Berkeley_Griz said:
Spanky2 said:
My hope will be a conference championship against more talented teams and the opportunity to win a national championship against the best. I think you are short changing our ability to raise substantial NIL funding——be reminded that our potential contacts aren’t limited to the Missoula city limits.
There is absolutely no chance, none whatsoever, that Montana could ever win a FBS national championship. So if you value playing for a national championship, you simply have to accept that is forever out of the cards at FBS. I'm not saying that's a bad position to take - FBS has its own advantages - but a natty is not anything remotely close to feasible for us at that level. In reality, it's not really feasible for about 80% of FBS programs absent some miracle makeover of their program.
In the FBS playoff era (2014-2021) the following teams have been represented:
Alabama * * * * * * (3 NC’s)
Clemson * * * * * (2 NC’s)
Oklahoma * * *
Ohio State * * * (1 NC)
Georgia * (1 NC)
Notre Dame *
Oregon
Florida State
Washington
LSU (1 NC)
Michigan State
Michigan
Cincinnati
Just 13 different schools in 8 years (spanning 32 playoff slots). There are 131 FBS schools, so right at 10% have been represented in the playoff era (and two of those new ones were just THIS year in Cincinnati and Michigan, so before that it was just 11 schools in 7 years). Point being if you’re not on THAT short list, you probably don’t have any shot at the playoffs, despite being a really, really good P5 school. Penn State, Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Florida, Auburn, USC, UCLA nor any other number of “blue bloods” have sniffed the playoffs since their inception. That field will obviously increase now that they’ve enlarged the playoffs to 12 schools. Will they eventually go to 24, just like FCS? If they did, would that change anybody’s minds as to our chances at making a playoff?
If you did a similar study in the FCS, you’d find the same thing. Year after year, the vast majority of the slots are occupied by the same teams from the same conferences while 90% of FCS has zero shot at the playoffs and less than zero chance of a national title. Do those 90% kid themselves into thinking they have a chance? Hell, there was a time not so long ago when Griz fans considered a playoff berth the bare minimum and our freaking BIRTHRIGHT. And yet here we sit going on 21 years since our 2nd (and last) national title, and 13 years since we even sniffed the NC game. And in fact, while NINETY ONE different current FCS schools have competed in the playoffs since 1978 EVERY FCS National Title has been won by one of just 14 different schools (of those still in FCS).
so at the end of the day, there’s really not a shred of difference between the two levels, other than the players and the amount of money/notoriety.
It really just boils down to do we want to continue be a big(ish) fish in a small (and getting smaller) pond, or do we want to be prepared and plan to run with the big dogs should the chance ever present itself?
