Time to Question Curley?

My point is that he could have kept the cash flow going without jeopardizing the team’s postseason chances.

Who is going to drive all the way to happy valley to see us play Akron or Coastal Carolina. In this case, I think scheduling the better opponent would be the more financially sound investment. You’re going to fill that stadium to the brink every time a BCS opponent comes to town, but your going to see a drop in attendance, and most likely revenue when were playing a lower division team.

-We grabbed Oregon St. out of the blue. There are far more teams in the BCS leagues like Oregon St. then there are like Alabama or Nebraska. If we proactively combed the country for the ones willing to come to Penn State to get themselves on national TV and get some exposure, we might be in business. You don’t think teams like USF would kill to have Penn State show up in their stadium in a year our big OOC game is at home, even if it meant going to Valley twice? I do. I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I don’t expect us to be pulling in the best teams in the country. I do expect them to at least be in the same subdivision as we are.

-I feel like the fact that when we lost to Iowa, we were dropped from the MNC conversation is just plain wrong, and we did that to ourselves. Did the Big 10 hurt us? Yes, but we could have at least TRIED to make up for it by getting a I-A program to fill Coastal Carolina’s spot. In the grand scheme of things, it may not have made a difference, but all I’m asking is that we try harder to avoid crap games like that one. They offer you nothing.

-As far as basketball goes, lets take a quick look at Pitt’s OOC, the #1 team in the RPI. They had 4 remotely tough games in Siena, Texas Tech, Washington St., and Florida St. Had we played their OOC, lost all 4 of those games, and done the same thing in the Big 10 (a league who’s RPI is higher than the Big East’s), we’re in big time now. Just look at their schedule. We could have beaten the rest of those teams any other year. The difference is, Pitt played a few decent teams, and it shot their RPI through the roof.

…I look at the OOC as an insurance policy against trouble with the Big 10. If its a down year, like it was this year, we can fall back on a good OOC. If its a good year in the conference, then even a loss with a good OOC won’t necessarily eliminate us like it did this year.

Had we had a respectable non-conference, a name like TTU doesn’t pass Penn State. Period. There was no excuse for Coastal Carolina, or Youngstown St. before them. People look at your weakest game, especially in a time when Big 10 teams seem to be perceived as an enemy to college football. Like I said, if you’re in the media’s pet leagues like the Big XII or SEC, you can get away with it. But we’re in the Big 10. We can’t get away with that.

To get them on the schedule, at least in football, we’d have to make them the fixture (the home and home), and if you’ve watched them at all the last 20 years, you’d know they aren’t worth that.

As far as basketball, it doesn’t even have to be Villanova. Any of the Philly teams would suffice. Even Duquesne is turning into a good option, or Robert Morris, 2 wins away from and NEC title and NCAA berth.

7 home games can still be done with better opposition. I’m not saying concede home games, I just want better opposition. The idea that Coastal Carolina is the best we can do is a joke.

Hell, we could play all 12 games at home if we wanted to. Wouldn’t the millions of dollars we’d get from those extra four games far surpass anything we’d get out of the Big 10? And let’s not bother worrying about TV, because you know someone would pick up an independent Penn State if they wanted to, even if its on the ESPN plus channels. And don’t forget, since we’ll be playing the shitty teams, we’ll probably end up in the BCS every year because we’ll be undefeated all the time. Thats a nice pay-out right? Granted, we won’t have a remote chance at the MNC, but really, who cares when you’re swimming in money?

Why stop at 8?

But I have no idea where to even look for it. Yes, the ultimate point here is that Penn State wants 15 home games every two years. If they really felt like creating a realistic, competive schedule, my long-standing suggestion is this:

(1) National superpower team for an even home/away. We’re already doing this for Nebraska. Virginia falls into this category too, even though they kind of suck.

(1) Regional, familiar opponent from the independent days. Could be PITT, SYR, WVU, RUTG, BC. Whatever. Same sort of even-handed arrangement, no 2-for-1 crap.

That leaves (2) other opponents who can be sacrificial lambs. The Coastal Carolina / Eastern Illinois teams who are just looking for a payoff and are willing to not demand a return trip to a place like Conway, S.C.

Stagger the teams from the first two categories properly, and you have a totally acceptable seven-game home schedule. But PSU isn’t interested in that. They want the home game against (Nebraska, Virginia, Syracuse) to be matched up with three abject patsies, ‘cause Cash Rules Everything Around Me. And it’s their right to do that. Tickets aren’t going to be any more or less expensive if the home opponent is Texas or Southwest Waco Community College, and as long as people are buying PSU v. SWCC tickets, Penn State has absolutely no incentive to change its scheduling practices. They’d be crazy to do so.

We don’t schedule for favorable computer rankings of our non-conference slate. We schedule for money. Such is life. It’s a big part of why I don’t bother buying season tickets.

The basketball schedule is a whole different story. Scheduling one of the better teams from the Atlantic Sun or MEAC is totally fine. Scheduling NJIT and similar programs is simply attaching an unbearble weight on the team when it comes to the bubble situation we’re currently facing.

…Joe Paterno was always Rene’s biggest supporter on that campus.

Was that her views were never, ever, a secret. It’s not like we just found out she was anti-gay after the team got bad. To the contrary, the exact same controversy came up in the late 1980’s, and pretty much nobody cared. It was the late ’80’s that saw the no gays ever crack, and she was never close to being fired.

To advocate for the dismissal of female student athletes who simply don’t act feminine enough, that’s another matter.

See that’s just a little touchy to me. I think telling a coach telling a player how to dress is perfectly in bounds. Bob Knight did it. Joe Paterno does it. Put the show on the other foot, what if a Penn State football player was running around town in mesh t-shirts or whatever. Think JoePa wouldn’t have something to say about that? Yeah. Right.

By all accounts the player (Jennifer Harris, I believe) had a shitty attitude to match her shitty statistics. She was in clear violation of long standing team rules regarding personal apperance that she should have known about before she came to Penn State. And she is not a lesbian. What she did was spot a chance to stick it to a coach she didn’t like, and she did.

I’m no fan of Rene Portland’s politics. But there were/are two sides to that story.

everyone says, “well look at USC’s schedule, they’re able to schedule big non-con games and win and still be successful” but fail to really point out any top level program that consistently puts together a non-con slate (usually making the excuse “well they play in the SEC or Big 12, so they have a tough conference slate” while completely forgetting that until the last 2 years the Big 10 was considered to be in the same situation. Then O$U had to go and shit the boat in the 2 MNC games, and Michigan fell off the face of the earth, and apparently those were the only 2 schools in the Big 10 that mattered)

Then there are these things you have to take into consideration when it comes to USC:
1) their major recruiting advantage(s): they get to play in friggen sunny LA as the premier football team on ANY level in town (and then there’s all the booster $$ scandal that seems to come up every year). USC is able to recruit 3 & 4 star players to come in just to play BACKUP. Few other teams can realistically do that, and Penn State, unfortunately, isn’t one of them, at least at this point in time.
2) not to bash one conference and call it weak, while simultaneously disregard the “Big 10 is weak” argument, but the Pac-10 is (recently, in regards to scheduling) historically a weak, nearly 1 team conference. As I already said, the Big 10 has only been looked at as “weak” the past 2 years, well after most of our scheduling had been done (though admittedly there was still plenty of time to go out and land another Oregon State type deal, which we attempted, yet failed at, since despite what some people may think, there aren’t a ton of decent-quality schools willing to do anything less than a home & home deal, but we don’t have any more of those to hand out currently, as we can typically only give out 1-2 a year)

I would imagine if the Big 10 really does continue to look like crap the next couple of years, then you’ll see programs like O$U & PSU go out and schedule tougher non-con teams in order to boost their schedules, but as of the time last year’s and this year’s schedules were made, we didn’t feel that need.

It is wat it is. And what it is, is not going to change.