Are you a Bison, longhorn or goofs fan? JFC man make up your mind!
I'm pretty sure this was good natured, but...
I believe one is fully entitled to be all three. They dont play each other with any regularity. They dont really recruit head to head a whole lot. All three can be successful without it impacting the others.
I suppose Minnesota being good could have a negative impact on NDSU since they could keep more kids home as walk-ons if they believe they will be a competitive team in the B1G.
College of Business Alumnus
I agree with MOST of what you say except the bolded text
1. If that were true, why schedule SDSU, Western Illinois, Road Island, etc...? Why not play the local team with the winning record over FBS schools, including over the Gophers? Considering NDSU is ranked above a LOT of other teams (and gets votes in the FBS top 25 from time to time) it only seems logical that they would be the team TO SCHEDULE if you're not afraid. The reason those other schools get the phone calls is because, with the exception of SDSU, they are body bag games. But that goes COUNTER to what you're saying. If the gophers didn't play ANY FCS teams you'd have a point, but since they clearly do your point is null and void. Seriously, you have absolutely no
2. Yes, many teams are afraid that NDSU will come in and beat them. That's NOT why you schedule down a level. You schedule down to get a live scrimmage in that is never in doubt. The fact that very few schools will return NDSU's phone calls tells me that while they may not "fear" NDSU any more than they do an in conference foe, they fear what the affect of NDSU coming in and wrecking shit will do to their year.... and they realize that NDSU is more than capable of doing that to some very good FBS schools.
3. If there were a nearby conference looking to add another team we'd definitely do it. You can't just go to the B1G/BigXII and say "we decided we are going FBS and are joining your conference". You need an INVITE. It's no different than if Minnesota said "the B1G is lame, we're going to the SEC next year" quite frankly they'd be laughed out of the room. The same applies to us. Going MAC/Sunbelt would be a step backward. AAC/MWC would make sense from a competitive standpoint, but geographically would suck. The costs associated with going to any of those conferences would likely never be worth the return and playing in the Little Caesars Bowl. Now yes, there are teams that don't offer scholarships unfortunately, but they are our equivalent of scheduling down and having it still count. But every team in our conference has 63 full scholarship equivalents (available) spread between up to 85 players. Quite a few of us offer FCOA as well.
So, remind me again, which of us doesn't know college football and the inner workings involved with it? Because out of the two of us, you were the only one making foolish statements with no facts to back them.