Fedora stepped ...

[BiscuitEater]

in a 'deep' pile and it is getting deeper every day.


Link ...

http://www.charlotteobser...in-unc-probe-may-be.html


Julius Pepper's 'alledged' transcript may cause additional problems for football ... plus basketball may get drawn into the muck because he played BB for two years.

 

[EAVdog]

Nm

 

[nemsdawg]

if this has legs they are going to be in athletic purgatory for many years. What is so scary is this could happen anywhere and probably does.

 

[was21]

nm

 

[EAVdog]

I don't have a lot of faith in CONFUSA long term. I think USM sat around hoping to get an invite to the Big East and screwed themselves. They needed to be proactive and think out of the box.

 

[KurtRambis4]

the NCAA looking at someone's transcripts (or care) that got drafted ten years ago? What a joke.

 

[goshdawgit]

Hattiesburg is a hellhole.

 

[patdog]

I think USM sat around hoping to get an invite to the Big East and screwed themselves.

They tried to get into the SWC after Arkansas left and they tried to get into the Big East for years but didn't get anywhere on either front. What other options did they have?

 

[DirtyLopez]

looks like Sumrall will be the new oak grove.

 

[patdog]

Other than a bunch of strip malls, a lot of traffic, and a bedroom suburb? Agree with Dirty Lopez. If I were about to move down there, I'd be looking real hard at Sumrall.

 

[jackstefano]

it's only 100 miles from New Orleans. I lived there for 2 years and wouldn't call it a decent town in any other sense. I'm actually curious as to what makes you think it's decent.

 

[dawgs.sixpack]

it might be decent by MS standards, but it's not even in the same universe at chapel hill and the research triangle.

 

[Johnson85]

Hattiesburg is fine. If you're comparing it to college towns, no it's not as nice as even Oxford or Starkville, but otherwise it's decent. It's not going to offer as much as a Atlanta, N.O., or even Birmingham, Memphis, but it would be considered decent across most of the south. If Hattiesburg isn't decent, that means the only decent places to live in Mississippi are potentially the gulfcoast, south memphis area, and maybe Oxford and Starkville? Or is Tupelo any better than Hattiesburg?

 

[EAVdog]

They should form a new conference and model it exactly like the SEC, same revenue sharing, same geographic footprint etc.... Take the best you can get from CUSA and the Sunbelt and form a new conference. Try to establish a relationship with the SEC to match up every team with at least one SEC team for an OOC game in football and potentially more in the other sports. Perhaps even angle for the 11am ESPN 2game to be a warm up to the SEC slate on ESPN.
They should also lower their admittance standards

West Teams: Houston, Tulane, La Tech, UTEP, USM, Tulsa, SMU

East Teams: East Carolina, UCF, UAB, Troy, Ga State (growing univ.), Middle Tenn, Fla International.

I think a more compact footprint would help build some rivalries too. I mean how excited can you get with a Marshall to UCF matchup? Seems to be a long way to travel.

 

[patdog]

And good luck on getting the SEC to partner with any smaller conference. You think CUSA wouldn't have tried that if it had a chance of working? For that matter, what makes us think CUSA hasn't made a few phone calls and didn't get anywhere. What they really need to do is to bring back the partnership with the MWC that seemed to be on and then was off again.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

...heading out towards Oak Grove/Bellevue. It would be nice if Oak Grove had a Ridgeland Renaissance-like shopping center but the closest to I-59 where it would be would be probably across 98 from Canebrake or the strip mall with the Corner Market by there.

That being said, I'd go to Petal-- for years it's had the best schools in the Hattiesburg area.

 

[EAVdog]

I just think they need to realize that there will be 4 big conferences in the near future and none of those teams listed will be in one of the 4 conferences. So they may as well come to the conclusion that they are a step below. And when the SEC picks up 2 more members the chances to play OOC will be less likely. Which means less money for smaller teams. So if they can form even an unnofficial relationship with the SEC it'll be better than nothing. Plus everyone inthe SEC has played one of those teams on a regular basis, it's not like they have to establish some contractual relationship.

Basically there will be the Haves and the Have Nots. They are the Have Nots, so they should try to align themsleves with one of the biggest Haves out there and draft in it's shadow. Otherwise they won't be financially viable in a few years.

 

[patdog]

There's just nothing they can really do about it. They tried to get in the SWC back when it still existed after Arkansas left and they tried for years to get in the Big East back when it was still a major conference. They're not going to be able to partner with the SEC because there's nothing in it for the SEC. I agree that their conference is too spread out but your proposed improvement still spreads from Miami to El Paso (that's twice as far as the furthest two schools in the SEC even after expansion).

 

[OneParticularHarbor]

For at least this coming school year.

 

[hburgdawg]

[No message]

 

[jackstefano]

I would agree that Tupelo, Starkville, Oxford, and the coast would be the only places that offer a consistently nice quality of life (restaurants, some night life, normal people, nice aesthetics). Wasn't comparing the Hat to N.O. or other larger cities.

 

[goindhoo]

if Oxford is where all the "normal people" live, then I'm glad I live amongst the abnormal.

 

[RocketDawg]

so I don't know much about it. But that's fixin' to change ... we're staying there for the games this year. Actually, it's in a place called Saltillo (never heard of it) but it must be close enough to say it's Tupelo. Staying near a shopping mall in a Fairfield. I just couldn't see being coerced into a two-night minimum in Starkville and even Columbus.<div>
</div><div>I thought Tupelo was larger. According to the census, it's only 34,500 ... quite a bit smaller than were I live in Madison, AL (about 45,000) which is a western burb of Huntsville.</div>

 

[maroonmania]

peed in your Wheaties? Interesting though that Larry Knight moved his entire family to Sumrall to coach baseball in order to get out of Hattiesburg High School.

 

[OneParticularHarbor]

If Sumrall handles the growth coming north on 589 and west on 42, it could become a nice little city. The downtown area needs some work. Oak Grove didn't handle the growth well and has become a mess of sprawl, traffic and unregulated growth due to lack of zoning.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

While there've been moves to incorporate, it's not been done well-- based on conversations with family members who live in the area-- and Hattiesburg for the most part has pretty much followed Highway 98 westbound when it expands west.

 

[Johnson85]

of the people that actually work, shop, eat, etc. in the city limits.

 

[GerryBertier]

Giannini shouldn't have been hired and should have been fired long ago. The good ol boy network killed us and is a large reason we are still in CUSA. Our market is a killer but our "potential" market is not bad when you look at it with Jackson, Mobile, New Orleans, the coast, etc. We should have pitched that and didn't. We needed to upgrade basketball facilities but didn't. We've been passed up by Memphis, UCF, Houston, SMU, USF, Louisville, and Cincinnati all because of this. If it were the product on the field that mattered, we'd have been in long ago. When we 17ed up and didn't get in back in 2004 you could see the writing on the wall. Now we have little options. Hopefully our new AD will do something proactive. The B12 showed interest and came to campus but our academics are not up to their level. The ACC may be our best shot, but that just depends on how depleted they become when the B12 and SEC go to 16 teams. It doesn't look good.

 

[jakldawg]

and Hattiesburg is way better than Tupelo.<div>Which I'm sure will be an unpopular sentiment on this board.</div>

 

[OneParticularHarbor]

However, by now it would be hard to clean up needs cleaning up. I don't know if you can retroactively zone. Hattiesburg most recentlyannexed west in the business sections only. The residential areas of Oak Grove are largely a mess. You have a pretty nice subdivision, then have a trailer park a half a mile down the road. The schools are overflowing now due to a lot of multi-family housing in the city of Hattiesburg that is part of Lamar County. About 15 years ago, there was an opportunity for Oak Grove to do things right, but it was missed.

 

[patdog]

They finally did a couple of years ago, but a lot of the damage had already been done by then.

Edit: Just read OPH's post and it looks like Oak Grove made the same mistake Byram did. Just stupid.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

...in Lamar County. The Oak Grove community is historically south of 98 and then you have the neighborhoods such as Lake Serene and Canebrake that are further west (and in Canebrake's case-- north of 98 in Bellevue) so I don't think incorporation is going to really help but zoning will. If only it had been done, oh say, in 2001 instead of 2006 when the county got the authority to zone unincorporated areas.

 

[Irondawg]

It grew quickly and haphazardly so traffic is a disaster and it's full of crappy looking strip malls and chain restaurants, most of which are half empty and already look to be falling apart.<div>
</div><div>USM is finally getting their campus to look nice for the most part but the city just doesn't have any charm anymore</div>

 

[GerryBertier]

The Hattiesburg area is still one of the best places to live in MS. But we're talking about MS