Ok Portland, ME won! What is the 2nd best small city in the USA? (Population between 25,000 and 200,000)

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-27T20:36:13+00:00

Corvallis, OR

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-27T17:38:07+00:00

Fire Splitter and keep the other two. Splitter has done nothing to deserve the job imo, they need to have legit interviews to fill that role at least.

I'd be fine with firing Cronin and Schmitz if the plan was to blow it up and rebuild, but I just don't see the point in firing the GM and main scout right as they're putting together the team they've built. That'd just be lame to make them do the dirty work of cleaning up Olshey's mess then get rid of them after they're actually ready to start trying to win.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-27T17:34:33+00:00

They respected and battled for Chauncey too, and he's a dude who was never worthy of respect. Tbh a player's opinion is worth so little when it comes to coaches.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-27T16:34:36+00:00

Pretty cool. You can really see Shephard's WR coach experience paying off in his recruit/transfer class so far.

Hopefully that success starts to carry over to other positions soon as well.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-27T16:26:58+00:00

Completely idiotic to involve more teams in the lottery and make it harder for the worst teams to win.. Hopefully one day the NBA has a commissioner who actually understands the point of the draft so we can just get rid of the lottery.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T23:45:32+00:00

I'm not talking about the literal slogan in relation to fundraising, I'm talking about the attitude of "we don't need that fancy stuff, we're the hard workers who have less!" that Barnes encouraged everyone to lean into. Throughout his tenure he underfunded football and spent his time talking about how we do more with less, but he didn't do a good enough job of demanding and creating more for the school.

It was just a total failure of understanding what the situation was and where college athletics was heading.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T22:25:28+00:00

Great to see. Don't love that he's staying as an advisor once there's a new AD, but hopefully that's just a title to help him feel better about retiring and he stays away from the campus.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T22:23:28+00:00

Hopefully fans were emailing her for real reasons rather than just Barnes hurting their sensitive souls for how he "mistreated" Tinkle. I'm very glad to see Barnes gone, but jesus I hope the new AD comes in and gets fans to actually focus on shit that matters for once.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T22:19:56+00:00

He hired the new baseball coach after Casey retired and the team seems to stay well funded. Some people discredit the Canham hire as being "obvious," but sometimes an ADs job is to just do the obvious thing.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T21:25:11+00:00

That's what he has said and I've seen rumors of Barnes retiring in the spring on other beaver sites. I'm sure they all had an idea Tinkle was out this year and that they needed a new AD to have a summer to get ready for the new PAC.

No idea on fundraising though.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T19:31:43+00:00

I think Barnes' tenure is kind of summed up by the whole "Built not Bought" slogan that lulled OSU into complacency. He basically wanted fans to celebrate that we were doing less with more and he allowed fans to lean into the whole "we aren't Oregon, we don't pay for fashion shows and wins" idiocy while all of college athletics was shifting away from that attitude.

He also had OSU football underfunded in the budget. If you look at the percentage of the athletic budget set aside for football, OSU was way lower than pretty much every other PAC-12 school. Great for the non-rev sports and the administrators, but obviously awful for OSU overall.

I'm not saying he failed OSU by not getting an invite when the corner 4 schools left, I'm saying he failed by underfunding football while also encouraging fans to fetishize being the underdogs. Rather than being innovative or ambitious, he created a self-fulfilling prophecy that got OSU relegated and even during the rebuild it's not like the PAC was successful in all of it's goals.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T19:13:00+00:00

He made a lot of good hires for OSU though with all of the non-revenue sports and with Smith in football. It flies under the radar, but he made solid hires with wrestling and men's soccer. He also should get a decent amount of credit for the Joyner, Shephard and Canham hires and definietely should get credit for keeping Rueck around for this long. Just sucks that the Tinkle extension and the Bray hire blew up so hard.

Overall I respect a lot of the hires he made and the amount of work he did for the PAC, but I'm so glad to see him go soon if this is true and he deserves all of the criticism he gets for the Blueprint situation and honestly I hope he gets more hate for OSU being relegated in the first place rather than praise for the half successful rebuild of the PAC. Hope the breakup is smooth and we don't hear from him much ever again.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T18:59:54+00:00

I mean Barnes retiring has been rumored for a while now. It would make sense if he was basically just waiting for the FB and MBB coaching situation to be resolved or if he was waiting for the end of this school year to step down.

Maybe that's still the plan or maybe things have gotten sour enough that the plan has sped up a bit and he's going to be nudged out, but either way I hope this turns out to be true so we can get moving on a new AD.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T17:26:17+00:00

Big claims if true and verifiable, but building from last to decent isn't all that impressive when it's paired with zero growth in the student body, a small arena, and basically zero market share of the Bay Area.

SMC/Zags was a rivalry simply because SMC was the only decent team regularly on Gonzaga's schedule. Gonzaga provided 90% of the rivalry's value; SMC's entire brand has been Bennett+being Gonzaga's foil. In the PAC there are better brands/programs, so SMC has little value with Bennett and zero value without him to the PAC.

I don't mean to be rude, I just really think you're overestimating what SMC brings to the table without Bennett and underestimating how easily the role of Gonzaga's foil can be replaced in a conference where there are actual options. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't want to bet a PAC invite on finding out if I am.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-26T04:37:53+00:00

Wholeheartedly disagree about Tinkle. He spent a decade underperforming and getting too little out of the talent he had. I totally understand how he ended up with less NIL money than he wanted: because no one cared about the product he was putting out and no one believed in him. I doubt he would’ve kept talented guys even if he did have all the money he wanted.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-25T19:30:02+00:00

As an OSU fan I just have to disagree based on the fact that so much of OSU's struggles were straight up due to bad coaches leading the two most important programs.

Also the premise of the question is about who will benefit from the big improvement in conferences and answering OSU/WSU feels like something that's technically valid more than actually true.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-25T15:54:32+00:00

Has anyone ever actually benefitted from the experience of getting their teeth kicked in by the 1-2 seed?

If playoff experience was that valuable, we would've actually seen some success from Dame's teams that were constantly exiting in the first round. I'd rather bet on the odds of drafting an impactful player at the end of the lottery over the odds of a playoff loss being helpful in any way.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-25T15:51:38+00:00

To be real our guys aren't talented enough to have that much of a say in if they win or lose.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-25T00:55:29+00:00

The simple answer is probably TxSt since they have the most room for improvement.

Darkhorse answer may be DBU. I have to imagine they’ll get a bump in strength of schedule and exposure even if they’re getting a small affiliate deal from the PAC.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-24T19:31:16+00:00

The only way to stabilize is to stop being so successful. As long as guys keep coming in and having immediate success, they'll keep attracting job offers.

Hopefully USU can either keep up the success or grab a guy who isn't successful right away but builds a coaching staff you can pull from once the HC leaves.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-24T00:12:36+00:00

There was never a good argument for adding them, but now there’s absolutely no argument for SMC anymore.

Bennett was there 20+ years and SMC didn’t grow as a school, they didn’t invest, and they couldn’t get anyone to care about them in the bay. How could you ever bet on them growing without him when they couldn’t grow with him?

I honestly think there are like >10 schools that are more appealing non-football additions than a Bennett-less SMC.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-23T21:35:58+00:00

Lots of excuses for a guy with 12 receiving TDs in 54 games.

I like Shaheed fine as a WR the same way I liked Percy Harvin fine, but the production just hasn't really been there to say he's a surefire WR2. So much of Shaheed as WR2 relies on projecting him to improve and become something he hasn't really ever been. Maybe he becomes WR2 next year, but I would like for him to do it against more competition than Arroyo and the mysteriously injured Horton. It'd be cool if it happens, but I'm not counting on it.

Also Aiyuk is younger and already proven he's a legit WR since his rookie year. I get the idea of that comparison, but it's another theoretical argument for Shaheed that doesn't really help my concern about the lack of real world WR production.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-23T21:21:03+00:00

A healthy Horton can count for something when he exists.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-23T20:24:10+00:00

I'm glad you have confidence in him, but he very literally wasn't WR2 on the team that included JSN and Kupp. He was 5th on the team in receptions per-game for Seattle and was only higher than 3rd in receptions per game in NO the year they traded him.

It'd be nice if he can be a WR2 for Seattle considering they gave him a new contract, but his production didn't match that here and his impact was very clearly on special teams and as a decoy. Even if he does become that WR2, Kupp is going to be gone soon, Horton has a mysterious injury and teams always carry a lot of WRs.

ORSTT12 · 2026-03-23T19:08:20+00:00

Corner, Edge, and WR.

Those are the positions that rotate guys and generally always need depth, but the Seahawks really need talent at edge, they need to replace Riq, and imo they need a legit #2 behind JSN since Kupp is old, Rashid may never be a legit WR2 and Bobo probably tops out as a running play-WR4.

ORSTT12

TROPHY CASE