Times are tough at the Cuse and not many people are happy with the basketball team's perceived lack of respect for its schedule. That includes Jimmy B, who finally came clean when asked by Fraudulent Doug Gottlieb to explain why Syracuse played such a Carrier Dome-heavy November/December schedule. Our non-conference schedule, we chose to bring teams in; Wichita and Drexel, Hofstra, Penn, Holy Cross ... teams that are in the tournament. We chose to bring them in here because, obviously, we make money. Football doesn't make as much money as it used to. So we use it as a revenue thing.
A whole new world, isn't it? Football and basketball programs are not two free-standing entities, they're the two big cogs in the symbiotic relationship of all university athletic programs. When one suffers, the other has to pick up the slack. It's not a solid argument, by any means. I mean Syracuse has been scheduling this kind of early-season creampuffery for a long time, even when the football team was good. But at least we used to leave the state, now it seems like we don't have the luxury.
Suddenly, all this talk of scheduling Texas, USC and others for football makes a lot more sense for a bottom-of-the-conference program like ourselves. As Donnie Webb points out, me thinks that the USC-Syracuse two-sport agreement will go from handshake to signed-sealed-delivered a lot sooner than later.