Sources: Maryland is finalizing an agreement to participate in the 2025 Players Era Festival in Las Vegas.

— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) April 9, 2025

A&M no longer is showing as participating in the NIL tourney in Vegas. That's pretty big!

We loved him more than he loved us, but that's not saying much. He was the one that made that happen though so I don't have hard feelings.

This was the tournament that paid out 1 million in NIL to each team right? Sucks I thought we were locked into it for several years, but must have read release wrong and it was only a one year contract.

It's on the tourney for letting him do that, if he did get us booted.

But someone here may not have wanted us to be in that tourney. IDK. Maybe Buzz called them before he turned in his resignation, telling his buddy A&M is no longer interested, but to invite Maryland when he gets there.

Trying to get the good rate... We may still go anyway, but dayum...

TyperWoods said:

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It's on the tourney for letting him do that, if he did get us booted.

But someone here may not have wanted us to be in that tourney. IDK. Maybe Buzz called them before he turned in his resignation, telling his buddy A&M is no longer interested, but to invite Maryland when he gets there.

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I'll reserve judgment until I get a look at the final roster, but I think it's somewhat likely that we may decide that a watered down non-con sked is the best thing for us.

You can build some momentum in year 1 by having a deceptively good record and beating up on bad teams in the non-conference. It's not going to help you get into the tourney, but we may look at our personnel in a month and it looks like a mid-major roster which would make the tourney unlikely at best.

And at that point we may decide discretion is the better part of valor.

Another consideration, and I don't know what Bucky's philosophy is on this or whether he's really been in a position to even develop a philosophy on it given his background, but it seems to me that a lot of high-paced run and gun type teams like to work out the kinks early in the season vs lesser opponents to kind of get their legs under them and get used to the pace in live action.

Since Oats has been at Alabama their non-con SOS has been (going backward): 3, 3, 1, 7, 26, 13

I don't think we need to necessarily play an absolutely insane non-con like we did this year, but we shoudn't play a completely terrible one either.

bobinator said:

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Since Oats has been at Alabama their non-con SOS has been (going backward): 3, 3, 1, 7, 26, 13

I don't think we need to necessarily play an absolutely insane non-con like we did this year, but we shoudn't play a completely terrible one either.

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i am hoping we start in the softer side of things in year one of bucky ball. learn the system and cut our teeth to build confidence. still need 2-3 games against strong teams to see where we stand but would much rather have 10 easy wins and 3 tough ones than what we faced this year. so more in line with our schedule from 3 years ago.

There is also still a lot of questions on the long-term stability of the tourney.

bobinator said:

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Since Oats has been at Alabama their non-con SOS has been (going backward): 3, 3, 1, 7, 26, 13

I don't think we need to necessarily play an absolutely insane non-con like we did this year, but we shoudn't play a completely terrible one either.

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That's not necessarily going backward: could just be a case of some teams that were thought to be better didn't turn out to be as good.

Number 3 to number 13 isnt a big gap, and there's only one spike up to 26, which again, isn't a big jump up

Those are all still tough non conference schedules

It's not like he went from 3 to 60

Proposition Joe said:

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There is also still a lot of questions on the long-term stability of the tourney. everything involved in college athletics.

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FIFY

I meant it's literally backwards in time, like starting with this year and going back to his first year. My point was that's an uptempo SEC team and they've played incredibly hard schedules every season.

FracAg10 said:

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100% agree.
Lose a Quad 1 game, nbd. You lose to a Quad 4 game, or a couple, and that would be very bad.
Could always steal a Q1 win somewhere in there.

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If you're playing for the tourney, sure. If your roster isn't tourney-capable then you build momentum in year 1 how you can, and one way to do that is by racking up wins and stats in the non conference schedule. Manufacture a winning record, generate some excitement, instead of a season of "character building" with players who don't factor in longterm, and go play in the NIT.

But let's see how the roster comes together first.

Yeah, there's no reason to play as bad of a schedule as our first several under Buzz. We don't necessarily need to go crazy, but I'd at least like to see something in the 100s.

Only issue is this aint the 2016 SEC. You could go undefeated with a non-con schedule in the 300's but if you go 0-18 and get blasted by everyone in the league you're not building any momentum or anything.

At this point, can we just not pay him for his last week of employment? I know that's not a good look and I'm mostly joking here, but he was not only blatantly not working for us, and was actually working against us recruiting guys to his next stop. That's 177k that would be nice to just dump into NIL (I know it's not that simple). The dude just bent us over so egregiously on his way out.

bobinator said:

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I meant it's literally backwards in time, like starting with this year and going back to his first year. My point was that's an uptempo SEC team and they've played incredibly hard schedules every season.

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Oh ok, Yes, I agree! They've played hard schedules even though they are uptempo.

We can do the same

bobinator said:

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Only issue is this aint the 2016 SEC. You could go undefeated with a non-con schedule in the 300's but if you go 0-18 and get blasted by everyone in the league you're not building any momentum or anything.

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I agree

And playing some better teams could build confidence if you can somehow steal a win

bobinator said:

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Only issue is this aint the 2016 SEC. You could go undefeated with a non-con schedule in the 300's but if you go 0-18 and get blasted by everyone in the league you're not building any momentum or anything.

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If you can't win enough SEC games to make the tourney then taking three more L's in the non conference schedule to maybe eke out another W in the SEC isn't doing anything for you. Assess what your personnel is realistically capable of and build momentum however you can.

One thing we know for sure is that our roster isn't going to have many freshmen with potential on it, so if you don't have a capable roster then you're not even building that group up for the following year, because you're going to be looking to upgrade most of them.

Regardless, this is all theoretical until we see the roster. And there's also the question of whether Bucky can realistically assess the capability of his personnel to threaten the tourney given his background. The assistants will help in that regard, but it'll be more of a WAG for him than it will be for most coaches at this level.

But it might? Or maybe you get hot and knock off one of those teams. Who knows.

My point is who cares about "momentum" in December if you've lost it all by March.