Arkstfan

Membership changing certainly had an impact but that isn't the only thing that changed from when the old deal was signed back when you were in the Sun Belt. Fox. Had contracts with the Pac-10 and Big XII at the time but at the time were limited in the areas Fox could distribute that content. CUSA was the only FBS content they could distribute nationally. That meant if Fox NW had a hole to fill, they could plug in a CUSA game. Today Fox can distribute P12 and B12 nationally. CBSSN. Had no content in FBS in the Eastern and Central time zones. All they had was MWC. CUSA gave them content in a region they lacked. Since then ESPN has been selling excess AAC and MAC content (in the two time zones covering the Midwest, northeast, and south) to CBSSN at less per game than what CBSSN was paying CUSA. The scarcity value that CUSA capitalized on with some well regarded brands (now mostly in AAC) simply no longer exists.

It's not a waiver, its a rule change so it would require approval from the Division I Council (AD's mostly) and Board of Directors (presidents) to change it back. 12 works nicely because it's easy. Two divisions of six, play 5 divisional games, play three crossover and everyone comes to your stadium at least once in four years. 10 you have to either play a 9 game schedule playing everyone or two divisions of 5, play four division games, four crossover skipping one team and are all but assured that the title game will be a rematch. But you get more dollar bang for your buck with 10.

Supposedly the AAC commissioner has said that if they lose one, they will replace, if they lose two, they will be inclined to sit at 10. Remember the CFP formula changed. It's $1 million per school up to 10 instead of 12 as first reported. The extra revenue went into the performance pool. Looking at the public schools in the eastern and central time zone based on total athletic budget who are G5 but not in the AAC. In millions. 1. Old Dominion $43.9 2. Army $41.2 3. UMass $36.5 4. Western Michigan $34.7 5. TXST $34.5 6. Eastern Michigan $33.9 7. Charlotte $33.1 8. Miami (OH) $33.1 9. Buffalo $32.1 10. UAB $31. 8 Now the public's by athletic revenue generated by the department (excluding government, university, and student fees) 1. Army $28.9 2. ODU $15.5 3. UL Lafayette $15.2 4. USM $15.2 5. AState $15.2 6. Marshall $14.9 7. UTSA $13 8. La.Tech $12.5 9. UAB $12.3 10. MTSU $12.2

ODU AD says contract may be $4 million to $6 million and they are budgeting on the assumption it will be $6 million. Also article from Virginia says TV rights were cut after the defections and exit fees were used to supplement it. Based on CUSA tax filings the TV rights were actually cut from $14 million to $10 million. I'm reminded of what happened to the pre-Benson WAC CFA TV deal collapsed, ABC was talking about not even picking up their rights. Big 8 raids the SWC and the WAC goes to 16 and is able to secure a TV deal that would pay the 16 roughly what they had received at 10. Then a few years later the core members no longer like what they have and sit down and create a new league and got a bit more money per team but put the regional schools together (SDSU being the outlier) but culled Hawaii, Fresno, SJSU, TCU, Tulsa, SMU, Rice, UTEP making the WAC map look like a doughnut with a big hole in the middle. MWC members were more interested in playing regional teams and built a dang good brand in the process. Somewhere out there is a CUSA president who no longer sees the value of playing "them" i.e. schools in the other division and wants to shift things around geographically and quit splitting the CFP money 14 ways when the optimal number is 10, though 12 has value in scheduling.

To become I-A (in addition to playing the required schedule) 1. Average 17,000 paid attendance once in four years in a 30,000 seat stadium -OR- 2. Average 17,000 paid attendance over the past four years. To remain I-A Meet one of: 1. Average 17,000 paid attendance once in four years in a 30,000 seat stadium -OR- 2. Average 17,000 paid attendance over the past four years. 3. Average 20,000 home and away attendance over the past four years. 4. Average 20,000 home and away attendance once in the past four years if you had 30,000 seats. 5. Be a member of a conference where more than half of members meet I-A criteria. Problem for UNT (and AState and others) was there was no compliance period. If you did not meet the standards 1-4 to remain I-A at the end of the 1981 season, you were I-AA. No grace period, no time to ramp up. UNT could not avail itself of options 3, 4 or 5 because all that mattered was what happened prior to the end of 1981 when the change was passed. Without looking it up, I seem to recall UNT had a compliant schedule in 1982 and could have moved to Texas Stadium and if arrangements were made to sell sufficient tickets UNT would have been reclassified I-A for the 1983 season. There was no avoiding being I-AA in 1982. Cincinnati did sue and the settlement agreement was that Cincy would remain I-A for 1982 BUT if they didn't meet I-A criteria in 1982 they would be reclassified I-AA in 1983. There was an opportunity to seek a one year waiver at the NCAA convention and numerous schools applied. AState was the only one to get close and that was mainly because Larry Lacewell had a lot of coaching buddies who included his father's best friend, some guy named Paul Bryant from Alabama who campaigned for us.

If you are going to spend the money for a new coach, set your sites higher than Shields.

Our AD played football at AState and our system president grew up in Jonesboro. There is a great deal of passion for the athletic program at the top. A friend went on a football trip with the team and his wife told him he'd need to watch his mouth. Once the game started he was sitting near the Chancellor and AD and quickly realized he didn't need to worry about anything slipping out and having attended a football watch party at the President's house, I learned I didn't have to worry about anything slipping out there either. Volleyball went 16-0 in conference, football 8-0, women's hoops 19-1 and honestly our women's hoops coach is on a flaming hot seat because he's never made the NCAA Tournament. The leadership expects NCAA not runner-up tournaments.

I don't like UALR but I'm very pleased. Last year Georgia State advancing to round of 32 made little impact on the AState fan base. None of the money people cared enough to pony up to send Brady packing (we tried and couldn't raise the money). UALR advancing is going to set off a collective "hell no" among our boosters hopefully accompanied by the ceremonial opening of checkbooks.

I was looking at the Chattanooga coach when AState was still looking. The talk on him is that he thinks he's about to be loaded for bear and is a year maybe two from a P5 job and not looking to move around to a mid-major needing a rebuild.

Well it is easier to be the "winningest" coach when you are allowed 12 years to coach. Other than Happy Mahfouz who guided them from NAIA to the NCAA and then Division I (and was also AD) no one else has coached 12 years there, in fact of the 21 coaches they have had only three served more than 6 years there (Shields and Mahfouz 12 years each, Longstreth 8 years). Shields coached 72 more games at UALR than any other coach. Sort of had to be their winningest coach by default. If you want to measure winngest by percentage of games won Shields was fourth at .519 behind Wimp Sanderson .594, Ron Kestenbaum .620 and Mike Newell .689 In 12 seasons at UALR they reached post-season once 2010-11 with a team that finished 7-9 in the Sun Belt and was 5th in the Western Division in 2011. They then lost the play-in game. Contrast that with Mike Newell who in six years went the NCAA tournament three times (1-3 record including a double OT loss to Valvano and NC State) and NIT twice (3-2 in the NIT). AState fans vividly remember the SBC tournament where UALR knocked off UNT for the title because we remember that we the West Division champs and thought it was our tournament to win until three days before the tournament when Trey Finn blew his knee on a layup in practice. We had handled UALR without much trouble in the two prior meetings then lost by 7 without Finn. That Sun Belt championship game was awful. UNT who finished three back in the west and five back of league best FAU was playing UALR who finished four back in the west and six back of FAU. UNT had tied for 6th best record in the league and UALR had the 8th best. I may be a bit daft but winning the conference tournament by one point over the 6th best team in the league being the highlight of guy's career wouldn't put him high on my hire list. That year the top four seeds in the conference tournament went 1-4.

Did you notice how much better UALR got after getting rid of him?

Nothing has really changed. When the NCAA held the TV deal, the small conferences got a token regional ABC appearance or two every two years. That was too much thus the change to I-A criteria after the 1981 season. Under the CFA deal the Big West and MAC got zip. CUSA leadership had no fricking clue how TV worked after the AAC raid. The market model is bunk. Why would anyone look at markets and guesstimate viewership when there are multiple ways to get real time data about what people are actually watching? The large ad firms subscribe to that data and they aren't falling for some BS line about maybe viewership when they can get actual data. People fail to understand the expiring in June television deal CUSA had was a quirk. First there were different schools involve which everyone understands. Secondly the needs of CBSS and Fox were different than they are today. CBSS needed content and at the time had nothing but MWC but the bulk of college football viewership exists in a band from Texas and Oklahoma heading due east. Exception noted for B1G schools, but CBSS had NOTHING to offer to viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones. That has changed with ESPN selling content to CBSS. Fox at the time had ZERO college football games it could distribute nationally. The Pac-12 and Big XII contracts precluded distribution outside of their region. Not until those two deals were redone could Fox distribute nationally. Now FS1 and FS2 weren't online yet but it still applied to national clearance for Fox regionals and Fox college. CUSA was the first college football they could show nationally. The needs of the networks have changed. As to the bubble bursting, let B1G finish their negotiations before digging the grave of sports media rights. The business remains drawing people willing to pay for the privilege of watching and if you can't do that, it becomes about people just watching to deliver eyeballs for advertisers. I am pretty confident that the bubble for prime brands not only hasn't burst, it hasn't hit potential. In a cord cutting environment selling to the consumer on a subscriber basis has a great deal of potential. Five years ago MLB had 2.2 million online subscribers at $100+ and not offering any local teams, Netflix had around 24 million with most of them DVD subscribers. Netflix just passed 75 million online. Subscription packages are going to be a really big deal. In the UK a single day pass to Sky Sports is $9.90 with their service. Online you can buy two one day passes for $35. That's for a channel offering essentially one significant sport. Just wait for ESPN to offer only a school, or for a bit more only a conference, a bit more a single sport, and for even more all you can eat. Sports fans will pay it. Less than 18 months ago ESPN bought 100% of MAC rights for 13 years because it gives them week night filler, they resell some to CBSS, and the rest fills ESPN3. The folks in Bristol haven't even bothered to scratch the surface in the online space as far as monetizing it. More people watched Mizzou at AState on ESPN3 as watched La.Tech-Rice on FS1. Yeah it was mostly Mizzou fans since the game was at AState but it was part of ESPN3 teaching people to watch ESPN3. Would Fox look at it differently if they were talking to a conference built around the core of the old Fox SW (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, parts of New Mexico and Mississippi) and tossed in a national game or two? Maybe. Then the games would be in a distribution area that would make regional ad sales work. But part of the problem is neither Fox nor CBS is currently positioned to do a lot in the online space the way ESPN is.

UAB and USM are the only charter members left, USM the only charter football member left. FIU and FAU didn't play football when CUSA was chartered. ODU, UTSA, and Charlotte didn't have football when CUSA 2.0 was created. Only five schools have played 10 or more seasons in CUSA. WKU is the newest member joining in 2014 and eight schools have only one more season in CUSA than WKU. Replacing DePaul didn't turn Rice hoops into DePaul and didn't turn MTSU into Memphis. The Southern used to have Alabama and North Carolina as members, WAC used to have Arizona, Arizona State, BYU and Utah. The Valley used to have Kansas and Nebraska. The brand doesn't build schools. The schools build the brand.

Fascinating that the NCAA discovered the assistant was dirty while at Ole Miss and started backtracking his career and landed on the Cajuns. Even though the investigation of his dirty practices started at Ole Miss and thus has been "investigated" longer, the NCAA doesn't have enough information yet to make a ruling on what happened at Ole Miss. All animals are equal, some are more equal than others.

I fully expect Idaho to announce FBS by the May 4th deadline from the Big Sky. They don't have any games after 2016 scheduled with anyone in their student-recruitment area and not many against teams in their athlete recruitment areas. NMSU talk about regret. Ditched Sun Belt full membership for the WAC and what did it gain them? Going further back, ditched the Valley to keep I-A football and went to the Big West. If they drop football or drop to FCS what wasted number of decades when they could have been in the Valley all that time in hoops. When CUSA did the mega-expansion that was the biggest surprise to me. I fully expected CUSA would take UNT and figured IF CUSA were to add two that FIU would be the other. I really thought ECU and USM would balk against purely market driven expansion having seen how poorly it worked for them as programs but thought UNT was in good shape along with FIU because of the interest in playing in Florida and Texas for recruiting. Instead added a school that had never played football, two more that had never played a down of FBS ball. The idea of yelling market, market, market was utterly baffling to me. Showed a horrifying lack of understanding about how television works in the 21st century. Markets have declined in importance since the 1980's. Between the Nielsen metering, the services that provide realtime data about what channel your cable or satellite box is tuned to, to the internal data regarding how many people are streaming online, the old model of we guess about this percentage will watch and there are this many in the market is a dead model. If you aren't so big that a large number of customers will switch providers if you aren't on to drive carriage fees, the game is all about eyeballs. The market talk showed the leadership didn't even understand the game they were playing. It's a new era. More people watched AState and Mizzou on ESPN3 than watch La.Tech and Rice on FS1 or watched eight other ESPNU telecasts (mix of MAC, MWC, AAC, and Sun Belt telecasts). Yet MARKET! Viewership for G5 home games is pretty easy to understand if you start looking at it. Team success and team support (attendance) are generally the best predictors of TV viewership. You can have moderate success and good attendance and draw an audience (ECU) or great success and little attendance (NIU) and post nice numbers. This Houston was pretty much the beast of the G5 in audience, AState and App battling for first in the Sun Belt was one of the better watched ESPNU games this year among G5 telecasts and it had competition from NFL, Big XII and SEC (two teams that draw well, two teams playing fairly well). The ideal conference in this era is either spread out superstars who draw a big home numbers and are contenders for being ranked or lacking that, the ideal is 10 teams with decent support who make up a fairly compact league. AAC as constituted works well. CUSA and Sun Belt not so much, both leagues are way too big geographically for the product value.

1994-2012 Benson lost 17 schools 2002-2015 Bankowsky lost 15. Birds of a feather I suppose. As I stated in the other thread, the CFP formula has changed from $1 million per team up to $12 million to $10 million per league with the other money put in the performance pool. Financially the Sun Belt makes more being at 10 than being at 12 no matter where we finish in the performance pool. The change means the 12 team leagues (MWC, MAC, AAC) make less unless they finish 1 or 2 and CUSA makes less unless the league finishes 1. The Sun Belt had a four year contract with the two schools, they've gone 4-12 in league play the last two years combined so there wasn't any real interest in bothering to extend the contract, Sun Belt loses two of the three worst performers which should bolster the performance money. Sun Belt, like CUSA has seen a power shift to the east so the efforts of Arkansas State and Louisiana Lafayette to get NMSU in as a full member went nowhere.

The interesting thing that came out of this is that the G5 formula has changed. It's no longer $1 million per team up to $12 million plus performance pool money, plus money for an Access appearance. The formula has changed to $10 million per conference, money saved from that added to the performance pool, plus the money for an Access appearance. The economics reward a 10 team league. With the Sun Belt being the only G5 how on earth would that change have been approved? Simple. Putting more in performance pool makes it more profitable to #1 or #2 in the performance pool than to have the larger guaranteed payment. In other words, in most years, AAC and MWC are better off with a smaller guaranteed payment in return for the bigger performance payout. The Sun Belt at 10 (with Coastal coming in) is better off getting $1 million per school guaranteed from the $10 million payment and seeing a larger performance payout even if the league finishes 5th. MAC at 12 is always worse off unless they finish 1 or 2. CUSA at 14 is always worse off unless they finish first. How bad have Idaho and NMSU been? In 2014 Georgia State went 0-8 in the Sun Belt. Georgia State over 2014-2015 combined won more conference games than either Idaho or NMSU did over those two years (also bested ULM). The Sun Belt eliminated two of the three worst performing schools over the past two years which should improve the odds of moving up in the performance pool. As to making Access, it is no more laughable than to think CUSA can make Access. Marshall undefeated spent one week as the Access front-runner trying to hold off a multiple loss Boise State. Using the Massey composite, only one CUSA (WKU) was rated ahead of the top TWO Sun Belt in last year's final numbers, same was true of the BCS composite of six ratings which is provided to the selection committee and is used to distribute the performance money. Whether it is Sun Belt, MAC or CUSA, the path to Access is always going to require that the champion of AAC and champion of MWC have more losses. As to the fate of the two schools. Idaho is already Big Sky for all other sports, they were 1400 miles from the nearest Sun Belt school (NMSU), there are only two independents within 1400 miles (NMSU and BYU) so the likely outcome is Idaho will reclassify FCS for the 2018 season. We will have a clearer idea by May 4th since the Big Sky commissioner has said Idaho needs to notify the league by that date if they intend to play in the Big Sky. NMSU is a tougher call. They have the luxury of home and home deals with New Mexico and UTEP but the reality is they have historically been bad when affiliated with leagues to their east and worse when affiliated with leagues to their west in football. They might survive as an independent long enough to see if there is some realignment breakthrough in the next few years but with the economics changing to favor 10 team leagues CUSA can lose four and likely not feel compelled to replace. MWC can lose two and not feel any urgency. Based on media reports, MWC turned down overtures from UTEP and Rice so if MWC were to be in a position where they felt the need to expand, you have to think MWC calls those two before NMSU. If Big XII adds two AAC, the AAC can sit at 10 or take two CUSA or UMass plus a CUSA or even Army plus UMass. If they take two CUSA its improbable that CUSA would expand, if they took one I suspect with the CFP funding situation and claimed drop in TV revenue that CUSA would tough it out at 13 and privately cross their fingers hope that falling revenue means the UAB situation resolves to get CUSA to 12. So hanging around for realignment is a very very long shot proposition for NMSU. Their AD says an FCS league has called to assess their interest. Rumor mill says Summit has offered membership as well. The WAC is such a cluster now that I would think they are actively seeking to leave. Summit in all sports MVFC for football might not be a horrible option (4 of 10 members are Summit) and they would probably gladly join the Valley all sports were that an option. Seriously? 1994-2012 the WAC lost 17 members on his watch. 2002-2015 Bankowsky lost 15. Let's not rewrite history. WAC pulled apart in large part because the rules favored 12 team leagues. Pac-12 raiding MWC and Big East raiding MWC cost the MWC TCU and Utah and caused BYU to go independent. MWC's desire to get to 12 cost the WAC members. CUSA being raided repeatedly cost the WAC members as CUSA desired to get to 12 (and later to 14). That left Idaho and NMSU without homes. The economics changing to favor 10 (better CFP money, still can do title game) made it so that there was no financial benefit to extending Idaho and NMSU's contract past the 2017 expiration.

SEC, Big 10, and Pac-12 are the only leagues to not be raided. But most of the raids in P5 beyond money made some sense. Nebraska and OU had given up their regular series, Nebraska and Iowa had a heated though infrequently played rivalry. Rutgers as the first football school always felt it belonged in B1G, Maryland has oriented away from the south culturally. TAMU wanted to join SEC back when Arkansas left and had infrequent but interesting rivalry with LSU. Mizzou was sort of the oddity though the fans from south of St Louis to around Springfield and south felt they belonged SEC (just as NW Arkansas felt the call of the Big 8 while eastern Arkansas has always been SEC oriented, in Jonesboro for example go to the country club and you'll see more Ole Miss than Arkansas). If you've ever been to Boulder you totally understand Pac-12 for them. The ACC/quasi-absorption of Big East linked like-minded schools. Really few odd ducks, though WVU to Big XII is a glaring example. The G5 was a series of reactions and compromises and absent MAC booting UMass and the rumored booting of NMSU and Idaho, no one has tried to fix those reaction moves. When CUSA formed, my Dad said, "They sure went through a lot of trouble to re-form the Missouri Valley".

If oil were found on the UNT campus it would naturally happen when oil is $30 a barrel.

If you are asking if CUSA should expand you don't understand the question. People do not watch Ole Miss play Alabama because they are in the SEC. They watch because: 1. They are a fan of one of the two teams. 2. They hate one or both and want to watch the SOB's lose 3. The game is interesting because it impacts the conference race 4. The game is interesting because it impacts the CFP 5. It is more regionally relevant to them than the other games available to watch. I watched few CUSA regular season games last season. UNT vs. Tennessee for a bit and was tuning in and out of USM-Tech, I saw that WKU-Marshall was on but flipped past it and did the same with an ODU game. I watched enough of an FIU game to take a pic of the stands and send it to a friend. I don't give a rip if I ever see Charlotte or ODU play and have little interest in any game involving CUSA East or UTSA. When Marshall looked like an Access contender in 14 I watched a couple of their games. CUSA (like Sun Belt) fails the primary test of a conference. Take the money away, take the bowl deals away, take the conference patch away and call it Conference X and how many stick together. LSU and Alabama want to play each other whether there is money involved or not, they did it back when there was no money. FIU vs. FAU on TV in the Sun Belt didn't get me to watch unless it had some impact on AState and I sure don't care now that they are in CUSA. Before Nebraska was even rumored to join B1G I was on the Nebraska board before an AState game and quickly learned they hated Iowa and Iowa hated them because Iowa fans were trolling the board. The fundamental flaw of it all is my interest in Georgia State is limited to when AState plays them and when their game has an impact on the league race and I doubt anyone here has any different view of FIU or ODU. If you go back and ask "why" about old conference alignments historically conferences reflect economic zones and the transportation of the era. The Big Ten was not just organized around the economic unit of the Great Lakes, but transportation-wise around the railroads. Ohio State was located at railroad hub while the older more established University of Ohio was not. Taking a train from the University of Arkansas to cities in the SEC was very difficult, even much of the Big 8 was hard to reach from there, but it was easy to get to.... Dallas, thus Arkansas was in the SWC not the SEC and not the Big 8. When Arkansas State moved out of the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference (which we were barely in because Jonesboro was nearly impossible to reach from much of Arkansas and rarely played a full schedule) we went indy and played mostly schools in the Midwest that were more accessible by train. The interstate system and larger more reliable buses started changing things. In 1963 the Southland formed with five Texas schools and AState, what changed the dynamic? Bus travel. US 67 was a busy Texas to Illinois route and I-30 was under construction (basically done by 1965) making that the natural direction to travel. Economically, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma are entertwined, Arkansas used to be more oriented economically around St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, now Dallas, Houston are the major players though Memphis and NOLA still matter to the agri industry and Memphis matters to some degree in shipping. What happens in Dallas is rarely news in Nashville or Birmingham but matters a great deal in Little Rock, OKC, and Tulsa. That's the fundamental problem of CUSA and Sun Belt has they stand today, they don't reflect the reality of travel or economics.

Newspaper predicted football would cease to exist because of concussions back in 1905 http://awfulannouncing.com/2013/newspapers-were-warning-against-concussions-in-football-in-1905.html The NCAA exists because there was a need to create a rules framework to make football safer. Let's not even think about the billions, trillions invested by colleges in football since the creation of the sport, look no further than the NFL. You've got a guy getting ready to plow $1.85 billion into a privately funded stadium in Los Angeles. The NFL is more valuable than the NBA and the Clippers the distant second most popular NBA team in LA sold for a billion dollars. The 32 NFL franchises are worth probably $50 billion plus. People with that sort of money at stake aren't going to let football die. If you watched the playoffs Sunday a couple times in each game as a college fan, you probably saw hits and said, "That's an ejection in college." The NFL is taking action but the NCAA is currently more aggressive. New rule now says team doctor or concussion protocol officer is god on whether an injured player is cleared for action. They will tweak the rules, they will modify the equipment but above all they will protect the investment.

You don't have to go to college to play professional basketball, soccer, baseball, volleyball, or turn pro as a skiier, hockey player, golfer, or track athlete. Now some of those, you won't make enough to live on in the US and in the case of basketball you have no choice but go outside the US if you aren't old enough for the NBA draft. Only football players don't have a choice. In any sport other than football, if you don't like what college offers in compensation for your time, don't effin go to college to play your sport, go pro. My cousin is a pipe fitter and was sub on the construction of a major hospital in Jonesboro. Guy who wanted a job there then turned his nose up at the pay and said he could make three times that in North Dakota. My cousin told him, "I'm not stopping you from going." and the guy explained he didn't want to be up there working. My cousin explained he could work in Arkansas for the market rate in Arkansas or he could get the market rate for North Dakota by going to North Dakota. That's basically the conversation for every NCAA athlete who isn't a football player. You can take what the rate is where you are expected to go to class and make progress toward a degree or you can pursue a different route to play your sport. UNT is an educational institution, so UNT has to offer roughly equal opportunities to male and female athletes. The market value of their athletic abilities doesn't get to be a factor in determining if equal opportunities are afforded and as a member of FBS UNT has to offer not less than 16 sports. It doesn't matter whether football could be profitable but for say volleyball, the arena UNT operates in makes volleyball a cost of being FBS. Cowt#rd is an agitator and I'm sure he's tickled people are mad. Fact of the matter is non-high resource schools have performed quite well in post-season vs high resource schools.

I made a prediction back when Big East/AAC went predatory that the G5's in the Eastern and Central time zones would eventually (by eventually I was thinking a decade) would realign into one of two models. MODEL 1. There would be two geographically organized "between" leagues that would be between the P5 and the lower tier which would be MAC and a geographically spread out entry league for newer FBS members and low resource members. In this sense there would be a mostly Eastern time zone league and mostly Central time zone league then there would be MWC with those three leagues doing most of the battling it out for Buster, now Access. MODEL 2. There would be a single East/Central league that would be ahead of the remaining leagues but for MWC with that league and MWC being the clear leaders in the buster/Access battle and there would be two entry leagues that would mostly geographically compact. I believed model 1 would happen if AAC were raided presumably by Big XII, especially if Houston were left out. Model 2 now looks more likely but it lacks an AD or president to take the lead and make it happen (as far as I can tell that person hasn't stepped up). The G5 situation is changing dramatically. With the exception of ULM Sun Belt athletic budgets now are very competitive with CUSA budgets. ULM, La.Tech, and Idaho were the only Sun Belt or CUSA football schools under $20 million in 2013-14. Arkansas State once was nearly $10 million behind USM and should pass USM by several million if not in the next round of released numbers, we will by the time the round after that comes out. Monken was being paid the same as AState's Anderson but AState has a larger assistant budget. That's part of the flattening out that is taking place. The G5 are richer than ever before, but the P5 have grown even richer. The decision by Fox to not follow the ESPN model of buying all the rights will accelerate the flattening. The whole model is changing. We've gone from markets, to carriage fees, and coming next is viewership and whether people are willing to pay to view a subscription feed and how much they will pay for that feed.

Regionalism is the great untapped fountain. Take a hypothetical AState vs. UNT game. Option 1. Telecast on FS1. Option 2. Telecast on Fox SW. Same day, same time slot, the Fox SW telecast will draw at least 75% of the audience of the FS1 telecast unless someone is in position to contend for access and has some national interest. Not quite as valuable for national advertisers but it opens the door to a host of regional advertisers who cannot justify buying ads where many of the viewers are not close to the area. If you are Whataburger getting your ad seen in Chicago and New York or even St. Louis isn't a priority. Bad Boy mowers has more dealers located within 100 miles of Dallas and 100 miles of Little Rock than they have within 100 miles of Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York City combined.

Never asked. They gave me a cheaper deal to have the bare bones UVerse than what I could get for internet and phone, soon as the special ran out canceled it. I was getting TV from Direct at that point. But UVerse internet does get you ESPN3 content.