Jackson1011 Wrote:And this leads to the larger question...why can Nova and Marquette put good teams on the floor year after year and Depaul and St Johns cannot. I know a lot of us like to make fun of Providence, but at PC actually spent some cash on a coach and fascilities
Jackson
For DePaul, there are two big issues:
(1) Highly Competitive Home Market - Chicago arguably might be the most competitive basketball recruiting market in the country. The entire Big Ten is dominant here, Notre Dame and Marquette are a stone's throw away, and both Duke (Coach K is from Chicago) and Kansas (Bill Self's deep connections from he was the Illinois coach) have direct pipelines to the area. Once upon a time (late '70s/early '80s), DePaul got every top player from the Chicago area. Today, they carry almost no home advantage whatsoever with Chicago kids since there are literally 15-20 BCS conference programs both near and far that recruit here heavily. Marquette, on the other hand, essentially only goes head-to-head with Wisconsin in its backyard, while Villanova is the only power conference school of the Big Five in Philly. Of course, as I'm sure others will argue, there are many markets that are competitive, so that leads to the next point...
(2) Ugly Horrible Horrific Arena in an Ugly Horrible Horrific Location - DePaul's Lincoln Park campus is pound-for-pound one of the best urban campuses that you'll find anywhere - classic brick buildings in an upscale neighborhood with tons of young people, nightlife, theater, shopping, and parks along with Lake Michigan beaches right down the street and easy access to the Loop. Unfortunately, DePaul's basketball team doesn't play anywhere near there - the Blue Demons are up at Allstate Arena in suburban Rosemont 15 miles away from campus and literally 15 yards from the runways at O'Hare. This is one of the big critical sea changes in college basketball recruiting over the past 20 years. It used to be that the average highly recruited city kid from New York or Chicago wanted to play at a city school at an NBA (or NBA-style) arena like MSG. Since many of these kids lived at home, schools with lots of commuter students such as St. John's and DePaul were the beneficiaries. Now, the average highly recruited kid wants to live on-campus away from home and play in an on-campus arena where the stands are filled with students and fans. (In contrast, Marquette and Villanova are not nearly as commuter-heavy. Marquette plays in an NBA arena, but it's also only located about a mile from campus, so it's relatively easy to access for students.) Unfortunately for DePaul, there's essentially no opportunity to ever build an on-campus arena because Lincoln Park is completely developed and even if there were an open plot of land, it would be so expensive that buying it would likely be cost-prohibitive considering that it would be a space that would be used on 15-20 times per year (not to mention if the very wealthy residents of the neighborhood would allow even more traffic and congestion in a place where people sell separate titles to parking spaces for $40,000-50,000 a piece).
Now, that's not to say that DePaul doesn't add something vitally important to the Big East: it's FREAKIN' CHICAGO. St. John's also adds something vitally important to the Big East: it's FREAKIN' NEW YORK CITY. These schools may not deliver those cities in the same manner that they used to, but they meet the threshold of at least having a daily beat reporter assigned to them by the local papers and always have their highlights on the evening news (note that this is significant in markets such as NYC and Chicago that have more sports available to cover than there are inches in the newspaper).
Maybe this doesn't matter to the pure basketball fan that just wants to watch the best match-ups possible, but it does matter A LOT to the people at ESPN and CBS where one Chicago market is worth 7 times as much as the Memphis market. It would take almost every household in the Memphis market to tune into a single Memphis game to achieve the same number of viewers as a very pedestrian 1.0 rating in Chicago (essentially what the Blackhawks get in terms of ratings and they are by far the lowest-rated sports team in the market). The differences in New York are even more pronounced. Not only that, the average household income in New York and Chicago is measurably higher than any of the main southern markets, so there is a greater sheer number of viewers and such viewers are more valuable from an advertising perspective. (Advertisers don't just pay for ratings - they pay a premium for the "right" type of viewers that fit their demographic parameters.) The same can be said for the other northeastern markets such as DC and Philly.
As someone else has stated repeatedly on some other threads (Krocker?), you need to take the long-term view when constructing a conference. Too often, the short-term fan wants to kick out the program that has had a few bad years recently and add on a program that has had a couple a few years without looking at all of the long-term factors.
In fact, I think expansion should be looked with a contrarian question: if a program were to absolutely suck on the court or the field, would it still add value to the league in a significant fashion (such as delivering a major market, a great fan base, national name recognition, history, etc.)? If the answer is yes, then it's probably a good long-term addition to the league. If the answer is no and it's main attraction is that the team got hot in the NCAA Tournament last year, then it's probably a very bad long-term addition. (Note that I'm not saying this about Memphis at all, which has a pretty good long-term track record. It's more of a response to some wacky suggestions that I've seen on various threads, such as Richmond, George Mason, and Davidson.) Unless you're a UNC or Duke-type program, wins and losses invariably come and go, so the factors OFF the court or field need to be weighed as much or more than how a team is playing in a particular year.
On that front, the value of the Catholic schools taken as a whole (as opposed to any one individual school) is readily apparent - they allow the Big East to sell itself as the conference that covers NYC, Chicago, Philly, and DC. That's simply a whole lot easier and sexy to sell than being the conference of Louisville, Morgantown, and Cincinnati (this isn't personal - the Big East itself trumpets its major markets in its own press releases as opposed to the other schools, so the conference obviously finds a significant amount of value in that). Remember always that sports revenue is NOT about the hardcore fans that take the time to write on message boards. It's all about the CASUAL fan that doesn't really have an allegiance to a team. New York and Chicago have lots of those casual fans (not just because of population, but there also isn't a southern culture where EVERYONE has a favorite college team even if he or she didn't go to school there), so the TV networks and advertisers pay to reach him.
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Forget SH and ND, let's dump DePaul and add Memphis!!!
