Sites have been reporting that Western Illinois will replace Marshall. Can anyone confirm. Who knows anything about this team?
Skippy could look like a jacka$$ and hypocrit all rolled into one depending on how this thing pans out. He previously said he considered McNeese and would have picked them up had they won the I-AA national championship but since they didn't the game wasn't as attractive. Take that with the fact our opponent could end up being W. Illinois......another Div I-AA team who last I checked didn't come close to the national championship game. Skippy want to see you crawl from under this if we do end up with WI.
They lost to eventual champ Western Kentucky in a much better game than the championship game that was played between McNeese and WKU. Western Illinois beat WKU at WKU earlier in the season. They are a strong 1-AA team.
Better than I assumed. McNeese and W Illinois split with W Kentucky......both played em twice during the year. W. Kentucky beat both when it counted......in the playoffs. Still proves my point. Skip didn't take the in state D I-AA team, McNeese, and opts for another Div I-AA team. Scheduling wasn't a problem...McNeese was open on that date until just recently when they lined up Ga Southern. Skip preached about playing the in-state D-I teams and keeping the $ in-state. He did the same in baseball. Now he goes and shoves his foot in his mouth and signs a Div I-AA team who is good, as you point out, but there is one just as good 2 hours down the road.........heck over half the kids on that Lake Charles roster have probably dreamed all their lives about playing in Tiger Stadium some day.....and the chance got swept out from under them by some BS. Book it, it had to do with the fact that we "couldn't" play 3 teams in one season from Louisiana.....ULM, La Tech, and McNeese. the NCAA, polls, etc, etc, etc would frown on it. All BS.
Crap...Western Illinois it is. http://www.theadvocate.com/stories/030103/spo_lsufoot001.shtml We should have a more stringent contract with those po-dunk schools like Marshall. They are going to get the better end of this deal. We probably would have been on TV playing them...now they'll be on ESPN and we'll be listening to weak AM feeds of this game.
We have to do better with the contracts - bigger penalties and/or much sooner notice. We tried with Marshall to bring in a team that for the last 2 or 3 years has been in or at least around the Top 25. The fact the we now have a Div 1AA team might bring in less people, and I think with Marshall we would have ended up on TV. We have to be losing more than the $100,000 Marshall paid to get out of the contract. It also means we will lose exposure - no TV and this game will not be mentioned as much on Sports news outlets as much as the Marshall game would have been. Hopefully we will have much better contracts drawn up in the future.
I can't figure out why they wanted out of playing us...they're still playing Tennessee this year. I guess they didn't want to have to travel far.
Western Illinois over McNeese State The way I understood it, the only way we woudl play McNeese State was if they won the national championship on their level. The reason being that if we played McNeese then all the other D-1AA in state schools would want their fair shot at playing LSU and getting the big bucks for playing in Tiger Stadium.
