5 schools, which is pretty hard. Not even Boise or TCU ever made the access bowl/BCS "more often than not" in any 10-year period and I would not expect any school ever to be able to do that. Remember, UCF making a BCS bowl against Baylor was not only not a guarantee of sustained success, it wasn't even a guarantee they would never go 0-12 and have to start over from scratch.
The prize for just missing out on the access bowl and finishing #2 out of all of G5? The proverbial "set of steak knives" from Glengarry Glen Ross: likely some nondescript bowl against another G5 team, and it gets worse from there.
Oh, and the access bowl is not the playoff and no G5 team will EVER be allowed in the playoff.
What, then, is the point of playing G5 football, and more specifically, what is the point of Rice playing G5 football? I could see it if we were a non-flagship public school content to play other nearby, similarly-situated schools and maintain/develop some rivalries, like the vast majority of the rest of G5, but we're not. I could also see it if we were willing to invest like crazy and basically try to make it a launching pad back to P5 (a la TCU, Louisville), but we're not. And the kicker is that the G5 conference we've managed to land in is so spectacularly ill-suited for us and so off-putting to Rice alums and students as to actively depress our ability to even be competitive at this level, much less dominating. So I really fail to see the point.

I understand the dissatisfaction with CUSA, but I still have the same question. What instead?
What other options are available to us?

At this point, not much else. But the general dissatisfaction is that we knee capped ourselves, let gangrene set in and now are forced to accept limited mobility and no future of real improvement.
The fact that Sunbelt dba CUSA level conference was apparent years and years ago means that the question of what instead should have been asked and acted on then.

Yeah, and I should have married Janis instead of Donna, and I should not have loaned that money to Fred, but can we start living in the here and now? Dwelling on past mistakes seems very unproductive.

So what is available now? We can make it our objective to dominate CUSA. I think any chance at improving our conference lot starts there. Once we get established there, then maybe we can get some "signature wins." But they aren't signature until you are backing them up by winning consistently at the CUSA level. Without that, they're just flukes--if they happen.

I'm still of the mind to give Bloomgren 3 years and see what we look like then. We never got that far with Todd or Watson or Homer Rice, obviously. After 3 years I'd have been fine with keeping Ken and Fred. After 3 years (or 4 or 5), I'd have been fine with letting Bailiff go.