I'll tell you what royally ____es me off...
I live up in the great white north of Wisconsin. It's a great place to live, and I've made no secret that one of our models to follow should be UW. It's a great program, has great fans, and their programs are consistently in the top tier of the B1G. Not only that, their academics are top notch.
So they're playing in something called the Duke's Mayo Bowl. Which, on its face, isn't much better than the First Responders' Bowl, or the Cure Bowl. It's not a NY6 bowl, just some made up bowl owned by ESPN that takes place in a large Southern city between Christmas and New Year's Day.
But look at the payouts:
Cure Bowl: ~$573K
First Reponders: ~$825K
Duke's Mayo: ~$4.7M
If you're looking for how the powers that be view ranked G5 teams versus unranked, mediocre P5 teams, you've found it. A G5 team can have a perfect or as close to perfect a season as you can get, and still get treated with utter disdain by ESPN and the P5. Meanwhile, a P5 team can put a mediocre product on the field, and still take home a multimillion dollar payout at the end of the season. It's simply disgusting.
I agree, the Sun Belt is rising. But there will always be a glass ceiling for us and other G5 leagues. That includes the AAC, even though they like to call themselves part of the P6.