Week 5 college football thread - The Bamachurian Candidate

Florida State found it a blessing and a curse. They struggled to find their place until it allowed Bobby Bowden to create that monster "play anyone, play anywhere" mentality until FSU got so good nobody really wanted a piece of them except fellow independent Miami.

The end game of all this has to be a tiered system of leagues, similar to European soccer, where the best 12 teams (meaning an 11-game schedule plus a "rivalry" game) play each other for the right to be national champion. The next best 12 vie to move up.

 

It would be hard to explain to anyone under 50 just how many independents there were.

Of course almost all of those teams had a league in other sports.

In other words, the very model (football affiliation separate from other conference affiliations) many suggest it should be today. Time is a flat circle.

 

Imagine an East Coast league with Penn State, Boston College, Miami, Florida State, VaTech, Syracuse, West Virginia, Pitt and Rutgers back in the early 1980s. You could throw in UConn or Louisville if you want.

 

Louisville was trash in the 1980s until Howard Schnellenberger arrived and I think UCONN was D-II. They were part of a Big East football expansion project in the early 2000s in which they transitioned up to division I.

Paterno tried to organize a league like this in the early 1980s, but in the most Paterno way, he wanted Penn State to get 30-percent of the football TV revenue while the remaining schools shared the rest. His argument was always that Penn State had like 22 varsity sports to support (of course, the great Republican Paterno would never ever ever consider cutting some of those sports if PSU simply couldn't support them). He was a-okay with an equal share on basketball revenues because Penn State cares about Penn State basketball as much as I care about Penn State basketball. So, the eastern schools told him to pound sand and he stewed about it for 20 years.

 

It needs to be mentioned that the Big East hoops surge in the '80s complicated a lot of this as well.

 

Minus the Florida schools and maybe VT, you’ve just described the Lambert Trophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert-Meadowlands_Trophy

Also, JoePa’s demand for the lion’s share (See what I did there?) of conference revenue was decades ahead of its time. Texas and Clemson salute.

 

VT was involved in the Lambert Trophy. Won it in 1995 and 1999.

 

I couldn’t remember if they were before the Big East was formed. Seems like I remembered them lumped in with “Southern independents.”

 

Regardless of what happens to him in college, he's gonna Sunday it up.

 

Liberty at App State is cancelled due to flooding in Boone.

 

Liberty-Appy State cancelled after storm damage in Boone. Won't be rescheduled.

EDIT: Curse you, Inky!

 

It's bad. I posted in the hurricane thread a link to some live cams in Boone and the one for downtown is crazy. King Street is a river. Looks like the power to the camera must've gone down though as it's no longer working.

https://wataugaonline.com/cams/

Way down the mountain, I've got about 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch of water covering my entire street right now. Been through at least a dozen tropical systems in my nearly 20 years in this house and have never seen water cover the entire street - or even come close - before. Also getting water pooling in places it never has in the past, too.