Ill flame wrote: ↑July 9th, 2022, 12:52 am
LUOrange wrote: ↑July 8th, 2022, 6:58 pm
To Staedtler's point though, until they show some life UMASS is practically an FCS game. UCONN's not far behind them. I do have some sympathy and loyalty to UMASS, but why can't we at least get some MBB games out of the deal?
Good point. The occasional football game against those schools wouldn't be so bad if we got a relatively attractive home basketball game out of it. Unfortunately that just hasn't been happening. I don't see uconn being a team we end up playing every year moving forward. They have been relatively successful at scheduling in their short time as an independent and won't need to rely on us as much. UMASS on the other hand has not done as well and will need a lot of help to fill out their schedules moving forward. Regularly playing them in basketball as a consolation prize would be a big step up from a lot of our current non tournament competition.
UConn hasn't had and probably won't have issues scheduling due to their old Big East relationships and their BB teams. I believe that I read that they'd like to keep thei football schedule focused in the northeast, even if it means 2 FCS games as well. But I also believe UConn will be on a quick shortlist of ACC back-fill candidates once the NFL Lite pro conferences are set up.
UMASS isn't that lucky. For me part of the appeal on CUSA 4.0 is that it's the rejects conference, and UMASS football fits that. So, Im not opposed to playing them, but I do agree that we should drop the FCS games so long as they remain on our schedule while they stink.