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Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
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Yosef Himself Offline
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Post: #21
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-18-2019 10:50 PM)CarlSmithCenter Wrote:  
(03-18-2019 06:00 PM)Yosef Himself Wrote:  Belmont would give them 3 in Tennessee

UNCW would add a 3rd in NC

Lips/Radord a 2nd in VA.

W&M or Richmond would be the crown jewel though. They each probably have an unspoken open invitation, even though they have FB, which would make their round robin conference play go away, they would be the only schools that the rest of the conference would vote in to do such..

Lipscomb, like Belmont, is in Nashville so adding the former wouldn’t increase the number of Virginia schools, nor do I think the SoCon would want both.

Add Belmont and UNC-Asheville and you get two additional non football schools in desirable tourist cities that are close to schools in the league already, UNCA to ETSU, Wofford, Furman and WCU would be super convenient and Belmont to Chattanooga, ETSU, Samford would also be easy.

Yeh I was thinking Longwood which is in Virginie. UNCA is very close to WCU, ETSU and Furman and I don't see them getting anywhere close to an invite from the SoCon. Belmont and Murray or Belmont and UNCW would be good for the Con.
03-19-2019 06:25 AM
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solohawks Offline
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Post: #22
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
A Western poster commented on our board about how the SoCon was content at 9/10 and schools are not interested in issuing a waiver for non football schools to join
03-19-2019 10:02 AM
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TDenverFan Online
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Post: #23
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-19-2019 01:12 AM)DawgNBama Wrote:  
(03-18-2019 08:35 PM)TDenverFan Wrote:  Yeah, we'd definitely rather be in the CAA than the SoCon

Even if JMU left??? SoCon might look pretty good then.

If not, here are a couple of other ideas:

See if they can pry Murray St. away from the OVC before the Horizon or the MVC has a chance to; or

Roll the dice with Norfolk State. It gets the SoCon into Virginia, albeit with an HBCU. The Big South pulled it off with Hampton, so it’s not without precedent though.

Nah. CAA works for us and W&M's vision. Despite being located in the south, our draw is almost all northern students. Outside of Tidewater/Richmond, our big alumni bases and where we recruit students from are DC (CAA tourney/Towson), Philly (Drexel), NYC (Hofstra) and Boston (Northeastern). We've built up rivalries with a lot of the schools, not just JMU. Delaware, Hofstra, UNCW, Villanova and Richmond for football, etc. Schools like WCU or ETSU won't move the needle for us, VMI is the only Socon school that's somewhat a rivalry, and we stopped playing them in football after beating them 25 times in a row.
03-19-2019 10:03 AM
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ken d Online
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Post: #24
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
I have a hard time seeing how adding more basketball schools is going to significantly change the number of tourney bids the SoCon would get. If it doesn't, then splitting the pie more ways sounds like a losing proposition.
03-19-2019 02:15 PM
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DavidSt Offline
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Post: #25
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-19-2019 02:15 PM)ken d Wrote:  I have a hard time seeing how adding more basketball schools is going to significantly change the number of tourney bids the SoCon would get. If it doesn't, then splitting the pie more ways sounds like a losing proposition.

OVC is a 2bid league this year with 3 teams 20+ wins. Take those 3 from OVC and you could steal a bid away from OVC.

Murray State
Belmont
Jacksonville State
03-19-2019 11:25 PM
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ken d Online
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Post: #26
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-19-2019 11:25 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  
(03-19-2019 02:15 PM)ken d Wrote:  I have a hard time seeing how adding more basketball schools is going to significantly change the number of tourney bids the SoCon would get. If it doesn't, then splitting the pie more ways sounds like a losing proposition.

OVC is a 2bid league this year with 3 teams 20+ wins. Take those 3 from OVC and you could steal a bid away from OVC.

Murray State
Belmont
Jacksonville State

The operative words being "this year". Over time, maybe Belmont and Murray State just keep the current SoCon teams from getting the autobid without getting an at-large bid because they beat each other.

The value of a tourney bid isn't so great that just occasionally getting an at-large bid offsets several years of remaining a one bid league with more mouths to feed. If adding a school doesn't make sense for any reason other than hunting at-large bids it's probably not a good idea.
03-21-2019 09:25 PM
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Mister Consistency Offline
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Post: #27
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
I've rolled this idea around before... if you're looking to push for multiple bids, you need consistently good programs. Belmont is the natural choice, having just secured an at-large in the OVC, but I'm not sure what incentive they have to move unless they just want to be in a league with other private schools, which the SoCon has in spades (4 plus a pair of military colleges that tend to vote like privates). Certainly having a regular presence in Nashville would be good for the league - lots of alumni functions and fundraising opportunities that can't be had in, oh, say, Cullowhee.

But the other schools they might look to add - Lipscomb, UNCA, Radford, Winthrop - they're not going anywhere. The A10 or CAA are not calling on those schools anytime soon. There's no need to rush in with a school that is one coaching change away from falling off a cliff and becoming dead weight in a 12-team SoCon. Look at what happened to UNCA when McDevitt took the MTSU job. That could happen to any and all of the schools already in the league, too, which means they would have that much more difficult of a path back to the NCAA Tournament AND are distributing the proceeds of any success over more schools if the SoCon expanded.

Unless Belmont wants to join and you need a 12th school for logistics, I'd stand pat as the SoCon and ride this out, because none of the top four teams from this year have any kind of permanence to their success. They are all vulnerable to the coaching carousel at all times, and most of the schools they would add in an expansion scenario aren't going to turn the SoCon into the new A10.
(This post was last modified: 03-22-2019 11:42 AM by Mister Consistency.)
03-22-2019 11:41 AM
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H.U.S.T.L.E. Offline
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Post: #28
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-22-2019 11:41 AM)Mister Consistency Wrote:  I've rolled this idea around before... if you're looking to push for multiple bids, you need consistently good programs. Belmont is the natural choice, having just secured an at-large in the OVC, but I'm not sure what incentive they have to move unless they just want to be in a league with other private schools, which the SoCon has in spades (4 plus a pair of military colleges that tend to vote like privates). Certainly having a regular presence in Nashville would be good for the league - lots of alumni functions and fundraising opportunities that can't be had in, oh, say, Cullowhee.

But the other schools they might look to add - Lipscomb, UNCA, Radford, Winthrop - they're not going anywhere. The A10 or CAA are not calling on those schools anytime soon. There's no need to rush in with a school that is one coaching change away from falling off a cliff and becoming dead weight in a 12-team SoCon. Look at what happened to UNCA when McDevitt took the MTSU job. That could happen to any and all of the schools already in the league, too, which means they would have that much more difficult of a path back to the NCAA Tournament AND are distributing the proceeds of any success over more schools if the SoCon expanded.

Unless Belmont wants to join and you need a 12th school for logistics, I'd stand pat as the SoCon and ride this out, because none of the top four teams from this year have any kind of permanence to their success. They are all vulnerable to the coaching carousel at all times, and most of the schools they would add in an expansion scenario aren't going to turn the SoCon into the new A10.

I'm not sure how much Belmont really would want to move anyway. They've proven they can get an at-large bid in the OVC, and they're generally going to be favored to win the conference every year.

On top of that, they're in the very center of the OVC footprint and that allows them to save tremendously on travel costs. They had always targeted the OVC as the goal as they've moved up in the D1 ranks.

To move to the Southern Conference would put them as the western-most team in the conference. Chattanooga is the closest drive at 2 hours, then the next closest is Samford at 3 hours. ETSU is almost 5 hours away in the same state.

In the OVC, they have 5 opponents within a 3 hour drive, and every school in the conference is under 5 hours from Nashville. In the SoCon, there's only 3 schools within a 5 hour drive.
03-25-2019 01:16 PM
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Yosef Himself Offline
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Post: #29
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
Belmont is already an associate member for Soccer (was hoping they'd join the Sun Belt in soccer) in the SoCon. If Belmont administration is under the impression that the OVC will usually be a 1 bid league while their addition to the SoCon would solidify a 2nd bid every year then they possibly could make the move. Fighting it out for 2 bids is better than one.
03-26-2019 09:06 AM
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H.U.S.T.L.E. Offline
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Post: #30
RE: Should the SoCon expand for basketball?
(03-26-2019 09:06 AM)Yosef Himself Wrote:  Belmont is already an associate member for Soccer (was hoping they'd join the Sun Belt in soccer) in the SoCon. If Belmont administration is under the impression that the OVC will usually be a 1 bid league while their addition to the SoCon would solidify a 2nd bid every year then they possibly could make the move. Fighting it out for 2 bids is better than one.

Associate memberships are usually lesser indicators of conference interest and more marriages of convenience in many ways. In Belmont's case, it's only for men's soccer and given their women's team plays in the OVC, I bet they'd rather be there with their men's team too if given a choice to save on travel costs.

Their choice to be associate members of the SoCon in men's soccer makes more sense than the Sun Belt anyway given the profiles of the schools who play soccer in the SoCon - mostly smaller private schools as opposed to the larger public universities of the Sun Belt with soccer.

Plus, I'm not sure that there's anything to suggest the SoCon will consistently be the stronger league in the future. It's really hard for mid-major conferences to be multi-bid leagues, and it usually goes in cycles. It seems like the SoCon has tried its best to invest in its basketball programs, but it's still going to difficult to maintain momentum (though Wofford seems poised to be good again next year with only a couple key contributors graduating).

This is a good read on the SoCon's investment in basketball:

https://www.postandcourier.com/sports/ho...1c7c0.html
03-26-2019 09:54 AM
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