I recall one of the skeptical Hornet posters on the Sac board mentioning months ago “I hope we don’t pull a Suck State on this”. That comment has aged like fine wine.

Marion is probably gone by January one way or the other. If he’s good, he gets scooped. If it’s bad, he’s the scapegoat for busted dreams.

If Sac doesn’t get a legit invite, at some point Wood will get told to sit down and shut up if the governor decides to run for higher office. The last thing a politician needs is to discuss why a university with negative cashflow is trying to rattle the cage on FBS where there are already too many mouths to feed if you ask the big boys.

The difficulty in making Marion the scapegoat is that Sac’s football record is not what makes them unattractive to conferences. Sac had impressive recent success in football. They had a nineteen game conference win streak just a few years ago, had a winning record in 2023 including a win at Stanford and conferences weren’t and aren’t after them to join.

It’s the President of sac who has to stand up and take responsibility for his actions. And I would not want to be in his shoes when the chancellor of the CSU calls him on this.

agreed. The point I was trying to make was that Wood and Marion are upwardly mobile self-preservationists. I don’t think either will hesitate to deflect responsibility on each other if desired results are not achieved and they run out of third parties to blame.

It is odd that the focus of moving up seems to be on how the football team performs, when I suspect the conferences have expressed other concerns, and rather than addressing those concerns, whatever they are, Sac doubles down on proving the football team is good. Short of winning a national championship can’t prove anything new at the FCS level, with this years weak schedule.

Marion is a coach, given authority to act and goodies to disburse as if he was at Nevada Las Vegas or Texas, so he does. I don’t know that that shows bad character or dishonesty.
Woods is a pitchman, with the ethics of the marketplace, selling a vision unlikely to come to fruition as a sure thing. Buyer beware.

Short of winning a national championship can’t prove anything new at the FCS level, with this years weak schedule. — Riveraggie

No doubt that Marion has brought in an unprecedented FCS recruiting class. You would think, that with so many FBS transfers with 3 to 5 star ratings, they should dominate their FCS opponents or, as Dr. Wood likes say, "the JV football programs" on their schedule. It's going to be embarrassing for them if they don't.

NOTE: Those are "3 to 5 stars" players who didn't shine at a previous stop or stops. So they still have to live up to that rating.

And even if they do, the fact that they were "varsity players" playing a "JV schedule" might lessen whatever they accomplish in the eyes of scouts/recruiters (for individual players), or conferences that Sac might be interested in joining. Damned if they do, damned if they don't situation.

Not an expert on the legal landscape here but it seems like an uphill battle when you're arguing you have a legal right to a waiver in a process like this

Not a lawyer and maybe it is an up hill battle. But I think the NCAA needs a better argument against Sac going FBS than that the two conferences in the region haven’t invited them. That looks like restricting competition. Maybe there are other reasons. Sac argues that that requirement was waived for other schools, like Liberty, so argue the rule is unevenly applied.