(11-29-2017 11:33 AM)MWC Tex Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 10:21 AM)Bogg Wrote:  It's not up to Cal and UCLA, it's up to the Mountain West, and my guess is those schools don't want my additional programs in their footprint. Short of an actual conference invite that isn't coming, FBS isn't feasible for UC Davis.

I'm not so sure it is up to the MW. I'm pretty sure the WAC would have added them awhile ago and even add them before Texas St and UTSA were added.
UCD has excellent facilities all around including a large basketball arena that fits a FBS conference.
Given the academic profile of UCD I believe even the current MW would be open to add them. Even though MW turned down the overtures of UTEP and Rice....Rice was just too far away.

What does the WAC have to do with a school moving to FBS?

(11-29-2017 12:24 PM)Jjoey52 Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 10:21 AM)Bogg Wrote:  It's not up to Cal and UCLA, it's up to the Mountain West, and my guess is those schools don't want my additional programs in their footprint. Short of an actual conference invite that isn't coming, FBS isn't feasible for UC Davis.

UCD is not even close to the MW, the tiny football stadium, cracker box gym, and being in a semi-rural area do not make it viable. Sac State will be FBS before Davis. The Big Sky is perfect for them for the immediate future. Remember they have only been out of D2 for a few. Those who think the are FBS material now are very delusional.


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That's kind of my point. They aren't getting a MW invite, and there's no other game in town that far West.

(11-29-2017 05:51 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  I would amend this. It is 3 tier.

Tier 1 is Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD.

Tier 2 are the other 7 campuses of the UC system.

Tier 3 is the CSU system.

I think this is really underselling UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, and UC Irvine.

In the latest US News National rankings they, along with UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD are all in the top 46. The only other big public universities in that category are Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Florida, and Wisconsin.

All 6 of those UC campuses also rank in the top 43 in the US in the most recent ARWU.

All 6 are in the top 100 (in the world, not just US) of the latest Times Higher Education.

And all 6 are top 53 in CWUR, which I hadn't previously heard of until the University of Utah cited them in a recent self-congratulatory tweet.

While UCLA and UC Berkeley are always the top 2 the next four campuses change order depending on the ranking system used. But they're always ahead of the other UC campuses at Riverside, Santa Cruz and Merced.

So I'd say the tiers go a little bit like this:

1a -- UC Berkeley, UCLA

1b -- UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, UC Irvine

2 -- UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz

3 -- UC Merced, SDSU, Cal Poly SLO

4 -- The rest of the CSU system

5 -- California Community College system

Every journey begins with a first step, as they say. As it's been mentioned, there is just no way of knowing what UC-Davis' ceiling is if they don't just go into FBS first.

CSU is a different beast. SDSU is enigmatic to me; they were so close to joining a then-major Big East conference that still had major status, dropping when it was lost. The MWC where they coexisted with TCU, Utah, and BYU should have been a major conference. They tossed their hat into the Big XII thing...but it's hard to see where they are in this, and their football stadium issue is something that exposes the infrastructure challenges.

Cal-Poly SLO is the one I've thought over the years should try to push up to FBS, but Mott is a high school gym.

(11-29-2017 12:24 PM)Jjoey52 Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 10:21 AM)Bogg Wrote:  It's not up to Cal and UCLA, it's up to the Mountain West, and my guess is those schools don't want my additional programs in their footprint. Short of an actual conference invite that isn't coming, FBS isn't feasible for UC Davis.

UCD is not even close to the MW, the tiny football stadium, cracker box gym, and being in a semi-rural area do not make it viable. Sac State will be FBS before Davis. The Big Sky is perfect for them for the immediate future. Remember they have only been out of D2 for a few. Those who think the are FBS material now are very delusional.


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You call an 8,000 seat arena a cracker box gym? Or are you thinking of Sac St with the 1,500 seat gym?
UCD has excellent facilities: http://www.ucdavisaggies.com/facilities/...ities.html

How do you consider being 15 miles from Sacramento semi-rural? Eugene is semi-rural, Corvallis is rural since both are an hour or more away.
Hmmm....I didn't catch that 2007 was when they became officially D1 so yeah...that will have something to do with it. I had thought that was back in the 90's.

However, I do think quite a few MW schools would like to be associated with UCD and it would up the academic profile of the MW schools.

(11-29-2017 11:46 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 11:36 AM)MWC Tex Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 10:59 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 04:50 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 02:29 AM)Wedge Wrote:  The entire UC system is increasing the number of undergrads by 10,000. No single campus would want to add 10,000 or more new students; as far as I can tell each campus is taking its share of the total increase of 10,000 grudgingly because of the strain it puts on existing facilities.

And any of the campus' home cities would raise holy hell if UC doubled the number of undergrads at one campus because it would have a huge adverse impact on the city, especially campuses in smaller cities like Davis or Santa Cruz or Santa Barbara. It's also politically beneficial from politicians' point of view, in either the UC or CSU systems, to deliver political "pork" to different areas of the state by opening a new campus (like UC Merced or Cal State San Marcos) rather than doubling the enrollment of an existing campus (like UC Davis or San Diego State).

Adverse impact? Yeah, it would be awful to have an extra 5,000 new high paying jobs in town.

Seriously, only in California would university growth be seen as an "adverse impact" (which is even odder when you consider that every big city in the state just offered Amazon huge incentives to bring in 50,000 jobs to a single site).

10,000 extra students is no big deal for a system with 251,000 students. That's 3.9% growth, and if the pace of construction at UCSD is any indication then it's going to take 5 years to hit that goal (which means they're not even keeping up with the USA's 1% average annual population growth).

I agree that residents of college cities see "hordes of students" and not "jobs" when they read about university expansion. Maybe they shouldn't. But I know what residents of Davis or Santa Barbara would say about doubling the number of students on campus. And it's not just California. I bet the reaction of residents would be the same in other smaller cities like Eugene, Oregon or Lawrence, Kansas. Larger urban areas are different.

I'm also pretty sure that few if any administrators at large schools want to double their campus population, either. You went to grad school at SDSU, right? Does SDSU's faculty and administration want to have 70,000 students at the school? I doubt it.

Wedge, do you think UCLA and Cal would let UCD become FBS if the MW came with an invite?
I ask this because the UC board seems to be a lot tighter than the CSU board.

UC Berkeley and UCLA don't care at all about that. The UC regents would care if Davis wanted to use university money to fund it, but wouldn't care if private donations funded it.

I see. But they don't care when Cal and UCLA when university funds though.
Anyway, if UC regents don't have any issue with UCD becoming FBS then there is still a path for UCD to be a FBS school down the road in the not to distant future.
I'm sure when they are starting the phase 3 for stadium expansion to 30k as planned then the MW will probably consider them more likely.

The jist of this is that they would be a better option for an expansion for the MW and they sure would have been better than SJSU as a 12th member.

(11-29-2017 01:30 AM)SDHornet Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 01:26 AM)Stugray2 Wrote:  There is no formal block in either the CSU or the UC systems.

The issues facing the schools is more about resources for development and research. For Davis it is the politics of UCLA and Cal wanting to remain the flagships of the UC system. Both are seriously hemmed in by urban development and so have very limited student enrollment additions possible. UC Davis on the other hand is in a rural area and literally has the land space to double in size, to perhaps be a 45-50,000 student undergraduate program. But their growth is targeted at a much lower pace despite California having a significant shortage in residential seats and a population that is almost 40 million now. Basically population has doubled in the last few decades but residential seats have not come close to keeping pace.

This has nothing to do with athletics, except that finding Chancellors who are not too ambitious is part of the formula. UC Davis' restriction is more self imposed and psychological.

The Cal States face a much harder time, as the budget is always crimped for them, and UC pressure to not allow any of their campuses to truly develop in residential and research Universities. This results in a lower student success rate and lower donations by a few orders of magnitude. The way to think of it is California has a tier 1-A+ system and a tier 3 system, with no tier 2. It's a long standing feature of California politics, which is not really party related. What it means is any overly ambitious CSU President will find their wings clipped fast, and their school unable to take advantage of the opportunities all around them. I marvel at how SDSU has pushed the envelope as far as they have.

All this is a long winded way of saying, the CSUs are charter and funding restricted, and the UCs have more subtle pressures, which really are only to protect UCLA and Cal as flagships. But all UCs have the funding to pretty much do what they want if their leaders have the guts to do it.

Excellent post and spot on. Note that davis would need a much larger stadium to ever be able to make the FBS move, and there is zero need to invest in a larger stadium at the FCS level as they can't constantly fill it up now. Kind of a chicken and egg situation.

Davis looks like an FCS school, but their program still looks a lot like a Division II program. They are a school that, with the right backing from the administration, could eventually be successful in FBS, probably more so than anybody else in FCS.

(11-29-2017 01:15 PM)GiveEmTheAxe Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 05:51 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  I would amend this. It is 3 tier.

Tier 1 is Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD.

Tier 2 are the other 7 campuses of the UC system.

Tier 3 is the CSU system.

I think this is really underselling UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, and UC Irvine.

In the latest US News National rankings they, along with UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD are all in the top 46. The only other big public universities in that category are Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Florida, and Wisconsin.

All 6 of those UC campuses also rank in the top 43 in the US in the most recent ARWU.

All 6 are in the top 100 (in the world, not just US) of the latest Times Higher Education.

And all 6 are top 53 in CWUR, which I hadn't previously heard of until the University of Utah cited them in a recent self-congratulatory tweet.

While UCLA and UC Berkeley are always the top 2 the next four campuses change order depending on the ranking system used. But they're always ahead of the other UC campuses at Riverside, Santa Cruz and Merced.

So I'd say the tiers go a little bit like this:

1a -- UC Berkeley, UCLA

1b -- UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, UC Irvine

2 -- UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz

3 -- UC Merced, SDSU, Cal Poly SLO

4 -- The rest of the CSU system

5 -- California Community College system

Agree. ARWU has:
Cal #5
UCLA #12
UCSD #15
UCSF #21 (medical)
UCSB #45
UCI #64
UCD #85
UCSC #98
UCR #151-200

Texas is #51, Rice #74, and Arizona #99 for comparison purposes.

(11-29-2017 04:52 PM)MWC Tex Wrote:  I see. But they don't care when Cal and UCLA when university funds though.
Anyway, if UC regents don't have any issue with UCD becoming FBS then there is still a path for UCD to be a FBS school down the road in the not to distant future.
I'm sure when they are starting the phase 3 for stadium expansion to 30k as planned then the MW will probably consider them more likely.

The jist of this is that they would be a better option for an expansion for the MW and they sure would have been better than SJSU as a 12th member.

(11-29-2017 05:36 PM)bullet Wrote:  Davis looks like an FCS school, but their program still looks a lot like a Division II program. They are a school that, with the right backing from the administration, could eventually be successful in FBS, probably more so than anybody else in FCS.

UC Davis has another problem. Fees.
They have by far the highest student fees in the UC system, with only one of them possessing a expiration date. Their largest fee, the Campus Expansion Initiative. is the one which funds the athletic department's scholarships and the second largest fee is for the athletic facilities. In order for an additional referendum to pass, those in favor will likely need a very. very low turnout.

(11-29-2017 04:52 PM)MWC Tex Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 11:46 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 11:36 AM)MWC Tex Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 10:59 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(11-29-2017 04:50 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  Adverse impact? Yeah, it would be awful to have an extra 5,000 new high paying jobs in town.

Seriously, only in California would university growth be seen as an "adverse impact" (which is even odder when you consider that every big city in the state just offered Amazon huge incentives to bring in 50,000 jobs to a single site).

10,000 extra students is no big deal for a system with 251,000 students. That's 3.9% growth, and if the pace of construction at UCSD is any indication then it's going to take 5 years to hit that goal (which means they're not even keeping up with the USA's 1% average annual population growth).

I agree that residents of college cities see "hordes of students" and not "jobs" when they read about university expansion. Maybe they shouldn't. But I know what residents of Davis or Santa Barbara would say about doubling the number of students on campus. And it's not just California. I bet the reaction of residents would be the same in other smaller cities like Eugene, Oregon or Lawrence, Kansas. Larger urban areas are different.

I'm also pretty sure that few if any administrators at large schools want to double their campus population, either. You went to grad school at SDSU, right? Does SDSU's faculty and administration want to have 70,000 students at the school? I doubt it.

Wedge, do you think UCLA and Cal would let UCD become FBS if the MW came with an invite?
I ask this because the UC board seems to be a lot tighter than the CSU board.

UC Berkeley and UCLA don't care at all about that. The UC regents would care if Davis wanted to use university money to fund it, but wouldn't care if private donations funded it.

I see. But they don't care when Cal and UCLA when university funds though.
Anyway, if UC regents don't have any issue with UCD becoming FBS then there is still a path for UCD to be a FBS school down the road in the not to distant future.
I'm sure when they are starting the phase 3 for stadium expansion to 30k as planned then the MW will probably consider them more likely.

The jist of this is that they would be a better option for an expansion for the MW and they sure would have been better than SJSU as a 12th member.

You are deluded. UCD cannot even win in the Big Sky, and conferences are driven by sports with academics a very minor part and is used only when the conference does not want a school,. The MW has no interest in another losing program, SJSU is sufficient.


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