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Notre Dame, USC, SMU, and Army. What comes to mind? In the 40's, these were successful programs from private or service academy schools. Good old days? Yes.

I am surprised that ND bashing is in vogue this days. Arrogant? Yes. But, they are a private school with strong academics, who takes pride in athletics and demands performance at the highest level. They are BCS, but earned that right.

The Rice's, Tulsa's, Tulane's, Vanderbilt's, Northwestern's, Duke's, Wake Forest's, BC's, Stanford's and SMU's of the world need a fellow private school to be successful at both sports and academics. If future success is pre-determined by whether a school is in a BCS conference as a state school with low graduation rates and huge alumni bases, then privates will always be second class citizens.

Therefore, I want ND to be successful. We were partners once in success and I want SMU to be able to compete at the highest level.

Thanks, Doak. Go Mustangs. And CUSA, here we come!

I think the short-sighted arrogance of the move was such that ND gets hammered. They fired a coach who had SUCCEEDED as a head coach and was righting the ship and they fired him after only 3 years. Not only that but the racial aspect to it, makes it all the more odious. Yes, the BCS is bad too and ND is a member of that evil club. I fear that ND is edging toward a path that will be destructive. Will they start taking short-cuts educationally? Will they start to have boosters doing booster like things? Throwing out a good coach, with a clean program signals a turn. The question is what kind of turn with occur.

quite frankly any chance that ND had to be a moral force for reform in College Football went out the window with their selfish money grabs on the NBC contract and their unjustified grab at special treatment in the BCS system. They are just like all the rest except they now insist-which has not always been the case- on higher academic standards-and failing miserably. I am actually for higher standards for ALL NCAA schools. But those schools that want to play the Division 1A game on their own terms will continue to be classic underachievers unless those universal changes are made. Look in the Dictionary under "Classic Underachievers" and you will see Notre Dame.

Stallion wrote:quite frankly any chance that ND had to be a moral force for reform in College Football went out the window with their selfish money grabs on the NBC contract and their unjustified grab at special treatment in the BCS system. They are just like all the rest except they now insist-which has not always been the case- on higher academic standards-and failing miserably. I am actually for higher standards for ALL NCAA schools. But those schools that want to play the Division 1A game on their own terms will continue to be classic underachievers unless those universal changes are made. Look in the Dictionary under "Classic Underachievers" and you will see Notre Dame.

I concur.

Greed killed professional boxing, and ultimately, greed could kill NCAA football.

It is a myth that big state schools have the 'alumni' that allow the big networks to have an 'audience' to watch those BCS teams. That is hogwash.

Look at the 'ratings' and 'shares' of the big games.

Tens of Millions of people watch an OU-OSU game, or a UTenn-Au game, yet they probably only have a few 100k of alumni total between them.

Obviously, its a 10x more than a smaller private school, but alumni account for a small fraction of the audience out there.

BCS greed is limiting the 'breadth' of the NCAA football fan by hording $$$ and TV for itself....

Realize that the vast majority of people go to and graduate outside of the BCS-64 schools.

As more and more of this greed is localized to the fewer schools, the opportunity to expand the 'fan' base is for college football drops.

Look at California, in general, with immigration. Their amount of Div1A talent > Texas is nominal, yet they have 40% more population.

As more and more potential 'fans' are turned away because their schools are shut out of the dollar to support their Div1a or even Div1aa schools, fewer and fewer football fans will be there to support the Big64.

They need to share the wealth. Of suffer the same fate as Boxing, where virtually no one watches except the 'big' fight.

Can anyone name the current heavyweight champion(s)? I heard the name of one guy last night sounded Russian. Never heard of him before. It used to be that the heavyweight champion was one of the most recognized faces in sports. Everyone knew who Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson were. Today, who cares. The NHL is next. When the strike is over it will be a shadow of its former self.

EastStang wrote:Can anyone name the current heavyweight champion(s)? I heard the name of one guy last night sounded Russian. Never heard of him before. It used to be that the heavyweight champion was one of the most recognized faces in sports. Everyone knew who Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson were. Today, who cares. The NHL is next. When the strike is over it will be a shadow of its former self.

exactly.

How about a welterweight, a middleweight? We used to see all of those fights on ABC Saturday Boxing...then the greed set in, and Pay per view offered the 'champions' major money.

But, where is the sport today?