Let's face it. There are several tiers in college football today. Let's put it in baseball terms.
Major Leagues - P4 Conferences
Minor Leagues - G6 Conferences (in reality and in perception):
AAA - American, PAC 12, MWC (the two conferences need to merge)
AA - Sun Belt, MAC, CUSA
A - FCS conferences
The Minor League conferences are feeders to the P4 and the AA & A conferences are also feeders to AAA as well as P4.
UL is a AA program with poor funding and no major donors to move it up to a better conference. That puts us at the same level as LA Tech and ULM. Tulane is a AAA program.
UL fans are dwindling because we are a AA program, we are pretenders to be at a higher level, we have poor perception due to the conference we are in with a losing record in 3 of the last 4 years (includes this year), and our game day experience is putrid. Fans would rather see a P4 game on tv than watch a losing team before 15,000 fans in a poor atmosphere. Everything we gained with Napier is now lost. We can't even afford to change coaches, so we continue on our losing path. We are not on anybody's list for expansion and if we aren't careful, we may not make the next realignment of G6 schools. Football is becoming what basketball was under Marlin and it is our main source of revenue. Hard to sustain things under those conditions. It really pains me to say all of this, but IMO, that is the reality of our situation. I hope I am proven wrong.
We need to run a system of offense that doesn't rely on one or two players. The Academies do it every year. They plug and play new guys every couple of years and still make Bowl games and get ranked. The same was true for Leach's Air Raid. It didn't really matter who the QB was. Sure, some are better than others, but success of the program did not rely on keeping specific players.
The more we try to copy the P5 plan we had in place before NIL, the more we will struggle to win games.
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