U of D Football should add 8,000 bleacher seats and join The Big East
This John guy seems to know his shit.
I follow Pitt. Go to any Big east blog, including ESPN.coms Big East blog. All of the fans of all programs are sick of the 3-4 scheduling. They need 1 more team to be able to schedule 4 home and 4 away. If UCONN can move up to div 1 so quickly, so can U of D. Uof cinn seats 35,000. If you added 8000 bleachers in your stadium the Big east would invite you in 2 seconds.
But could Delaware put 8,000 asses in those 8,000 seats? Who cares.
The Big East does not need a small school like Villanova in football . We already had Temples 8000 per game attendance. Read Rutgers websites, they would much rather be playing a division 1 Delaware than the pansys they were able to schedule. If you look at the Big East’s schools future schedules they could start your transition very quickly. you could join the Big East and still play Navy if you wish,
On word: North end zone. That’s three words, but you get the idea.
Also – all those teams would love to play Delaware because (like Navy) they would take million pictures of their receivers making catches over the Delaware secondary and their running backs jumping over the Delaware defensive line and publish the pictures all over the place without disabusing anyone of the notion that they were taken against Michigan.
Honestly, I think a WVU and UD game would be a good regional draw. I can think of the jokes, yes, but for some reason, there are a lot of Delaware transplants in WVa and WVa transplants here, in addition to WVU grads.
I don’t understand why UD would want to become a crappy IA team, rather than be a good IAA team.
Just what makes that little ole any think he can move a rubber tree plant?
Everyone knows an ant can’t move a rubber tree plant.
But he’s got high hopes. High hopes. High apple pie in the sky hopes.
Dude. Harry is dead. You’re making him spin in his grave and he did a terrible job at that song, but we loved him for it. You? Stop it now! 😉
So any time your gettin low, stead of lettin go
Just remember that ant…
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant!
I hear the Frank version when I read that.
Re: #3 – UI, The point of being a crappy 1 A team is that in 5 years you’d likely be an average 1 A team (or even better). You’d actually get better recuits straightaway. Big time high school players want to play in front of 50,000 in Morgantown, WV not 1,000 in Orono, Maine.
If it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it.
Have rooted against Blue Hens for years. A move to Big East would make this task easier.
Keeler has trouble going .500 in 1-AA league. Moving to Big East would erase his biggest recruiting source: discontented second-stringers who want to transfer with immediate eligibility.
“…discontented second-stringers who want to transfer with immediate eligibility.”…and who end-up being the Baltimore Ravens’ starting quarterback.
Belinsky’s memory doesn’t go back very far. Mediocre last year, fine. 11-4 in 2007 and lost to App State in the title game. And Keeler won the National title in 2004. The middle two years (’05 & ’06) they were 6-5 and 5-6 respectively. They are regularly in the top half dozen teams in the country…
You are a player hater…
Can’t wait for the visual clusterfuck that will be Delaware v Michigan in the Tampax Cotton Bowl!
Belinsky’s memory goes back too far. Hugh Dougherty, Paul Hammond, Jay Hooks, Cepeda Whaley, Guy Ramsey, Herky Billings, Gardy Kahoe, Conway Hayman, Jim Colbert, Joe Shetzler, Mike Purzycki.
In Keeler’s 7 years as coach, the Blue Hens have been ranked in the “top half dozen” twice – in the 1-AA title game seasons of 2003 [not 2004] and 2007, each fueled by transfer quarterbacks. In Keeler’s other 5 seasons, the Blue Hens have been 30-30.
For 36 years, Delaware was coached by the football equivalent of John Wooden. Tubby was succeeded by the equivalent of John Calipari.
LOL!
DG #7 is right. It would be way easier to get the promising recruits out of HS. Also – I don’t buy that UD would be forever consigned to 2nd rate citizen staus in the Big East.
Sure they’d take some lumps getting started – but Athens Georgia wasn’t built in a day.
Herky Billings,
That’s a great football name.
It’s not like Delaware has a lot of colleges. Would going Div.I. keep a lot of Delaware high school players out of UD?
B knocked KC, who has been to 2 title games in 6 years, winning 1.
Dorian may be sincere, but his posts betray a reflexive defensiveness often found in sports loyalists. The fans who fall into this trap often don’t know Billy Zwaan from Pedro Swann, but they know they don’t like skeptical analysis.
I generally don’t root for the Blue Hens. Nothing personal; I just come from different collegiate roots. But like everyone else, I greatly admired the program under Tubby Raymond and Dave Nelson. Tubby was a national-caliber tactician, educator and personality. He was sought by programs from Princeton to the Kansas City Chiefs, yet chose to stay here. His program maintained the highest standards and kept ethical company, whether in the Middle Atlantic, Yankee or Atlantic 10, or the 15 years with no conference. The Hens drew most of the state’s best players, and produced many of its best coaches. They weren’t in the top 10 every year, just most of them. When traditional rivals Temple and Villanova tried to go big-time, Delaware still beat them.
The notion that “small college football isn’t good enough; we should go big time and become just like Arizona State” is common. Most university presidents are smart enough to dismiss it. For every Virginia Tech that leverages itself from 1-AA into national prominence [and proud alumni like Michael Vick], there are dozens more who bleed the taxpayers and tuition-paying families by enforced subsidies to megalomania.
When Penn won big under Jerry Berndt and Ed Zubrow, there were folks who wanted the Quakers to join the ACC. Honest. Every once in a while, a cadre tries to roust Villanova into mimicking Notre Dame. Temple fell for the siren song, with grisly results.
K.C. Keeler recruits no Delaware players; there are a few token walk-ons who could find the Charcoal Pit or Dillard’s, but he’s taken a course that ignores local players. And fans wonder why guys like Andrew Szczerba and Anton Ridley go elsewhere. The result: one big national championship that can be compared to the Florida Marlins’ ephemeral success in 1997 with transient players. There were two other seasons above .500. Four of KC’s seven years have been mediocre. The 2007 post-season run only occurred because DelState won the MEAC and the NCAA, sensing an uncharacteristically large playoff crowd, paired them with the Hens, who had just played themselves out of most tournaments with consecutive losses.
But KC thinks big. He sells. He wears the sunglasses in the rain. If you like all that, fine, but don’t saddle the taxpayers with the multi-million dollar start-up costs for to chase the tail of big time college football.
If he gets a good transfer QB he wins. If he gets a crappy one he loses. There are worse systems.
The notion that “small college football isn’t good enough; we should go big time and become just like Arizona State”
That hurt.
One more thing that goes beyond the sports page and runs to the shared purpose of this site.
The explosion of costs of UD football over the past decade [11 assistant coaches, four other full-time FB administrators] has impaired participation in athletics at Delaware. There will be no more indoor track team at Delaware, and the school is even planning to turn its indoor facility into a football-only workout center [so the kids don’t have to hit the blocking sleds in the rain, I guess], which will remove this state’s principal indoor track facility. Likewise, UD has had no rassling team for 15 years. Both of these are due to football’s bloated budget.
The emphasis on the national over the local, the adoration of the big splash, are features of the corporate state. They have had bad effects on both sports and entertainment. Big time football is no better – for student-athletes, fans, the student body or true football fans – than a world where Vern Roberts and Scott Reihm lead the Hens to the Boardwalk Bowl [which the average fan could watch for $5 in Atlantic City.]
Big time football is chained to the caprices of the advertising market. It hurts other sports, the misleading “revenue sports” title notwithstanding. It has a savage effect on ethics. [Don’t take it personally, JoPa, but Villanova runs a far cleaner program than yours.] Big-time FB spikes ticket prices, yet usually loses money, requiring massive subsidy from the rest of the university, and especially from those who pay the tuition of the actual degree candidates.