There's a method to TCU's madness

MeanGreen61 · July 7, 2005

Houston Chronicle's take on TCU's move to the MWC

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/s...college/3255853

July 7, 2005, 1:25AM

There's a method to TCU's madness

Eschewing rivals to join far-flung Mountain West serves to advance Frogs' ambitions

By TERRANCE HARRIS

ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE

Eight Conference USA schools are closer to TCU than the nearest one in the Mountain West. The approximate distances from TCU to schools in each league:

C-USA Miles Mountain West Miles

SMU 40 New Mexico 629

Houston 266 Air Force 720

Rice 266 Colorado State 932

Tulsa 310 Wyoming 1,014

Memphis 496 UNLV 1,195

Southern Miss. 525 BYU 1,203

Tulane 555 Utah 1,251

UTEP 609 San Diego State 1,321

Eric Hyman has little use for dispelling rumors.

But the former TCU athletic director wants it clear the decision to move the Horned Frogs to their fourth conference in a decade was not about SMU or the desire not be realigned with their Metroplex partner.

Instead, the jump from Conference USA to the Mountain West Conference had everything to do with the private school's desire to be a player on the national stage. The Horned Frogs officially made the leap Friday, the same day Hyman was breaking in his new office as athletic director at South Carolina.

"Not one time did we make a decision based on what SMU was doing," said Hyman, who spent nearly eight years as athletic director at TCU. "It had nothing to do with SMU.

"If you go back to the goals and objectives of what TCU laid out several years ago, they wanted to be a nationally prominent program. What we tried to do is build a road map to try to achieve those objectives."

Goodbye, C-USA

In the minds of the decision makers at TCU, that meant changing conferences for a third time since the Southwest Conference disbanded in 1996. That meant forging a partnership with eight universities that met secretly and decided to break away from TCU and the rest of the Western Athletic Conference in 1998.

That ultimately meant exiting C-USA, a league whose realignment would have placed TCU and its fans within driving distance of natural rivalries such as SMU, Rice, Houston, Tulsa and even Tulane in the new West Division.

Now, the Frogs will have to wait for rivalries to be born at a distance against New Mexico, BYU, Utah, UNLV, San Diego State, Colorado State, Wyoming and Air Force.

It's a scenario that has some puzzled.

"We wish the TCU people the best moving forward, though we are still scratching our heads a little bit over their decision making," C-USA commissioner Britton Bankowsky said. "But nevertheless we respect it."

Officials at TCU aren't looking back. Instead they are looking to the future and the possibility that one day the Mountain West will become a player in the exclusive club known as the Bowl Championship Series.

The league realized a mild breakthrough after last season when undefeated Utah became the first non-BCS school to earn a berth into a lucrative BCS game — the Fiesta Bowl — in January. Before then, BCS leagues Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10, ACC, SEC and Big East along with Notre Dame had kept the invites to their four bowls to themselves.

TCU had its chance to be the groundbreaker on the non-BCS front in 2003, but an undefeated season and BCS hopes were derailed by a late-season loss to C-USA foe Southern Mississipi. The Frogs finished the campaign 11-2 after a loss to Boise State in the Fort Worth Bowl.

"This (the move to the Mountain West) places us with a conference that has made unbelievable progress in a short period of time," said new TCU athletic director Danny Morrison, who has been on the job for nearly three weeks after leaving his post as commissioner of the Southern Conference. "It has outstanding schools, both athletically and academically, and it's well-positioned nationally for a BCS berth.

"That is a credit to the institutions that make up the Mountain West Conference."

Doing the math

Still, there is no getting around how far TCU seems willing to go to achieve its goal of being a player in big-time college athletics. In addition to the absence of any natural rivalries, the Frogs likely will incur significant cost increases in travel to MWC schools for its 19 teams.

New Mexico will be the closest member school at an estimated distance of 629 miles from the TCU campus in Fort Worth, while the swings to schools such as San Diego State, Utah, BYU, UNLV and Wyoming will all exceed 1,000 miles.

Hyman said he hired an accountant to do the math on how much more travel would cost in the MWC than the old single-division version of C-USA, which could include trips to places such as South Florida, Charlotte, Louisville and East Carolina. The increased expense came to less than $200,000 annually.

"You would be surprised when you look at it," Hyman said. "The difference really wasn't that significant."

And MWC commissioner Craig Thompson vows that what difference there is should be more than made up for through increased revenues generated by conference members. This past year, Thompson said his league had a record-base distribution of $2.6 million to each member school.

TCU, which has had 10 wins or more in three of the last four seasons, opens fertile Texas recruiting ground for MWC schools and also brings in the lucrative Dallas-Fort Worth television market. MWC is wasting little time taking advantage, putting the Horned Frogs-Utah matchup in front of an ESPN viewing audience in their inaugural MWC game Sept. 15.

"Hopefully, we are going to be generating new revenues that are going to effectively eat up any travel cost," Thompson said. "It is going to be more expensive because there is no getting in a 15-passenger van and drive over here."

'West-oriented'

As far as the eroding of rivalries, Hyman simply shrugs off that notion.

"I'm not trying to be disrespectful to any schools, but nobody had ever heard of some of the schools like East Carolina and South Florida," Hyman said.

"But everybody is familiar with Utah, BYU and Air Force and all of the others."

He says that school officials studied home attendance records the past several years and found little difference when the MWC schools came to visit versus the C-USA programs and the Frogs' so-called natural rivals, including SMU.

"The mindset (at TCU) is West-oriented," Hyman said. "If you look at some of the attendance (of some C-USA opponents), it would surprise you. It's not what you thought it would be, and I've got 20 years of factual numbers.

"I know when we go to SMU, we sell a ton of tickets. But when they come to our place, they don't sell as much. It's great for the Metroplex and great visibility for both schools, so we always want to continue to play them."

And that TCU will do, keeping SMU on the schedule consistently for the next several years, with this season an exception.

Not like OU vs. UT

All those close to the situation seem to agree that TCU's shifts, while perhaps unorthodox, do not appear to have anything to do with distancing TCU from SMU. Both entered the WAC in 1996, and both were expected to jump to C-USA as a pair, but SMU did not receive the invitation.

"I don't sense that their decision was a function of them not wanting to be in the same configuration as a particular university," Banowsky said.

While Hyman certainly concurs, he also suggests that the rivalry isn't as heated as some might have been led to believe.

"It's a great game, but it's not like a rivalry like Texas versus Texas A&M or Texas versus Oklahoma," Hyman said. "I would have loved to see more passion in that rivalry. It's passionate but not the extent you would like to have."

terrance.harris@chron.com