(08-10-2019 10:29 PM)NoDak Wrote: (08-10-2019 09:13 PM)Hilldog Wrote: (08-10-2019 07:57 PM)NoDak Wrote: (08-10-2019 01:44 AM)Hilldog Wrote: What's the relationship between UTRGV and the Southland? Is UTRGV relationship with the Southland like Bakersfield-who basically begged and pleaded to get into the Big West for years? Is lack of football a non starter for UTRGV to the Southland? But, Corpus Christi also doesn't have football and a member of the Southland.
The Southland needs to slim down a few schools and Sam Houston, McNeese St Lamar and maybe UIW have been wanting FBS for years. The Southland will get Tarleton St as a move up and call it good. Tarleton St wants the Southland not the WAC, as the Southland has a smaller geography now than the Lonestar but it DI.
I agree that the Southland needs to slim down! If you're a non P5 school, there is no reason to have that many schools in your conference.
But, I doubt any of those Southland schools you named will all move up!
The next round of conference realignment will force non P5 conferences to make geographic sense.
UTEP, which is a CSUA outliner, will go to the Mt. West.
Texas St. will go to CUSA. This creates four schools in eastern Texas, Rice, UTSA, North Texas, and CUSA, all within a 250 or so miles from each other. Rice to UTEP is about 700 miles.
The Sun Belt fills with one of those schools you named.
Then the Southland fills with UTRGV!!
I remember reading that UTRGV hired Oliver Luck to do a football study. I don't remember reading what were the conclusions from that study!
Mack Brown chaired the UTRGV fb feasibility campaign. He has said in print that FBS will happen at a nearby minor league soccer field but it hasn’t been officially announced yet.
https://www.utrgv.edu/en-us/about-utrgv/...committee/
1. You're correct that HEB stadium, where the RGV FC Toros play, was supposedly designed so it could be restriped for football. It's big enough (9735 w/o endzones built out) and it's a nice looking modern facility. But.....
2. Two previous partnership deals have fallen apart: (a) UTRGV backed out of using the Bert Ogden Arena for basketball, and (b) the joint minor-league/UTRGV baseball stadium is now just used by UTRGV after our minor league team faded away. I don't know if the local community can be be persuaded to try again.
3. That football feasibility report was never officially released, it was extracted from our admin by the local paper filing information requests (state equivalent of FOIA). Officially there's not even a plan for football, there is only an unreleased study on whether to have a plan.
4. Your link is from 2016. Neither the prez, the AD, nor Mack Brown has said anything of substance in roughly two years. The study on whether to have a plan is on indefinite hold. Repeat: it's not the plan that's on hold. It's the study on whether to have a plan that's on hold.
5. There is no money. The new med school is a huge cash sink and our capital campaigns are organized around propping it up, not starting new teams. In the regular academic departments we're being asked to let go full time faculty and replace them with grad students and part timers.
6. Our dual EVPs are putting heavy pressure on faculty to change classes to online, and to focus on commuters and people not even in the valley looking for cheap, low-commitment MS/MA/MBA degrees. That's the opposite of resident, committed undergrad students who'd go to football games.
7. Again, my read on the Conque hire is the opposite of yours. If there was any glimmer of an idea of starting something in the next 5-10 years, our prez would have hired an AD with experience overseeing football.
8. And finally, football would need approval from the UT system office in Austin. Here's the unpleasant truth: the merger with Brownsville has not gone all that well, we just recently got off SACS probation (which was a full-up national academic walk of shame), our prez is an absentee landlord who's rarely seen except at graduation (and he missed some of those too). It could be that as far as Austin is concerned we don't have our act together and need to focus on fixing what we already have. Of course we think that's too harsh but I could see it from their point of view. I strongly suspect that items (3) and (4) above are the result of an order from Austin to file the football study, stop talking about it, and focus on basics.