Seeing the thread about Feinstein's article comparing AAC football to ACC begs the question about how the college football landscape will look in the future and U of Memphis' place in that landscape. One of his points was that schools not in P5 conferences need not apply for a national championship. UCF went undefeated 2 years in a row and never sniffed the playoff. No G5 school will get enough benefit of the doubt from the decision makers to get in, unless the expansion that has been rumored comes to pass and they slot the 8th seed to the G5 winner.

Short of that, what do you think the U of M should do in light of the fixed and broken D1, FBS college football system? If good coaches keep leaving for P5 schools, at what point do we acknowledge the ceiling that Memphis football has? How much more investment should be made? in what way should the school be investing in football?

We need to be one of the good schools that leaves to the P5. We want in on the next round of expansion.

(12-09-2019 01:47 PM)aardWolf Wrote:  We need to be one of the good schools that leaves to the P5. We want in on the next round of expansion.

Yep. It's a long shot, but we have to go all in. What choice do we have.

We just need to keep on keeping on and continue to ride the momentum we've built to this point. There are a lot of positives going on right now.

There isn't a way to fix it, but there are doable ways to make it more fair.

1. 8 team playoff with a spot for 1 non P5 team

2. Two made for TV neutral site games at the beginning of each season with two preseason top 5 P5 schools versus the two top preaseason non P5 schools.

3. Everyone talks about the NY6 Bowls. Let the next highest ranked non P5 have a spot in the next tier of bowls with payouts of $6 million or more. Last year they would include the Citrus Bowl, Alamo Bowl, Outback Bowl, Holiday Bowl, Texas Bowl and Camping World Bowl. Having non P5 schools taking up 2 spots out of 24 shouldn't be the end of the world for the P5.

If you have two non P5 schools playing in meaningful bowls with good payouts, you incentivize playing a tough schedule, which then will allow a great 2 loss team to make a good bowl game.

(12-09-2019 01:47 PM)aardWolf Wrote:  We need to be one of the good schools that leaves to the P5. We want in on the next round of expansion.

We are for sure right now. Us, UCF, and Cincinnati have created separation from Houston, Boise, BYU and USF. Only UCF has reached its ceiling; us and Cincinnati have room to grow.

(12-09-2019 02:01 PM)Stammers Wrote:  There isn't a way to fix it, but there are doable ways to make it more fair.

1. 8 team playoff with a spot for 1 non P5 team

2. Two made for TV neutral site games at the beginning of each season with two preseason top 5 P5 schools versus the two top preaseason non P5 schools.

3. Everyone talks about the NY6 Bowls. Let the next highest ranked non P5 have a spot in the next tier of bowls with payouts of $6 million or more. Last year they would include the Citrus Bowl, Alamo Bowl, Outback Bowl, Holiday Bowl, Texas Bowl and Camping World Bowl. Having non P5 schools taking up 2 spots out of 24 shouldn't be the end of the world for the P5.

If you have two non P5 schools playing in meaningful bowls with good payouts, you incentivize playing a tough schedule, which then will allow a great 2 loss team to make a good bowl game.

Make sense.

Yep. Say we solidly beat Penn St or even blow them out and next year go undefeated and go back to a New Year Six Bowl and beat a P5 team again. That doesn’t make us automatically in with the big boys but it will be an audition of sort as we continue on in the next 5 to 10 years of consistently being good, that we are not just ‘another group of 5’ program, that we’re something more

(12-09-2019 02:08 PM)BigTigerMike Wrote:  Yep. Say we solidly beat Penn St or even blow them out and next year go undefeated and go back to a New Year Six Bowl and beat a P5 team again. That doesn’t make us automatically in with the big boys but it will be an audition of sort as we continue on in the next 5 to 10 years of consistently being good, that we are not just ‘another group of 5’ program, that we’re something more

That is why it is crucial, when you see 8,000 actual attendance at Miami games and they announce 42,000, that we can't have stupid bull**** problems with scanners and actual attendance.

Announced attendance should be the athletic director or his assistant making a phone call to the Liberty Bowl PA announcer and telling them what to say attendance is. From having seen every single home game on tv this year, not a single person in the country would have raised an eyebrow if we would have announced average attendance of 46,000 this year. That is in line with the ratio that EVERY other school uses.

Every little bit counts.

Going forward, we need to continue to invest in the program and keep improving until we get to the point that someone has to take notice. See how far we've come in the last few years since our AD turned over leadership and the investments started coming in and we started to apply them where they would provide the biggest impact.

Bottom line - we have to continue on the trajectory we've established in the last couple of years until we become recognized as the "new Boise State". Then if expansion shakes things up we might have a chance.

(12-09-2019 02:03 PM)Stammers Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 01:47 PM)aardWolf Wrote:  We need to be one of the good schools that leaves to the P5. We want in on the next round of expansion.

We are for sure right now. Us, UCF, and Cincinnati have created separation from Houston, Boise, BYU and USF. Only UCF has reached its ceiling; us and Cincinnati have room to grow.

Unfortunately there are other factors that do not include performance on the field that seems to be keeping us out of the power five. I’m not saying that it’s right, but it does seem to swing that way. We were nowhere near the big 12 the last time, and we thought we were the top contender and didn’t even make the first Round of cuts.

(12-09-2019 01:44 PM)Collegiate Black Man Wrote:  Seeing the thread about Feinstein's article comparing AAC football to ACC begs the question about how the college football landscape will look in the future and U of Memphis' place in that landscape. One of his points was that schools not in P5 conferences need not apply for a national championship. UCF went undefeated 2 years in a row and never sniffed the playoff. No G5 school will get enough benefit of the doubt from the decision makers to get in, unless the expansion that has been rumored comes to pass and they slot the 8th seed to the G5 winner.

Short of that, what do you think the U of M should do in light of the fixed and broken D1, FBS college football system? If good coaches keep leaving for P5 schools, at what point do we acknowledge the ceiling that Memphis football has? How much more investment should be made? in what way should the school be investing in football?

Why couldn't the NCAA have the non power 5 schools have a 4 team playoff and the two winners could start the College Super Bowl. I'm sure this will never happen because the NCAA wants the Power 5 to stay in power and make the money.

(12-09-2019 02:29 PM)BIGDTiger Wrote:  Unfortunately there are other factors that do not include performance on the field that seems to be keeping us out of the power five. I’m not saying that it’s right, but it does seem to swing that way. We were nowhere near the big 12 the last time, and we thought we were the top contender and didn’t even make the first Round of cuts.

Exactly. This isn't just about on the field performance or selling out the Liberty Bowl for the UALR game. There are academic factors that come into play. To improve those factors may take investments that are just not feasible for the U of M. That is part of the reason why I asked about how to invest in football going forward. The reality is that U of M probably won't be considered for expansion in any of the P5 conferences, no matter what happens on the field. At some point, either the system has to change, or some hard decisions will have to be made about the right level of investment for football. Paying the Football Coach at U of M $5 million is just not a good investment, will never get the return on that. Like Ms. Sofia to Ciely in the Color Purple "It ain't wirf it, it ain't wirf it" LOL!!!!

(12-09-2019 02:14 PM)Stammers Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 02:08 PM)BigTigerMike Wrote:  Yep. Say we solidly beat Penn St or even blow them out and next year go undefeated and go back to a New Year Six Bowl and beat a P5 team again. That doesn’t make us automatically in with the big boys but it will be an audition of sort as we continue on in the next 5 to 10 years of consistently being good, that we are not just ‘another group of 5’ program, that we’re something more

That is why it is crucial, when you see 8,000 actual attendance at Miami games and they announce 42,000, that we can't have stupid bull**** problems with scanners and actual attendance.

Announced attendance should be the athletic director or his assistant making a phone call to the Liberty Bowl PA announcer and telling them what to say attendance is. From having seen every single home game on tv this year, not a single person in the country would have raised an eyebrow if we would have announced average attendance of 46,000 this year. That is in line with the ratio that EVERY other school uses.

Every little bit counts.

Yes! There was more than the announced 33,000 at the game Saturday and the UM need to take control over that.

(12-09-2019 02:40 PM)2tigers Wrote:  Why couldn't the NCAA have the non power 5 schools have a 4 team playoff and the two winners could start the College Super Bowl. I'm sure this will never happen because the NCAA wants the Power 5 to stay in power and make the money.

The NCAA has never awarded a national football championship for D1. The "gestapos" that ran the traditional Bowls (Sugar, Rose, Orange, Fiesta, Cotton) made too much money. So, the national collegiate football champion was really a media decision (who ever ended the year #1 in the polls was deemed the "national champion", but nothing was ever really official).

Now, too much TV money involved with the Playoff system, even though the winner is still not awarded a national championship from the NCAA. That's why UCF awarded themselves a national championship two years ago, all of this was "mythical" anyway.

Until schools come together and decide that not enough D1 schools are getting a big enough share of the pie from TV, instead of trying to become part of the P5, we will continue to see this injustice.

(12-09-2019 02:58 PM)Collegiate Black Man Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 02:29 PM)BIGDTiger Wrote:  Unfortunately there are other factors that do not include performance on the field that seems to be keeping us out of the power five. I’m not saying that it’s right, but it does seem to swing that way. We were nowhere near the big 12 the last time, and we thought we were the top contender and didn’t even make the first Round of cuts.

Exactly. This isn't just about on the field performance or selling out the Liberty Bowl for the UALR game. There are academic factors that come into play. To improve those factors may take investments that are just not feasible for the U of M. That is part of the reason why I asked about how to invest in football going forward. The reality is that U of M probably won't be considered for expansion in any of the P5 conferences, no matter what happens on the field. At some point, either the system has to change, or some hard decisions will have to be made about the right level of investment for football. Paying the Football Coach at U of M $5 million is just not a good investment, will never get the return on that. Like Ms. Sofia to Ciely in the Color Purple "It ain't wirf it, it ain't wirf it" LOL!!!!

Football is the single-most highest profile outreach that universities have. Attendance and tv appearances put the school in front of more people than anything else - either athletically or academically. There have been plenty of studies showing the correlation of football success to university enrollment.

To make "hard decisions" regarding football, is to jump headlong down a slippery slope of contracting the outreach of a university.

We need advocates that will attack the exclusive, discriminatory power structure that currently exists. ESPN won't do it - they're making too much money off of it. No one else in the media cares. The NCAA should do it for the health of their member institutions. But they won't do it because they have acquiesced the post-season to the good ole bowl tradition.

And don't give me the "win the games and earn respect" nonsense. It's a double-standard. Besides, the games have been won, yet no change was yielded.

The NCAA has sold it's soul and the power institutions are more then happy to pay commission to the NCAA while they rake in all the cash. What other sport excludes half of it's teams from championship contention before the first game is played? What other sport lets ticket sales and tv ratings determine the teams that will play in the post-season?

As for what Memphis and the AAC should do? They need to be more direct in their fight for inclusiveness. Bring in the lawyers and congress. We've tried playing by the P5 rules, but it gets nowhere. In fact, while the competitiveness gets closer, we seem to be getting further away from an equality standpoint.

With all the protests, and fights against power, and large media exposes these days, it's kind of amazing that the general public is not aware of this problem in a billion dollar industry.

I think discussions on the current set up are probably meaningless.

With the new rulings about compensating players, the changes we are about to see will be broader and much more disruptive to the status quo.

The University of Memphis is where it is now, in part at least, because for years its athletic decision makers prioritized basketball at the expense of the football program.

Arguing that it should go back to that mindset now or that football should again be de-emphasized is so crazy as to not even really be worth discussing.

(12-09-2019 02:29 PM)BIGDTiger Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 02:03 PM)Stammers Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 01:47 PM)aardWolf Wrote:  We need to be one of the good schools that leaves to the P5. We want in on the next round of expansion.

We are for sure right now. Us, UCF, and Cincinnati have created separation from Houston, Boise, BYU and USF. Only UCF has reached its ceiling; us and Cincinnati have room to grow.

Unfortunately there are other factors that do not include performance on the field that seems to be keeping us out of the power five. I’m not saying that it’s right, but it does seem to swing that way. We were nowhere near the big 12 the last time, and we thought we were the top contender and didn’t even make the first Round of cuts.

Clueless.

(12-09-2019 02:40 PM)2tigers Wrote:  

(12-09-2019 01:44 PM)Collegiate Black Man Wrote:  Seeing the thread about Feinstein's article comparing AAC football to ACC begs the question about how the college football landscape will look in the future and U of Memphis' place in that landscape. One of his points was that schools not in P5 conferences need not apply for a national championship. UCF went undefeated 2 years in a row and never sniffed the playoff. No G5 school will get enough benefit of the doubt from the decision makers to get in, unless the expansion that has been rumored comes to pass and they slot the 8th seed to the G5 winner.

Short of that, what do you think the U of M should do in light of the fixed and broken D1, FBS college football system? If good coaches keep leaving for P5 schools, at what point do we acknowledge the ceiling that Memphis football has? How much more investment should be made? in what way should the school be investing in football?

Why couldn't the NCAA have the non power 5 schools have a 4 team playoff and the two winners could start the College Super Bowl. I'm sure this will never happen because the NCAA wants the Power 5 to stay in power and make the money.

So #22 Cincinnati would be in the playoff and have a chance to be national champion but #5 Georgia doesn't? 4 P5 and 4 G5 in the playoff?

Wow.