Arkstfan

16 only works at any level if your intent to is to affiliate rather than associate with the other division. The nominal amount of cross-over is not designed to achieve anything other than what is for all intents two seperate leagues except for the rare cross-over and championships and for a joint marketing effort. I don't believe the SEC will go to 16 because key rivalries essential to the conference identity have to end (as happened with WAC16). The only reason it could be contemplated in CUSA is because of the mass apathy about games against the other division.

The variable at that time was if the Sun Belt added one of the teams headed to the WAC, the WAC ceased operation. The ACC had not added Syracuse or Pitt and the rumor mill believed the ACC was done.

If SDSU goes back to the MWC, they have 12 for football and can get to 12 in all-sports merely by calling Hawaii who is already in for football and having to subsidize travel for the Big West. If you look at CUSA, you have the eastern corridor of Marshall, ODU, Charlotte, FIU, FAU. You have UAB who has to be thrilled with Charlotte and ODU but likes USM for football and is looking forward to MTSU for hoops. Then you have Tulsa, UNT, UTSA, Rice, UTEP. Sitting in the gap between the SW group and the eastern group you have USM, La.Tech, and MTSU. If Tulsa goes (and I expect they will if offered) I think you see CUSA seriously consider borrowing a page from Big East in the wake of the Miami, VT, BC raid. Going large to appease the divergent interests while setting the stage for an eventual split. Before they got the call from Big East, ECU was rumored to want to take CUSA to 18 so that football did not play intra-divisional games and could eventually split. When the Alliance was still on track, the plan was for Bankowsky to serve as special assistant to Thompson to finish out his contract and then semi-retire. I wouldn't be even mildly shocked if at some point after Tulsa's departure if CUSA were to go to 16 looking at ASU, ULL, James Madison, Texas State, Appalachian State, Georgia State with eye to splitting in 2019 right around the time Bankowsky would be 59.

Totally understand wanting to align with UTSA, Tulsa, Rice, Tulane and said so when UNT joined, but UTSA was available to be a Sun Belt and UNT didn't want them.

Wrong year. UNT announced May 3, Spring meetings are the week before the Memorial Day Holiday.

The market is inefficient right now outside of the west and midwest because of the belief (hope) that ACC, Big 10, Big XII, SEC are going to lose members (which won't happen to SEC or Big 10) or add members creating an entry point to the elite. SMU's hope that they can land in one of those openings as a route to help say the ACC have access to the DFW market means they don't want UNT who can also offer such access. UNT being in a different "perceived" lower league grants them an advantage. The same story plays out across the Big East footprint. MWC has reached market equilibruim they have no place to go. Pac-12 is the only viable option and in most MWC cases the issues are more academic than athletic. That hope of a place up the ladder drives the decision to forego the benefits of regionalism, creating local rivalries, driving attendance, lowering overhead with reduced travel costs, because the idea isn't to build a maximum value program via ticket sales and regional interest but by attaching to a wealthier host. Of course if you look back to 1998 when the BCS formed, it covered 64 schools. The new BCS of 2014 will cover 65 schools. The probability is there won't be such a spot or if there is one it will be as fleeting as the one Cincinnati and USF enjoyed.

I can understand not liking the expansion choices since of the 8 only two are in your region and one of those is UTSA. At the last Sun Belt spring meeting before the CUSA raid UNT was told if the school were to make the motion to accept one or both of UTSA and Texas State that it would receive unanimous support and during old business, UNT elected to make no motion.

Five years: 7 of 8 rated below Arkansas State and Louisiana (Tech narrowly beats ASU by about the same margin as ASU over ULL) Four lower than WKU.

"Further watering down" is an interesting turn of phrase considering CUSA has added 8 schools for football rated lower in the BCS or Sagarin than Arkansas State. Seven rated lower than Louisiana and six lower than Western Kentucky.

Just under $3.5 million per year per school. Just shows how bad the Big East was looking to screw the basketball schools. They were going to get a good bit less than that under the plan that would have allocated 70% of revenue to football.

My theory Story reputedly comes from UConn so while it might be true of Cincinnati I'm assuming it applies only to UConn. Feel free to add Cincy to any proposition below. 1. UConn does want to align with C7. Four of the C7 have been conference foes since 1979 and five since 1980. (or all for Cincy since 2005). 2. UConn DOES NOT want to align with the MWC. 3. UConn does not think it can go C7 and sell MAC, CUSA or Sun Belt to the fans even though the past two years the top of MAC is comparable to MWC and Big East in football having a similar number of schools in the top half of the country. 4. The timing is no accident. UConn's president did not attend the Big East meeting so it adds an element of doubt. 5. UConn does not want to propose football only for fear of damaging the relationship if this does not work. 6. UConn is just fine with creating doubt and if that doubt leads to a football only offer in Big East to keep them from going MWC then so be it. 7. If it doesn't work, UConn can laugh it off and blame it on some blogger.

Shortly after his position at the school was being evaluated "week to week". He had to have gotten at least three if not four extensions in there during the Sun Belt run.

So Tulsa goes nBE, WKU to CUSA and the beat goes on.

Except there are apparently no guarantees about the name. Some of the reports have said that the Big East bylaws provided that if ALL basketball or ALL football left that while it wasn't a dissolution, the assets of the league were to be divided between the two groups. Assets would include the right to receive exit fees, NCAA payments, office space, and intellectual property such as the league name and logos. If that is true and the C7 want the name I'm sure they will be happy to trade some of the exit fee payments for the name and logos.

They would get to be in a division with Houston, SMU, Memphis. They would be in a league with more basketball cachet which carries more weight there (see sub 18,000 crowd for CUSA title game).

CUSA departee went 2-1 CUSA remainders went 2-0* *subject to change per Tulsa rumors.

I don't think Arkansas State will ever be in a Conference USA that has 10 or more of the current members. We don't fit the model. Even if we did, CUSA is still a continuation of the same wrong thinking plaguing the Big East and CUSA of trying to be a national or multi-regional league with a national oriented revenue stream. Until the thinking lines up with what MWC and MAC are doing, it will always be a mess in the south and east.

Thinking back over Harry's Epistle on realignment which was a great hammer/nail effort. The Gang of Five (particularly Big East) are being driven by trying to do what the Rich 5 do. The problem with that is there is apparently insufficent value to drive a big national contract. Clearly nothing that remotely touches what the Rich 5 have and debatable that it can be significantly greater than CUSA much less MWC. The only hope is that a newer player to the market (NBC Sports, the new Fox) will pay a premium merely to secure content and believes that there are enough national viewers vs any other available content to justify paying extra to lock that content in. This would require an NBCS vs. FoxS bidding war because ESPN will drop out quickly unless they want to pay a premium to keep NBCS or FoxS for getting it. I think ESPN drops out early because they aren't going to over-pay after Big East rejected the big offer. So if you have a Big East that is now in the CUSA/Sun Belt/MAC realm of the nation deal being less about money and more about exposure, how do you drive maximum revenue? With regional TV. Drawing 1% of the national audience on a national channel gets you no premium, but let's say that you can draw the same number of viewers by only being available in 10% of the national market. Now you are drawing 10% of potential households for the network. That makes it more valuable for the network. Look at Fox SW. It's divided into five zones that will carry different pro-content based on the NBA territorial limits but otherwise runs identical content across the zones as long as some black-out restriction or schedule conflict does not arise. The Fox SW coverage area is: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas with all but a sliver of Arkansas (during the NBA season due to territorial limits), parts of the Gulf Coast regions of Mississippi, Alabama and northern Florida (mainly again NBA territorial limits). With a teams in each of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas you've covered virtually the entire Fox SW system. Add a school near the Mississippi gulf coast and one in the far edge of Texas or southern New Mexico and you've covered every area of Fox SW coverage except the Alabama/Florida gulf coast area receiving Hornets coverage on Fox SW. Fox SW covers 10.898% of the nations market. With UTEP, Houston, Rice, SMU, UNT, UTSA, Tulsa, Tulane, ULL, La.Tech, Arkansas State, and Southern Miss you have a league that is present or reasonably strong in markets that make up 7.977% of the national market or 73% of the Fox SW market with areas I consider absent being Oklahoma City, Austin, Waco, Baton Rouge, Tyler, Corpus Christi, Amarillo, Lubbock, Wichita Falls, Abiliene, Laredo, and San Angelo. I would think it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to assemble an over the air syndicated network across a big portion of this area and tap into local advertising dollars.

Maybe more like 24,000 - 26,000 but designed to easily expand. But the problem is stadiums aren't cheap, nor is expanding stadiums if you remain within the design elements. That almost certainly far outweighs any benefit of trying to be fluid with capacity. You have to strike when the funds are available rather than monkeying with perfect economic alignment.

Match-ups matter. For example. If NIU had fallen short of the BCS, the Sun Belt bowl picture would have looked like this Liberty: ASU-Tulsa GoDaddy: MTSU-NIU New Orleans: ULL - ECU Independence: ULM - Ohio Motor Pizza: WKU - Toledo and MAC like this GoDaddy: NIU - MTSU Famous Potato: Kent State - Utah State Independence: Ohio -ULM Motor Pizza: Toledo - WKU Military: Bowling Green - SJSU Motor Pizza Toledo- WKU Likely result? Sun Belt goes 2-3 instead of 2-2 and MAC goes 4-2 instead of 2-5.

A perfect example of the effects of capacity. The Memphis Tigers had a long waiting list for tickets at Mid-South Coliseum (just under 11,000 seats). Good years, bad years the only difference was the length of the waiting list. Then they moved to the Pyramid with 20,000 seats, large enough to accomodate the waiting list. Then some bad years hit and people figured out with no waiting list they didn't have to buy season tickets and could go to the few games they wanted without a season ticket. Attendance fell below what it had been at Mid-South by several thousand. The program improved but the attendance climb took some time. Now they are the slightly smaller FedEx Forum and average about 2,000 below capacity. Arkansas had a similar experience in basketball routinely selling out the roughly 9,800 seat Barnhill, moved to the 19,300 seat Bud Walton. Barnhill was always sold out because it was so hard to get tickets, you held on and hoped for the best in down years. Last year they averaged 11,300 and look to be down quite a bit this year.

Taking it all a step further. The old Mountain States Conference produced current MWC members Colorado State, Utah State, Wyoming and New Mexico. Other members were BYU, Utah, Colorado, Denver and Montana. Basically the core is the old Mountain States minus two that moved to the bigs, an indy, one that dumped football and one that went down a level in football.

So much of realignment is just the slow process of taking the same old conferences and turning them into the same old conferences with new names and logos and the occasional riser added and dog dropped. Every MWC team came out of the WAC. New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming WAC 1962-1998 Colorado State WAC 1968-1998 San Diego State WAC 1978-1998 Hawaii WAC 1979-2011 Air Force 1980-1998 Fresno WAC 1992-2011 UNLV WAC 1996-1998 San Jose State WAC 1996-2012 Nevada WAC 2000-2011 Boise State WAC 2001-2010 Utah State WAC 2005-2012 So basically the 8 that left the WAC to form the MWC have lost two original members, added four of the eight they escaped, lost one of those four, and added three they never thought were worthy of adding when they were in the WAC and basically added two of them and Fresno to plug a hole that ended up not existing. Idaho and NMSU get left in the cold but Idaho would still be in the Big Sky if the WAC raiding the Big West hadn't provided an opportunity to move up and NMSU would still would be in the Sun Belt but for the WAC losing teams that never should have been in the WAC in the first place. Makes Congress look effective and efficient.

always cracks me up when someone uses that comparison. Maybe could make some money letting people spread their ashes or for enough cash bury 'em like Reville.

Do you want cheap players or good players? 11% of MAC rosters come from Florida even though few MAC teams ever play there. You go get the players that fit your need. 13% of Arkansas State's scholarship football players are from Alabama an area we used to never recruit. We used to go cheap and recruit Arkansas, West Tenn, North Miss, North Louisiana, Houston and Dallas. Now we've spread out.