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Message: [QUOTE="texacuse, post: 3929639, member: 3478"] With all due respect, and as a firm believer in the glory and respect of our beloved ‘Boys of Syracuse’, and as a native Syracusan, I believe that I may be able to bring a little more light to the discussion of where A&M may be in the national pecking order of strength in the collegiate football universe….. First, I would find it difficult to believe that either UM program would fare any better than Texas A&M in any year that they would have to compete for a football title from the SEC West division. Texas A&M had enough clout and program strength to shed its former principal and most hated rival in all sports and leave it scrambling for life support in football program relevance. A&M’s Texas recruiting profile has gotten better each year and ut has withered despite massive financial and past historical advantages competing against most collegiate universities including against A&M and some wasted political advantages from also being located at the Capital of Texas. The historical fact that A&M could single handedly derail both ut’s and OU’s planned exodus to the PAC10 a few years ago may be another significant sign of program strength that few if any other program would have had the capacity or temerity to pull off when they did. From the appearance of our perspective in the state of Texas, ut will always appear to have come to the SEC as a 2nd fiddle to A&M because of its own failure of dominance in its own selfishly created Big12/LHN network windfall paradigm and now it’s having to grovel for some restoration of past glory by trying to play a form of reputation catch up to its former perceived greatness by transferring into the SEC. The salary given to Jimbo Fisher of $75 for 10 years is only small potatoes as well when compared to the just under $500M renovation of Kyle Field which the university paid by 2015 after only 2 years of construction. The ‘12th man’ history at Texas A&M is so pronounced in its longevity and its state wide application and tradition that it was patented in 1989 and even the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL pay an annual rights fee to the university for the rights to use some of this term in a very limited way…e.g…only within the Seahawks stadium, never with the full name ‘The 12th man’ and never on any merchandise sale because of a fiercely defended patent infringement policy on its beloved property. When I was born in St. Joseph’s in Syracuse, the state of NY had about 10% of the population of the US. Today, Texas has about 50% more population than NY and is adding about 500K citizens just in the legal variety each year. With all of these massive state strategic foundational financial advantages and not counting many other economic engines too numerous to count here, Texas A&M is poised to not only be a visible flagship of collegiate US football in the heart of the economic engine of this country, but under any reasonable stewardship can only grow into a greater mantle of authority and program excellence over the perceived and foreseeable future. Nevertheless, even in this climate, despite these things, I raised my children to be SU fans for life. My youngest son was widely known as an SU sports fanatic even though he attended A&M as an undergrad and post graduate student. He still wears his SU gear deep within all areas of Texas today. :) However, I truly believe that that this era is not of the Bo Schembechler UM Wolverines of 1970 nor even the Jimmy Johnson UM Hurricanes of 1982, both a couple of generations ago. If we need to recognize the shifting importance of conference realignments, it may also be time to reevaluate who we believe are the current pillars of college football relevance going forward. Reasonable minds may agree to differ but I believe that the argument of the current football program hierarchy would be difficult to overcome by insisting that the shrinking state of most things in ‘pure’ Michigan including its football team as well, almost never competing successfully against its former peers at Ohio State and also with the decidedly non college experience at UM in Miami, Florida, I believe that these former football factories will be unable to compete or consistently sustain any perch of football peer excellence that would be easily expected to thrive at Texas A&M compared to the others in the current landscape without any other unforeseen massive and systemic changes. [/QUOTE]

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