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So do a home/home with Hofstra or Iona? Like I mentioned? So you’re in agreement with what I was saying.

We have been reluctant to schedule Home/Home games. The athletic department has been focused on selling games to bring in money. Playing teams on the road that will give us a paycheck. Trying to get good competitive games in tournaments which is often when we see other good mid-majors. Then filling the slate with home games with teams we buy for less than we sell our games for. This is why we always play a non-D1. They are dirt cheap. The idea has been to bring in money (which the athletic department hasn't had) and use that money to pay for the staff and to get some teams to come in to try to cultivate a local Buffalo fan base through home games. These are the home/home deals we have done since 2015 to 2020: - St Bona (every year) - Canisius (every year) - Niagara (stopped playing) - Southern Illinois (2x in 2019) - Delaware (2016/2018) - Binghamton (2014/15) The program has been VERY light on playing Home/Home deals. Most mid-majors will play between 5-6 home/home series year. Often it is about half of their non-tournament games. For instance, Cornell played 10 home/home games in 2019. 5 home and 5 away with the alternate the year before or the year following. UB plays between 2-3 a year. It's important to remember how low the program was even when we were winning and going to the big Dance. In 2015 and 2016 we were selling games to Texas-Arlington, Grand Canyon, St. Joe's, and Old Dominion through tournament deals. These are teams that should have been our peers and we should have been getting home/home deals with but they were buying us because we were desperate for the cash. Which is back to my original point on the strategy. It was a Buffalo (not NY State) focused strategy. The admin decided to invest in home games to try to cultivate the local fan base (which considering that student fees was funding the program it may have made sense to try to bring a lot of games to campus). Which was at odds with the branding that was put out at the same time. But now the program is turning the corner and there is a need to engage fans directly. Yes, there is still a cash crunch as there is a lot of debt with the football facility and other initiatives but we are in a position to be able to be transitioning away from what was done before and should be making the push to develop the downstate market. I have always thought a dual Upstate/downstate strategy should have been implemented and that in-state home/home deals would have been more beneficial. The scheduling strategy has shifted this year and focused more on scheduling home/home games with other top mid-majors to try to get good games at the expense of home games (#30 St. Bona, #112 UC-Irving, #135 North Texas, #90 Western Kentucky). Which is going to be a much more challenging schedule and will bring good games to campus. But in order to do it they are playing two non-D1 games this year (Point Park and St. John Fisher). I would much rather get rid of these non-D1 games to play a game or two around NY state every year to get in front of alums. But maybe the budget is already stretched and just can't support a trip downstate with only one buy game on the schedule so we were forced to bring in two non-D1 teams for less money than it would cost to get hotels/bus to a game a few hours away.

Still valuable in practice showing the young bucks the veteran moves.

I’m not gonna get lost in the weeds here but I’m gonna say one simple statement…every college basketball team would kill to play a game in NYC. No stipulations, no this, no that. Playing a single game down here goes a long way for recruiting and marketing. Whether it be the Garden, UBS arena, Barclays, Jersey or on the road to anyone of the NYC metro area schools…UB should make 1 yearly pilgrimage down here. It just makes sense/cents.

Nothing was wrong with NYBI other than thin-skinned locals feeling insulted. And the reason to brand NEW YORK over BUFFALO was so we looked like what we say we are: the flagship public university of New York State.

Agreed (it’s funny). (Seriously though) Even if their improvement is only behind closed doors in practice, they will elevate the production of their teammates. I feel either could go off for a 10&7 type game at any time, if called upon. Sure, those games may be outliers. Even reducing these numbers to 2 points and 2 rebounds per game, over the season that would be helpful.

Yup. The ideal conference for UB would be something like: - Buffalo - Ohio U - Miami-OH - Toledo - Kent State - Marshall - UMass - UConn - Temple - Army (football only) This would be the perfect balance of geography and talent for UB right now and would make a nice conference for basketball and football with perfect locations for recruiting. But there is no reason for the other schools to move to a conference that makes UB the center of the conference.

Everyone here is making it seem like this team turned down a bunch of road opportunities to play these non-DI games. I don't believe that is the case. The P5 schools don't buy teams like Buffalo because they know there is a chance they could lose them.. A $75K check and a loss isn't a good look when they can go ahead and play CMU or WMU instead and get the win. As for the home game scenario, it again I think one comes down to money. A D-I Q4 game probably costs UB about $50k to bring them in. They can bring a non-D1 in for $5K. And again a home win over a Q4 probably drops you about 15 spots in the NET rankings...The non-D1 doesn't factor in to the NET.

Saint Louis’ best player

The fact that it was called NYBI was comical. The branding literally had “initiative” in it. Nothing like making it obvious that it is a marketing ploy to shape a narrative. It was horrible. It caused misalignment with the academic side of the house as the branding and marketing were not aligned. It didn’t change the actual name of the teams for athletic purposes. So the moniker on the ticker and on the scoreboard on the screen said Buffalo but the field and Uniforms said New York. It caused confusion; it wasn’t succinct. It was the antithesis of everything marketing is meant to be. And yes it did alienate some of the local fans. Though I am not too concerned about that because there wasn’t much of a local fan base to begin with. And they would ultimately come back. The problem I have was not that the name was changed but that the name wasn’t changed. SUNY denied the request for a name change and to try to elevate UB to the flagship namesake. And as a result there was a fools plan devised to try it anyways. It was horribly executed. It was like it was the only idea they had and when it was denied they felt committed to it and tried to force it through despite all of the stakeholders withdrawing their support and not going along with it. It was horrible and had nothing to do with locals having thin skin. If it did we wouldn’t be talking about Buffalo today. It wasn’t the locals that made it a failure. It was the rest of the state that scratched their head and shrugged when they saw the pitiful preening that you call the NYBI.