fighting muskie wrote:
Perhaps "decimated" wasn't the right word. The conference would be dead in the water so much as the two factions are better off financially by separating than by hanging together. If you take the remaining Catholic basketball schools and infuse them with the best of the A-10 you have an excellent basketball product that would be appealing in a number of big television markets in the Midwest and Upper South.
If you're ESPN, I think you can replace the current Big East inventory by giving the ACC more money and adding the "Big East basketball only remnants with the top half of the A-10 and giving them a nice TV deal" at a lower rate than the Big East was getting. That saves ESPN $$$ and no one will notice you downgraded from Louisville-Cincinnati to Marquette-Xavier.
fighting muskie wrote:
I like your mock up of what it would look like for the most part but I think Richmond, Duquesne, and George Washington's names should be thrown around too.
I think that group would start small.
#1 - Fewer mouths to feed.
You're not going to get a very big pie from ESPN, and the fewer members you have, the bigger your slices are.
If you look at the A-10's currentl slate of ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU games (not counting the ESPN-sponsored tournament games), all but TWO game features: Xavier, Dayton, Butler, Saint Louis, St. Joseph's - or Temple (who's leaving anyway)
That other two games are: VCU vs Wichita State and Richmond vs Kansas. You don't need VCU
AND Richmond. You pick one, and VCU's the hotter name with the Final Four run and Shaka Smart's charisma.
#2 - You don't want to go "Great Midwest" and have 80% of the conference leave 20% behind.
Because then you could have lawsuits (like Dayton vs Cincy, Louisville, Marquette and DePaul. Dayton was guaranteed games vs those four over a 10-year span as part of a settlement when they left the GMW for C-USA).
Assuming UMass gets an all-sports invite from an FBS conference, you'd have 13 A-10 schools left. I picked those six because:
Richmond - Not needed if you take VCU.
Rhode Island - Not needed because you have Providence.
LaSalle - not needed because you have St. Joseph's (to replace the Philly market)
St. Bonaventure - not needed because they're in a tiny market.
Fordham -- not very good; Stony Brook or Hofstra are better (to replace the NYC market. Plus Seton Hall would be against a NYC based, but Long Island based SBU or HU would be a good compromise).
George Washington - George Mason is a hotter name because of their Final Four run in 2006.
Duquesne - Pittsburgh market would be nice, but Duquesne hasn't made the NCAA in a long time and really doesn't move the meter (nor does GW).
So you wait and who emerges as a mid-major power (if anyone). If Richmond dominates the A-10, you wait a couple years and bring in the Spiders with Duquesne to add the Pittsburgh market. And there's always Creighton, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland State, etc out there was well.
No need to go big at the start. With bigger revenue slices per team, that money will get re-invested and make all those programs better, the ESPN exposure will up their recruiting and then they can get bigger as TV negotiations warrant.
fighting muskie wrote:
Similarly, if you take the football faction and add in the best programs and markets from C-USA (lets say ECU, Charlotte, Tulane, Tulsa, and UTSA) you have a similarly attractive product in the Southeastern United States. At this point these schools are better off separating and cordially dividing the Big East's assets than trying to move on in their current arrangement.
The premise of this happening would be ESPN's meddling. If the ACC expands to a 14/18 model, ESPN really doesn't need the Big East except for Louisville, Cincy and Memphis. They have Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana with their Big XII, ACC and SEC deals. The Big East would make moves for Charlotte, UMass, Tulsa and UTSA solely to try and get a TV deal from anyone -- most likely either the NBC or CBS Sports Networks. ECU and Tulane don't move the needle either.