(12-22-2017 11:31 PM)CardinalBlackTrojan Wrote:  A lot of people here sure do get a red rump when Liberty is brought up.

Trolling a significant portion of your alumni, your students, your faculty, and your fans via scheduling is not a particularly good way to engender support for your institution or your program. Smart programs know this. Scheduling LU is for programs that are desperate to fill a schedule, arrogant enough to discount huge swaths of their interest base, ignorant of the issues involved, greedy enough to use a cheap stunt to balance the ledger, influenced by groups like the FCA or similar groups to use their program to make political/religious statements via scheduling contrary to the welfare of a large portion of the people who fund your program, or dumb enough to think that this might not blow up in their faces. God only knows what outrages are in the future by an emboldened and unaccountable program.

If I'm a fan of NMSU or UMass, I'd not be terribly offended by the decision to schedule Liberty. But for just about everyone else, the question is why would you do this. You don't recruit Southern Virginia. It won't help the conference gain on other conferences. It won't be a big game for your fans nor will it draw significant visiting team attendance. If you win it, so what. If you lose it, you're embarrassed. No upside, only downside. Why not schedule a traditionally weak program in a conference like UTEP, UNLV, Kent State, Ball State, EMU, FIU, etc.?

Besides, if you're doing 1 OOC G5, 1 OOC FCS as your home schedule, you're going to have a home OOC schedule of a FCS and Liberty. Bleech.