Idaho football finds itself in a precarious position. After being left out in the cold after the WAC disintegrated, the Vandals found a football-only home in the Sun Belt Conference.
The University of Idaho gave the world’s saddest PowerPoint presentation about its football team
Awww ... Idaho
But that may not be a permanent home either. Nothing is guaranteed after 2017. Since the conference is adding Coastal Carolina, it could decide to kick out Idaho and fellow football-only member New Mexico State. The fact that Idaho is thousands of miles from most Sun Belt institutions and that it has struggled at football further hurt its case.
In order to convince other Sun Belt members that Idaho should remain in the conference, university president Chuck Staben gave a 19-page PowerPoint presentation. (You can read the entire presentation, which was obtained by the Idaho Statesman, here.)
Unfortunately, some of these slides are really depressing.
Take this one, which seeks to remind other schools that Idaho football has been bad, but not worse than lots of other Sun Belt schools:
Or this, which argues that thanks to the stability of Sun Belt membership, Idaho has improved from abject disaster to ... well, merely bad.
Or this one, which points out that while Idaho wasn’t great at winning, it was great at not getting penalized very often or getting tackled for losses.
This presentation does make some solid points. By virtually every metric, Idaho has not been the worst team in the Sun Belt, and it does have historical ties to the conference. And for all the complaints about Idaho causing travel burdens, multiple other Sun Belt teams have scheduled non-conference games out West as well.
But it’s hard to look at some of these slides and just not feel bad for Idaho. “We’re not the worst!” isn’t the most uplifting argument to make.
Per the Idaho Statesman, the Sun Belt will meet again on March 10 to give a final verdict on Idaho and New Mexico State’s conference membership.
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