BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

I could see the ACC schools wanting UAB to join some kind of academic research consortium, but I can’t see them invited to play sportsball together. And I can the presidents of Duke, UNC and Virginia impaling themselves with an ice pick before admitting Tiger High to anything.

 

Tiger High is on par with University 6, no?

 

Louisville is a definite outlier: 176 in US News; but Memphis is 258 (out of 388 National Universities ranked). But UL has more than double the endowment.

BTW, WVU is 242 and has an endowment $100M less than Louisville.

 

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There are a lot or rumors about conference expansion. We can devise simple tests to determine how many are at least somewhat credible and those that are outlandish. In this case we can apply the West Virginia test. West Virginia has really, really wanted to join the ACC since it was founded. Even though West Virginia football draws about 55,000 a game and the institution is the dominant school in the state it has not been able to get in. WVU has failed to get in even when the ACC debased itself and admitted Louisville,

There is no reason to believe anything has changed now. And if the ACC is not going to let WVU in then they certainly not going to admit schools with smaller attendance numbers and smaller media contracts. So schools like Marshall and UAB are not getting into the ACC. .

 

Louisville at least has a medical school to its name.

 

The MWC is basically a creation of ex-WAC schools. The idea was to create was new league and not invite the weaker members of the WAC' So UTEP was left behind.

But the MWC admitted San Jose State as a school, even though their athletic programs are hapless and generate zero interest. The reason SJSU got admitted was because it was in the San Francisco television market.. The Dallas television market is bigger than the Bay area television market. And SMU generates a lot more interest in Dallas than SJSU does in the Bay Area. So I would think the MWC would admit SMU.

 

Certain schools I’ll never understand the suckage of, UTEP is one of them. Everything I’ve heard about El Paso is that it’s a fun, beautiful town. Then you have this neat stadium cut into into mountains. I’m not saying they should be national playoffs level but I would think they should at least be able to get to Texas Tech/Houston level.

 

To be fair, they were 10-3 in '88.

UTEP Miners Football Record By Year | College Football at Sports-Reference.com

 

Well, you'd think thst could happen once or twice a decade, not once in 33 years. Although they did have one stretch from 2000-2005 in which they went 8-4 in three out of six seasons.

 

Academically and culturally it's a decent fit. Gene Bartow took UAB to the Elite Eight when the program he started was just four years old (!) and beat Ralph Sampson's Virginia. It was a damn good hoops school back in the old Sun Belt/Great Midwest days. UAB athletics since has done nothing that makes me believe that the ACC would offer an invite. Football has been pretty good (not great, but solid) in the years since The Return in 2017, but it is no great shakes outside of the G5.

I think that one's a complete pipe dream. AAC is a reasonable move to target and work toward. ACC, not so much. I didn't post this because I thought it was viable.

 

LOL. Academics and college football. LOL.

 

One of the biggest incentives for moving up to a better conference is gaining access to their media contract. C-USA's is a fire in a dumpster full of rotting garbage, but it wouldn't move with the school. There is no question in my mind that having ACC (or AAC, for that matter, but not to the same degree) schools on the schedule would cause a huge increase in season and single ticket sales. C-USA teams, with a couple of exceptions, don't much move the needle for football, and in basketball even less so.