(07-22-2019 10:32 PM)UofToledoFans Wrote: Kent seems the least prominent in football and most likely to cut football to focus on their other very good sports teams. I could def see Kent going the way of a Wichita State and funding the heck out of basketball, golf, baseball etc.
Except there is no Basketball conference that would invite Kent that Kent would rather be in than the MAC, and no Baseball conference that would invite Kent that Kent would rather be in than the MAC. MAC basketball finally gets to the position of having a NIT at-large bid and a reasonably decent Tourney seed and
now you think you can shoo us off?
Luckily the MAC Presidents don't think the same way.
It may be that Kent needs to look at the talent they can get and get a system coach that can work with it to take their regular MAC opposition out of their comfort zone ... as well as being outside of what the Big Ten schools are looking for.
But be that as it may, a university with 29,000 students at the main campus and 39,000 students system wide is not going to be forced out of FBS against its will anytime soon, and being forced out of FBS is what it would take place for Kent State to drop football this close to the century mark.
Back to the topic, one style of opening would be because the AAC go raided and needed to reload. None of the MAC schools are on their short list, but if their short list all said "no", and they were forced to work their way down the list, if it's in the foreseeable future, it's a school with a relatively strong football pedigree in a location that is less bad than similar alternatives. I have no idea who that would be.
The other style of opening is because a school drops out of FBS. Most of the MAC schools are in FBS because they fought tooth and nail to stay in FBS back when FBS and FCS were 1-A and 1-AA and succeeded. And now, after most of the schools who were the most attractive to play in FCS back in the 80s and 90s have moved up to FBS, they aren't about to get pushed down if they can help it. Akron killed off it's baseball program to protect its football budget during its last round of budget cuts (even if baseball supporters have worked out a way to get a facsimile of a Division I baseball program going again) ... it wouldn't be the only MAC school willing to make the same decision if it came down to it.
So it would have to be an unusually severe budget crisis, probably a combination of a period of bad fiscal management coming to roost just as a economic or state fiscal crisis hits to make things worst. And predicting something like that is even harder than predicting which MAC school will be seen as the least ugly of the wallflowers if the American is getting desperate.
All up, if it happens, either JMU{+} or play as an 11 University conference. Heck, we spent 20 years trying to work out from under imbalanced divisions, with any luck before it comes to that divisionless top-two CCG's for under 12 school conferences will be the rule and the MAC can just go to divisionless play with some locked schools and some schools two years out of four.
{+ Or NDSU if we can convince them to move to the Milwaukee area.}
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Who would you add if the MAC lost a school?
