BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

There is no viable path forward left as independents for UMass and UConn. They either need to drop to FCS or drop football altogether. Notre Dame at least has the five guaranteed ACC games and name recognition to fill a schedule. With so many super conferences, there simply won't be enough games late in the season to sustain UMass or UConn.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Conference

 

In Army's defense, this is their worst team in a decade or so. The new blocking rules have really messed up their offense.

Not sure where else Tulane can go, if the Big 12 doesn't want them. The reformed Pac-12 makes no geographic sense.

 

Army and Navy can survive as independents, because they're Army and Navy. The schedules have slipped from their heyday, but they don't play too many tomato cans. Army has two games a year built in (Navy, AF), Navy has three (Army, AF, ND). They could play UMass and UConn and fill the other five games from AAC or C-USA teams, and add in a P4 school for good measure. Ken N. and Bob Sutton no longer have jobs because of this stupidity over a conference.

 

I'm well aware of that league and the bloated monster it's become now. There is some precedent for a team to drop and find FCS success (Idaho). There are a lot of teams that are pretty unhappy with what the CAA has morphed into. There's a world where you could have UMass and UConn drop back down and join a splintered CAA that sort of mimics what the old Yankee was, with a few additions -- Albany, Villanova, Monmouth, UNH, URI, Maine, Stony Brook. That's a solid nine-team regional FCS league. Then you'd have Richmond, W&M, Elon, UD, Campbell, Towson, Hampton and NC A&T remaining. But that makes too much sense so it'll never happen.

Of the current CAA, the only one with real aspirations to move up is Delaware. Villanova flirted with it for a bit but thought better of moving up. I really think once Kennesaw State moves into CUSA next year, that might be the last time in a long while that someone makes the move.

 

Not least because the fee to move up is going from $5000 to $5,000,000.

 

Yes, firing Sutton and then joining CUSA was a disaster. Army has perfect football scheduling now, why mess with it?

 

They can’t all be 1988, when Army went 9-2 while playing one school from 1-A with a winning record prior to the Sun Bowl. Four games against 1-AA schools, and arguably all of them were better competition than Northwestern, Rutgers and Vandy.

 

Nova moving up was a fair bit about trying to save the Big East.

 

And in a 70,000-seat stadium that hosted a Super Bowl.

 

It should be $50,000,000.