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YSU Penguin Athletics / Re: Penguins Announce December Signees
« on: December 23, 2023, 10:24:47 PM »
"On another hand, we are supposed to be a football college and yet, currently, our MBB is almost ranked in the top 100 in D1. I don’t think our football team is anywhere closed to be ranked in the top 100 nationwide."
YSU is a basketball school and has been for several years now. Maybe longer. And that's as it should be.
It's Division I competition with more parity; we still get to play big programs; there are natural regional rivalries in our conference; there's more games to enjoy and; it's not a violent sport subject to possibly permanently injuring young people for entertainment.
In fact, if given the choice between an FCS football championship, an NIT championship or March Madness appearance (consequence of a conference tourney championship), or a national championship in any other sport, I'll take NIT/NCAA tourney. Every. Time.
Most sports fans don't even care about FCS football to begin with. The average fan couldn't tell you who won the championship last year or who's in it this year without Googling it.
P5 separation will continue to create even further irrelevance to the remainder of Division I afterbirth. And those programs will just continue to drain school budgets out of some misplaced sense of pride.
Their highest possible achievement would, at best, be to win an irrelevant bowl game that only alumni or those with gambling habits would care about.
I'll take a sold out Beeghly for a NIT home game vs an Oklahoma State over an embarrassing 3K in an old stadium for the first home playoff game in years against a school from a level of football no one cares about, every year.
(Btw, instead of building a standalone WATTS facility, they should have taken time to raise more capital, phased out Stambaugh, and created a single, 10K-capacity, domed, multi-use facility for football, track and whatever else like a number of other schools in the MVFC...you know, since we're a football school and all. Only one facility to maintain and less folks want to sit in crap weather to watch YSU football; the fan base is getting older and it's super convenient to watch the game on the ESPN app. But I digress as that ship has sailed.)
Anyway, I know it's two different sports and two different season and folks can be supportive of both. But my point is when it comes to the question of "what sport is YSU?", I think it's become increasingly self-evident.
And if YSU MBB wins another 20+ games and a conference title this year, that's a two-handed jam on that argument.
Now fix those bleachers.
YSU is a basketball school and has been for several years now. Maybe longer. And that's as it should be.
It's Division I competition with more parity; we still get to play big programs; there are natural regional rivalries in our conference; there's more games to enjoy and; it's not a violent sport subject to possibly permanently injuring young people for entertainment.
In fact, if given the choice between an FCS football championship, an NIT championship or March Madness appearance (consequence of a conference tourney championship), or a national championship in any other sport, I'll take NIT/NCAA tourney. Every. Time.
Most sports fans don't even care about FCS football to begin with. The average fan couldn't tell you who won the championship last year or who's in it this year without Googling it.
P5 separation will continue to create even further irrelevance to the remainder of Division I afterbirth. And those programs will just continue to drain school budgets out of some misplaced sense of pride.
Their highest possible achievement would, at best, be to win an irrelevant bowl game that only alumni or those with gambling habits would care about.
I'll take a sold out Beeghly for a NIT home game vs an Oklahoma State over an embarrassing 3K in an old stadium for the first home playoff game in years against a school from a level of football no one cares about, every year.
(Btw, instead of building a standalone WATTS facility, they should have taken time to raise more capital, phased out Stambaugh, and created a single, 10K-capacity, domed, multi-use facility for football, track and whatever else like a number of other schools in the MVFC...you know, since we're a football school and all. Only one facility to maintain and less folks want to sit in crap weather to watch YSU football; the fan base is getting older and it's super convenient to watch the game on the ESPN app. But I digress as that ship has sailed.)
Anyway, I know it's two different sports and two different season and folks can be supportive of both. But my point is when it comes to the question of "what sport is YSU?", I think it's become increasingly self-evident.
And if YSU MBB wins another 20+ games and a conference title this year, that's a two-handed jam on that argument.
Now fix those bleachers.