The Jackal wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 6:23 am
youwouldno wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:07 am
I have a hard time seeing UTC and/or ETSU jumping to a bad basketball conference. It's not clear to me what the upside would be.
Basketball is always a carrot to consider, however the grand scheme for the ASUN is to create a 20 team conference under a different moniker.
The ASUN isn't void of basketball. They probably have more notable recent national success in the NCAA tournament than the SoCon. When Mercer beat Duke it was an ASUN member. Florida Gulf Coast had a nice run to the Sweet 16 a year prior. Liberty won a tournament game a few years after that.
I don't think they are as good as the SoCon in basketball top to bottom, but the conference isn't a black hole or anything.
Well it's one of the weakest basketball conferences in D-I and has been for 25+ years . . . in 2018 it was the weakest non-HBCU conference in D-I. I'm not sure how low a conference would have to go for you to consider it legitimately bad.
In any case, having now read a couple of articles, the actual goal is apparently not to create a 20-team conference - that's just one step along the way. The 20-team conference would exist temporarily as, essentially, a way around NCAA restrictions on new conferences. The rules seem to require that a new conference consist of programs that have already been members of the same conference for a period of time.
In other words, the rules make it easier to split than to create something new. Under this approach, after several years of playing as a 20-team conference, they would then split into two 10-team conferences, each with an NCAA basketball auto-bid. One of the two, apparently known as the "United Athletic Conference," would sponsor FCS football (though not all of its members would - but enough for FCS auto-bid). The ASUN would continue as a non-football conference.
The motivation for the moves vary somewhat. The ASUN has 9 basketball members but 3 play scholarship football (2 FCS, 1 FBS), which is a major source of instability because the minimum number of schools for an auto-bid is 7. So the ASUN is essentially acting as the surrogate mother of a new FCS football conference in the hopes of winding up with a 10-member ASUN with no scholarship football.
The football angle is a little harder to understand. Jacksonville St, EKU, and Central Arkansas are all on the geographic periphery of their existing conferences. But for EKU and UCA, I'm not understanding how the "UAC" footprint would be a guaranteed upgrade - it seems like they could easily be on the periphery of the "UAC" footprint as well. I assume there are other cost-cutting factors at work . . . presumably the "UAC" structure/rules would also save money in other ways.
From a SoCon perspective . . . the question is whether any members would prefer to be in the "UAC" (I guess UNC-G could theoretically be an ASUN target but it doesn't make much sense). The projected "UAC" members at this point would be:
Eastern Kentucky
Jacksonville State
Central Arkansas
North Alabama
Kennesaw State
*Maybe Liberty (as a non-FCS football UAC member)
Only one more would be required for an FCS auto-bid. Samford and Mercer would fit well geographically but not from an overall profile standpoint. It would also be a pretty good geographic fit for UTC, if they want to prioritize FCS football over basketball. I don't see any other realistic targets.
The whole scheme has a ways to go, and could go off the rails very easily.
