(03-26-2013 05:24 PM)Noodles Wrote: (03-26-2013 04:58 PM)panicstricken Wrote: Come on brah. You dont mean that.
USM and Tulsa have been playing football for a long time.
You have the best fans in the league. Dont be gay.
Not your "brah". You and the rest do your best to screw us over. Don't expect us to like it.
All right- NOW I am pissed.
.
There is a group of USM fans and administrators who have had a BAD ATTITUDE about this from day one.
If WE had done what we needed to do 5-10 years ago, we wouldn't be in this position. Blaming Tulsa, or ECU, or anyone outside of Hattiesburg, MS is wrong. No one at Tulsa owes us anything.
The people who DO owe us something are the people we hire to run USM. THEY are the ones who let us down: Thames, Giannini, Johnson, and maybe even Bower and Hammond.
It's not the ******** University of Tulsa's job to stay in CUSA just to help USM. That's one of the stupidest things I see on this board (along with the notion that we screwed up by beating UH in 2011).
No one here seems to want my honest opinion, but here it is: USM is not an attractive expansion candidate for any decent conference for three reasons (leaving out that which we cannot control):
Academics
Stadium Size
Athletic Budget
The first of these I blame directly on Shelby Thames. When CUSA started, USNWR used a four-tier system for large schools. We were in tier 3. Memphis, Louisville, and a couple of the other all-sport founders were in tier 4. Later, tiers 1-3 became the new "tier 1" and tier 4 became the new "tier 2." But it's the same system.
Shelby Thames singlehandedly engineered our decline from old tier 3 to old tier 4. It happened on his watch, but, beyond mere timing, there is no doubt in my mind that Shelby's idiotic plan to make professors PUNCH A TIME CLOCK and PEE IN A CUP was to blame.
Shelby wanted to take MY ALMA MATER and run it like a PAPER MILL. A huge component of the USNWR rankings is a simple, national survey of professors all over the country... and all of these people suddenly had a big fat reason to vote against us.
Ultimately, that's when our beloved "tier 1" school, with its powerhouse football team, turned into another ULL or South Alabama. Was Shelby also a huge prick who couldn't grease the wheels with Louisville, Cincy, etc., and get us out? Probably so; the USNWR ranking was what was shoved in our face most immediately.
The stadium capacity issue falls on Gianninni. He tried to get taxpayers to fund an appropriately sized expansion, lost a humiliating public vote, and settled for an expansion that barely moved the needle. Don't blame Tulsa or ECU for wanting to play teams with 50,000-seat facilities instead of 30,000-seat facilities. BUILD A DECENT STADIUM.
The budget issue falls on Gianninni as well. Instead of increasing our budget, he turned payout games into home games. That was a miscalculation, made with good intentions.
That's the only history of USM anyone will ever need. I believe all of it as strongly as anything else I've ever read or written. Tulsa, ECU, Houston, and even Cincy and Louisville would gladly have had us had our own administration not killed us with friendly fire.
