Miner Rush, a UTEP Miners community

WHEN THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL IN BOLD TYPE FONT..

Jim Tressel has resigned as head coach at Ohio St. Luke Fickell will serve as interim head coach for the 2011 season and a search for a new head coach will commence following the season.

Or perhaps, it would be more appropriate to say that Tressel was "resigned" by the university, according to the Columbus Dispatch who first reported the story.

Naturally, we are most concerned with how this affects the Cornhuskers, right?

1) With the program now officially in disarray status - fired coach, interim coach, impending sanctions, player suspensions, who is the new coach - how does this affect their chances in next year's matchup in Lincoln?

2) Does Bo become a target again?

The name being thrown out the most this morning is Urban Meyer, but we've a year to wait. If NU lights it up in its first tour around the Big 10, does Pelini become an option to come home and fix the Bucks with a decent rebuild job already under his belt at Nebraska?

``It's not going to be Coach Whipple,'' Golden told The Miami Herald on Friday when asked who would be his next offensive coordinator. ``There will be a decision here pretty quickly. The NFL season closes Sunday and there is a lot of interest from people there. We should have our whole staff together in three to four days.''

None of its programs were profitable in the fiscal year ended 2009, according to the school.

Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti said attending bowl games helps him build his football program and neither he nor the conference wants to give them up. Instead, they’ll look more closely at expenses.

"The best-case scenario is the payouts going up," Pernetti said in an interview. "But we also have to focus on keeping our budget tight and constantly look for ways to trim costs."

"We offered one gentleman a position here. However, his father has a terminal illness, and he's gonna go home to New Jersey to be with his father."

Q: What are the more significant costs/investments involved in a move to FBS?
A: Some of the more significant costs/investments involved in a move to FBS would include:
• Improvements to our on-campus football practice/training facilities. The cost of upgrading
practice facilities is preliminarily estimated at $35 million (for physical improvements only).
• Operational costs involved in an FBS move (above our current net expenditures), such as
additional salaries, marketing, and ongoing facility maintenance.
Because of competing institutional priorities, many of these investments would need to be fully funded through private gift support from donors. We are conducting financial analyses as well as a feasibility study to assess the implications of such private gift support–especially in terms of opportunity costs. That is, we are seeking to understand if donor support for football initiatives could preclude support for other initiatives at the university; and if so, how and to what extent.

In a similar vein, the median institutional subsidy for athletics in the FBS rose from around $8 million in 2007-8 to more than $10 million in 2008-9. This reliance on institutional funds has increased as the growth in median revenue generated directly by athletics programs in the FBS — via sources such as ticket sales and media contracts — slowed to nearly 6 percent from 2008 to 2009. This is down significantly from the 17 percent growth in revenue from 2007 to 2008. By comparison, total athletics expenses sped in the other direction, ballooning by nearly 11 percent. This is double the growth in expenses from 2007 to 2008.

From top to bottom, the Big East is as strong as any conference in the country, when you look at the eight teams and how competitive it is each and every week. - Randy Edsall, yesterday to ESPN.

6. Duke.
Awful doesn't begin to describe the enormity of the situation.

The high school stadium. The coaching graveyard. The utter despair.

The state of Florida has more non-BCS programs — Central Florida, Florida Atlantic, Florida International and South Florida — than BCS schools, and three of them went bowling last season. The Sunshine State is just one major program away from being able to form its own conference that is as large, and certainly more competitive, than the Big East.