(11-28-2019 11:13 PM)cr11owl Wrote:  

(11-28-2019 10:44 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  

(11-28-2019 10:17 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  

(11-28-2019 01:05 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(11-27-2019 10:30 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote:  Then how did UH hire Dana? Bobo at CSU? Harsin at BSU? Etc, etc.
P5 aspirations on a 3A budget. Pretty much describes Rice.

I don’t know much about Bobo to CSU.

But Dana got the job at WVU under circumstances that looked a lot like shoving Bill Stewart aside. If Stewart had any friends among the support group, they may we’ll have had it in for Dana. And while Dana’s teams scored a lot and were innovative on offense, they didn’t play enough defense to win any championships. So the seat at WVU might well have been warm enough for Dana to want to make a pre-emptive move. There has been some speculation in that direction.

Harsin is just the latest in a train of good hires at Boise—Nutt, Koetter, Hawkins, Petersen, now Harsin. They haven’t been afraid to hire guys with higher ambitions because they trusted their ability to hire replacements. As a result, those guys have built consistent winners to build their resumes, which has helped both sides. Some people have said that we need to hire someone who wants to stay at Rice. I disagree. Someone who wants to stay at Rice is happy going 7-6, 3-9, 2-10, 4-8, 5-7, 8-5, 10-4, 7-6, rinse and repeat. I don’t want anyone who is happy with that.

It's worth mentioning that Boise State currently has two distinct advantages over Rice:
1) they are basically similar to a football version of Gonzaga in that if you're a good player form the Northwestern part of the country and can't/aren't as interested in getting into a P-5 in that region (basically PAc-10, or perhaps some B1G) then they can suck up any other decent player in that part of the country (as long as they aren't longing for warmer weather): i.e. they have a lot less direct competition in their tier in that region than Rice does in its
and, of course
2) I'd go out on a limb and say that Boise is just a tad easier to get into academically then Rice, and there are more places to "hide" athletes academically, so they have a bit more time/energy to devote to football

Rice ostensibly has tons of competition from other G-5s in its own conference in its own state that are way easier academically, as well as have a bit better recent history of winning.

Not to say I wouldn't want Rice to emulate their string of coaching hires and successes, but it is a slightly easier school to have success on the football field for than we are at the moment.

Boise State has very few scholarship players from the PacNW (defining that as ID, WA, and OR)... I just went through their roster-you’d be surprised at the geographic distribution. The vast majority of their players are from CA (with a decent amount from Texas, actually)-where there’s plenty of G5 competition.

Agreed on the academics piece. Boise is a glorified community college though I’ve done some business in Boise (actually a great small city to visit) recently and it does appear to be a growing and vibrant school with lots of community support.

The general student body is basically a community college, imagine how bad the football team is. I’m sure Blue Mountain State isn’t completely made up out of thin air

Schools like Boise are why the NCAA requires athletes to have minimum SAT scores (our conference has those schools too, hey Marshall and UTEP). Looking at the rules now though if a student can get a 3.5 at a terrible HS then they only need a 430 on their SAT. The minimum you can get on the SAT for showing up is 400. Someone with a GPA of 2.5 only needs a 900. Low bars indeed....

From the Boise State grads I’ve met-which is admittedly a small sample and also probably some selection bias given that my interactions have been with the F50 company I work for-it’s a bit more complicated than that.

If you grow up in Idaho, you don’t really have many options for school. You can go to Boise St, University of Idaho, or Idaho State for public, or BYU-Idaho if you want a private/religious school. Traditionally, all of the “smart kids” went to University of Idaho, but with the growth of Boise and the increased notoriety of the school (largely due to football), many are now going to Boise State. As a result, I get the impression that there’s fairly high variance within the student body-lots of bright people and also some who are just scraping by...

But yes (stating the obvious), it’s not in remotely the same league as Rice or any of our peers.