This is a great discussion. So many excellent points! Conference expansion or realignment. It depends on where you stand. Is the Big12 expanding or being realigned, or both? Broadcast money is the real king of the world, now isn't it. Not regional rivalries. Not butts. Eyeballs. Texas and Oklahoma knew that more eyes would be there for UT versus Alabama than all of the rest of the big12 teams other than OU combined. The stars need to play other stars. That is the rule to shoot for. Week in and week out. The SEC still has fat to be trimmed, as does the Big10. Stars need to continue to gather until it is all stars playing stars. So the changing will continue. Conferences will be made on eyeballs not regional rivalries. Those regional rivalries are from the olden days when travel was actual travel and not a flight. Neither El Pasoans or Las Cruceans are bragging about beating the other, especially to anyone else in the world.
This is for sure. More conference changes will come. Being ready for them means one thing-winning. Win and live on and move up. Lose and well, there isn't much room left for that. Brass tacks. Games this season are tryouts. Auditions, Whatever. We need a win over UNT. The game is a nothing burger to them. They are moving on up. We need the win to show that we are on the same level. The perception is that we aren't. OU we need to not be a joke. Play them tough. NMSU needs to be a cake walk. Sucks, but true and it may not be. But we can't afford to be having Hell with the 8th graders. UNM and Boise State are flat out auditions. We need very much to be able to beat UNM or play toe to toe with them. That only shows that we could maybe hang. Beat Boise and all of a sudden the MWC isn't too good for UTEP. One game. Even if they would beat us the next nine, that one would be the one that said we can. The cusa tams fall into teams that are thought to be better than us and those staying at our lowly level. We have to beat both groups of teams. Have to.
I was raised in the Bay Area of California and had an outsider's view when I moved to El Paso in 81. In my mind there were football schools who were so good that they were also good basketball schools, too(ie; UCLA of the 60-70's). Then there were the next level of schools that were football schools. Then there were the schools that weren't able to be good at football and they were basketball schools. Then there were the Track and Field schools. UTEP was for as long as I have known it was a basketball, excellent 2nd level teams except for the 66 team basically and for a long time a leading T&F school. Cute but football is almost all that really matters. In the last 20-30 years basketball has become more than the distant 2nd place to football, but fb is still king.
Since the 80's, Natalicio was on a mission and it was an academic mission(as it should have been) but athletics was left up to Stull. He was a money man and left his mark in the buildings and facilities built under him. Athletics-actually football which is king and bb he was somewhat mixed in his success, but what is critical is that was during a time of much change. Break up of the WAC and rebuild of it. Move to C-USA, and the spit up of it.
So, we have pretty nice facilities. The Tier 1 status has raised the standards and reputation of the academics. The fans are widely known to be passionate and come out in big numbers to support the team. And we are barely surviving.
Why?
Television audience? Is that it? El Paso TV sets? How many TV sets are in Stillwater, Oklahoma or Ames, Iowa? So, tv sets by themselves are not the answer. It is also who you play? Nobody wants to be able to brag that they watched their team beat up eight graders from the middle school. But beat up the bully from Norman and you can brag for years. That is the crux of the whole thing. For the most of the last 40 years UTEP has been the 8th graders from the middle school. When our 8th graders were even ok the people supported them. Ask yourself if location or tv sets would be a problem if the football team was always good. Hell, to the no! Ask BYU, Utah, TCU, Houston, SMU, or others if it was the location, tv sets or butts in the seats, or if it was our horrible football dragging their credibility down that was the problem.
So, the question that has to be asked is why has UTEP football been so bad. Recruiting to El Paso or UTEP is tough. MY ass! That is just bullshit. Well, let me clarify that because it is UTEP, but not because it is a bad school. It is because it is known to be a horrible football team. Losers. And winners like to be where winners are. The thing is, we can eliminate so much of the bullshit and boil it all down to going from losers to not being losers. The old saying winning solves everything is true for a reason. I still don't understand "the process" because CDD started as a solid loser which defies the logic but it is the winning that he is using to bind together a winning team now. As I have been saying for forty years now, we are at the edge of the black hole, and we have to drag ourselves away. And it is done with wins. Wins over teams that build UTEP's respect. That is why even though I have been saying it for 40 years, this year is the year that could be either the beginning of the end or the beginning of the new beginning.
