(05-05-2018 11:35 AM)McKinney Wrote: I really think that UCONN at this point is better off making the AAC work. However if the Big East is really that important to them, maybe the MAC would reconsider the UMass football-only deal that was in place if UCONN came in for Temple's former spot? I can't see any benefit for the MAC here taking on two poor programs, but if it happened I think UCONN & UMass would be fools not to take the offer.
The benefit would be similar to the benefit of the Temple / UMass arrangement, but even stronger. It gets eight OOC BBall games per year that are excellent gets from the MAC's perspective, and especially every school being able to host one of those schools once every three years. It gets the Eastern Exposure that many of the Eastern Division schools would value. It gets rid of the locked Bowling Green / Toledo game and improves the number of trips to Ohio for Western division schools.
It only really works with a pair of northeastern schools, both with respectable (from a MAC perspective) BBall programs ... with a single FB-only affiliate with only two home and two away OOC BBall games, and without the divisional realignment, it is not attractive, and the awkwardness of FB scheduling for an even and an odd number of divisional members, hence without two full divisional round robins, makes it even less attractive. But UCOnn/UMass would be even more valuable than Temple/UMass ... and if they were both starting the same year, the MAC might even get to actually experience those benefits, which never happened with the way that Temple left the same year that UMass was able to join.
(05-05-2018 02:23 PM)Kittonhead Wrote: There is also Army sitting out there as independent.
Mid-"American" Conference
We've got the name for it.
The name is all that the MAC has going for it, and CUSA has an equally fitting name, so it's not even a win in that column, just a draw for first place.
Even assuming Army changes its mind and starts looking for a conference home, the biggest problem for the MAC is that among the three conferences where it seems like Army could expect to have a bowl game route without expecting the cadets on the line to be beaten up too badly (the MAC, CUSA and the Sunbelt), the MAC is the most compact, which is all things considered a positive for the MAC ... but a big strike against it from Army's perspective, since it makes it the hardest to put together something like a national schedule.