With Blaudschun reporting today that negotiations to sell the name are underway, and a lot of NBE posters worried that they'll get shafted out of the name and that UConn, UC and USF will split the money among themselves, I'd like to go back to the deal I suggested.

1. C7 gets the name, leaves the entire Realignment Fund. Half of that is somewhere between $20 and $35M eventually.
2. C7 takes 70% of the tournament credits, UConn, UC and USF get the rest.
(The entry agreements say that the incoming schools don't get to share tournament credits earned before they entered.)

Now the deal between the holdovers and the incoming members.
3. All entry fees are waived.
4. Exit fee changes to $20M with six months or less notice, $10M with 6-18 months, zero with 18 months notice. (That way Louisville and Rutgers are still on the hook.)
5. The Realignment Fund will pay out $500,000 per school per year to all members.

(02-27-2013 07:29 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  With Blaudschun reporting today that negotiations to sell the name are underway, and a lot of NBE posters worried that they'll get shafted out of the name and that UConn, UC and USF will split the money among themselves, I'd like to go back to the deal I suggested.

1. C7 gets the name, leaves the entire Realignment Fund. Half of that is somewhere between $20 and $35M eventually.
2. C7 takes 70% of the tournament credits, UConn, UC and USF get the rest.
(The entry agreements say that the incoming schools don't get to share tournament credits earned before they entered.)

Now the deal between the holdovers and the incoming members.
3. All entry fees are waived.
4. Exit fee changes to $20M with six months or less notice, $10M with 6-18 months, zero with 18 months notice. (That way Louisville and Rutgers are still on the hook.)
5. The Realignment Fund will pay out $500,000 per school per year to all members.

Who are you offering the deal to??? Will they be able to accept or deny on behalf of the football schools/C7?

Seriously though, if it were that easy...don't you think the would have just signed that off by now?

(02-27-2013 08:02 PM)apex_pirate Wrote:  

(02-27-2013 07:29 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  With Blaudschun reporting today that negotiations to sell the name are underway, and a lot of NBE posters worried that they'll get shafted out of the name and that UConn, UC and USF will split the money among themselves, I'd like to go back to the deal I suggested.

1. C7 gets the name, leaves the entire Realignment Fund. Half of that is somewhere between $20 and $35M eventually.
2. C7 takes 70% of the tournament credits, UConn, UC and USF get the rest.
(The entry agreements say that the incoming schools don't get to share tournament credits earned before they entered.)

Now the deal between the holdovers and the incoming members.
3. All entry fees are waived.
4. Exit fee changes to $20M with six months or less notice, $10M with 6-18 months, zero with 18 months notice. (That way Louisville and Rutgers are still on the hook.)
5. The Realignment Fund will pay out $500,000 per school per year to all members.

Who are you offering the deal to???

You, representing ECU. Do you like the deal for ECU?

--No entry fees, and a slice of the Realignment Fund money (and the all-sports invite, of course)
--C7 takes the name and GTFOut of the way
--UConn, UC get a break on exit fees come the day

Quote: Will they be able to accept or deny on behalf of the football schools/C7?

Of course not. We're idiots on a message board. We can't accept or deny anything.

Quote:Seriously though, if it were that easy...don't you think the would have just signed that off by now?

I suspect that the meeting Friday is to finalize and announce a deal a lot like what I'm outlining here.

Actually my math on Louisville and Rutgers is off--if they leave for 2013, that's 7 months notice, if they stay for 2013-14, that's 19 months. So that part would have to be fixed--possibly a handshake deal now, finalized after Rutgers and Louisville settle up.

(02-27-2013 09:35 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  You've got this wrong, Melky. We at least rubber-stamped Tulane.

(02-27-2013 08:26 AM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  There are 10 votes in the Big East this year - 3 football schools and 7 non-football schools. We know that the vote was not a unanimous vote.

The BIG EAST Board of Directors, by a unanimous vote of its Presidents, extended the invitation to Tulane, which will begin competing in the BIG EAST in the 2014-15 academic year. - See more at: http://www.bigeast.org/tabid/435/article...rence.aspx

Quote: All it would have taken to approve Tulane would have been the 3 football schools + 3 of the 7 non-football schools, resulting in a 6-4 vote to approve.

Invitations need a 3/4 majority, so you needed 8 schools to approve.

It's possible that the "unanimous vote" was a fiction, where the real vote is taken verbally, but if it's going to pass, everyone votes "yes" to make it look good on the record. Much like Villanova and USF officially making the motions to sponsor Temple and UCF for membership.

It's also possible that the basketball schools had agreed to support whoever Aresco chose, with the exception of ECU. (ECU had been discussed in the past as a Big East candidate and was a known quantity--the C7 presidents knew they didn't want ECU.)

It's also possible that the C-7 presidents know Tulane's academics, prestige, research levels, endowment plus they know Tulane President Scott Cowen through years of working on NCAA issues and that got the presidents on board.

It's also possible that a C-7 school or two were ready to split last fall, and another school or two had already decided that if Louisville or UConn left too, they were ready to split. So those schools would be willing to give the football schools whoever they wanted. Someone was holding out, otherwise ECU would have been waved through, too.

Then the reality of Tulane's athletics sank in, the estimates the C-7 were getting from their consultants were certainly no worse than what they'd get in the hybrid league.

Quote:This set up the odd dynamic of a majority of the non-football schools voting against Tulane, but Tulane getting approval despite the non-football schools having a majority. By all reports those opposed were vehement in their opposition.

What reports? I remember a report that the AD's were taken by surprise, but that's not opposition before-the-fact.

Quote:The football side went forward anyway. So, what was left?

What was left was a majority of the Catholic schools being so opposed to Tulane that they couldn't tolerate playing in a conference in which the basketball side had been so badly watered down by one move rafter another. The vehement opposition, which again was the majority of the Catholic schools, said we're out of here.

I don't think we had a source on C7 presidents opposing Tulane.

We have Marquette AD Buzz Williams coming out immediately and saying that Tulane is a stupid addition and that he (and the other AD's) weren't consulted. And we have an avalanche of articles about Tulane joining the Big East noting how, despite Tulane's awesomeness, their athletic programs are terrible.

But that doesn't indicate that any of the C7 presidents said "We don't want Tulane."

Quote:That siad to the minority of the Catholic schools who had voted for Tulane: "We're moving on one way or another. You can join us or stay behind, your choice, but we're leaving." That really left those 3 Catholic schools with little choice but to stay with the Catholic majority.

Aside from everything else, the prenup says that if the IA Schools or Non-IA Schools vote to split, it doesn't have to be unanimous. But if there is a split, it applies to all the schools in that category. (Individual schools would have the right to defect, but that would be complicated, the mirror image of UConn to the C7). I'd also point out that usually, something as important doesn't happen without a supermajority. For a long time, Georgetown was one of the biggest proponents of the hybrid. If Georgetown is the holdout, then it's hard to see the rest of the C-7 charging ahead no matter what the documents say.

Quote:The most telling indictment here is that someone didn't do their homework and see this coming.

This is true. On the other hand, assuming that the hybrid would continue, who do you add instead? I don't think Tulsa or UMass or UTSA would have been more welcomed than Tulane. Or do you just not replace Louisville or Rutgers in basketball, and add ECU as football-only and stay at 15 for basketball, and 12 for football, with 8 full FBS members and 4 football-onlies?

Quote:At some point leadership has to step back and reassess in the face of such strong opposition. Even when leadership has the votes, the minority still has options and if they exercise their options the consequences can be devastating as was the case here.

This was a leadership failure BOTH of Aresco and of the school presidents.

Quote:Back to the original question. The "basketball" schools did NOT add Tulane. To make that claim is revisionist history.

The record shows that we did. The record may be deceptive, but it's what we have right now. The record also indicates that the initiative for Tulane was taken by Aresco and UCF, but that doesn't change the fact that the Big EAst press release says that the vote was unanimous.

We could have blocked Tulane, just like we blocked ECU.

John, thank you for your corrections to my post. I apologize for not having all of the information. When a knowledgeable poster like you contributes to the conversation, I appreciate being educated.

Sorry that it's taken me a full day to respond but it's been busy here.

I don't have time to search for a link right now, but I certainly have read articles indicating that members of the C7 were vehemently opposed to Tulane. I remember one on Bleacher Report n particular.

I agree with your speculation that the unanimous vote was a fiction. It would be standard practice for many boards to make a public vote unanimous while the private vote received the bare minimum that was necessary

What we did read repeatedly was anger from member of the C7 that they were not consulted on this decision. I am currently on a board where the chair forced a vote on a very important decision without a requested discussion with the membership of new information because he knew that he had the votes.

A scenario similar to this is what likely happened. The board moved forward with a vote despite internal opposition from some members of the C7. Although the public vote was unanimous, there was internal opposition which was not made public. That minority explored its options and likely Fox became a very viable option in that same period. Likely the offer from Fox combined with the deteriorating quality of basketball in the Big East and the repeated failure of the promised TV contract to materialize was enough to convince enough other members of the C7 to decide to go in another direction. Whatever C7 members who remained loyal to the old Big East would really have had no choice at that point, knowing that their power and influence would be further marginalized if there were only 1 or 2 of them left.

The claim to which I was responding that this was a choice by the Catholic schools still doesn't fit with everything else I've read. But no one really knows unless they were on the inside. It was clearly a move led by football interests. The single fact that things fell apart so quickly afterward,is an indicator that whoever was managing the football interests didn't do his due diligence to assess the needs of the C7 to insure that they fully were on board. Either that, or the football side didn't care and were just as happy to let the C7 go.

Who else should they have added, you ask? I have no idea. But I do know that there has been a misguided belief that conference realignment is all about football. This has led to the conviction that as long as a conference has football, it will make big money. I think that the recent experience of the Big East demonstrably shows that this isn't true. If a conference can add the right football programs, it will make money. Or if it already has the right football programs, it can possibly expand its market by adding new football programs. At least that's what the B1G hopes.

The B1G experience shows that not just any football program will do. Clearly they overvalued the group of football schools that they have. So, I believe that their best option would have been to not add any more mediocre football programs, just to water down their membership even further. A far better strategy would have been to build around basketball, which was clearly their strong suit with the C7 and the additions of Temple and Memphis. That would have allowed further development for the existing football programs in hppes that they could grow into something special. However, the more dead weight that they carry in football, the more likely that they are spread too thin and that they ave retarded everyone's chances to develop.

Thanks again for your input and for helping me to be better informed. Greatly appreciated.