dutchcountry7

I would put UC Irvine as the best team on the schedule now. Their wins over Boise State and Santa Clara are two big wins. Their only loss is to a good New Mexico State team.

George Mason is also public. I think they were trying to make a comment about how people write off the "Small private Schools" but not sure why they didn't include VCU...

The good news is that with both of us rebuilding next year we should keep the rivalry competitive. It would really help us to continue to have a win against an A10 team and to get that rivalry going.

It's harder to make the NCAAs being in a better conference. The MAC being tougher has hindered our number of bids compared to others. You could make the same statements Vermont has more bids (7) this century. We would have a lot more success in the AEC. Iona has more bid (9) this century. We would dominate the MAAC. With that said, we would absolutely have more big wins if we could get good teams to come to Alumni Arena. We would probably compete for more NIT bids but we wouldn't have as many NCAA bids in the A10. We weren't that great in 2016 when we won the MAC tournament.

Who? Never heard of him...

If you look at nearly every mid-major (and even some majors) you will see that they play Non-D1 games. It is a limit of programs at this level. Non-D1 games played going back to 2010... 2010 - Buffalo State 2011 - Houghton 2012 - Buffalo State 2013 - Mansfield, Notre Dame of Ohio 2014 - West Virginia Wesleyan 2015 - None 2016 - Pittsburgh-Bradford 2017 - Nazareth, Alaska-Anchorage (at the Great Alaska Shootout) 2018 - Central Penn 2019 - Le Moyne 2020 - Nazareth 2021 - Mercyhurst 2022 - Point Park, St John Fisher It is what it is...

So there were a few of us watching that game! I don’t see Lofton playing against us. He looked to be hurt. Few weeks would be my guess.

Couldn’t get those games. D1 games weren’t an option.

No, he can't.

This is a big one. The biggest game every year in my book. Looking forward to seeing how the team comes out early.

Ha. Not what I was thinking. More so that we have a bigger brand and have been at a higher level athletically and we don’t want to raise other’s brands by tethering us to them through long running series and trying to develop a rivalry. We do already have an academic rivalry with SB and compete for students. But the point of playing different teams around the state is to extend the brand of Buffalo. We want each team we play to view the Buffalo game as a big game to market to their own fan base. Hofstra may only have 25,000 basketball fans. But the majority of them are in the NYC/Long Island area. When we play them we introduce those fans to Buffalo and if Buffalo fans/alums work with or are friends with Hofstra basketball fans then there is a connection that is cultivated that leads to the Buffalo people being more vested in the program—even casually. And when we play Stony Brook, the same thing is true. They may only have 20,000 fans. But they are a different set of fans. There aren’t the same people who are fans of both programs. So if we play SB in another season we are reaching another set of fans who also have connections to other Buffalo fans/alums and possibly those same ones as before. It’s not uncommon to have an office where you know where people went to school and to talk about college sports when their school is playing your school. The same is true of neighbors. Even if the people aren’t vested they will casually discuss it. By rotating through teams you hit many different touch points in the same market. You keep the Buffalo fans in the market having something they are locally connected to while also having new avenues to reach potential Buffalo fans. Some people will travel an hour and a half to see Buffalo basketball. Others will only go to a game if it is 15 minutes from their house and they get an email from the alumni association and this it would be something different to do that weekend with the kids to get them out of the house in the winter. Moving the games around in a market allows the program to benefit the most. The teams we are talking about playing, I think we all can agree, we view as below us. That probably isn’t really true when it comes to ability to schedule but is how we view them athletically. And as a result we don’t want to be playing any one team every year like we do with St Bona. When you play teams regularly you tend to be lumped in with them and people view you as peers. We want these programs to feel like they got a big game like we did when we had SIU come to Alumni.

Yes, but they are just other NY teams. Binghamton is no different than Cornell or Siena. An Eastern upstate team to play. Play Stony Brook but not as a rival. Play them in rotation with other NY teams. Stony Brook is like Hofstra.

National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. It is an alternative Association to the NCAA more common in the Midwest. Schools are typically funded at a level between D2 and D3 of their NCAA counterparts and play at a similar level. Daemen was a member of the NAIA until they moved to the NCAA D2 about 10 years ago. NAIA is as legit as D2 or D3.

Tiger woods?!

Yup. It is insane that it has not been a priority to okay games in New York State and in areas where our alumni live. That was one of my major criticisms of the NYBI. They wanted to be known as New York’s team but refused to take the teams around New York to play in front of those fans and actually claim the state.

The absolute minimum is one game in Albany every three years in my opinion. Which would mean playing Siena and Albany once every six years in a staggered schedule. I also think it is reasonable to include UMass as a Albany area team even though they are a ways outside of Albany. It’s a big enough game that it should attract some traveling alums. You won’t get teams to agree to games every year but one game in Albany once every three years would be big for alumni, students, and recruits.

We don’t recruit New York. Historically we have excelled recruiting the Midwest. But our fans and alumni are in New York. It would help engage the fan base but it isn’t realistic that we would get home games with St Johns and Syracuse. And New York doesn’t actually have good college basketball with good followings. Playing Army, Wagner, St Francis, and Cornell every year isn’t going to be great long term. But playing four games against NY teams every year would be great. - St Bona every year for the big WNY rivalry. - Eastern NY upstate every year. - One down State game every year. -Additional floater for alumni base adjacent game (could be NJ, CT, MA, or NY as long as it is a short distance from an alumni base).

There is a big difference between doing things strategically for one season and doing things strategically to better the program long term. The athletic department needs to be focused on the long term and doing the things that benefit the program long term. Making games financial transactions is a short term perspective. Selling expected losses and buying expected wins is not how you engage fans. It’s also not how you get to the point where you can get at large bids. It is hard to get MAC at large bids but we know it isn’t impossible. I am sure you’re just cracking a joke about the previous discussions and how it makes this discussion moot but I think your comments warrant some consideration. The reason we (in the MAC) are in the position we are in is because the conference schools have accepted their plight in college sports hierarchy and are content with it. Decisions are very short sighted in part because the programs are simply trying to survive but also in part because they believe that when the going is good it will be short lived. We know that it has been a stepping sting conference. But you can build a winning program in a stepping stone conference that rises above it. We have to continue to lay the groundwork and think strategically about our relationships, rivalries, and how we cultivate fan interest so it remains for years to come no matter if the team is winning or losing.

He absolutely can coach. Which is why he is still around. It is also why I can’t stand him. I am so jealous for all of the coaches with great character who put in all the work and simply don’t have the talent Pitino has. I like coaches of character even if they aren’t as good.

It’s not that he hasn’t had the title of Head Coach; Hodgson doesn’t coach. Sure he attends some practices and games but he doesn’t run work outs and he doesn’t do coaching activities. He is the one always on the road. He has less coaching experience than Oats did when Oats came in from Michigan high school.

Pitino is a great coach. He doesn’t need the recruits to win. I would never want to hire Pitino because I think character matters which is part of the reason I wouldn’t want to hire BH.

He is a good recruiter because he lives on the road. He doesn’t do any player development. He doesn’t run practices and doesn’t lead a program. Everywhere he has been he has been a recruiter and not an X and O coach or an individual workout coach. He is the riskiest kind of hire you can make. I believe he is not a good basketball coach and that is why he has been asked to be on the road so much. When you have someone with strengths and weaknesses you have them focus on their strengths to hide their weaknesses. I am not convinced Oats can recruit. But it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need to as long as he can hire good recruiters to bring him players. Part of being successful is finding the right staff to surround you. But I don’t think you can be a successful head coach when your strength is recruiting. You can be great in a midmajor but you will hit a ceiling pretty quickly.

Every team has a price. Syracuse gets bought. They agree to get bought for $300,000 and 7,500 tickets in NYC with a marquee opponent. Every team has a price. But we aren’t buying South Dakota State for $85k (the going rate) even if we are a ranked team. We don’t bring exposure to them. They would rather play a Midwestern school in areas where they recruit if they are going to get bought. Playing another game at a power conference school (if we can find a buyer) is not going to bring in enough money to attract South Dakota State to come to Buffalo. We can buy a program like Cleveland State, Maine, Morgan State, or the like. But we are not buying a top-75 team unless they have a budget crunch. Which does happen sometimes. Some schools are required to bring in a certain amount of money to fund their own athletic department and if they get too good they struggle to get bought by the five schools it takes to bring in the money. That’s when you can buy good teams. But there aren’t many out there like that.

That’s the reality. Sorry it hurt your feelings to find out that the program needs to have money money to do the things you want them to do…

Yeah, that’s kind of the problem here. No clue about who you could actually bring in A lot of people think scheduling is easy. And it is further down the line that the problems would come up than they realize. case in point: South Dakota State won’t come play us for money. They probably wouldn’t even agree to a home/home. The teams people think we could buy are not the teams we can buy. Would we let South Dakota State buy us? What makes you think they would let us buy them? South Dakota State has the following teams on the schedule in SOUTH DAKOTA this season. Bradley Nevada Washington George Mason South Dakota State has a larger buy budget than us. This is partly due to them being remote and everyone needing to fly in to play them but it also makes it possible for them to schedule more teams than we have available to us.