BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

Yeah, they're asses, or certainly the majority of their fans are. They also have the second lowest athletic budget in C-USA, above only Southern Miss.

 

The other was Fresno State that eventually got back into the group, but not until 2012. I get the UTEP tradition with the rest of the old WAC schools, but, ugh, they don't fit any more. Even for getting Texas, it's not getting the Texas people want. Basketball history or not. I am unfamiliar with why they weren't included, but that original MW grouping was pretty solid.

 

I think this is kind of off. The MW doesn't seem to get any kind of notoriety and is definitely not in any football hotbeds, but other than a couple of schools having some recent successes the Sun Belt is not close to the MW overall. I'm trying to find computer rankings and failing, the easiest one I found was Massey and the MW is the sixth-ranked conference right now and Sun Belt is eighth and they're not particularly close. If you throw in basketball it is ridiculously not close. There has to be some consideration to the other stuff too.

 

I’m talking football only. The basketball will largely suck, with the exception of ODU, Marshall and maybe Georgia State. But a lot of these more isolated schools the AAC snubbed actually have a regional following the big city commuter schools would die for. And the amount of respect that the MWC gets seems to rise and fall with Boise State, which is in a downturn.

 

Market size and time. The AAC seems enthralled with UNC Charlotte, for example, because this is a long-game play. They figure that the growth of the school and the program will make UNCC valuable over time. I'm not sure that'll happen.

 

Oh, it's easy to see why the AAC picked the teams it did. I was mostly wondering why a school like Louisiana Tech, which isn't a national brand but I think is a respected regional one in several sports, was passed over by the Sun Belt and doesn't seem to be on anyone's lips for expansion. They certainly seem to have more going for them than, say, Louisiana-Monroe or Texas State.
Others have explained the politics behind it, which explains a lot. If you're on the shit list of two in-state legacy members of a conference you suddenly need to join, that's never a good thing.

 

I think it has more to do with being in the west. A program making noise helps, and Boise State has established that name, but the MW is generally pretty good overall and just doesn't get the notice. I don't think San Diego State is any kind of true force this year, but they are undefeated and what does anyone know about them? Maybe that is because of Boise State. Who knows.

 

I actually think that's true for a lot of the teams they got. The Texas schools are in decent markets and in Texas and yay, but will they all of a sudden explode in a watered down AAC as opposed to CUSA or wherever they were?

 

I could see UTSA blossoming. Combination of a big market and surprisingly limited direct competition (NBA doesn’t start til mid-October and people don’t get deeply invested before Christmas.)

 

The Mountain West was conceived because the WAC’s traditional schools — more correctly, their boosters — suddenly realized that the quadrant format of the expanded WAC meant that traditional WAC rivalries were cast aside. I’d have to go back and dig, but I’m pretty sure that Wyoming-Colorado State — those schools’ biggest rivalry by far — was on the verge of being cast aside for several years.

It is a cruel damn world. That said, Texas-El Paso was left behind for reasons already stated, and at that point the legacy of Texas Western was already 30 years into the wind and was not a compelling reason to drag UTEP into the new league when UNLV made more business sense.