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TexasTerror
August 20th, 2006, 07:44 AM
Enjoyable read on UTPA and the fact they are floating around as a Div I independent. UT-Pan American has applied for both SLC and MidCon admission, being rejected. There's no football for the Broncs and one would question, would football help get them a place to play ball for all their other sports?

UTPA compares themselves to A&M-CC, who just recently got admitted into the SLC...
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One quick fix points to the Broncs adding football, with the Southland Conference — the most geographical fit league-wise — always looking for Division I-AA programs to add to its gridiron stable.

It’s common knowledge that if UTPA did have a football program, it also would have received a green card to Southland Conference membership. But Street said that adding football “won’t happen during the next five years,” meaning it isn’t the cure to UTPA’s conference woes during the foreseeable future.

“I think it may take football for them to get into a conference,” said former UTPA men’s basketball coach Bob Hoffman, a former Oklahoma assistant and the current coach of the American Basketball Association’s Arkansas Aeros. “You don’t find many college football programs out there without a conference. To be honest, football is the sport that speaks.

“They get football down there, and they’ll find a conference in a hurry.”

http://www.themonitor.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=14922&Section=Sports

Sly Fox
August 20th, 2006, 08:31 AM
The school's reputation for total lack of institutiomnal control in their basketball program over the past two decades is probably their biggest deterrent to finding a new league. But I agree that football would be their only real shot to be associated with schools close enough to not kill them with travel costs.

I do wonder if they are prepared to follow A&M-CC's plan of getting associate memberships wherever they could in non-revenue sports (i.e. playing softrball in Big South).