New poster on here, Herd Fan and Marshall alum, and also WVU fan and current student.
As objective as I can be, when looking at the landscape of CFB, I think it is inevitable that the BE will split in the future. The question is to go to 9 or to go to 12. Nine schools can provide round-robin play but will force every BE member to schedule 4 OOC games per year. Which is indeed better than 5, but the one thing hurting the BE here is it can't afford to schedule up all I-AA teams, and it will be hard pressed for every conference member to schedule good (or even bad) I-A teams every year. That is 36 teams just for the BE schools to schedule. And the BE needs to get its SOS up as much as possible, especially in this transition period with the BCS.
Having said all that, I think the BE schools would be wise to pick some OOC games with some of the eastern most C-USA schools that will help the SOS. ECU has been down lately, but they have a great atmosphere, pack the house and provide away trips to NC for recruiting against the ACC. Memphis, Southern Miss and Marshall are also good options for playing good I-A teams that aren't in a BCS conference. UCF would bring another game to Florida.
As for Marshall. They have a new President whose primary goal is to increase the out-of state and out-of-country enrollment by at least 500 new students, and get the total student body up to over 20,000. He is a friend of athletics, and wants to use the FB team to help keep MU's name out there, providing better access to more students. He is just going to use that as a tool to aid in this endevor. The main selling point is going to be increasing the academic diciplines and increasing the Doctoral degrees. The newsest doctoral to come about is in BioMedical sciences, which coincides with the new Biomed science center and new School of Med Level I Cancer center in the community.
The campus is also building a brand new, very large (they have increased the original design by 2 or 3 fold from what I have heard) student rec center, as well as building even more new dorms. There is also a design for increasing the basketball arena by adding and end deck and re-doing the upper decks on bith sides to match the plush revamp from a few years back of the lower bowl. BB will come along. The women are pretty stacked and the men will only benifit from a better schedule and better recruiting. We also have Louisville 2-2 coming into Huntington. One of the best most rocking games I've ever seen there was when Marshall beat #23 Wake in Huntington. It was an awesome atmosphere. Marshall BB used to sell out 10,000 every game back in the late 80's in the Southern Conference even. It will come. And the adjacent building that used to house the student rec BB courts will be getting revamped to house the VB team on a permanent basis with an atmosphere similar to UofL's hopefully, once the new student rec center is built. Also, the women's Tennis team is really ahead of the game. Hopefully there will be a new indoor/outdoor faciltity for them in the future too. Last season the doubles team played against UCLA in the National Championship match.
Football is currently adding new FieldTurf, and a new huge weightroom/player facility (not sure the size but I heard 2x as big as LSU's). That will be connected to the stadium. Next year the new IPF is going in adjacent to that, as well as a brand new Baseball field, and new/revamped softball field. A new soccer stadium is in the works I believe, as the FB team is taking over the current one as its outdoor grass PF after the IPF gets built. Plans are already in the works (design is already in the hands of the pres and AD) and talks are underway for expanding the FB stadium with a double-deck on the away team sideline with brand new skysuites incorporated into that structure. There is a waiting list a mile long of people waiting for skysuites, who pay, every year, just to stay on that list. The stadium must grow in size to accomodate the games with WVU (a major sore spot with some, and understandably so),and with VT, Miami (FL) and Tennnesse (if they don't buy that game out). That may happen whether our stadium seated 70,000 or 15,000, just becasue a teams UT can make a crapload more $$$ with a home game sell out of 105,000 than traveling to any other stadium in America.
Marshall has the game with WVU mapped out now, and from what I have been hearing is setting up a series with Pitt also. Marshall travels very well (even to crap teams like when we went to the directional michigans, boy I'm glad that is over). But especially to "big" games and ones in the south. There are a whole lot of MU alumni and fans in the south. We took 10,000 people to Tennessee and Ohio State. Probably about 8,000-9,000 to Clemson, Georgia, etc. Some teams like Pitt really would benifit from this fan travel. That would be an easy road trip for the northern most fans and fans could be willing to travel for sure to that game. the home attendence has been hurt by a bad season, and by people's apathy for not watching Central Michigan, Kent State and Buffalo get beat 50-0 in the first half anymore. The MAC was draggin MU down. You get better teams in, then the people will show up.
As for the TV market, the Huntington-Charleston market is 62nd in the country with 508,750 population viewers. and you have consider that Marshall also brings in all of Eastern Kentucky and Southern Ohio. The Clarksburg-Weston (Morgantown) is 165 with 109,480 people, but also has a big southern Pa following. (
http://www.nielsenmedia.com/DMAs.html)
So to the point of conference expansion ...
IMO, if the BE goes to 9 teams by adding one, the most likely canidate should be Memphis. They play in a 62,380 seat stadium which they pack (
http://www.collegegridirons.com/cusa/LibertyBowl.htm), bring great BB in and would offset any loss on the BB side of things and bring a great city like Memphis to the conference.
If they go to 12. The next logical choice is ECU. They have great fan support, bring the NC market and would be a good add IMO.
Then I think Marshall is next and IMO, Southern Miss should also get the invite, adding recrutin in Mississippi and creating a North and South divisional format so the BE can hold a champ game in NYC (although it looks as if the new Manhatten stadium is not going to get approved now.)
So it would look like this.
North Division
*UConn
*Syracuse
*Rutgers
*Pitt
*WVU
*East Carolina
South Division
*Cincinnati
*Louisville
*Marshall
*Memphis
*Southern Miss
*USF
ECU and Cinci could be swapped if need be. But everyone would play their 5 divisional games + one primary cross-over game, and the others would be rotated every 2 years. It is the same model used by the ACC.
A championship game could do the BE well, especially when all the other conferences are playing on that Saturday and the BE is not.
Exposure is huge. I like this model in that it makes the BE an EAST-COAST type conference as opposed to a NORTH-EAST conference.
Well, that is enough for now. Thoughts about this?
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I think Marshall Univ. should be the 9th
Temple, Marshall and Navy? Never will happen!
but is having a championship game gonna bring enough bucks in to make it worthwhile. I doubt it.