Montana is nowhere near the recognition locally as the schools in the now PAC-6. They are an FCS school with a state with a tiny population. The schools in the now PAC-6 are at a much higher level in recognition and brand awareness.

The race is really for who moves up to the new MWC.
The crazy thing is if Sac makes it due to high community support and the Ags are left in FCS. I don't know how they recover from that esp when you consider the Causeway gets a lot of attention in Sacramento compared to most FCS games.

I do wonder what happens to CP if both the Ags and Sac move up. Does CP cut their program or remain as the Big Sky's CA presence? The Big Sky itself can take the two Utah UAC schools.

In no universe would Sac St be taken and not Davis

Are you guys for real? These moves and deals are put together by ESPN and Fox. Davis and Sac State are not under any legitimate consideration by the networks. The legacy Pac 12 brand needs to get to 8 programs to be a playoff qualifier. Gould is holding out hope that something goes spectacularly wrong with the ACC in order to grab Cal and will otherwise add 2 more from the MWC.

For those that are too young or too saturated to remember, the move up from the NCAC to the American West Conference was going to change the game for Aggie football. Throngs of fans were anticipated to pack Toomey as Davis leveled up from conference games with Chico and Humboldt to Cal Poly and Sac. And further the move to the Big West and Sky was expected to be a boon for football and basketball. Just wait till the new stadium opens! In reality, none of this interest materialized. There have been damn good football programs visit with limited fanfare and hoops attendance at home has backslid from 30 years ago.

Rocko should focus on getting the game notes out with less than 30 typos and stay at the kids table.

The stadium picture that Rocko DeLuca tweeted out continues to create some media buzz.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/live/

Oh baby this is the thread and topic I have been waiting for…

I am a believer that we should do everything we can to play with the big teams and put Davis on the sports map. I would have loved to see us move up to FBS/Pac 12 even before all of this chaos. I see no reason that we can’t given other “academic” schools can also have top programs (UCLA, Cal, Stanford, USC are all as tough or tougher to get accepted to)

For context - I went to every football and basketball game while in attendance and still watch them now to this date. Very few of my friends joined me at Davis and even less keep up with the teams now. So while I’m going to be a little critical, I’m a huge supporter of our program.

Students in seats:
Part of the problem here in my opinion is that sports is not a reason to come to Davis as part of your Davis experience outside of the athletes who play it. We aren’t attracting a sports fan student. If you got into Cal, Stanford, UCLA, and Davis and you wanted sports as part of your college experience, you aren’t picking Davis. You are picking a bowl eligible, pac 12 school playing against some of the better college program and NFL level talent. While we are technically D1, we are a lower level D1 than the college football programs you know. We get one game a year (Cal) to put us on the map. Imagine a whole schedule.

Respectfully, the world doesn’t care about FCS. Outside of the playoffs and maybe even just the championship does ESPN talk about the FCS or show games? No.

Let’s talk about the best scenario for a second. We are the #1 ranked team in the FCS for the next 5 years. Ok, so we are North or South Dakota state? There is still an element of “ok, so what?”. There is no doubt a move up, we would likely lose a lot of games in the short term, but imagine a schedule filled with mid to top FBS talent. Imagine upsets over UCLA, Cal, Stanford, a random Auburn or Wisconsin game. Imagine we finally put together a good season and make it to a bowl. I guarantee any one of those situations gets more attention than our current best possible scenario.

This leads me to my next point, which a lot of folks in here are not going to like. In basketball and football specifically, I would be open to scholarship players not needing to separately hit the requirements for acceptance to Davis. I know we pride ourselves on the scholar-baller but the kids getting into UCLA/USC etc wouldn’t get in without their athletic achievements and scholarships and truthfully, no one is looking at those schools as any less prestigious.

If you want to get butts in seats, you need to be in the highest division possible, playing the best talent and making sports part of the college experience at Davis.

My solution:
- move to the PAC 12
- relax the scholarship requirement to allow athletes to join the program that wouldn’t otherwise be able to come to Davis
- join with Sac State to fuel a rivalry from day 1 that can grow for years to come at the new level.

Athletes have to meet the fairly easy requirement of taking 15 courses and having a B average in those courses, or be admitted by exception, which likely isn’t too hard to get if they came reasonably close or had a story. A B average is well below the median in California. I don’t think they are turning away many players who wouldn’t fail if admitted, The legend that UC has hard admissions requirements is a legacy of the past when UC only took the top 1/8 of high school students.
Several posters seem to think that getting students to attend games would be a revenue source. Students get into games free, they support athletics financially through their fees.

this is it. Students will come and fans will come if we are FBS, especially PAC-12. Things CAN change but you have to take leaps and risks. College football is rapidly changing and the teams that are “idle” are getting left in the dust.

Agreed. We are a much better brand athletically, facility wise and academically.

Aren't TV eyeballs key? The Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto area is the #20 TV market. Boise and Wyoming can't touch that.

FYI - athletic admission to Davis has not been held to the general student body requirements for about 50 years now.

Boise supports that program. The Davis community won’t even support a decent restaurant.

Here’s an interesting tidbit (at least to me). Neither Boise nor Colorado State have baseball programs. Will the Pac-something offer baseball?

LeFan said it well: ESPN and Fox determine what schools get on television and the size of the local population is not as important to the as the size of each school's fan base. UC Davis can't match the fan bases of most Mountain West schools. let alone the former Pac-12.

What restaurant are you talking about?

My point exactly.

Let’s be realistic. If we play Cal, UCLA, USC, Michigan…whomever. I am driving from LA to Davis with an Outback full of Aggies and potentially UCLA/Cal/Stanford co workers in it. That will happen many times over. I am not doing that for EWU, Montana State, SUU…you get the picture.

We are next to Napa for Christs sake. You know how many people from those big name schools will come for that alone?

I’m totally aligned. FBS needs to be the goal.

The anticipated attendance jump and atmosphere/culture boost from playing at Toomey vs. Chico/Humboldt/Western Oregon/SMC to moving into a new stadium and playing D1 Big Sky schools like Montana / Montana State was negligible. The dream of becoming a Montana with a consistently packed house with a rabid fan base has yet to materialize.
And believe me, the argument was an important one at the time. So making the argument, again, that improving who we play is going to make this a football school is iffy.

If this were to ever happen, we'd be relying on our opponents and their fans to change our culture, because history shows the community/students just haven't been into it.

I do think UC Davis has always been a sleeping giant at whatever level we've played in.
Its just been frustrating to always be that and not actually realize all the potential of an enormous student body and a huge endowment.

Hopefully all this realignment and upgrade talk boosts UC Davis to new levels.

How do we define “the community”? Davis and environs?
To fill a large stadium the community has to be bigger than that. The media coverage in Bay area and Sacramento media didn’t take a jump when Davis went from Division 2 to FCS. Those are just two names for what used to be the College Division, which got a few paragraphs back in the Far Western Conference days, and got about the same coverage after the transition Only since streaming games became available in recent years has Davis been exposed to a larger audience. Overall what is Davis’ record in the FCS years? People get excited about winning, not finishing top five in a conference.

when was the last time a power 5 team, beside Stanford, played AT San Jose State?

It does seem.like the last year or two we've gotten bigger crowds. The first home game is always tough.

We were close in 2018.

They hosted Utah a few years back, but it's grim for them. On the flip side, SDSU was fairly consistent in hosting at least one Pac game a year since I was a fan, even before the new stadium.

I would expect Davis to have luck somewhere between those two by being in a good recruiting ground and not being a commuter school. An expanded Aggie Stadium and locker room facility would probab;y be significantly better than SJSU's aging facility as well

I know WSU and Oregon State aren't power schools anymore but last year Oregon State visited the Spartans. Utah visited in 2016. Cal oddly had a 2 for 1 with them (unless it was H/H) but it was canceled at some point before the pandemic and no games were played.

SjSU has a future series with the 2 Pac that was scheduled before the realignment mess but it doesn't count now.

I expect that you'd get a lot of good G5 teams to visit and only a weaker Power Team like say Wake Forest or what WSU was to come for recruiting.

I read somewhere the Pac Conference will have at least 9 teams for scheduling purposes.

I'm pretty sure we aren't getting attendance from Sac residents that aren't Aggie alums. So we basically rely on Davis proper, Dixon, Vacaville, Fairfield and East Bay alums like me (?). It seems like slim pickings.....

I can't imagine Sacramento residents (who didn't go to Davis) picking UCD as their college football team of choice when Hornet Stadium in their backyard. So far we haven't won the Sac metro area, when Sac is in the middle of it, and we 'aint.

Who knows what the future may hold though!

I’ve only read that 8 is the minimum to be recognized by NCAA as a conference. You’d have to find 5 out of conference games to fill your schedule. For basketball, you’d need to fill in about 16 out of conference.

Get in losers, we're going to the Pac-12! :)