Arkstfan

Believe that is the closest. USM took advantage of ASU's mistakes, ASU failed to score off USM's. Simple as that. Very easily could have been a 10 point halftime lead for ASU but just as easily a 10 point lead for USM.

Wow little losing turned you into a no class piece of crap in a hurry. Oh scratch that, a lot of losing. Ya'll going to use the Kentucky recruiting plan to turn the program around? Violation Summary: Recruiting inducements for prospective student-athletes and high-school coaches; impermissible tryout; unethical conduct; academic fraud; falsification of recruiting records; institutional control of recruiting funds; failure to control salary of employee; violation of supplemental pay provision; failure in fiscal control of outside agency; failure to monitor and a lack of institutional control. Also, numerous secondary violations.

I know but I didn't make it. At least it doesn't say Sunblet.

They need to pay attention to what happened in Shreveport. Started out as a Southland team vs. at-large and though the game teetered on the verge of being bankrupt a number of times they kept just making it. Now they pay out something like $1.3 million per team WITHOUT A TITLE SPONSOR. The local sponsors who used to want to be on the prime New Year's Eve date now want the game earlier because they are filling up their hotels on New Year's Eve any way and want them full those earlier dates. Right now they are slated to have 7,200 out-of-state visitors between South Carolina and Missouri who will spend money and go home. A few years ago Arkansas and Missouri brough 24,000 people to town and there wasn't a hotel to be found within 20 miles of Shreveport.

Very cool. As to Texas, that is the attitude at most big name schools. Very few schools "get it" when it comes to the internet. All you have to do is look at their web sites. They know they need of them web site things but don't have a clue as to what they should do with it when they get it.

That right there is what makes college football so much fun. 119 I-A schools and if you can't find someone to hate for any reason whether reasonable or not... you just ain't watching enough games.

Maybe it says something about what the voters think of UT's opponents. Ohio State #4 Texas Tech #18 Maybe it says something about what the voters think of USC's opponents. Notre Dame #5 Oregon #6 UCLA #17

Don't be silly. The ticket allotment numbers are set at a level that that insures the game will break even. The only financial risk belongs to ASU and USM.

Historically the New Orleans Bowl ain't got what they wanted. They wanted MTSU in 2001 and got UNT. In 2002 they wanted Tulane and got Cincinnati (thanks to Cincy having already played in Hawaii that year and getting in a brawl to boot). In 2004 they wanted Troy to such a degree that they were willing to find a site for USM if UNT failed to find a berth elsewhere. The fact that they have honored their committments despite not getting their wish doesn't offend me in the least.

Nor at Southern Miss. They are estimating taking 3,000 to 5,000.

Bush got it despite competing for attention against last year's winner ON THE SAME TEAM. That speaks volumes about what Bush did this season.

Depends on the sport. Football players normally don't leave for a road trip until after classes on Friday unless they are going a really long distance or they are playing a mid-week game. Basketball players will often miss Thursday and Friday on road swings. Baseball... jeez those guys just disappear in the spring semester, playing a lot of day games and going to tournaments. They rarely if ever fly so they bus and long trips mean more missed class than for the hoops players going to the same location.

They bid.

When the average student works finishing school on the pre-ordained timetable just doesn't happen. One of my fraternity brothers was an engineering major who worked part-time in a local factory. Starting his junior year the company moved him into a training program for industrial engineers and he started working 40 hours a week and going to school. Took seven years to get out. My wife needed 6 hours to graduate when I started law school and rather than her commuting 2 days a week or 3 days a week to finish she was offered a full-time editor's position in our community and didn't finish for another 9 years.

Learn something new every day. I thought everyone played their title games at pre-determined site. Some just make sense because of facility (ie. Missouri playing at the Edward Jones Dome, Iowa playing at Northern Iowa's dome) and some due to geography Tennessee playing in Nashville or Murfreesboro, Arkansas playing in Little Rock.

Good PowerPoint use is a great aid. Bad use is bad. The best speakers using it will insert some blank slides to get the focus to what they are saying rather than the bullet points. Chalkboards ain't great if you have professor with lousy handwriting. When I took Fed Jur in law school the professor had an outline on the board and told us to copy it down because that was the entire class right there. We spent the next three months filling in the branches of that outline.

Or you could run the entire Sun Belt (no non-football schools) for that amount.

I was suprised with ASU's numbers. We didn't have any really well attended games like last year's sellout against Memphis but then we didn't have two Thursday night games in the November rain either. Thanksgiving weekend is just lousy for football unless you are a mega-school with a tradition of playing on Thanksgiving weekend. I would have come down for the UNT game with my family but it meant leaving my sister-in-law's house at 8:00 pm on Friday and driving 450 miles, much of it two-lane to get to Denton.

Just more of the positive press the bowl has received the past five years. Screw 'em.

Time for my anti-Microsoft rant. According to PCMag since Microsoft bought the company that makes the Gator spyware and adware they have been disabling Microsoft AntiSpyware's ability to detect and remove that spyware and adware. If you use the Microsoft program, download a free one like Yahoo's as extra protection. In fact, not a good idea to rely on just one anyway. Of course if you buy a Mac it's not an issue.

Not true. The WAC has two bowl ties. Boise and Hawaii. The Fresno to the Liberty agreement this year was a function of two things. #1 The Liberty wanted to lock in a ranked team (which Tech blew to hell). #2 The Liberty's contract with the MWC ended last year and their contract with the SEC doesn't start until next year. No team other than Hawaii plays in the Hawaii Bowl and comes anywhere close to breaking even. Fresno didn't get national attention this year because they are in the WAC. They got it because they traveled to the #6 team in the nation and lost by 3. They beat a team headed to the GMAC Bowl by 30 points. They lost to the #1 team in the nation by 8 points the second closest game they played all year. Don't think that the college football establishment respects the WAC. The bottom four teams in the WAC (SJSU, USU, Idaho, NMSU) went 7-37 against I-A competition and had one I-A win outside that group of four teams, USU's home win over 2-9 UNLV. That group includes two teams that finished tied for last in the Sun Belt last year. Just above them in the standings was Hawaii at 5-7. Four of those wins came from (big shock) Idaho, USU, SJSU, and NMSU. Their non-conference win came at home over 5-7 San Diego State. At the top of the WAC, La.Tech lost to Kansas and FAU played Kansas a closer game. Five of their 7 wins came over the bottom five WAC teams. One game over the last place team in the Sun Belt. They had Fresno for their sole win over a winning team. Nevada lost to 4-7 Washington State by 34. Beat 2-9 UNLV by 8. Lost to 6-5 Colorado State by 21. Went 5-0 against the WAC's bottom five. Beat La.Tech and Fresno. Lost by 35 to Nevada. Boise lost handily to Georgia (played them 2 points better than ULM but UGA had a larger halftime lead against Boise). Lost to 5-6 Oregon State. Crushed a Bowling Green that finished tied for second in their division in the MAC. Beat a 6-5 Portland State (I-AA) that finished 4th in the Big Sky by 7 points. The WAC has two pretty good teams, two average teams and 5 teams that pretty well stink. It is marginally better than the Belt simply because of Fresno and Boise.

I've seen it when a school can't keep players eligible and lose a bunch to quitting and transfers.

The last word I had heard was that Tech would go to Hawaii IF Oregon makes the BCS leaving the Pac-10 short in Las Vegas and that Nevada would go to Las Vegas freeing up the Hawaii bowl for Tech. That's the only Tech to a bowl game scenario I've heard, there might be others.

Do you really want to be in a league worlds better than the Sun Belt given not just this year but the number of close games UNT has had in the Belt since 2001?

Plus 1 is the extra BCS game. If the Orange Bowl is hosting the BCS title game the plus 1 will be played a week before that in the same stadium. If I understand the process correctly, the title game will technically be the plus 1 game and the earlier game will still be the Orange Bowl. This creates an extra BCS game to create more room for a non-autobid league to get in the BCS. The large piece of the revenue from the game will go to the non-autobid leagues regardless of whether they play in the BCS or not. In the event a non-autobid league does make the BCS then that team's conference will get a larger share of the money. Now instead of having to be in the top 6 to make the BCS the non-autobids need to finish in the top 12. The new deal puts the Sun Belt on the same payout footing as the rest of the non-autobid leagues (league didn't exist when current deal was cut so we got scraps) and basically doubles what the other non-autobid leagues get. Originally the plus 1 idea was touted as a playoff game to pit two bowl winners but that idea was rejected. The new plus 1 came up because the BCS leagues had agreed to increase access to the non-BCS but the BCS bowls didn't want another bowl in the title rotation other than their group. The other bowls weren't interested in bidding unless they were in the title rotation. The whole compromise was on the verge of falling apart and some guy named Wright Waters suggested creating a new bowl that rotated through the BCS bowl sites. The brilliance of the idea is this. Each of the four BCS bowls have very large local purchase (and scalper) bases. When the title game rotates to town you will have to purchase tickets to both games to get title game tickets (though participating teams will only purchase tickets to their game). That insure thousands and thousands of tickets sold even if it is FAU vs. Buffalo.