TheGoldCrotchPiece

14 hours ago, TuTigers2012 said:

Don't be so mean! This is Towson athletics, trying is as good as winning here!

had a nice actual LOL from this 

watching a game on the hill randomly on a nice spring afternoon - what a time. the beach and the baseball hill always had great people watching.

JMU won the sun belt. two years in the league. 

that 2016 Maryland game just kills me - up 13 in the second half. talk about what could have been a program changing win.  I was at the game and I remember Maryland had to call a timeout in the first half and all the Towson fans spread out in Comcast stood up and got loud. It was awesome, we had so many fans there and to see all the twerp fans losing their minds 😁.... then we proceed to blow it.

the color guy during the CofC game still it super well - playing not to lose vs playing to win. we play not to lose and thus do most of the time.

bay area said it in the other thread: we have alums that want to believe and turn on, go to, the big games. You see it when we play power 5 schools in MBB and FB; when we made the FB championship game, the CAA tournament. People post pictures of their TVs along the lines of 'here we go' and what Towson goes full Towson and chokes. At some point give the alumni base something to cheer about, something to remember, something to talk about new since 1991.

it's my fault. 😬

I saw the 91% chance of winning up by 7 on the ESPN app so I turned the game on which was a huge mistake. Watched the complete and total collapse.  The first time in a very long time I yelled at the tv for the stupid plays we made.  Towson basketball and football have totally desensitized me to the point I don't even watch much anymore. I'll still check scores on my phone and I desperately want us to win, for the school to figure out WTF it wants to be for athletics, I'll still donate, I'll still root for the teams but each time the disappointment kills any passion left just little by little.

Towson Horse said it well on Twitter at the beat down by COFC at home. After all that hype at some point you have to win some of these games. In no order off of the top of my head games for MBB and FB that could have turned the tide and didn't:

• MBB: Wake this year, Clemson last year, Pitt in 2021 Florida in 2019, Maryland in 2016
• FB: the national champion game; when NDSU came to town; Maryland in 2011; LSU in 2012; San Diego State in 2021; pretty much any JMU or UD game over the years.

5 hours ago, tigerjake said:

So I guess we're saying bye to Charleston now that there's an opening in the A10...

exactly what I was thinking. the MAC will be looking at least for another school to make it 14. the A10 will look for more (mostly) private schools that focus on basketball  - they want to be the big east 2.0. Hofstra, Drexel, Northeastern would all love to go to the A10. (also 2/3 are only in the CAA because of football then dropped the sport)  

we continue to get left out because we have no plan.

the CAA is dead - i'd love for us to break away with the other northeast state schools that play FCS and maybe look to move up as a conference to FBS.

Towson
URI - they don't fit with the private school/basketball only A10
Stony Brook
W&M
Albany - upgrade from American East
Maine - upgrade from American East
UNH - upgrade from American East

One to Three of the following
Force Vermont or UNCW to start football to stay relevant 
VMI and maybe the The Citadel  (military rivalry)
Chattanooga
Youngstown State (doubt they leave the MVFC and trash school)

On 12/6/2023 at 1:36 PM, TuTigers2012 said:

We are going to have to agree to disagree, except on the track! 
I’d rather the stadium have a shitty field and need to walk 300 steps more, but have a winning team with fans ..

ohhh I would 100% take the worst stadium in the country if we won championships and had a packed house. 

On 11/21/2023 at 12:56 PM, TuTigers2012 said:

So what are we judging/opining off of?  Location of stadium? Campus?  town?  I was under the assumption it was the overall town/experience.  If so I stand by my statement. 
Our stadium is in the middle of parking lots also and a hospital campus…

Very late to respond with the holidays. Was just my personal list. I think it's pretty clear I favor views of elevation change and historic buildings in the background and walkability vs flat parking lots in the middle of nothing. 

For the most part our lists are not that different and clearly my list isn't tied to actual fan support.

HOWEVER; I will firmly stand by believing Delaware Stadium or the Fargodome are not better than Johnny U.

• Delaware Stadium: is in a field, with zero views of anything other than parking lots and other athletics buildings. some of the parking lots are legit fields. you have to cross the northeast corridor high-speed rail tracks to get to core campus. It's a 28 minute walk to the library which is much closer than most of the rest of core campus.
• Fargodome: is just as close to core campus as Johnny U (using my library landmark it's 18 mins vs 17 to Johnny U) but you are surrounded by 360 degree of flat parking lots and nowhere near downtown if you wanted to walk to a bar before/after the game. it's also a dome built in 1992 with blue and red seats for a school for colors are green and yellow. not to mention the stadium is at the literal end of a runway for the airport. no thank you
• Johnny Unites: yes we have parking lots near the stadium but they are pretty small and have nice trees to break up the sea of asphalt.  I actually think it's more annoying when they get full and you have to park in the union garage but that isn't a huge walk and a full stadium is a great problem to have. the stadium is built into a nice natural bowl, giving it a more enclosed feel and the views of Sheppard Pratt at least are of historic buildings and trees that really shine in fall colors. By no means in Johnny U perfect, cough... track.. cough but of all the things not great about Towson athletics our stadium is not one of them.  

On 11/19/2023 at 7:54 AM, TuTigers2012 said:

Newark. Missoula. Bozeman. Fargo. Williamsburg. Just to name a few lol

Here is my personal list. Biased for places I have been. I enjoy checking out stadiums on road trips so been to a decent number

Newark: Absolutely not, I almost spit out my coffee reading this. the stadium is in the middle of flat parking lots and fields. nowhere near the core campus or downtown. literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Been to a game

Missoula & Bozeman: 1000% both fantastic towns with amazing views of the rockies from the stadiums with huge local support because the Cats/Griz is the only sports in the state. I lived in Bozeman for a winter, driven by both many times. Yes, it's cold but the scenery is worth it

Fargo: No; it's just cold and flat. Same for all the Dakota schools. Driven by

Williamsburg: Yes; but also pretty stuffy people. Same feedback for most of Ivy's. Generally cool, old stadiums but the alumni are the worst.  Been to a game

San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly): Yes, in the heart of SoCal wine country. Rolling hills, palm trees, beaches, sun, warm weather. Driven by

Georgetown: Small but built right into the heart of campus. Went to a lax game

Ogden (Weber State): Right in the mountains, very close to campus. Cool ski town. Driven by

Driven by: UC Davis, Sac State, Western Carolina, Maine, UNH, Youngstown, Howard...we beat all of them 

BONUS Personal FBS ranking:
Awesome: App State, Nebraska, UCLA, Penn State
Fine: Notre Dame, UVA, VT, GT, USC, Minnesota
Booooo: JMU, Maryland, GA State (lol, its a baseball stadium)

19 minutes ago, TheGoldCrotchPiece said:

not bad. they finally got someone who has shopped in this millennium to do merchandising. love the vintage collection and cartoon collections. only small thing is I wish for the vintage stuff they used TSU vs updating to TU for the pre '97 logos.  It's not really vintage, more retro-inspired. I get hating when people call us "Towson State" (mostly on tv...looking at you ESPN) but we don't need to erase history. 

I'd love some kind of super retro inspired: Maryland State Normal School; Maryland State Teachers College; Towson State College. So much cool history the university could use but we really only function like most of the post WW2 schools. 

https://archives.towson.edu/wiki/normal-schools
https://archives.towson.edu/wiki/name-changes

some quick googling - we've had a basketball team for over 100 years (1921-22)!! How did we not celebrate this?!? forgetting covid and all but still could have done something last year to make up for it. So many throwback jersey opportunities.

https://towsontigers.com/sports/2014/8/4/gen_0804140237.aspx?id=88
https://archives.towson.edu/Documents/Detail/first-mens-basketball-team/60531

2 hours ago, mat1992 said:

Store for apparel 

https://x.com/towsontigers/status/1696523097044631791?s=46&t=nScacl1TWT-KyOwj5stBaw

not bad. they finally got someone who has shopped in this millennium to do merchandising. love the vintage collection and cartoon collections. only small thing is I wish for the vintage stuff they used TSU vs updating to TU for the pre '97 logos.  It's not really vintage, more retro-inspired. I get hating when people call us "Towson State" (mostly on tv...looking at you ESPN) but we don't need to erase history. 

I'd love some kind of super retro inspired: Maryland State Normal School; Maryland State Teachers College; Towson State College. So much cool history the university could use but we really only function like most of the post WW2 schools. 

https://archives.towson.edu/wiki/normal-schools
https://archives.towson.edu/wiki/name-changes

On 8/15/2023 at 9:13 PM, Bay Area Tiger said:

Please no Spokane!

Spokane or Salt Lake would be better for me personally coming from SoCal but the West Regional would be ideal. 😁

On 7/14/2023 at 12:07 PM, mat1992 said:

 

I hate the track sooooo much. Should have moved it down the soccer and practice fields when they redid those 

Very much will be pulling for him. If he goes off on national tv you know for sure the announcers will say he was at Towson for 5 years.

nice!

On 4/4/2023 at 10:33 AM, Blazer49 said:

Ok this is great and obviously needs to be done.  I do have a couple issues with the marketing of it however.   

1) gohcollective.com, this GOH marketing push is only months old so when you think GOH not sure how many people are thinking Towson.   

Yes! I've said this on other threads before but I hate the GOH marketing push. It alienates any student or alumni not from the Baltimore area, who can speak without a jar full of marbles in their mouth. 

This feels like a vendor (likely since it "had" to be a third party) or low-level employee wanting to brown nose Dr. E so they are like oh let's name it after the marketing push he thought up a few months into his employment without understanding Towson's (lack of) connection to the local area.

Unfortunately, because they made it the URL and program name as we'll inevitability need to rebrand the NIL program to something more obvious to what the NIL program is once we move off the GOH push which will create more confusion in the long run.  None of this is surprising just classic Towson.

On 3/31/2023 at 12:01 PM, mat1992 said:

I don’t see the comparison with basketball and there’s no reason why you can’t compete to win your league. Those big schools are not in the CAA.

Now, despite complaining about recruiting, it seemed like it has picked up, at least in the last year when they got Weisshaar, Villagomez and Schier. 

Not saying we are going P5 but gotta leave the CAA asap. To what I don't know but Dr. E needs to be working the phones to get us someplace with better-aligned schools. I firmly believe a breakaway league needs to be started with us and UD, W&M, and some convo of the OVC and Missouri Valley football schools. Lax can be an associate member of the Patriot league or even the America East, both are better lax leagues than the CAA.

For football, we are already going up to Maine and for basketball to Charleston. All the way to Chicago is the same distance

I haven't really been following lax at all this year but what happened? are we just bad at lacrosse now? are we young? key injuries? I just feel like we went from going to the final 4 to getting beat by UMBC, gross....just gross.

this is just another reason the death of the CAA is killing us. We went from having Penn State, UMass and Villanova as league games to Hampton, Monmouth and Fairfield. Our schedule is trash so why would top talent play here? No more hopkins, college park on the schedule. Big games people used to tailgate for when I was in school. 

No, just no.

Just leave the CAA already; at this point go to the SoCon or whatever the OVC is going to be call. I now only watch games when we are away out of conference and get them free on ESPN +. I'd rather listen to the free radio stream than pay for Flo.  Give a membership away as a Tiger Club perk or I will continue to never watch Towson sports which is just sad. 

Should this be in the football topic?

Also wow 7 years, did not feel that long at all.

7 hours ago, TigerNation said:

That video is going viral right now smh. I’ve had it sent to me twice already. 

same. even if its 2019 its such a bad look 

For the first time since Mikey W I feel like we have an AD that knows how to use the internet and knows how to build engagement, despite the fact that I hate the GOH campaign at least he tried something.  I have faith Dr Steve will be able to sell the position well to get good candidates. We have a good stadium, new practice fields, a talented area to recruit from, a solid geographic rival (UD). Yes, we likely need an indoor practice facility but if the new coach can start winning and filling the stands that will come.  Mikey W got us our only sellout ever ten years ago - it can be done again with the right pieces in place.

 

1 minute ago, Tiger93 said:

I actually think this is all happening at the right time. I am not as down on Ambrose as many on this board, but the writing for me has probably been on the wall since we lost to Elon and missed the playoffs in Flacco's last year in 2019. All the COVID stuff made it hard to do anything in a fair way, and frankly I don't think we would have been prepared enough to get a good outcome out of a search process. 

I appreciate everything Ambrose has done and while you all want to equate all his success to Terrance West and say Ambrose got lucky,  that was a badass offensive line that West was running behind. Ambrose was a big part of putting that line and team together. I was in Baton Rouge when we actually physically hung with LSU for a half and that was a pretty amazing thing to watch. I also think Rob deserves some credit for getting Flacco here, although I don't think we were nearly as successful at that time as we should have been. I love having an alum as a coach, and I always appreciated that Ambrose shows his love and pride for Towson in a landscape dominated by the Ravens and Terps. 

As for the bad, I always felt like we weren't very good on special teams, had some dumb penalties, bad clock management, have been very hit or miss on QB transfers, didn't capitalize on run to the national title game, and have not developed a system where our players have developed well (although the transfer portal has thrown that out the window). Right now, this program does not have an identity at all (as evidenced with all of the transfers that aren't amount to much colletively) and we need to have one in a league that feels like it is there for the taking if we can just get back on track as a program. 

There were a lot of highs with Rob, but this program is having more bad moments than good ones recently. 

I have always been against the trigger happy fire-the-coach crowd mainly because I didn't think think AD we had in place would do a great job finding a replacement. I feel like now that we gone out and hired what I consider a quality AD I have more confidence that we are in the right space to hire new football coach. 

There is a lot of season left and I will be rooting for Rob to turn this ship around, but I think it is pretty evident a change is needed at this point.

I will second all of this - I've taken a long while to come around to moving on from Rob because of what we had before. He will leave the program in a better place than he found but our expectations have elevated and he has not been able to match them.

The stupid penalties, bad game management, inconsistency in transfers, blow out in recent FBS games, bad playoff L's at home - we can't have those anymore if we are going to try and build a sustainable program.

Considering the schools that have left we should be top 4 of the CAA every year or we are backsliding overall. (same goes for MBB)

4 hours ago, mat1992 said:

There are other issues the last few seasons that people aren’t aware of.

There are always so many "secret" issues around this program. For a couch that is always coming off as 'holier than thou' (benching star players, getting flagged for sideline behavior) you'd think the program would be much more transparent.