Going Independent

[BUS]

SOunds good but to schedule good teams during the season gets a lot harder that pre-season kickoff games. The money issue could be handled by expanding the WAC into two 6 team conferences and only going to Hawaii once eveery 4 years.
The academic side of only playing school that match up do not make a hill of beans to me. I want to play more team from this geographical area.

Why don't the prof's get steamed about the MILLIONS lost in the peoplesoft F#$k up.

That a lot more money that athletics spends!

[Guest]

I'm sure Jim Copeland could address this issue better than any of us, but you'll never see him on these boards. Anyway, the WAC is good for SMU. For the moment, (with the exception of Hawaii), travel is limited and cheap for the team. If we were to go independent, scheduling tough opponents could take us all over the country. I dno, just doesn't seem like there is an advantage to going indie. Gaahh I don't even want to go on...

[Charleston Pony]

I agree with BUS that we would be hard pressed to find anyone to play in Oct/Nov. The number of Independents is dwindling fast and it's for that reason. Unless you are Notre Dame, you need a conference affiliation. Navy is being accomodated by a lot of schools & conferences which allows them to remain Indy, but the rest are anxious to hook up with a conference.

I've said all along that the WAC would be wise to expand to 14 teams in order to develop more regional rivalries and to limit long distance travel. The "watered down revenue" arguement used by those who oppose expansion just doesn't fly. What revenue are they concerned about? WAC members get precious little from TV and post season appearances of it's members. I've always suspected the reason many are resisting expansion was that they don't want to jeopardize the conference's I-A status (by adding schools that can't average 15k attendance). Many of the SBC schools who might make good regional competitors for us fall into that category.

I also agree the "academic compatability" issue is not high on the list of reasons why or why not to align with someone athletically. The better compatability test is the relative size of each school's athletic budget.

I'd love to someday be reunited with TCU, Baylor & Houston and to compete with Tulane, Tulsa & Rice...but I'd also like to throe in UNT & La Tech to that mix to keep the public vs. private thing going. That would be a nice 9 school conference in my opinion, but it's not likely to ever happen.

Our goal must be to continue improving so we are more attractive to others in the event of another major shake-up of conferences. I don't doubt that at the very least we are going to see future realignment of the mid-major conferences.