The "Other Major" Creed
Courtesy of BeltBoard.com
Ok, hate is strong word and mostly not accurate but there is a point to be made.
Look we don’t roll into your stadium for a check ranging from the high hundreds of thousands to a million bucks expecting there is a high probability that we are going to win. We also don’t come expecting to roll over and play dead either. We sure as heck don’t come in believing there are mystic powers in that plastic grass or real grass (whichever the case may be) that insures we have no chance of winning.
You don’t respect us for what we are attempting to do. Yeah we understand the deck is stacked, you get more money just from your conference merely for having a pulse than we will spend this year. We are trying to do a lot with a little.
The big lie in this country is that we love underdogs. That’s far from the truth. Visit any message board of a rich six conference school and see the contempt heaped on the less popular leagues. Americans hate underdogs, go back and read what was said about Utah before either BCS appearance or about Boise State. Listen to the radio and TV experts.
The BCS didn't want to see Toledo win in Ann Arbor.
Our refusal to concede defeat until it is actually inflicted for some reason offends you. I don’t understand your logic in being offended. You aren’t as entertaining as the Harlem Globetrotters so why do you want to play the Washington Generals? Our players think they are better than your coaches thought they were during recruiting, they intend to do their best to prove it. In many cases your coaches thought our kids were just as good but went with the closer guy or the one they thought might have a bit more growth potential. Our coaches think they know the game as well as yours and they intend to prove it as well. If you don’t want competition get out of Division I.
We are offended that anything we do positive is automatically spat upon. Beat a team from your league? Worst team they’ve ever fielded and they shot themselves in the foot with mistakes. Play you close? Well the coaches didn’t want to show anything to our conference opponents and the officials let you get away with holding all day. We don’t hear a lot of admission that we actually fielded a team capable of staying on the field with you.
You can play an FCS and three of our conference mates and go 3-5 in your conference and people are telling us Coach Bubba really has it going. We go 8-4 and lose to two teams from your league and its nothing much to talk about. I remember when Troy beat Oklahoma State, and it was dismissed as what happens when you play on the road. The Cowboys were good enough to win in Waco, Lincoln, and in a bowl game that year, but there no was respect for Troy in beating them. My blood still boils thinking about Lee Corso declaring that Northern Illinois couldn’t compete in any BCS league after they beat Alabama, Maryland and Iowa State all in the same season. Maybe if he’d confessed to having been fired as failed coach at NIU it wouldn’t have made me so angry.
Drive around your community and look at the cars. If you see “Arkansas State” or “North Texas” or whatever the local team is outside of the rich six leagues, you can see that and with some certainty conclude the driver either is a student at the school, an alumnus, or a relative of a student.
Now look at the cars with the “Arkansas”, “Texas”, or “Oklahoma” logos. You cannot make the assumption they went to college there or any place else. You can’t safely guess they know a student there. You cannot even assume they’ve ever even been inside the stadium. You’ve got a pack of hanger-ons who really hurt the reputation of your good fans.
The Rich Six would like to forget about Western Kentucky.
Most of the name schools were playing football before our school was founded, and playing at the top level before we became four year colleges. You get buckets of money from people who have no direct connection to the school while we really have to depend on our alums. The problem is many of our alums are pretty pathetic people who are terribly insecure and want to fit in with the people they do business with. They’d rather support the local version of the NFL under the guise of college football than support the school they went to. So we don’t get to rely on our alums, but rather the subset of alums who aren’t pathetic bandwagon jumpers.
Every year we get told if we get a good RPI in basketball we’ll be in the NCAA Tournament and every year we watch one of our peers get left at home while five or six schools rated worse in RPI not only get in but get better seeds. It’s of course about that tough schedule, never mind that 75% of that RPI rating is a measure of the quality of the schedule.
We go into the season knowing that undefeated might get us in the BCS but not the title game. Money talks in this business so we hit the road just as most of you don’t know what a non-conference road game looks like. Florida hasn’t played a regular season non-conference game outside of the state since 1991. LSU’s trip to Washington was the first out-of-state non-conference trip since 2005. Imagine the Dallas Cowboys being able to play 10 or 12 home games every year and the LA Lakers playing 60 home games. That’s what the current system is like.
We aren’t asking you to fear us. Just respect us as an opponent that is going to work hard. We want you to realize that Scout and Rivals don’t get ‘em all right and we do have some players who could play for you. The NFL believes we do. We’re just living the dream of trying to be better today than we were yesterday. Why that causes scorn I don’t understand, but we aren’t going to back down and play the patsy no matter how much money you pay us.