Quote:
Originally Posted by MichiganWolverines
Week one of college football has been very strange.
- Pittsburgh losing to Youngstown State 31-17
- Houston losing to Texas State 30-13
- Penn State losing to Ohio 24-14
- Wisconsin barely beating Northern Iowa 26-21
- Oklahoma are barely beating UTEP
- Stanford barely beating San Jose State 20-17
- Iowa barely beating Northern Illinois 18-17
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A couple of those aren't so surprising...
-Pitt to YSU should never happen...but when you have 4 head coaches in a 54 week span, as Pitt went through...yeah. It's going to be a rough season for Pitt, as they have a roster filled with players fit for conflicting styles, most of which
aren't good fits for Cryst's system. Youngstown State may well be very good in the FCS this year, but they've still be little more than a middling FCS team for the past decade (they went 6-5 last year but were the only team to beat FCS Champions North Dakota State...take that for what you will).
-Wisconsin is a far weaker team than they were last season and UNI is an FCS power that has a penchant for taking BCS conference teams to the wire (more typically with Iowa State, but still).
-Iowa is nothing special this year and Northern Illinois is a very solid MAC team...a surprising score, but only barely so.
-Houston isn't a good team...now Texas State was a mediocrity that almost never made the FCS playoffs so it's a surprise in that sense, but I'll chalk this one up to adrenaline, this being their first game in the FBS and all.
-San Jose State has a surprisingly talented team this year for once and Stanford lost basically everyone good on their roster to the draft...I still expected a 10 point victory, but that one isn't too surprising.
Also I want to take this chance to laugh at Idaho...who got completely ****ed in the conference shuffling. They're set to be an FBS Independent next year with the WAC falling apart, they have no fan base (they're one of three D1 programs in the sparsely populated Palouse, which includes a Pac-12 program that absorbs the minimal talent in the region and an FCS program that absorbs the transfer talent), they have the worst (and smallest) stadium in the FBS by a large margin, they have no television deal...but they're too proud to just accept that their move up was a bad idea and they keep thinking that they can be Boise State. They're too proud to accept their fate and just fall back to the Big Sky Conference (which is better at the Olympic sports than the laughable soon-to-be-sans-football WAC), where they spent four decades before.
Probably because not only would they be 'demoted', they'd be demoted to being a middle of the road program. Eastern Washington, the other Palouse team, dominated Idaho in Moscow despite having 22 fewer scholarships and a youth-laden roster.
Idaho has no hope of latching onto an FBS conference at this point...as the only conferences that are anywhere near it with the downfall of the WAC are the Mountain West (hah) and Pac-12 (haha).
Unfortunately the conference shifting also essentially spelled doom for my Montana Grizzlies from moving up...at least until the FBS finally adopts a real playoff system. As long as the Mountain West is pursuing an automatic bid they're not going to invite any move-up programs and they're our only option for a move-up now that there's only two damn conferences that cover the western US. I've always been on the fence on the issue and I'm pretty content right now, though. With C-USA raiding the CAA the FCS is basically going to be ruled by the sparsely populated state schools (exceptions being Appalachian State, who will move up eventually once they realize that the ACC isn't going to invite them outright, and Eastern Washington, which is acting as the western version of Delaware right now (that is to say a depository for drop-down players wanting playing time in the hope of getting drafted...EWU has a pipeline of SMU QBs going very nicely for them right now)).
As I've said forever...I'd rather be competing for FCS Championships than a berth in the Tums Antacid Bowl or whatever.
Fun fact: Both Idaho and Montana were members of the old Pacific Coast Conference when it folded...forerunner of the Pac-8/10/12...had the financial landscape been different in the 50s (or UCLA hadn't paid players causing the scandal that broke the PCC) things would be awfully different for those two schools. Oddly enough I find myself a semi-student of UCLA these days (I'm taking some classes at UCLA, but not in any pursuit of a degree) so...hmm.
Also Cal originally named their athletic teams the Grizzlies, which makes sense when you look at the state flag of California (featuring the extinct California Grizzly, which was merely severely endangered at the time)...but changed their name to the Golden Bears when they found out that Montana had named their athletic teams the Grizzlies first.
