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Good regional game. Away is in a recruiting area and not terrible for fan travel. Home vs a name people will likely recognize.
Perfect type game against a team that isn't a "name". Better than playing Wyoming or San Jose. North Texas, Rice, USTA are other similar programs we should look for games with. Decent travel in recruiting areas.
Perfect type game against a team that isn't a "name". Better than playing Wyoming or San Jose. North Texas, Rice, USTA are other similar programs we should look for games with. Decent travel in recruiting areas.
It’s fine. Better than a D-2. Let’s tey not to bitch about every single thing tu related today. Ok?
I’m good with it - a little history there from the WAC days. Not super far away. I think overall the good outweighs the bad with this series.
La Tech is no slouch , but I do like playing Wyoming .
This. It will be a net money maker and a game we can win. Alumni can go get drunk foolin’ at the casino.
Prefer the T-bred races at La. Downs.......... & get drunk there. (OOPS-LaDowns is in Shreveport but Ruston ain't too far east)
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I actually prefer playing all of the MWC teams (other than San Jose) before La Tech. I put Rice at the same interest level as La Tech, because of the recent CUSA rivalry and tradition.
Better a dog game against CUSA than a non-game against FCS like Central Arkansas
We have home openings in 2021, 2022 and 2 in 2023 with no road openings in any of those years. We’ll probably get FCS opponents for some of those.
Looking to 2021 and beyond, we have 7 home and 13 road games on the schedule. That’s going to take some creative scheduling to balance out.
What I hope we never resort to is 5 home game schedules, and/or seasons with multiple FCS games.
We still don’t know how the conference will change scheduling next year with only 11 teams. Could they go to a 9 game conference schedule? That would obviously affect our future schedules.
That would only make sense with 10 teams, with 11 we still couldn’t do a true round robin. I think the league feels we need more quality OOC games rather than more conference games.
Think this is a solid 1-1 in a recruiting area that we’ve pulled some dynamite players out of.
A couple things.
Wyoming and the other MWC teams aren't in our recruiting area and the locals don't care. They do know Rice and La Tech; even Arkie St. Those schools also bring fans to the away games. We might see 20 people from Wyoming and there might be 20 people total when SJSU hosts us in a couple weeks.
Having games in Texas and Louisiana means our name in the local papers, potential discovery by future recruits, games family members of current recruits can go see played. It's also more likely to be close to Alumni bases in Houston and Dallas who might travel.
I don't know anyone who doesn't have family in Wyoming going there, football game or not. Maybe the golden hurricane club is big on it, I don't pay that much attention to them other than sending a donation so I don't know.
I think getting people to show up at away games is a big deal in building the Tulsa following, that having games where recruits can attend or the family of players can is a recruiting advantage. Finally that the community of Tulsa is geared towards Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana; not Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, or Utah. Unless it's a Boise/BYU name type team, I think g5 opponents should be regional and our attendance shows that when comparing the two groups (Rice is always one of the better draws).
I also doubt the AAC goes to 9 conference games, that's tough on Navy who has 3 ooc games permanently set.
Just my thoughts on it and not a knock to anyone's views, the "pro Wyoming game" comments have solid points.
Wyoming and the other MWC teams aren't in our recruiting area and the locals don't care. They do know Rice and La Tech; even Arkie St. Those schools also bring fans to the away games. We might see 20 people from Wyoming and there might be 20 people total when SJSU hosts us in a couple weeks.
Having games in Texas and Louisiana means our name in the local papers, potential discovery by future recruits, games family members of current recruits can go see played. It's also more likely to be close to Alumni bases in Houston and Dallas who might travel.
I don't know anyone who doesn't have family in Wyoming going there, football game or not. Maybe the golden hurricane club is big on it, I don't pay that much attention to them other than sending a donation so I don't know.
I think getting people to show up at away games is a big deal in building the Tulsa following, that having games where recruits can attend or the family of players can is a recruiting advantage. Finally that the community of Tulsa is geared towards Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana; not Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, or Utah. Unless it's a Boise/BYU name type team, I think g5 opponents should be regional and our attendance shows that when comparing the two groups (Rice is always one of the better draws).
I also doubt the AAC goes to 9 conference games, that's tough on Navy who has 3 ooc games permanently set.
Just my thoughts on it and not a knock to anyone's views, the "pro Wyoming game" comments have solid points.
I’ve been away from Tulsa for almost 22 years but when I look up football scores it’s those in the Oklahoma/Texas/Arkansas etc. area first because I grew up with Big 8 and SWC football. After all these years I still don’t care about the PAC-12 or MWC.
People aren't going to go to La Tech for an away game. La Tech fans aren't going to come to Tulsa either. Neither did Rice fans. If you truly want to visit Jonesboro Arkansas to go to an ASU game you're insane. That place is a dump. You don't only have to play teams in your recruiting area. If you wanted to do that we should be playing North Texas every season.
We get one and maybe two kids from Louisiana every couple of seasons. It's incredibly unlikely that any of our recruits would go to a La Tech game to see us... and if they did they'd probably be there to see La Tech, not Tulsa.
Fun fact. We've been in a conference with La Tech and Wyoming at different times. Wyoming was in the WAC with us until 99' and La Tech was there from 01' until we left in 05'.
Say what you will, but in terms of conference strength the MWC is head and shoulders above the C-USA these days.
La Tech does bring fans when they travel here. I was sitting on the east side the last time they visited and it was like listening to a foreign language whenever they got fired up. I guess I just don't speak Cajun.
Those must be the same folk that would travel from Bossier City by the busloads to watch their boys battle the Tulsa Talons at the BOK Center. Oh how I miss the Talons. Fantastic people-watching!
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Loved going to the Talons games. I think it actually hurt them moving into the BOK Center
Oh yeah, so much more suited for the Convention Center. My wife loved Woosh or Swoosh, whatever his name was. Whenever there was a bad call, he'd run out on the field and give the refs the trusty "suck it" maneuver. She thought it was hysterical.
You realize that it's like 250 miles from Dallas right? Closer than Tulsa is to Dallas actually. For Tulsa fans in Tulsa its the same distance as Dallas. It's an extra 50 miles from Houston than Dallas but 200 miles closer than Houston is to Tulsa. All of which to say is it's a four hour drive for our biggest alumni bases and heavily recruited areas. It's a day trip if you really want it to be.
How many FBS recruits does Wyoming's entire state produce?
While some mwc teams are quality, some aren't, SJSU is one of the worst teams in FBS and that's their normal. Wyoming is a bowl team semi regularly but fall most years in a 4-7 win range. AFA, CSU are about the only ones besides Fresno/Hawaii attractive to play. Boise of course but I consider them a name opponent regardless of conference.
You would be surprised to know that Rice is one of our best attended games consistently. I dragged the numbers out in schedule thread when we were discussing how we make our schedule.
We never bought tickets from the box office. Someone was always selling tickets outside and we usually ended up paying less than face value. One time we spent $30 total for two of the sideline box seats right up against the field. Saw one of the opposing players come in and lower his head and slam head first into the boards about 3 feet from us. Pretty sure he had a concussion...eyes rolled back and he laid there dazed for about 15 seconds. Back on the field in 2 plays.
We don't really need to put an extra game in between Dallas and Houston. We already play there every other season. If we wanted the folks from Dallas to drive 4 hours to see their team play, we should expect them to come to Tulsa home games instead of Middle of Nowhere Louisiana. I'm not mad about playing La Tech since they've had moderate success while in the C-USA, but it's not something that excites me. I just want us to play good teams that can draw a bit at home.
In some ways it's hard to judge just how many people some of these teams will bring out. It really depends on how good the fans perceive the other team in any given season. In 2012 for example, a mediocre Fresno State drew us 24K fans where Rice only drew 22.5K. Rice also had the advantage of being played on homecoming and after the team had won 6 straight games and they were still outdrawn by the MWC team. The year after that CSU was the highest attended home game of a really poor season. By the way, our CSU matchup outdrew our away game at La Tech that year by 2K
New Mexico was one of our last sellouts in 2008. Boise St. was the other in 2009
The MWC series in football have been pretty good to us in all honesty.
The 2008 New Mexico sellout was the grand reopening of the stadium.
Fair point lol. Boise was also #5 when they sold out. Still, it says something that those teams can garner that many tickets. I think the last team outside of the AAC / MWC / OU-OSU to draw over 24K was FAU in Monty's first game as HC... before that.... jeez it's been a long time.
I think any of us would argue that the Iowa State H&H was a good signing... but they only drew 20K when they came to Tulsa because both squads were poor to mediocre.
I do.... :wink:. I'm probably the only alumni up here.
Even if I was still in Tulsa though, I'm not a huge fan of the new C-USA teams. I've already argued that I think we should cut out the pay-day games and start trying to get more big teams to Tulsa more often, even if that means agreeing to 2-1's. The new OSU deal should be great for us to be fair.
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If I remember right Texas State brought a whole bunch of people when they played up here last. Even brought their band of about 200+ members. I wouldn't mind doing a home & home with them.
We postponed then eventually cancelled the return game with them. It would be difficult to get them back up here.
Yeah that was David Baliff/Todd deal as I recall because they were old friends in the high school coaching ranks as I recall. They are both gone now. I have no problem with a 1-1 with UTSA.
Wait, the MWC examples you brought up are all the ones I mentioned lol. CSU, Fresno, Boise.....Fresno has a special place of hate for example. Rice attendance is consistently better than the average of each year they played here. Even in 2008 we had two sell outs, UCF ranked and New Mexico to open the new stadium. Rice was basically 25k and the next highest attended game.
2012 Fresno had 24k highest attendance and Rice had 22.5k for second, 3k better than anyone else.
Actually we want all the fans to go to every game possible, that's what a following is. Having a game in Wyoming, or against Utah St, does nothing for our fans in travel, nothing for our recruiting and doesn't help us with our national perception, playing in western timezones against unknown teams.
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