C-USA holding tight with additions of WKU, ODU and Charlotte

[Harry]

With all the talk regarding the future landscape of college football and what that may mean for Conference USA, one thing is for certain — the conference survived realignment and is fairly sturdy at the present day.

Beyond that is anyone’s guess, but the stability falls on the shoulders of C-USA commissioner Britton Banowsky and his ability to replace the three most recent departing schools with quality programs that offer the same amount of upside.

“That’s our last piece of the realignment puzzle, which makes me very happy because realignment was a very taxing and challenging thing for all of us,” Banowsky said last week at Conference USA Media Day in Dallas. “It’s nice to put all the pieces together and get in a position to move the conference forward.”

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Thanks to coaches like Texas San-Antonio’s Larry Coker, Rice’s David Bailiff, North Texas’ Dan McCarney, Middle Tennessee’s Rick Stockstill and Marshall’s Doc Holliday, along with some new faces at FAU, UAB and Western Kentucky, the conference is still earning respect.

read more: http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20140730/SPORTS/307300038/C-USA-holding-tight-additions-WKU-ODU-Charlotte

[North Texas Shep]

Mean Green football is a quality product once again. Regardless if we are in the premier conference or even in a top five conference, we are still playing hard and doing what we need to on the field. That is what matters and all we should ask for.

[untjim1995]

I truly believe that CUSA, even as it exists today, is still the best conference we have been a part of for football since the MVC days, maybe even the best of alltime. Is it perfect? Of course not. But being in a conference people have heard of, with teams that people have heard of in Texas and actually can get people to come and watch them are waaayyyyy ahead of anything this place has seen in the last 50 years. Rice, UTEP, La Tech, Southern Miss, and now, even UTSA, are just light years ahead of the SBC, Big West, and the independent days of the 70s and early 80s (not even counting the SLC 1-aa debacle).

I can't even imagine how good it would've been if CUSA still had Tulsa, Tulane, SMU, UH, Memphis. UCF, and East Carolina along with Marshall, USM, La Tech, us, Rice, Utep, UTSA, UAB, and MUTS. That would've been a strong 16 team collection of southern based programs and markets, with a great mix of public and private schools. But egos are just too big with this stuff and once you are stuck too low on the totem pole, it seems you pretty much get stuck there in perpetutiy by those above you, which is understandable to some degree. How great though would it be to have small market teams with solid histories in Marshall, ECU, USM, and La Tech, add in the private schools that get you the NO, Dallas, Houston, and Tulsa markets to some degree, get coverage in Orlando and Nashville from UCF and MUTS, then add in UNT, UH, UTSA, and UTEP to get coverage in every big market in the biggest state in the conference, and then throw in markets and basketball tradtion in Memphis and Birmingham. It makes so much sense that it would never happen.