amount of revenue all for the opportunity to play a 'big boy' team is ridiculous. The fans don't like it, the players don't like it."

While I am very much a capitalist and work for a publicly traded company, this whole notion of "well we certain lose a lot more and our seasons are pointless after Sept. but hey we make a lot of money" is crazy talk. It all comes down to ROI. 2 areas we are losing.

1) Our product and brand is no better today than it was when we were in the MWC. In fact I would argue will all the extra money, we are even worse.

2) (This is a bit of an assumption) But will how poorly our team plays and our TV ratings, is this a good investment for ESPN? How is their ROI? And that is exactly how they look at us, we are an investment to them. I don't know the answer to this, but having the rivalry game on ESPN 2 with 668k viewers is not a good sign. Time will tell though. It will be very interesting to see what the offer(s) is when our contract runs up. I truly hope that I will be able to eat crow.

I love my Cougs, but this Indy thing is killing a once proud program.