Wright’s thoughts
July 31, 2007
Here’s the full story on Scott Farmer leaving Troy for ULL.
At Media Days last week, I caught up with Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters. Here are the quotes I got from him.
On which bowls the Sun Belt is in contact with for a second bowl
We’ve got a number of conversations going on. We think it’s premature to name any names right now. We’ve got to make it work financially and make sure we have a playing partner.
We’re actively pursuing it and we laid it out for the athletic directors and sent a strong recommendation to the executive committee to go forward with it.
The concern is, I think we’ll get them in games, I just don’t want to run the risk of sending them to Lower Oshkosh to games as opposed to being in the Southeast where people can travel with their teams.
We were within a gnat’s eyelash of having to send Middle Tennessee to San Diego rather than Detroit last year. That would have been a problem.
His thoughts on Troy’s performance in the New Orleans Bowl
Troy’s been everything we thought they would be when they came into the league. They’ve set the bar with their facilities, enthusiasm and intensity for football and it’s made everybody better for it.
When we look back and when somebody writes the history of this league 50 years for now, Larry Blakeney’s name and Troy University will be a prominent part of it.
Do you want the league to go to 12 teams?
I don’t. I think with those 12-team, conference championship figurations ... a lot of people made those decisions because TV needed programming that weekend. Now with the 12th game, there’s another regular season game available. Some of those championships outside the SEC and Big 12 are really struggling to put people in the stands.
If you can’t make it work at a neutral site with lots of attendance and lots of media, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get in that business.
What do you think about games not on Saturdays, specifically Troy’s games on Friday and Tuesday nights this year?
I think Thursday night, we’ve been playing those since the early 80s, that’s become a traditional date. Saturday’s a traditional date. If it was up to me, college football would be played then. The national exposure is so important that if you can get one game a year to that date it’s all right, but if you have to move two, three or four games a year to midweek dates, you’re in trouble.
