SMU Professor Says Move To Big East Will Hurt SMU...

[PlummMeanGreen]

I do believe that the Big East splitting up to basketball-only schools will happen sooner rather than later. Those that play football in the NE (Uconn and Rutgers) will be going to either the Big Ten or the ACC. Louisville, USF, and Cincinnati will have a home somewhere in the ACC or Big 12. Boise State and SDSU will go back to the MWC.

The others that remain will probably be forced to start a new conference. To me, that will be terrible for CUSA/UNT. Those old CUSA teams (Tulane, Tulsa, USM, ECU, Marshall, and UAB) would love to get into a league with SMU, UH, Memphis, UCF, Temple, and Navy. Basically, we would have to replace those schools with SBC schools or FCS schools to get back up again. The only saving grace would be continuing to have Texas and Louisiana schools in our conference. UTEP, UTSA, Rice, La Tech, and maybe ULL and Texas State would still be conference mates in the same division, hopefully. I don't think Rice will get any consideration to move up because of UH, so that would help the other Texas/LA schools to keep a presence in Houston. But, make no mistake about it, I don't want this split to occur on basketball/football programs for the Big East. It would hurt CUSA, as it currently stands, very badly. I want that conglomeration to remain a league, but see some of the members leave becasue the AQ goes away. Boise is the best team over there, but they should be out west and that will happen, just like it will for SDSU.

Rutgers and UConn will get gobbled up sooner rather than later, and Louisville wants out badly now. But, hopefully, with the Big12 and the ACC signing new deals, those schools will have to stay in the Big East for a few more years. Then, maybe things work out to where we finally start winning and getting strong attendance numbers in both money sports, which leads to us finally leap-frogging SMU in terms of value to a conference. SMUs history and cash get a lot of media coverage to this day--even ESPN used the Death Penalty thing to give SMU a free commercial on how the program has "risen" from the ashes in that 30 for 30 episode. But their attendance for games against opponents that Texans don't care much about has really been awful for as long as ours has. Without a connection to local fans and with small alumni and student bodies, SMUs ceiling is almost being reached right now. TCU has them blocked for anything bigger than their current conference setup. They cannot compete with the "potential" that we have because of our alumni base, student body, and Denton's size--granted UNT has done relatively nothing to gain on that potential, but it exists. If we were to win a conference championship or two in the next 5 seasons, and it led to a ranking and attendance that averaged around 25k, we would absolutely leap-frog them. June Jones is trying to get out of there right now--he knows that the long-term viability at SMU is not something that is sustainable. Even having winning seasons there recently have produced very little in attendance. Now that we won't have to play SBC teams every year, after this season, lets see how attendance starts to look. Playing a game against Southern Mississippi or East Carolina is a lot different from playing Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee. If we can do what we want to do in CUSA, the rest of this stuff will take care of itself, both media-wise and in conference affiliation.

Darn good post.

You have obviously been an astute follower of the the local and regional college football scene for awhile for you to understand to what extent some schools will go to create yet another pecking order. The development of a pecking order seems more important than developing good fan support for some.

Yes, we need to win as a ranked football program this time around and get closer to our stadium capacity every game and may have to do some very un'North Texas culture things to make that happen. I defer to the Einstein quote below in my signature.

GMG!