Originally Posted by longtimefan
To beat a dead horse, the East Tennessee State and Winthrop games were buy games (and pretty good ones). I'm not sure whether you are suggesting that OU and Akron (and Miami) would be willing to play us in buy games, or that we should give them home-and-homes. And I'm guessing we purposely scheduled a weak team for Dec 23, since we play Vanderbilt on Dec 21. It's tough to squeeze games in around Christmas, especially with the A-10 schedule starting Dec 30. Also, I believe we normally try to schedule a weak team the Saturday after finals, but the Northwestern game was too good to turn down.
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I'm suggesting we play at least one somewhat local school a year. Between Austin Peay, Winthrop, ETSU, D2 St Joes, and VMI we could have swapped one of those buy games for Youngstown St, Bowling Green, Miami, Toledo, Akron, Kent St, Cleveland St, NKU, etc. Each of those schools is comparable to one of the buy game teams in RPI rankings.
I guarantee you they'd sell more tickets to a Saturday afternoon UD v Ohio game than what they did versus ETSU. Ohio is a top 100 program, just like ETSU. Sell even 200 more tickets, plus food, beer, etc -- it's a win-win for everyone. Same goes for VMI on 12/23. A comparable bad team like Miami will be more engaging for the fan base and generate more revenue for the school, while still accomplishing their scheduling goals.
