apaladin wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2025 1:26 pm
Confirming what I have said before baseball gives mid-majors the best chance to compete with the big boys. A couple of examples already: UNCG 4 Wake Forest 0. Upstate 10 Boston College 7. There are many others.
Apaladin writes many good and interesting and helpful things on the UFFP, but affirm does not like apaladin's incessant comments about baseball and usually ignores them.
Saying that baseball gives mid-majors the best chance to compete with the big boys is irrelevant. He names a couple of examples and says there are many others. He does not say how many others there actually are, so who knows how many such scores there are in a season, compared to the total number of games mid-majors have against "the big boys". It may be a relatively small number. A D1 team can play up to 56 games in a regular season, so a lot of games have to be scheduled within approximately the same number of weeks as are in the football and basketball seasons. Big boys have to schedule nearby games (such as WFU vs. UNCG) in many cases because of all the travel that would be involved otherwise, expensive in both time and money for the visiting team when the game is far away.
The percentage of mid-major wins against big boys may be no higher than the percentage is for FCS wins vs FBS in football or the percentage of mig-majors wins vs major conference teams in basketball; and if it is higher, it is not much higher and can usually be explained because the big boys are needing to rest pitchers for more important games. Basically the big boys in baseball do not even take the mid-major opponents very seriously, because the big boys have so many subequent chances to bounce back in upcoming imporrtant games. Most importantly, when a mid-major team does beat a big boy team in baseball, very few people even know about it, it is not big news, and it is essentially irrelevant. When a mid-major beats a big boy in basketball, people know and people remember. The same is equally or even more true when it happens in football. In baseball, no one really cares. It is merely an interesting but trivial and irrelevant occurence that very few people even notice. A mid-major team can somehow beat a big boy in baseball and be terrible the rest of the season, when it really matters. The best chance to compete? What does that even mean? To compete in one single basically meaningless game? "To compete against the 'big boys'" is no reason for wanting Furman to reinstate baseball, all things considered.