Interesting that my comment got so much attention in this thread. I'll expound a bit on my original point...

While App State has certainly achieved success in its short time in FBS, I just wonder what the measuring stick for success is going to be in 10 years? Maybe in that time the landscape will dramatically shift in G5 football, but with the current trajectory of FBS football I have serious doubts about the viability of G5 football. The elites of college football are outpacing the rest at an alarming clip.

This doesn't just affect G5 schools either. I don't post here a ton, but schools listed that I root for in my profile should give some hint as to my affiliation. I am a VT grad who married a JMU alum, and given that we live in the DMV we made the decision to buy season tickets to JMU. It's more affordable, a closer drive, and fulfills our fix for seeing live football during the fall. But while I openly root for JMU, Tech will always be #1 for me. In this new economy of college football, I think even a school like VT is going to have a hard time breaking through the proverbial glass ceiling. There's a route there, but it's a much narrower one and fraught with many potholes on the way to becoming one of the elites of college football, or more realistically, sniffing a CFP slot.

Now, if it's tough for a school like VT (an ACC member who has been to a national title game, won multiple ACC championships and been to BCS bowls - but never in the CFP era) to get to the mountaintop, it's going to be much harder for G5 schools.

That's the existential question here. Is App State going to be content in 10 years if the same obstacles still exist? I don't know. Maybe so, but I would think that Sun Belt championships will move the needle less & less over the course of the next decade, as will the bowl tie-ins the Sun Belt can muster. At least they have some fun bowl locales in their lineup at the moment (New Orleans, Nassau, Orlando top the list I'd say, while Frisco, Montgomery and Mobile seem a little less attractive).

But what is the ultimate goal? At this moment in the landscape, it would seem that the best-case scenario is the type of season we just saw from Western Michigan - undefeated in the regular season, a conference title game win and a spot in a New Year's Six bowl game.

Is that glimmer enough to satisfy G5 fanbases long-term if it may only happen once in a program's history? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe some here can help answer that. People like to bring up, "We could be the next Boise State," but they fail to acknowledge how different things are now than even ten years ago. I think it's infinitely harder to replicate Boise State's success in today's landscape.

Maybe I'm wrong, and I'll end up eating crow with regards to App State. I would happily do so. I just fear that the road to high-end success in FBS is so slim for G5 schools that there's a point where a fanbase wonders if there's a diminishing return to the enterprise.