Ha, like the Big East, I forgot about ECU. Same with AF. totally slipped my mind after a sleepless night before.

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Some 70% of UMass total alumni live in the Boston area. So listing the Springfield market is a bit off. When you have so many alumni from over 5+ decades living in Boston, it's safe to include that market. UMass basketball just as recent as 1998 show that Boston supports UMass sports (when they are relevant ). Sure, you include all of Western MA too.

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I still think Utah St. brings more to the table than F_U. Just because of the need to bridge some of the other area schools and include the SLC market due to the loss of 2 schools from it. Not a ton of big cities in the region and SLC is one of them.

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Compared to most of the other cities & states, the US Census includes a ginormous hunk of Massachusetts included in the Boston Market (now I'm hungry). It's the entire area to the right of Amherst (pink):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_MA_MSA

By your argument, I suppose any 30,000 student university in any rural or suburban area could claim any major city located 2 1/2 hours away. You can't live in a dorm forever and, eventually, you're going to have to move somewhere!


But I did check to see if it was listed under "colleges and universities in metropolitan Boston". Of the 52 institutions included, UMass-Amherst was not one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... tan_Boston

Posting this in each of the conference threads:

About to go on vacation, so I likely won't be writing any longer articles for a week of so. So here's some long winded drivel covering each of the FBS football conferences and what to expect next in Conference Realignment:

http://collegesportsinfo.com/2012/02/17 ... s-up-next/

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In some cases, one needs to use logic, but that logic will be derived from experience. UMass is in a unique situation where the flagship school is so far away from the state capital and largest city in the entire region. But we have TV ratings for basketball (and even FCS football) that tells us that the UMass following in Boston is higher than most Boston based universities. To put it into practical knowledge: of the say, 100 people I was closest with while going to UMass, 90 of them were from the Boston area. Of those 10 not from Boston, only 3 did not move to boston after graduation. Of the 90 from the boston area, all but 2 moved back to the Boston area after graduation.

There is a reason why UMass is playing it's football games at foxboro...because that is where (Boston) all the alumni live. Very few make the drive out to Amherst each Saturday, the plan is that in total, more will drive to Foxboro. The school and Gillete Stadium would not have made the deal unless they had more solid revenue projections that just browsing a wikipedia page and accepting it as an accurate accounting source

that said, the move could always fail. But that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a small minority of UMass alumni that live in the Western MA region compared to Boston.

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I think you're adding subjectivity to a list that was never intended to be subjective. Which is good, since it was meant to generate discussion. But I stand by the data.

Been there, completely understand.

Agree with Quinn's assessment. Best 4 schools to add are Utah State (SLC), North Texas (Dallas), San Jose State (SF Bay area) and Temple (PHL for football). This gives the new merged league a nice clean 20/18 split.

Point is, using just the local market may not be accurate.

App State has a market far larger than just Boone. App State has more of the Charlotte market than Charlotte does, especially in football.

Personally, I would disagree completely.

Boone is a cold-weather rural community along the Tenn/Va. border way up in the Blue Ridge mountains. Charlotte (the city) is an urban city that shares a border with South Carolina. Culturally, geographically --- they're nothing at all alike.

I went to the Charlotte Observer website and clicked on 'college football'. Plenty of articles on Charlotte (the university) but, at a glance, nothing on App State.

Now you can argue, like Quinn, that App State graduates will leave small-town Boone, NC and move somewhere else. So a major city like Charlotte might be among the destinations of ASU alum (along with Greensboro or Asheville or Bristol, TN).

HOWEVER, if I'm the C-USA/MWC commissioner, I would not expect to capture the Charlotte market by inviting a school that's over 100 miles away on lonely mountain roads.

As do I. If you presented a well researched source of UMass alumni data versus a wikipedia DMA list and even better, a list of universities in Boston (when the list is of course going to only include schools physically in a city), I would be swayed. Since as we know, you will find more Penn St. fans in north and western NJ, despite the fact that the school is in a different state).

Or maybe even a alumni density map that disproved what I stated... then I would be the first to side with you. I realize that my sample population might be small and it was based on 14 years ago. But the very fact that the school is upgrading to FBS and playing it's games in Boston should be a very strong fact you should be considering. If the school did not have penetration into the Boston market, why on earth would the school move it's home games there when they could have just upgraded their Amherst stadium to MAC standards (which does not require much funding)? The answer is because for many decades, there has been student body fatigue for attendance: students just don't go into the games. They tailgate and then go home. The information I am presenting might be subjective to you, but they are still facts. As is the fact that your wikipedia link does indeed state that Amherst is in the WeMa/Springfield DMA...which is helpful in gauging Neilson ratings of Everybody Loves Raymond reruns in the area...and your wikipedia link of schools physically in the Boston market.

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Huh.

I think you're way off base, here. You think I'm attacking you or your school and I'm not. My "wikipedia link" data is fine. I totally stand by it. Anyone reading this can click on it and see it for themselves.

The best part of your argument is that UMass is moving to play their games in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. That's definitely an indicator of pursuing Boston.

Honestly, I was just trying to contribute. I'll stop.

Capture it a lot better with App than Charlotte. App is very much a regional university, who's success has made it the university of western North Carolina, Charlotte included

My apologies if you feel I'm attacking you, because I'm certainly not. But this is a business where the information that is important, is not always information one will find in something as simple as wikipedia page of DMA lists and a list of physical addresses of schools. Conference realignment is never that simple. It's about market penetration. If you review your wikipedia information, you will find that University of Houston is in the Houston DMA and that the school is physically located in the confines of the city of Houston. Houston has turned around it's football program. But when it came to SEC expansion into Texas, the SEC took Texas A&M. Why? I mean, if they wanted a school in Houston for all that TV revenue, shouldn't they have chosen UHouston? No, they didn't because UHouston has little market penetration within Houston. Texas a&M, located 2 hours away from Houston..about the same as Umass to Boston... was instead brought in because they have much more market penetration in Houston due to the large TAMU alumni base in Houston.

(And with the Houston example, we also saw the Big 12 pass on them, never really consider them based on multiple reports, instead opting for TCU and WVU).


You'll hear the words "markets" mentioned on the forums often. But it's important to remember that 9 out of 10 times, "market" is being used as a word to represent "market penetration". It's not a secret that I am revealing to people here that Boston, the state capital of Massachusetts is the DMA where the greatest majority of UMass alumni reside. In Western MA the ratings might be higher, but that is simple math: there are so many more people in Boston. It's the same reason why TV executives go crazy for a 2 share Rutgers game in NYC, because that's more people than say a 10 share in small Springfield DMA for an airing.


It is a bit discouraging that you provided a link to a wikipedia page listing schools in Boston without any explanation. 99% of the regular readers of this site know Amherst is not in Boston. There is an entire A10 and MAC thread to see that. That was following a DMA list of Western MA you provided. But despite being given information such as the reality of the region, you say you are standing by your data. And now, when every public comment from UMass (all links provided by freaked and others in the MAC thread) specifically talk about the move to Boston being to better connect with the huge UMass alumni base rather than relying on them driving 2 hours west each saturday, you seem to think that's not the case.

It would be very helpful if you described exactly how you think this DMA data is worthy or helpful to the discussion given the responses about alumni location vs school physical location.

You said you wanted a discussion, yet the responses you've given seem to just go back to your data in that:
1) There are DMA rankings and that if a school only penetrates the DMA that it physically is in
2) A school does not count as having a media presence in a city if on a wikipedia page listing schools in a city, that the school does not appear.

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