SMUleopold

No. The attendance thing is always going to be a problem for us, to be honest with you. - Small-ish school whose alumni tend to scatter upon graduation - Little or no winning for two generations, so nobody looks back fondly on football games -No 'T-shirt' fans - A conference affiliation that provides no real ticket sales to opponents, or even provides much name recognition to the average fan. SMU has a little under 6500 undergrad, and around 30,000 alumni in Dallas, around 45,000 in DFW. So if every undergraduate and living alumni in Dallas attended a game we would just barely sell it out. This is the point of the whole 'Dallas' marketing idea. Yes, it's cheesy and distracting, but the school and Sonny both realize if SMU never gets the city behind us, then we are always going to be playing to an empty house. North Texas has the chance to market to a much larger fanbase if simply based on nothing other than enrollment, but SMU is going to have to come up with some way to find more fans, one way or another.

If it's going as well as his recruiting plan did then Dallas is recovering from a city wide crack epidemic right about now.

Honest question: Has Littrell been offered a position somewhere? I'd be shocked if he hasn't been contacted by someone, but actually offered?

Uh huh, Uh huh Whatever do you mean?

No. We have had 33 years to hide our fan allegiance. Today, good sir, is not that day.

That's a good question. My assumption is that red-shirting is about preserving eligibility, not extending it, so after you've used four years you can't add another one. But that's a guess on my part.

Fine. *sniff* No nose candy for you, peasants. Now go wash my Theta-girlfriend's hand me down BMW while I drink my Rolling Rock. Lol, even I laughed at that one.

Yes. All joking aside, many people believe this is what Houston is doing. Not only is Houston specifically redshirting the star QB and WR as of now, the indications are that moving forward they have some sort of stratified way they are planning on playing their players so as to use as little talent up this year as possible, as opposed to simply trying to win games in 2019. They have a half dozen or so big time transfers who will become eligible next year; a 5* LB from Alabama, a 4* CB from UCLA, and a few others. Their fans on another board are saying that due to the incoming talent and the leftover talent from this year that they are going to dominate their regular season schedule in 2020, and, well, they aren't crazy. And frankly, redshirting players and rebuilding teams are the norm in CFB, especially when it's a first year HC - it just usually isn't the all-everything QB a third of the way through the season. The question for me, however, becomes was this the plan all along, or is UH simply quitting on 2019 and finding a new loophole to justify it. Dana, in his defense, stated a number of times in the offseason that UH had a real developmental issue and that not nearly enough players were redshirted, that CMA played way too many freshman, and that he planned on fixing that. Well, okay, but was that the plan all along, or did he simply dip his toe into the 2019 season and, when he started out 1-3 rather than 3-1, decide to go to plan B, quitting on about 10-20 players, not to mention staff, season ticket holders, etc. So I'm going to ask ya'll after the game if you all thought Houston played hard, because I'm going to wonder if that's an indication as whether or not Dana simply pulled the rug out from under his senior class. If so, forget him, he's done something horrible to college football. If the 'cougs do play hard, and this was the plan all along, well, so be it. Rebuilding years happen all the time, I can live with it. Welcome to 'cougin it', 2019 edition.

Nah. We didn't buy 'em. We offered them a redshirt year if we started out 1-3.

I knew Morris was in trouble the second he offered Hicks a scholarship. He wanted Buechele, but Shane decided to come home and play for Sonny. I'm not that familiar with Starkel, but when Hicks, who is not now and never was an SEC quarterback, beat him out for the starting job going into the season I knew he had a smoking hole at QB, something you can't have in the SEC. Still believed they would beat SJSU, though.

Couple of Houston posters came over to Ponyfans after we played ya'll. They definitely took notice of the kid. Should've, too. He was fun to watch, even when running our DB's over.

Buechele graduated in three years at UT, got redshirted for playing only four games last year and has two years of eligibility, so he's back next year. In fact, almost all of the transfers have more than one year of eligibility. FWIW, Sonny seems have put together a bit of a model here. The transfers are almost all grad transfers, have at least two years of eligibility left, and mostly come from the DFW area. Buechele, the two kids from Rice, the Juco OL Hughes, the DB from UCLA who we paired up against Bussey, the LB from Auburn - all are grad transfers who were either passed over on the depth chart or made large contributions to a losing team - Rice - and left when the got the degree. Only Nelson, the LB, is from outside DFW but even he had graduated and god knows we needed help at LB a couple years ago when we picked him up. Congrats on the win yesterday. Pulling for you the rest of the year.