Arkansas Democrat article from the CUSA board.
Like it is : Mid-level conferences watching out for themselves
Wally Hall
It isn’t a top-secret meeting, but they are not exactly trying to attract attention either.
Next weekend the commissioners of the five football conferences that aren’t in the Bowl Championship Series will meet to discuss their futures.
The Atlantic Coast Conference’s raid on the Big East — which has resulted in a lawsuit — has sent a tremor through college athletics from coast to coast, especially in the smaller conferences such as the Sun Belt, Mid-American, Western Athletic, Conference USA and Mountain West.
If Miami, Boston College and Syracuse jump from the Big East, that league has two choices: auction off the furniture and padlock the door, or lure teams from another league.
The recruiting would be vicious. It would make the old Southwest Conference look like a glee club.
It could go on and on until some league was forced to cease to exist.
One example — Louisville, Cincinnati and Memphis are three schools that would jump to the Big East in a heartbeat. In fact, Memphis has hired a gunslinger just to pull off the deal.
If that happens, Conference USA would immediately look to the Mid-American and Sun Belt for schools that have football and basketball.
We’re not talking a trickle here, but a possible meltdown of a conference.
It could be that Conference USA could implode. There has long been talk DePaul, Marquette and St. Louis would like to start a smaller conference made up only of Jesuit schools.
If that happened, Charlotte, East Carolina, Houston, South Florida, Southern Miss, TCU, Tulane and Alabama-Birmingham would be looking for a home.
All of that is why those five commissioners have agreed to a summit meeting.
They may very well take their 61 schools and divide them up geographically, which would be a smart thing to do economically.
New Mexico State might switch places with Louisiana Tech, for instance.
It never made sense for Tech to jump from the Sun Belt to the WAC anyway.
Those leagues need stability, and sometimes that comes from playing within your own parameters because you can save tens of thousands of dollars by making a two-hour bus ride to an away game instead of flying across the country.
Understand, the six BCS conferences need those five conferences for nonconference Division-I games so certain schools can get bowl eligible. The Rich Six don’t want or need those others leagues folding.
What might be an even better solution would be if the NCAA told everyone to hold their horses and the governing organization made the realignments for all 11 conferences.
No doubt, some would see that as Big Brother interfering, but in this case it is going to take an organization that is at least somewhat objective to pull this off.
Until the SEC expanded with Arkansas and South Carolina, most of the leagues were geographical, dating to the days when players rode trains to games.
Granted, not everyone would be happy with a complete realignment, but the NCAA could look at it and say, "OK, everyone wants a conference championship game and the TV dollars that come with it, then this is what we are going to do."
The NCAA could give the ACC Boston College, Cincinnati and East Carolina.
Slide Iowa State from the Big 12 to the Big Ten, which would then have 12 teams.
Move Arkansas to the Big 12, have Miami move to the SEC along with Louisville (make him smiling Rick Pitino), and South Carolina goes to the Big East, which would also get Notre Dame as a football member.
The Pac-10 continues to do its own thing.
Then the NCAA moves on to the other five conferences and sets them up so that the studentathletes are spending more time in study hall and less time in an airport. That’s some academic reform that would actually help.
Of course, none of that will ever happen. It makes too much sense.
So five commissioners from the mid level will meet next weekend and try to determine a way to keep from having their life sucked out just because the ACC wants more TV money.
This story was published Sunday, June 08, 2003