Your thoughts on the Gateway COnference?

[SMEnetwork]

We want you to take part in all of our interactive polls. There is a new poll posted about what could be one of the biggest toss up conferences this season. Who do you feel will win the Gateway Conference in 2007? We want to hear what you think.

Will it be Youngstown, Northern Iowa, Southern Illinois, or Illinois St? It can go either way.

Vote at www.smebroadcasting.com

Send in your comments. There is also time to be put into our June prize drawing. All comments will be on our Fans Voice page in our Interactive section.

 

[5thAvenueVik]

Having attended Southern Illinois University for a year, I thought the Gateway Conference was quite a class act. Their institutions have fine character and performance. North Dakota State and South Dakota State made a fine choice in joining them. By doing so, they established a northern-most line of I-AA/FCS demarcation between West and Midwest.

The Gateway made a wise choice in offering NDSU and SDSU. They will become stronger as a result and NDSU can offer up perennial challenge to Montana, Montana State and Eastern Washington of the "big sky".

Their conference name is based on the Gateway Arch of St. Louis. I believe this is where their central headquarters are located. They have a good name that each one of their constituent members can rally around.

Not so in the "big sky" conference where the Montana schools clearly enjoy a stacked-deck advantage having the entire conference named in their state's honor, after their state's nickname. Intermountain schools are accepting of the name but the two coastal schools (Portland St and Sac St) are rethinking their options in terms of greener pastures. Perhaps membership in the Big West Conference for these two schools will at last open the door for perenially-rejected Southern Utah to finally gain acceptance to the "big sky" conference.

My guess, however, is the conference would offer D-II Central Washington first---just to spite Southern Utah, who deserves membership based on its geography and sustained level of performance. That's the kind of conference leadership it tends to have---parochially provincial and utterly self-absorbed.

SEE a clear example of this "big sky" sickness mentality personified in the form of the interloping and ubiquitous forum poster known as OneBigSkyFan, most often found harassing posters on the Portland State Viking forum at OregonLive.com/forums/Vikings. You wiould be amazed at his relentless, unbalanced pursuit of the Viking faithful in his one-man campaign to negatively infect the spirit of the fans whose forum it is.

But this is the nature of the beast. The name "big sky" conference is selfishly-conceived, unjustly applied and needs to be changed for the fairness benefit of the conference's non-Montana constituents.

 

[WiViking]

I like your use of the word infect. He jumps on every forward step the program makes, and tries to make it look like a negative. He seems to think PSU is somehow like MSU-connected to Montana's fate.