Television assignments are not complete for Conference USA's football schedule this fall, but you can sense where teams might stand after the league announced its preliminary schedule last week.
More announcements are likely on their way, but some trends within the East Division are interesting.
Middle Tennessee leads the division with 11 assignments (including nonconference road games), with Western Kentucky and Florida Atlantic landing eight.
MTSU has the best returning pitch-catch returning in Brent Stockstill and Richie James. WKU is the two-time champion and will be strong again, and FAU has enough talent to make coach Lane Kiffin's first year interesting.
After those three teams, Old Dominion has seven games assigned. The Monarchs and Hilltoppers will certainly get another game assigned, as they have games at Virginia Tech and Vanderbilt.
Marshall and Florida International have six apiece, with Charlotte dragging at five. The Herd will get an assignment with its Sept. 30 game at Cincinnati, but I see this as a painful consequence of last year's 3-9 collapse.
Whether or not MU receives a few more televised games, it's clear that it must restore the luster that has led to all 12 games airing on some outlet.
n Here's something more appetizing to munch on: I have gotten a peek at Phil Steele's magazine, which has the Herd projected for a three-way tie for second in the East with MTSU and ODU, behind WKU.
He makes this point: In 2013, he predicted the Herd would be the most improved team, and MU's win total doubled from five to 10.
n Here's an addendum to my story Saturday on Marshall's quest, difficult as it is, to purchase land and build a long overdue baseball diamond.
If you've been around Huntington, this saga doesn't surprise you. The fight for a new football stadium dragged on for 25 years or more. Land for the "Superblock" was leveled in 1970, with Pullman Square finally coming to fruition in 2004 or thereabouts.
I dearly love how ACF Industries still owns an empty shell of a plant and refuses to sell out. You have something like that in every city, I guess - that ugly, rotting railroad trestle over the Kanawha River on the West Side wasn't being used when I came to the this area 28 years ago.
I advocate eminent domain and dynamite in both instances.
Anyway, some Herd fans may wonder why MU doesn't just throw up its hands and build at the site of its bare-bones nonconference home, up W.Va. 2 at the YMCA Kennedy Center.
Hey, it could happen. I figure the Huntington YMCA would be more cooperative than ACF.
"That's always an option," said MU athletic director Mike Hamrick. "However, the preference would be to get it as close to campus as possible."
n One of the highlights of a Marshall game week during the Bob Pruett administration was attending the Huntington Quarterback Club luncheon. It was almost mandatory for the three full-time beat writers, and watching Pruett take over a room was something to behold.
One week in 2002, my first year as the Gazette's beat writer, softball coach Shonda Stanton was a guest speaker. In her third year on the job, she fired up a room full of football fans so much, they nearly pulled out their wallets on the spot.
Back then, a West Virginian pretty much couldn't play for Stanton. The 2006 roster, the earliest available online, listed two - pitcher Autumn Mitchell of Shady Spring and outfield Noelle Adams from the Linsly School in Wheeling.
Mitchell pitched two-thirds of an inning and Adams was used mostly as a pinch-runner in 50 games.
The 2017 Herd team had six West Virginians, five who played at least 40 games and helped fashion the program's best record of 42-12. One, Milton's Morgan Zerkle, is a Conference USA player of the year, all-American selection and a U.S. national team member.
This is a small state with little flat land and a late start to building the sport. High school and travel-team coaching is better, and that Hurricane team this was something else.
As to Stanton's role in the sport's improvement here, I'll leave to somebody else to determine, but the correlation is there. After 18 years, she certainly earned her ticket to the Big Ten and Indiana.
n I see where the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission is inviting bids for the state baseball tournament. It's hard to tell if the SSAC is conducting a legitimately competitive bid process, or if the rails have been greased to shift the venue to Morgantown.
Charleston is likely to lose the Mountain East Conference basketball tournament to Huntington, and city officials had better worry about this one. It would be a shame to lose it, because I've seen a great atmosphere at Appalachian Power Park in the few times I have covered the event.
But what APP doesn't have that Morgantown's new park has is a mall within walking distance and hotel rooms to boot, much like Charleston has at the Civic Center.
Beckley has a nice little stadium, but probably too little. Ditto Princeton, which was a good site for the West Virginia Conference back in the day. Bluefield has scenery to die for, but most nearby restaurants are in Virginia.
Yes, yes, I know that isn't always a consideration.
n A final suggestion: A double-elimination state baseball tournament would work nicely if it never rained in West Virginia. Having eight teams would be awesome under my (futile) crusade to reduce the number of classifications from three to two.
Otherwise, leave it as it is. Much like the basketball format, it is fine.
Contact Doug Smock at 304-348-5130 or dougsmock@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @dougsmock and read his blog at http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/dougsmock/.