I see progress in this post! Haha. Good work Sturt. By the way, I don't have a dog in this fight so I am not deflecting. I feel this is a pointless debate. I believe Hamrick is scheduling as good as he can for us, weak or not, and a fairy dust conference alliance is out of the question, no matter how much sense it makes. Kind of like how we should never let the government run any program snd should privatize about everything and save a ton of money and do it better....but it wont happen.
1. No one. least of all yours truly, calling into question Hamrick's scheduling.
2. Things like conference alliances... say, like Notre Dame aligning with the ACC... are always out of the question until you read about them on ESPN.com, and then people come out of the woodwork saying, "That's a great idea. Why didn't they do that a long time ago," or otherwise "I predicted ages ago that that would happen. It just made too much sense." And it seems so many are just unaware... we happen to have a commish who within the last 18 months has openly acknowledged his recognition that his conference needs a little help in football, and about his behind-the-scenes work to create some new structure to even the playing field. (If you've followed my posts, this isn't news to you... search on HerdFans.com for Banowsky with my username, and you'll find those.) Point being... nothing's happened, but that doesn't mean that conversations aren't being had, and the potential for something to come of those discussions omnipresent... er... how about... always lurking out there. ;)
3. The whole contention that you, me, or anyone else on this board can accurately predict what will occur in this realm over the next 6 months, let alone 60 months, ought to have been blown away when we all witnessed for ourselves that a school based in Boise, Idaho... s'helpme... and another based in San Diego, CA... s'helpme... signed up for competition in a conference called the Big East. EAST... s'helpme.
So, no. While I'll joke with you and others about it, more soberly, it's absolutely without credibility to keep making these fairy dust and unicorn allegations Truth is, practically everything is possible, or at least that almost none of us really understand where the boundaries are, i.e., sufficient to be making grandiose pronouncements about what is within the realm of reality. Some number of those things that make sense, especially financially, will eventually come to be. The only constant, especially where college football is concerned, is change.
4. Hold up on that last analogy. First, if it weren't for you and others digging in and pushing for federal fiscal thrift, we may already be in a Greece-like situation. Don't think that, because you never can completely win the war that winning the battles that you do aren't important. Application to this current situation is, if you just allow things to go without giving your perspective any voice, then having offered no input whatsoever, you're just as bad as the ones who drove things into the ground. The absentees have no excuse.
That's been much of my message in this thread, of course. One doesn't get to claim credit for bettering the program because s/he was so daring as to encourage the team to win... as-if that's not what every other fan in any sport in the world does. One salesman in this thread argues that the solution to everything is throwing money at our problems... incredibly... or un-credibly... even our scheduling problem... a matter of how the conference conducts its season can be resolved by throwing money at it, after, of course, he's raised it. Money is important, but there are selected areas where it doesn't actually hold any sway, and this is one. To-date, he still refuses to get real and acknowledge the truth.
5. Breaking away from sports into politics, some things but not everything is best addressed through the profit motive. Where there's a logical profit motive, I routinely agree. But there are societal needs that are best addressed by all of us contributing money into the pot to meet them.... but this, we can take up in a PM exchange sometime or over on the Tavern board, assuming we think differently in some way.