(05-21-2010 07:47 AM)Burn the Horse Wrote:  i wonder if South Alabama will be asked to play Alabama or Auburn before Troy.

I don't think Alabama or Auburn will ever willingly play USA, Troy, or UAB. I think the only way we'd ever see them play is some sort of bowl matchup or some scheduling issue beyond their control.

(05-21-2010 07:51 AM)SkullyMaroo Wrote:  

(05-21-2010 07:47 AM)Burn the Horse Wrote:  i wonder if South Alabama will be asked to play Alabama or Auburn before Troy.

I don't think Alabama or Auburn will ever willingly play USA, Troy, or UAB. I think the only way we'd ever see them play is some sort of bowl matchup or some scheduling issue beyond their control.

...or legislation...

(05-20-2010 05:01 PM)Hilltopper2K Wrote:  There in lies a problem. For CUSA, market size would be a big factor. For the Sunbelt I don't think it should be. Bowling Green, Monroe, Jonesboro, Troy, and to a lesser extent Mobile, Lafayette, and Murfreesboro are relatively small college towns. Yes some of those are part of larger metro areas, but they don't really "deliver" those larger markets. So any program we add for market size will not significantly change our TV viewership or TV revenue potential. Unless we threw out several small market teams and replaced them all with large market teams that is not going to change and as such I don't think that market size is very relevant to our choice.

I don't think there is a problem here. C-USA is becoming a peer of ours more and more every year (see football and baseball). Also, if the balance of payments ever start to shift more in our favor (non-AQ conferences) we will begin to look more and more like your MWC and BEast (esp. if their heavier hitters are poached).

Small time thinking does not get us to where we want to be. We now have a good mix of small and big size markets within the Belt. As we become more competitive/relevant in the college football world our university mix will become more important; hence the poll.

p.s. think about how far we've come in just 7 years. Imagine if one of our schools pulls a Boise. I think if that happened we'd have done a lot more with it than the WAC.

all it takes is one or two teams to really step up. Troy and Middle will probably be the ones to do that. the WAC was a nobody before Boise State and Fresno State started killing giants. The Belt may follow suit.

(05-21-2010 09:02 AM)FIUFan Wrote:  I don't think there is a problem here. C-USA is becoming a peer of ours more and more every year (see football and baseball). Also, if the balance of payments ever start to shift more in our favor (non-AQ conferences) we will begin to look more and more like your MWC and BEast (esp. if their heavier hitters are poached).

The problem as I see it is that if you weight market size too much then you might pick teams that are not good choices on the false hope that they will improve our tv contracts or revenue.


Here's a hypothetical for you.

Let's say we expanded to 16 teams in such a way that maximized our market size. In this completely unrealistic hypothetical UALR and Denver both add football (large market size) and then we add UTSA, Georgia State, Charlotte and Texas State.

That is probably the best case scenario for market size. It would be difficult for us to add any more market size than that. Do the existing Sunbelt teams get any more nationally televised games? Do the existing Sunbelt teams get better TV contracts with that scenario? Do the existing Sunbelt teams get one more dime of revenue?

If the answers to those questions are no then even in the maximum case of marketsize expansion we did not really gain much. And if the maximum scenario doesn't help us, I don't see how adding one or two teams will help us.

If we really need to expand (we probably don't) I think we would be better served to make decisions on the quality of the programs themselves instead of the surroundings.