(03-26-2013 08:52 PM)StillJonesing Wrote: Gezz USM fans doing what they do best. Put that brave face on. You can rock on about everyone being out of the big 5 but you are clearly a peg down "of the rest" and the suggestion that you turned down and offer is pure comedy. No ones turning down anything if it means getting out of the crap box called CUSA. Lateral move my ass. There is a reason basically all the schools with 30+ million dollars outside of the Big 5 banded together, and its because the programs that are serious and that actually have higher ceilings wanted to dump the ones that aren't. That's the reasons as much as anything.
There's actually a lot of truth in some of SJ's posts. A lot, not all.
After the TV contract numbers came out, SOME USM fans, me included, thought there was zero reason to move to Conference America, but Tulsa moving in spite of the evidence before them proves that logic is faulty. USM would accept an invite if for no other reason than all our old running buddies did. If you're not moving forward, you're getting left behind.
The athletic budget, or lack thereof, is also a valid point.
This is former USM AD Richard Giannini's biggest failure. Sure he was good at kowtowing to USM's big donors, but failed massively at cultivating the rest of the fan base. Any good AD should be able to do both.
That being said, it hasn't held USM back much relative to C-USA performance, but it will if it isn't addressed in the upcoming years. Overall, we get a lot for our money, but everything has a breaking point.
Is 0-12 a result of our budget? Maybe. SJ likes to point out that it is, but I can't imagine anyone looking objectively at the situation would jump right away to that conclusion, especially when evidence to the contrary was used to remedy the situation. Also, I'm not sure how having a $30 million + budget proves your program is serious about athletics when evidence to the contrary exists in spades. Or maybe it just proves that some programs are being horribly, horribly mismanaged and have been for years. You just can't say one thing and not the other.
USM fans can post what they want, but I cringe every time i read a post, in the context of Conference America, stating we wouldn't accept an invite, or how we beat Houston last year, or i see a post stating our overall record against opponent...etc, it just reeks of hurt feelings of being "left out" when the simple fact remains; USM didn't do enough to warrant an invite. Plain and simple.