Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which is stuffed already at the start of a weekend that figures to be filled with fulfillment. If you’re in town or headed here and need breakfast tomorrow, I must endorse the “Mountaineers on the Bayou Benefit Brunch.” Really neat back story to this and, obviously, a great cause.

And then there’s the food …

Ridiculous. The first is softshell crab Benedict. The second is a shrimp creole omelet. Tomorrow is the last day, 7:30-11 a.m. at the Richwood Grill. Cash or check only because of the charitable nature. Start there — here’s your menu — then head up the road to Mario’s and get a fish bowl.

Let’s get down to business …

I begin with a reminder and a plea: A “spirited” TFGD Saturday that I’m sure will last all day, plus a live blog that will start early in the day and may have a special guest. Still working on that.

Lastly, my plea: If you are in town, at GameDay, tailgating, looking at a hilarious sign or in any way a witness to the awesomeness this weekend can be, please, please, please send me pictures, video, anecdotes, etc. I’m all in for this occasion, so long as you’re with me (mikec@dailymailwv.com).

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, if at first you don’t succeed …

glibglub said:

Plainly, Geno has to get more air under the throw if he wants to complete La Paz.

This is wonderful.

pknocker40 said:

Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet I’m just going to say it:

Lake Titicaca

Carry on.

Done.

oklahoma mountaineer said:

Can’t believe that MD has not just lined up and ran straight at Bruce Almighty. Big OL for Maryland should wear down the edges, consistent with Edsell’s character, and takes pressure off QB who lost two starting WRs……….hard to understand.

Well, this happened later and Maryland had success. I imagine you’ll see a dose of that tomorrow. Curious to see Bruce willingly take on double teams for the cause. That has to get old sooner rather than later.

hershy112 said:

I’ve been pretty impressed with Pat Miller so far today and this season.

Yeah, definitely. Not a surprise inside the Puskar Center, but a good development, though. And he’s a a very capable tackler. Not a lot of leaning and lunging there.

pknocker40 said:

Hello, I am a Big East referee, and I happen to enjoy wearing women’s underwear…

Are you saying WVU was … hosed?

Jeff in Akron said:

Here’s to hoping Austin catches another 12 this Saturday.

My biggest concern is an LSU defender grabbing and pulling that finger during a tackle. It’s not like they haven’t fallen on a running back’s ankle ten yards out of bounds or anything. An ankle that never seemed to heal last year.

So glad you remembered that. The late hit on Noel did, in many ways, alter the season. For argument’s sake, does WVU have more depth behind Tavon this year than it did behind Noel last year? Devon Brown is good, but I would say no.

JC said:

Is it a coincidence that I went on Stub Hub to check out how much tickets were up to and if you put your cursor over Big East football the teams that come up are: Baylor, Kansas, K. State, etc…….??

Nope.

Dave said:

I am respectfully asking … can we officially replace the posts about what I think about beer sales with what I think about the national attention we’re receiving for morons wearing particular shirts?

Dave!

Jeff in Akron said:

How close is your earlier potential assessment that the Big-12 and the Big East will join forces? Plus, was Luck’s statement about Texas looking east just his opinion or did it have an undertone?

This was submitted Sunday before everything and everyone went crazy. I’m telling you, WVU people envisioned a lot of this and have ridden this wave without falling off the board. I still maintain this is the outcome — with a twist. The Big XII is going to hold on more than we previously thought and the Big East is going to lose more than we previously thought. It’ll take time, but at the end, whenever that arrives, I think this happens. But if WVU ends up in a conference with Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri and Oklahoma State in football and Kansas and Texas and Kansas State and Oklahoma State in basketball? That’s not a soft landing. That works pretty well, I think. That’s actually far better than I imagined weeks back. That said, I have less than full faith Texas and Oklahoma will be there by the time WVU would arrive.

rekterx said:

I remember when Mike Tranghese got the all of the schools in the conference to commit to one another in a meeting and Miami and Syracuse committed to their fellow Big East members. At the very time that Miami committed to its conference peers it was cutting a deal behind the scenes with the ACC. Soooo … whatever.

No one trusts anyone so, at the worst, no one will be surprised when the knife twists under the shoulder blade.

Teedub said:

“The group concluded the meeting with a strategy to recruit top level BCS-caliber institutions”….to replace Pittsburgh, Syracuse, UConn, Rutgers, and WVU after they’ve left

Came across clearly, I suppose.

overtheSEC said:

This is Luck winking at all the WVU fans tell us to be cool and he’s on it. I feared that he was pledging his allegiance to Marinatto and am pleased to hear it’s not the case.

Yeah, I don’t feel uncomfortable putting words in a guy’s mouth when I’m in charge of relaying the words that come out of his mouth — but he definitely did that.

Josh said:

The SEC doesn’t need Mizzou as a member in order to dominate the Missouri TV markets. The SEC has always been a geographically isolated conference, but has always delivered the best brand of college football. In other words, people all over the country watch the SEC because they know that when they do, they will see the very best college football teams play each other. If you don’t believe me, just ask CBS.

As long as the SEC continues to deliver the best brand of football, their geography/footprint should not matter, and both the networks and conference leadership know that — they know the whole country will watch the best football teams play each other no matter how close the campuses are to their TV sets. This is the SEC’s angle and it’s an angle that has allowed them to negotiate THE BEST network TV deals/contracts for its members, despite its relatively small footprint.

WVU is the best football team/program available on the market, and we are a excellent prgram as well. We will compete in the SEC. Mizzou may be a close second to us, but there’s no question that we are a better fit. I can’t say we’ll be invited, but if the SEC goes with Mizzou, their brand will suffer; it will suffer in order to “gain markets” they already had.

These are all good points, but the very easy counter is the SEC isn’t losing anything and is only adding with Texas A&M and — for the sake of this particular discussion — Missouri. The SEC wants to be bigger than the SEC and if it can deliver the undisputed best college football to half the country, it will do that. Missouri may stay now. It may go to the Big Twhatever. But the SEC isn’t ignoring Missouri.

Karl said:

There is a serious chance that the line has been crossed and Congress gets involved this time. There are real arguments to be made that this is not amateur sports anymore and the NCAA football should lose its nonprofit tax-exempt status. You now basically have four conference heads deciding who should have the right to play for national championships in an amateur sport. There is no central figure or body regulating anything. The closest thing is ESPN.

If you’re a team like WVU that has won two BCS games in six years, and just knocked on the door of the championship game, and is now being told they can’t play in big games anymore, there are real antitrust cases to be made. There will be a lot of teams in our position if the Big 12 and Big East collapse, leaving behind a bunch of good programs without opportunities. That’s also a lot of disaffected voters who’ll be calling their reps.

It’s time to nuke this whole system.

Completely agree. Congress got involved in the BCS and the BCS, as obnoxious and arrogant as it is, is not nearly as dangerous and crippling as this new outcome would be. And if WVU gets left out, I would almost guarantee Sen. Rockefeller gets involved.  That tax stuff frightens those college people.

Patchy said:

Occam’s Razor is always keen-edged and should be used without fear of dulling the blade:

1) Conferences want to maximize revenue and TV presence but living in a state of flux is not what they want or need especially the existing membership. Then there is the mundane but rather important matter of nailing down future schedules in all sports. Getting numbers and divisions set rather than adding members is the priority.

2) If the ACC had wanted WVU then WVU would have accompanied Pitt and Syracuse. It would have been ironic considering the outrage over BC/VT/Miami and would have effectively killed off Big East as a football conference (its days are probably still numbered) but musical chairs is a cutthroat game.

3) Realignment moves are lightning-quick relative to the age of most conferences. All this talk about WVU/Luck keeping powder dry, monitoring the situation, etc. is nothing more than a fan base frantically rubbing a rabbit’s foot. It’s quite possible, even probable, that a deal is being sought but the focus should be on events not words. I don’t regard Luck’s statement as some sort of Rorschach inkblot but rather as the kind of meaningless boilerplate that, unfortunately, is a frequent product of this administration.

4) If the SEC is the ultimate outcome nobody will be happier than I especially when I wished for it as soon as the 2003 split occurred. At the time I thought Vanderbilt might withdraw to focus on academics and leave a spot open but that was in an era of otherwise stable membership.

5) Let’s not forget the NCAA which has even more to lose than any school or league. They may step in – with possible antitrust help from Congress – to wreck the entire conference structure and declare the creation of one super-league with 4 or 8 divisions.

All of this is true or worth believing — I’m reaching on No. 4, but, what the hay? — but I can’t reiterate enough how possible and how thus significant No. 5 is. Really, imagine if after all this is completed — and that assumes it ever gets completed — and then Congress intervenes. Mushroom cloud?

The 25314 said:

What is sad, is that the Big East was in a position of power 10 years ago. We had perrenial Top 10′s in Miami and VT. BC, WVU and ‘Cuse were all solid programs. The BE had the Boston, NYC, Philly, Pittsburgh, and Miami television markets. The Big East should have been raiding the ACC, expanding to 12 teams and, buttressed by its vast market of cable subscribers, obtaining a lucrative television contract. Instead, the Big East was raided by a weaker ACC because of the lack of vision and allowance of basketball-only schools to weild underserved power.

Everyone wants to bag John Marinatto, and I get that, but in many ways, some of this — some — is on his predecessor. There was a failing before this failing.

rekterx said:

Here is what I am thinking of doing.

I go to one of the prominent WVU chat boards and register. Then I post something like the following. “I know this is my first post on this chat board. But I have decided that I should let you know that my sources, and these are very good sources, tell me that we should expect an announcement.”

Then I’ll sit back and watch another episode of Chat Board Frenzy,

Oh, by the way, my sources do tell me that we should expect an announcement.

Another great week for them breaking all the news and reassuring the followers all the people who had it right, or weren’t getting it wrong, were not to be trusted — and I’m just guessing. But I suppose that, more than anything else, is what a subscription gets them.

JP  said:

Ok, time to panic

McMurphyCBS Brett McMurphy
Multiple Big East sources said they have been told by WVU officials that WVU rejected by ACC & SEC

slmandel Stewart Mandel
ACC thumbs nose at WVU academics. SEC wants TV sets, and W Va doesn’t have enough of them.

Just because some people might not yet be clear on this, there has been no rejection by the ACC or SEC. WVU knew before then it was not a fit for the ACC, but the SEC ship has not sailed. WVU was kind of mad about this, not that Brett was going with it, but because WVU thought a recruiting rival or a Big East official/school official made it up to knock WVU down a peg.

lowercase jeff said:

i think firing luck, for the record, would be a huge mistake. im sure its not even nearly an option.

No one considers that a possibility.

SheikYbuti said:

Yeah, to even suggest such a thing, you’d have to be that guy in Texts From Game Day that, at 11:35 a.m., broadcast: “I am hammmmmmered.”

Have to be … but let me ask this. If WVU is left out or is in a watered-down Big East, and Luck couldn’t work a miracle, how long is he here before he seeks and finds a new challenge? I ask that with no insight into the future, but with just a hypothetical interest.

Rugger said:

I feel it. Game Day announcement. If I am wrong, it will not be the first time. I just smell a rat here. SEC standing at 13, Mizzou off the list, if not us then who? Personally, a B12 expanded would have great fball/bball balance and I prefer that but no one seems to care what I want. Add Navy/Airforce, I slit one wrist. Add ECU/UCF, the other. LGM!!!!

No offense to your wrists, but I can’t see this GameDay announcement happening under any conceivable scenario except the one in the most unusual part of my imagination. Yet I hope it happens.

glibglub said:

So I get to the office this morning, and I can’t find my favorite pen anywhere. @$#%! you, Swofford! You just won’t be satisfied until you have all of it, will you? But know this: I will get a new pen – a better pen. And then there will be writing again. Oh yes, there will be writing.

Enjoy the weekend!