Red Wolf

Finally, a topic I have some knowledge on where I don't have to recklessly speculate. Little Rock football ain't happening. When the Razorbacks were pushing harder to get out of playing games at War Memorial, the city and the state parks department were worried about all of the lost revenue and decided to push for UA-Little Rock to finally start football. The university wasn't super interested, but the parks department and the city agreed to pay 2/3 of a feasibility study. The results? Real bad. For one, the amount of donors who said they would give for football was super low, which is saying something since people will usually pretend they'll give money until they actually have to. I suspect this is because most of Little Rock's donors are already big Razorback football fans, as evidenced by the license plates one sees when walking through the donor lot at basketball games. The study also said that if they did start football, it would be best to be an FCS (specifically in the Ohio Valley I believe was the suggestion) as that would be more in line with Little Rock's budget. They would have also needed to increase the student athletic fee which was (is?) already the highest in the state. If I recall correctly, I believe it was the same amount that UTSA increased to when they started football. Also worth pointing out that UA-Little Rock has really struggled with enrollment lately, partially because UCA, just 30 minutes up the road, has become a much more attractive option for a lot prospective students. UTA's AD said that they had no interest in football several years back, basically claiming that they needed to better fund everything else before even looking into it. They also have their own stadium, but it seems pretty rinky-dink and would need massive upgrades to be FBS compliant. So it may be better for them to just play at the Rangers stadium under this hypothetical.

People are barely happy in P5 conferences right now.

BYU won't play games on Sunday. That's the big issue there.

Conference USA isn't what it once was. They overexpanded and based that expansion too much on markets that didn't care. The Sun Belt has a far better media deal. This isn't the Sun Belt of 2001 where the only bowl team had a losing record (C-USA's North Texas). Things changed over two decades.

Hey now, the Vikings used to be the only team that lost to the Chiefs in a Super Bowl, which was a great way to discount any of KC's achievements. That had value to me.

I'm sure UConn would be fine if they were offered football-only membership to the American, but the question is if the American is okay with that. The Big XII raid leaves the American at 8 full-time members (one being non-football in Wichita State) which I would think they need to fix before grabbing one of the saddest football programs in the country. Apparently the BYU AD has said there will be divisions. The SEC couldn't do that under the current rules* because you have to play a round-robin schedule or have divisions in which everybody plays everybody else in their division. *Keeping in mind that the rules can change if somebody important enough asks, such as when the Big XII got approval to hold a football championship game with less than 12 teams, thus giving us the round-robin rule. The Sun Belt is thankful for that one.

But how much does it matter when nobody in the market cares? Conference USA went hard on grabbing up teams in larger markets regardless of whether they had a following and it led to them being surpassed by the Sun Belt and becoming the worst G5 conference. The fact that Rice was in a major conference three decades ago hardly seems relevant when they've put forth no effort into athletics.

Maybe Marshall. The problem with Coastal is that they've only had the one good season, so I'm not sure I would make such a commitment to a school just on that.

Why would they want Rice? I get they're in Houston, but they add absolutely nothing. Maybe if Rice actually cared about football it would make sense. North Texas is another I don't see getting added unless SMU leaves, but I don't think SMU gets taken for basically the same reason, which is that UNT, SMU, and TCU are all in the DFW area. I don't see UConn coming back, nor do I see the American wanting them back unless it's as a full member. The American is going to be down to just seven full-time members, so adding a truly wretched UConn as football-only seems pointless. Schools I think will be looked at are: Appalachian State Louisiana UAB Buffalo One of FAU or FIU If they want another Texas school, then maybe like UTSA? There really aren't many good options at this point down there.

Yeah, the American is going to need full members who also play football assuming they lose Houston, UCF, and Cincinnati, and especially if they lose a fourth, so I'm not sure Army is the best choice unless they and/or Navy are willing to leave the Patriot League. It's weird that UAB and Buffalo have become so desired. UAB football was killed off not that long ago, and now they're far more successful than they were before their death (more conference titles since resurrection than they had bowl appearances before) and just built a fancy new stadium. Buffalo used to be on lists of schools that should drop back to FCS because there was no way they could be successful. I do think Buffalo needs major stadium improvements to make a real leap though. C-USA doesn't need to add anybody if they lose UAB. They have too many teams right now as it is. It's the one benefit of them having 14 teams right now.

New Mexico has about the same chance of going to the Big XII as Missouri State. They're generally awful to mediocre in football and their budget is unimpressive. Basketball doesn't drive expansion that much, otherwise Kansas would be getting poached. Conference USA is no longer in a position to poach Sun Belt schools. C-USA made bad bets during the last realignment by overexpanding and focusing too hard on schools in larger markets without considering whether those markets cared. Sun Belt schools make more money on their media deal than C-USA schools do. I'd be surprised if C-USA bothered to even look at expansion unless they lost five or six teams, but there aren't that many teams that anybody else would want.

Those schools will jump without a second thought. Before everything imploded, we almost ended up with Boise State and San Diego State in the Big East. For UCF, Houston, and Cincinnati, they would definitely prefer to be associated with West Virginia, Oklahoma State, etc. rather than Tulsa and ECU. Without regular Texas in the way, I'm sure Tech, Baylor, and TCU are fine with that choice. Houston has a larger budget than Memphis, twice the enrollment, better history in football, and the Houston metro is number five in the US versus Memphis being 43rd.

Lol, yeah that'll show them.

I like soccer and you can't stop me! Not that anybody was trying.

Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State to the Sun Belt. We earned them by beating them last season.

Somebody has to stand up for the One True City of Arkansas. I usually avoid I-30 because I've got time, especially these days, so I'll often take the new Broadway bridge into the One True City. Las Vegas can still suck it though. It's America's worst or second-worst city. I forget which one I said it was. I've stacked up too many gimmicks.

Maybe this says more about my friends and me, but I have a friend that loved Alaska. He ended up moving back to Arkansas because of his wife's family. The way he talked about Alaska sounded like the best though. Again, maybe that says something about the kind of people we are.

All of the people that mattered have left now, so they may as well change.

Well if we're putting forth joke ideas, then I would like to nominate Little Rock, Arkansas. Sure, we don't have a lot of the things that Las Vegas has, but we do have one thing they can never have: water.

I think there's still a lot of people who want sports talk to be very specific. However, we live in a world in which people not only appreciate off-topic conversation, they actually want it. Podcasting has probably helped that as radio dorks went from having to cut the fun out of their shows for time purposes, to having an avenue in which they can blabber on about whatever. ESPN's NBA coverage is stale and bad. It isn't interesting and it isn't fun. I don't get some knowledge of a team's strategery and I can't enjoy the host's banter. What is there to watch, people talking about petty drama that they made up? That appeals to somebody, but it's not for me.

Inside the NBA has been the gold standard of sports presentation for years. I just think it's almost impossible to replicate. The Bizarro World chemistry of everybody is what sets it apart in most cases. The other being that it's fun. Sports themselves aren't that serious and the Inside the NBA crew treats it as such without it becoming a total mockery. ESPN's best analogue would be College Gameday, which is a weird and wacky show running down stories from college football before the weekend's games begin. They have some interesting and serious stories sometimes, but overall the show is just fun. They have a bunch of people behind them yelling because they're inebriated at 10:30 am and they've got just under 24 hours before they need to get to church to beg forgiveness on Sunday.

Pretty standard stuff really. We had tons of NFL teams using Los Angeles as a threat to get what they wanted locally for a few decades. I vaguely recall the Saints using San Antonio as a potential threat as well. Without LA on the table now we have to settle for weird stuff like Toronto or London now. Or like, St. Louis I guess.

I hadn't even thought of a hypothetical world in which the AAF got through that first season. Even if XFL2 hadn't arrived, it seems unlikely that they would have survived COVID. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the AAF brands revitalized someday, especially the Apollos. Maybe we'll get a long-running spring league before the next generation realizes that football should die.

If it weren't for live sports I wouldn't have cable. So I'm hosed. I remember as a kid watching SportsCenter until it would repeat to watch highlights. The internet has completely changed that though. SportsCenter probably has a purpose for somebody, but for me I just look at highlights whenever I want instead of waiting for SC to cycle back through if I missed something. Even the pregame shows do nothing for me at this point. There's better pregame analysis written somewhere that I can easily read now. Part of this is the internet and part of it is probably just my personal tastes changing.