(04-18-2013 09:04 PM)Marge Schott Wrote:  

(04-17-2013 09:15 AM)bluesox Wrote:  It was really dumb for the big 12 not to take both to at least get to 11. I think you probably could make the case taking TCU was mistake too but that's not as clear cut.

Would've been better off taking UL, UC, Pitt and WVU to get to 12 and leaving TCU in the American.

I remember when Nebraska and Colorado left and Missouri and A&M were still in the conference the two schools the DFW media mentioned the most were BYU and Louisville to the Big XII North.

(04-18-2013 09:04 PM)Marge Schott Wrote:  

(04-17-2013 09:15 AM)bluesox Wrote:  It was really dumb for the big 12 not to take both to at least get to 11. I think you probably could make the case taking TCU was mistake too but that's not as clear cut.

Would've been better off taking UL, UC, Pitt and WVU to get to 12 and leaving TCU in the American.

I'm guessing the ACC saw something like that coming, which is why they moved so quickly on Pitt & Syracuse.

Where the Big XII dropped the ball was in assuming that Louisville would always be out there for them to take whenever they could decide on #12 to accompany them. No one saw the B1G move on Rutgers & Maryland coming, which triggered the ACC's action to pounce on Louisville. That blindsided everyone.

Who knows if the Big XII was preoccupied with trying to recruit Florida State & a 2nd ACC school, viewing Louisville as their safety school if they couldn't convince those other two. Funny thing is that by ignoring Louisville, they may just have given the ACC enough football strength to keep the FSU's of that conference happy enough to stay where they are.

Here are the things that I have noticed after one year in the Big XII:

Negatives
1) geography-- wvu had a lot of fans that literally traveled with them everywhere. It was almost like a high school football mentality where you are going to be there for every game whether it be home or away. That has been replaced by getting to one big xii road game per year. Travel defiantly wore down the bball team. We simply can't be given Missouri's schedule in the future a d told to go with it. Has to be multiple games on one road trip like the PAC 12 does.

2) lack of rivals.. No Pit, No Vt, No Penn st etc. Something special and historic has been lost. I'm sure a lot of schools and fans feel that way.

Positive

1) great football and huge home game draws. Playing Texas or OU at home would have been like playing Nd and Psu at home every year in the old Eastern Indy days

2) love the construction going on in the athletic department now. New weight room for football. Brand new baseball field will be going up. WVU got stagnet in the BE a little bit because it was already ahead of most schools in terms of facilities.

3) love being in a league with rural schools. There fans travel. TCU and Baylor brought crowds similar to what UL and Pitt did and blew away what Syracuse and Rutgers ever brought to Morgantown. Wierd how the hillbilly redneck jokes WVU fans usually get disappeared in one year in the Big xii.

Bottom line is I'm very happy with the league so far

Jackson

Cuse fans avoided traveling to WVU for a reason...too many stories of harrassment has hindered what little we do travel there. I do agree that Cuse fans don't travel well when they have to leave their comfort zone/alumni region (i.e. I-95 corridor). WVU always traveled well to Cuse.

Do you think TCU and Baylor will continue to travel in large numbers after the novelty wears off? I've spoken with some of their fans down here and they traveled to WVU because it was new.

Anyways...maybe someday conferences will realign back to more sensible pairings...but it might take 20 years and Cable TV Bubble bursting.

(04-18-2013 03:54 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:39 PM)cuseroc Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:04 PM)UTEPDallas Wrote:  This is a dumb article. WVU had a great run in their last year in the Big East and beat ACC champ Clemson by 70 points in the Orange Bowl on their way to the Big XII. Louisville ended last football season in defeating BCS superpower Florida and winning the NCAA Tournament this month. A better and fair comparison would be 5 years from now, then that will be apples to apples.

Only time will tell what conference got the better school, the Big XII or the ACC. One season won't tell us much.

If Charlie Strong and Rick Pitino are still at Louisville, and Holgerson and Huggy Bear are still at WV, Louisville will still come out ahead in 5 years, imo.

We shall see, cuse...

Are you seriously comparing Pitino to Huggins? Huggins has 2 Final Fours in 42 years as a head coach. Pitino has two national championships and 4 Final Fours in 28 years of coaching. Not even remotely close.

As for Holgorsen and Strong, I think Holgorsen runs a gimmick passing offense while Strong is much more balanced and has a tough defense. Holgorsen got lucky in WVU's last year in the Big East because of the stupid tiebreaker rule and got an undeserved BCS bid. I'm curious to see how well he does when he doesn't have the #1 QB on his roster.

(04-19-2013 05:15 AM)Jackson1011 Wrote:  Here are the things that I have noticed after one year in the Big XII:

Negatives
1) geography-- wvu had a lot of fans that literally traveled with them everywhere. It was almost like a high school football mentality where you are going to be there for every game whether it be home or away. That has been replaced by getting to one big xii road game per year. Travel defiantly wore down the bball team. We simply can't be given Missouri's schedule in the future a d told to go with it. Has to be multiple games on one road trip like the PAC 12 does.

2) lack of rivals.. No Pit, No Vt, No Penn st etc. Something special and historic has been lost. I'm sure a lot of schools and fans feel that way.

Positive

1) great football and huge home game draws. Playing Texas or OU at home would have been like playing Nd and Psu at home every year in the old Eastern Indy days

2) love the construction going on in the athletic department now. New weight room for football. Brand new baseball field will be going up. WVU got stagnet in the BE a little bit because it was already ahead of most schools in terms of facilities.

3) love being in a league with rural schools. There fans travel. TCU and Baylor brought crowds similar to what UL and Pitt did and blew away what Syracuse and Rutgers ever brought to Morgantown. Wierd how the hillbilly redneck jokes WVU fans usually get disappeared in one year in the Big xii.

Bottom line is I'm very happy with the league so far

I'm with you, Jackson. I like the B12. WVU is getting much more respect from B12 fans and media than we ever got from the eastern media and fans...

I plan to travel to Ft. Worth for the TCU game, if possible. I went to the TCU game in Morgantown last year, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting the folks that traveled up from Ft. Worth for the game. My seats were right in the middle of their fans, so I got to meet quite a few of them...

I got to meet quite a few Texas fans over the weekend in Nashville, since I had my annual checkup at Vandy on Tuesday. I was wearing WVU gear, and all of 'em came over to say "hi" and introduce themselves. Everyone I've met from the B12 has been very hospitable...

(04-19-2013 08:41 AM)gocards#1 Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 03:54 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:39 PM)cuseroc Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:04 PM)UTEPDallas Wrote:  This is a dumb article. WVU had a great run in their last year in the Big East and beat ACC champ Clemson by 70 points in the Orange Bowl on their way to the Big XII. Louisville ended last football season in defeating BCS superpower Florida and winning the NCAA Tournament this month. A better and fair comparison would be 5 years from now, then that will be apples to apples.

Only time will tell what conference got the better school, the Big XII or the ACC. One season won't tell us much.

If Charlie Strong and Rick Pitino are still at Louisville, and Holgerson and Huggy Bear are still at WV, Louisville will still come out ahead in 5 years, imo.

We shall see, cuse...

Are you seriously comparing Pitino to Huggins? Huggins has 2 Final Fours in 42 years as a head coach. Pitino has two national championships and 4 Final Fours in 28 years of coaching. Not even remotely close.

As for Holgorsen and Strong, I think Holgorsen runs a gimmick passing offense while Strong is much more balanced and has a tough defense. Holgorsen got lucky in WVU's last year in the Big East because of the stupid tiebreaker rule and got an undeserved BCS bid. I'm curious to see how well he does when he doesn't have the #1 QB on his roster.

That sounds like sour grapes to me, dude. If Louisville had taken care of business, they wouldn't have been in a tie-breaker situation. But it wasn't a 2 way tie, and so the tie breaker comes into play. It could just as easily been both Louisville and WVU watching Cincinnati in the BCS game. I don't see any Cincinnati fans crying about it like you've been for over a year...

It's not like WVU hasn't lost out on a BCS bid in similar circumstances before. It happened to us more than once - unlike UofL. It is what it is, and you go by the rules put in place, whether you like 'em or not. Those rules created while the Cards were still in CUSA...

Gotta agree with Bit on the Tiebreaker issue in 2011. If we would have taken care of business the week after we beat WVU in Morgantown when we played Pitt it would not have mattered.

But I do agree with gocards on Strong>Dana and Pitino much > then Huggins. But both schools are @ the Big Boy Table and as far as Louisville is concerned glad it worked out that we are in the ACC.

Maize, Strong was a defensive guru. IMO it's much easier for a defensive guy to manage an offense, than vice versa, due to the nature of the game. The defensive coaches have to break down an offense in great detail to figure out how to stop it. I don't think offensive coaches have to work as hard to get their system to work...

As to whether Strong will end up as a better head coach than Dana, that remains to be seen. Dana is only beginning his 3rd year as a head coach, and the weakness for WVU last season wasn't the offense. So we won't know for sure for a few years yet. Dana still needs to figure out defense. Strong does have a good head start on Dana though...

I will agree with you on Pitino. But considering that he's been at schools with a much higher profile than the schools Huggs has coached, you have to wonder how Pitino would have done at those same schools. It's much easier to recruit kids to Louisville than it is to recruit kids to Morgantown, and his job at Kentucky was far easier than Huggs job at Cincinnati. Even Providence had the advantage of being in a highly populated area as well (one of my neighbors was Pitino's first recruit at Providence, and he's a big Pitino fan), while Kansas State wasn't exactly paradise. So even that point is debatable to some extent...

[/quote]That sounds like sour grapes to me, dude. If Louisville had taken care of business, they wouldn't have been in a tie-breaker situation. But it wasn't a 2 way tie, and so the tie breaker comes into play. It could just as easily been both Louisville and WVU watching Cincinnati in the BCS game. I don't see any Cincinnati fans crying about it like you've been for over a year...

It's not like WVU hasn't lost out on a BCS bid in similar circumstances before. It happened to us more than once - unlike UofL. It is what it is, and you go by the rules put in place, whether you like 'em or not. Those rules created while the Cards were still in CUSA...
[/quote]

If the same thing happened to WVU we'd never hear the end of it from your fans. We beat the team that "won" the BCS bid on their home freaking field. But of course the league instead uses arbitrary computer rankings to determine who gets the bid, not going with the team that was clearly better. We also got screwed in 2005 (in Morgantown no less) after the refs forgot how the rules work on an onside kick, which coincidentally resulted in an official apology from the Big East admins a few days later, and cost us the BCS bid that year. And let's not forget about the 2007 UConn game where the refs failed to see a fair catch which gave UConn a free touchdown on a punt return. Official apology #2 from the league office. It's hilarious how many times we've gotten screwed in this crap league and yet according to you we're just supposed to be content and accept it.

So we have a legitimate reason to gripe while you guys don't. The only good news is we only have to deal with this stupid league and its subpar programs, admins, and refs one more year and we never have to deal with backwater WVU redneck fans ever again. We have that much to be thankful for.

Have fun watching your football team get smacked around (again) and your basketball team missing the NCAA Tournament (again) in the Big 12 next season. Your program is on a downward trajectory ever since you guys sued your way out and it won't get better anytime soon. If not for Oliver Luck's blind stupidity we'd be stuck in your position and you'd be headed to the ACC. Thank you Ollie!

(04-19-2013 08:25 AM)TexanMark Wrote:  Cuse fans avoided traveling to WVU for a reason...too many stories of harrassment has hindered what little we do travel there. I do agree that Cuse fans don't travel well when they have to leave their comfort zone/alumni region (i.e. I-95 corridor). WVU always traveled well to Cuse.

Do you think TCU and Baylor will continue to travel in large numbers after the novelty wears off? I've spoken with some of their fans down here and they traveled to WVU because it was new.

Anyways...maybe someday conferences will realign back to more sensible pairings...but it might take 20 years and Cable TV Bubble bursting.

Hard to say about the travel. My guess is that the #s will always be above average because if you are a XII fan east of the mississippi, away games at Morgantown would be a great chance to watch you team play. When I used to be on the road a bit, would always know who the SEC team was playing Kentucky because it was the northern most school and the SEC fans that lived in the north and there cars with the flags would be rolling down I79 from Morgantown to Charleston and over to Lexington. I would guess WVU would get a similar bump from from east coast xii alums

-- Trust me on this Mark, your going to love getting out of the Big East. Never knew how bush league the BE was till we were out. You'll probably feel the same!

Quote:I'm with you, Jackson. I like the B12. WVU is getting much more respect from B12 fans and media than we ever got from the eastern media and fans...

I plan to travel to Ft. Worth for the TCU game, if possible. I went to the TCU game in Morgantown last year, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting the folks that traveled up from Ft. Worth for the game. My seats were right in the middle of their fans, so I got to meet quite a few of them...

I got to meet quite a few Texas fans over the weekend in Nashville, since I had my annual checkup at Vandy on Tuesday. I was wearing WVU gear, and all of 'em came over to say "hi" and introduce themselves. Everyone I've met from the B12 has been very hospitable...

My buddies went to the game @ UT and loved it. Something to be said for being with schools with cultural similarties. In the BE certain schools would complain about the Mountaineer and ask that he not shoot off the musket or not bring the musket to their campus at all. No XII school has had issues with a mascot carrying a rifle haha

Now if we could only find a way into a league that may geographic and cultural sense (cough SEC cough lol)

Jackson

(04-19-2013 10:16 AM)gocards#1 Wrote:  

Quote:That sounds like sour grapes to me, dude. If Louisville had taken care of business, they wouldn't have been in a tie-breaker situation. But it wasn't a 2 way tie, and so the tie breaker comes into play. It could just as easily been both Louisville and WVU watching Cincinnati in the BCS game. I don't see any Cincinnati fans crying about it like you've been for over a year...

It's not like WVU hasn't lost out on a BCS bid in similar circumstances before. It happened to us more than once - unlike UofL. It is what it is, and you go by the rules put in place, whether you like 'em or not. Those rules created while the Cards were still in CUSA...

If the same thing happened to WVU we'd never hear the end of it from your fans. We beat the team that "won" the BCS bid on their home freaking field. But of course the league instead uses arbitrary computer rankings to determine who gets the bid, not going with the team that was clearly better. We also got screwed in 2005 (in Morgantown no less) after the refs forgot how the rules work on an onside kick, which coincidentally resulted in an official apology from the Big East admins a few days later, and cost us the BCS bid that year. And let's not forget about the 2007 UConn game where the refs failed to see a fair catch which gave UConn a free touchdown on a punt return. Official apology #2 from the league office. It's hilarious how many times we've gotten screwed in this crap league and yet according to you we're just supposed to be content and accept it.

So we have a legitimate reason to gripe while you guys don't. The only good news is we only have to deal with this stupid league and its subpar programs, admins, and refs one more year and we never have to deal with backwater WVU redneck fans ever again. We have that much to be thankful for.

Have fun watching your football team get smacked around (again) and your basketball team missing the NCAA Tournament (again) in the Big 12 next season. Your program is on a downward trajectory ever since you guys sued your way out and it won't get better anytime soon. If not for Oliver Luck's blind stupidity we'd be stuck in your position and you'd be headed to the ACC. Thank you Ollie!

You really have some serious issues, dude. You don't have a legitimate gripe. Things like that happen in every conference. So your complaints are pure sour grapes...

You just want to change the rules that were already in place to suit yourself. It doesn't work that way. WVU has lost out in a similar fashion more than once. But it happened while Louisville was still toiling away in CUSA. You aren't able to see that, because you weren't there. The first time that happened to WVU Louisville was just a basketball school and Howard Schnellenberger was still trying to get the football team going...

Also, Louisville wouldn't have been in WVU's position, because the Cards were never the first choice for the B12. WVU was always the primary choice. It was only last minute meddling from Mitch McConnell that made it seem like a debate. But the Cards were never going to get that invite. If you think otherwise, you're either haven't been following things closely, or you're deluding yourself. I think it's the latter, since you're still so bitter about it...

As for the ACC, even if Louisville had managed to steal the B12 invite from WVU, I doubt the ACC would have invited WVU. They've spent the last 60 years making excuses as to why WVU was unacceptable. I seriously doubt they'd have changed that stance no matter the circumstance. They'd have never been able to look themselves in the face, if they had changed their minds in a moment of desperation...

So enjoy the ACC. You'll be fighting Tobacco Road politics for the rest of your life, unless what all ACC fans say is impossible happens. Louisville has probably seen their last big time bowl bid, unless the ACC loses FSU and a few other programs, which is still a possibility. WV native, Jimbo Fisher, has FSU's football program back in the limelight, and running on all cylinders. I doubt Louisville will top them for the ACC's bid, and Clemson won't be a pushover either...

FSU will always have better talent available, no matter how good a recruiter Strong is. Most of the really good Florida kids stay close to home, and Florida and FSU are their top 2 choices. The best chance for Louisville to beat FSU was at the end of Bowden's career, or in the first couple of years of Fisher's. It's too late now...

Thankfully, not all Cards fans are as obtuse as you are. Some actually remember all the support Louisville got from WVU when they were building up their football program, and are grateful for that support. I have no idea what your problem is, and no longer care. You aren't worth knowing, unlike many other Card fans...

BTW, I fixed the quote for you, since you weren't able to do it properly yourself...

(04-19-2013 08:41 AM)gocards#1 Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 03:54 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:39 PM)cuseroc Wrote:  

(04-18-2013 02:04 PM)UTEPDallas Wrote:  This is a dumb article. WVU had a great run in their last year in the Big East and beat ACC champ Clemson by 70 points in the Orange Bowl on their way to the Big XII. Louisville ended last football season in defeating BCS superpower Florida and winning the NCAA Tournament this month. A better and fair comparison would be 5 years from now, then that will be apples to apples.

Only time will tell what conference got the better school, the Big XII or the ACC. One season won't tell us much.

If Charlie Strong and Rick Pitino are still at Louisville, and Holgerson and Huggy Bear are still at WV, Louisville will still come out ahead in 5 years, imo.

We shall see, cuse...

Are you seriously comparing Pitino to Huggins? Huggins has 2 Final Fours in 42 years as a head coach. Pitino has two national championships and 4 Final Fours in 28 years of coaching. Not even remotely close.

As for Holgorsen and Strong, I think Holgorsen runs a gimmick passing offense while Strong is much more balanced and has a tough defense. Holgorsen got lucky in WVU's last year in the Big East because of the stupid tiebreaker rule and got an undeserved BCS bid. I'm curious to see how well he does when he doesn't have the #1 QB on his roster.

undeserved or not, we beat the crap out Clemson and set a lot of bowl records in the process

(04-20-2013 12:40 AM)Theodoresdaddy Wrote:  undeserved or not, we beat the crap out Clemson and set a lot of bowl records in the process

Care to try it now?