The biggest problem with UConn is their dead weight football program, but they are willing to go independent anyway and not drag down the conference. Of course the ACC does not need UConn’s basketball pedigree to still be the top basketball conference, but still it’s men’s and women’s teams are a valuable brand that likely could have been the ACC’s for the taking. They also have a very respectable baseball program.

Did the ACC make a mistake letting UConn walk to the BigEast?

(07-06-2019 06:12 PM)Garrettabc Wrote:  Did the ACC make a mistake letting UConn walk to the BigEast?

No

UCONN was only able to get those programs at those levels because they were spending Big East severance packages (and public money) to run the department ludicrously in the red. Even the women's hoops program doesn't make money at UCONN last I looked.

Football is 80% of the TV revenue. Ergo, it's financially good for the conference if your football program is elite no matter how worthless all the rest of your teams are. You could win every national championship outside of football and that will be worth considerably less than winning the football nc in: TV revenue, brand, awareness, prestige, casual fanbase, ticket revenue, and corporate sponsorship. The football revenue differences can be so massive as to destabilize conferences because people on top can literally afford to double their budgets in men's basketball and baseball just for sh*ts and giggles. That has a long term impact. And it will rip the conference apart if it gets bad enough. UCONN is a boat anchor in the one .... the ONLY .... sport that matters right now. They're waving the white flag in the AAC. It's just dumb. And they burned bridges with the lawsuit. And if you were going to take on an overhaul project out of the AAC ... you wouldn't even chose UCONN first. That's probably Cincinnati. I don't think they're more appealing than UCF, Tulane, or even East Carolina. If Tulane ever broke their academic stranglehold and had a big daddy warbucks donor that would probably be the best case scenario for some future acquisition from the AAC. UCONN being relevant in the sport that matters is even less likely than that.

No. A thousand times no. And watch how their basketball team will struggle to field championship level teams when being outgunned by Vanderbilt, courtesy of SEC football money, as bad as 5 or 10 to 1 when it comes to staff and facilities. It's over for UCONN. They just don't know it ... yet.

Uh No

It has been discussed ad-nauseam but, in addition to what GTS outlined....

Uconn was on the original list but the FB schools wanted someone with some football history.
The old ACC schools were/are still holding a grudge about the lawsuit.
The oBE members in the ACC didn't promote or even defend Uconn. When Uconn became an issue, Syracuse suggested Pitt as an alternative.
BC was opposed to adding a regional competitor. How much depends on who is telling the story.

I am shocked the question keeps rising like the Sun.

To expound on what has been said about the lawsuit. I used to be in a business where suits were an every month affair. Most are just business to satisfy the damn insurance companies. Some are personal. Blumenthal made the ACC suit personal with the type of questions that were included in the request for discovery and proposed under deposition.

Some question are business. Some are personal. You remember the personal questions.

Most of all let's not forget who we are talking about here - Connecticut. They had a football program just a few years ahead of Villanova. A football program that was the ego child of their old AD in a place with no football stadium, in a town that is a just as much the boonies as Blacksburg or Clemson were in the early 90's.

Hartford makes Syracuse look like Vegas. Storrs makes Blacksburg look like Boston.

Four things cost UConn the spot in The ACC....


Shortsightedness:

Instead of working the phones, calling in favors, and visiting old friends to shake their hands, all the things Jurich and Ramsey did for Louisville, UConn leadership stayed in the VI with their ladies basketball team at a tournament.

I have read multiple times that Manuel and Herbst were confident they didn’t need to sell their university.

Timing:

Louisville was ready and UConn wasn’t. Louisville football was just getting its feet under it after the end of the Kragthorpe era. We had won a bowl game in 2010 but the team was still up and down. Actually lost to UConn in overtime the weekend before the invite came. UConn was in the middle of its second consecutive 5-7 season will Louisville was going 12-2. Three years earlier Louisville was 4-8 and UConn was coming off its third straight 9-4 season.


Support:

Louisville had Clemson, Florida State and Syracuse lobbying for their admittance. I haven’t read any credible source stating who if anyone in The ACC supported the addition of UConn. I’m sure they had supports but that information is buried once the league majority makes a decision.

Some how Louisville got cast as a “football school” in the battle with UConn for Maryland’s vacated spot. Never mind that Louisville, like Syracuse, has been in the top 3 of college basketball attendance for decades. Louisville has also been voted college basketball’s most valuable program multiple years. Perhaps it was commitment to football that did it. During the worst era in Louisville football, the football stadium was expanded. UConn was struggling through basketball probation in 2012.

Luck:

In the end the Louisville was lucky that Maryland couldn’t manage its money; otherwise Louisville would still be in The American.

BYU or navy football only might have got in before Uconn

The thing is, and I think some of you totally missed on the point, is that UConn was willing to sacrifice their football program to save their basketball program. To me that was a game changer when it comes to UConn being considered for the ACC, the ACC did not have to take their lousy football program nor would they be vying for recruits with BC and SU. I’ll buy that the grudge against UConn still exist. Does the ACC need UConn? No. Would they have been nice to have? Yes. At least that’s how I see it.

(07-08-2019 10:15 AM)Garrettabc Wrote:  The thing is, and I think some of you totally missed on the point, is that UConn was willing to sacrifice their football program to save their basketball program. To me that was a game changer when it comes to UConn being considered for the ACC, the ACC did not have to take their lousy football program nor would they be vying for recruits with BC and SU. I’ll buy that the grudge against UConn still exist. Does the ACC need UConn? No. Would they have been nice to have? Yes. At least that’s how I see it.

Well ... UConn is willing to sacrifice their football NOW. But not back then.

And how does inviting UConn to the conference WITHOUT their football program, IMPROVE the ACC's football, and appease the football schools in the ACC? Are you saying that the absence of UConn football is greater than the presence of Louisville football?

If so (and it sounds like you are) ..... you need to look at a handful of football games that featured Louisville and Florida State, and Louisville and Clemson, that were ratings hits for ESPN ... It may also behoove you to look at what it meant to have a Heisman Trophy winner in the conference that wasn't part of those power house programs -- how that builds credibility for depth in the conference.

Clearly I am biased ... but I think I have the facts on my side in this case too.

(07-07-2019 02:40 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  It's over for UCONN. They just don't know it ... yet.

Some of them know it ... And I feel for those fans. It's gotta be the gut punch of all gut punches to be going through that.

But .... Those who don't know it yet are the reason why I don't have total sympathy for their program. Slightly full of themselves, that bunch.

(07-06-2019 06:12 PM)Garrettabc Wrote:  Did the ACC make a mistake letting UConn walk to the BigEast?

.....oh Garrett

(07-08-2019 06:53 AM)CardinalJim Wrote:  Four things cost UConn the spot in The ACC....


Shortsightedness:

Instead of working the phones, calling in favors, and visiting old friends to shake their hands, all the things Jurich and Ramsey did for Louisville, UConn leadership stayed in the VI with their ladies basketball team at a tournament.

I have read multiple times that Manuel and Herbst were confident they didn’t need to sell their university.

Wow! The arrogance. As though no other schools had any thing to offer. In retrospect, no one needed to sell their program more than UConn.

Now, depending upon which conference needs members and who is taken, UCF Houston Cincinnati Temple Memphis and maybe USF are all ahead of UConn in the pecking order. Once the transfer to the Big East is complete, everyone will be ahead of UConn as they will have officially thrown in the towel on joining a P5 conference.

I think many of you "get it" based on your comments in various threads and good for you. For those that need a refresher...

1. The ACC is bigger than it ever really wanted to be in the first place. Adding just for the sake of adding is NOT an objective.

2. The ACC and ND have a good partnership that is a win-win-win. That is, it is a win for the ACC and a win for ND as both gets mostly what they want. And a 3rd win is ESPN who gets roughly 3 guaranteed Irish FB games each year at ACC stadiums which ESPN controls rights.

3. Moving forward, barring some unlikely scenario like losing a member institution ala the Twerps, the ACC would only consider extremely big fish such as Penn State in the extremely unlikely event they ever wanted to walk away from all that Big 10+4 money or another extremely unlikely event that Texas is willing to lower its enormous ego. In other words, UConn isn't nearly a big enough fish for the ACC to add yet another piece of the pie - not even close really. Same for the rest of the G5. The ACC is already at the top in MBB as far as conferences go so any MBB-focused arguments for UConn really don't make much sense.

(07-08-2019 12:32 PM)ChrisLords Wrote:  

(07-08-2019 06:53 AM)CardinalJim Wrote:  Four things cost UConn the spot in The ACC....


Shortsightedness:

Instead of working the phones, calling in favors, and visiting old friends to shake their hands, all the things Jurich and Ramsey did for Louisville, UConn leadership stayed in the VI with their ladies basketball team at a tournament.

I have read multiple times that Manuel and Herbst were confident they didn’t need to sell their university.

Wow! The arrogance. As though no other schools had any thing to offer. In retrospect, no one needed to sell their program more than UConn.

Now, depending upon which conference needs members and who is taken, UCF Houston Cincinnati Temple Memphis and maybe USF are all ahead of UConn in the pecking order. Once the transfer to the Big East is complete, everyone will be ahead of UConn as they will have officially thrown in the towel on joining a P5 conference.

I don’t think it was arrogance as much as it was reading their own press clippings and as a result failing to prepare.

As has been mentioned often UConn was preselected by the media to fill Maryland’s spot. Perhaps UConn leadership read those reports and decided it didn’t need to do anything other than wait for the phone call from The ACC.

Fortunately for Louisville we “thought” we were behind from the beginning. Thus we approached The ACC invite opportunity with every resource we had.

This not a thread about going back in time to pick UConn over UL.

(07-08-2019 12:48 PM)CardinalJim Wrote:  As has been mentioned often UConn was preselected by the media to fill Maryland’s spot. Perhaps UConn leadership read those reports and decided it didn’t need to do anything other than wait for the phone call from The ACC.

Fortunately for Louisville we “thought” we were behind from the beginning. Thus we approached The ACC invite opportunity with every resource we had.

My memory may be fading some, but IIRC the time between Maryland making it official they were leaving and an invite to UofL to join was a matter of days, certainly not weeks or months. So, any pre-selecting of UConn as a replacement by the media was short-lived (and pretty stupid in my eyes because I believe your Cards were a no-brainer from the moment the Twerps said goodbye and as evidenced by the speed of which the invite arrived to Jurich's desk).

UofL was and remains a significantly bigger fish across the board than UConn. I don't think when the ACC leadership and school AD's got together they discussed past lawsuits by UConn or any other stuff of that nature that folks like to bring up. It was a solid business decision based on bringing in the best option (by far) that will expand the geographic footprint while moving the needle financially.

*note, looking back via Google search, UMD announced they were leaving around Nov. 19, 2012, and UofL was invited in Nov. 28, 2012. Pretty quick.

I thought UCONN hoped ESPN would grease the skids for their entry into the ACC. Thus, there was no reason to sell the Huskies. I don’t think anyone saw the football school revolt coming.

(07-08-2019 01:11 PM)vandiver49 Wrote:  I thought UCONN hoped ESPN would grease the skids for their entry into the ACC. Thus, there was no reason to sell the Huskies. I don’t think anyone saw the football school revolt coming.

That's an interesting view. UConn President, Susan Herbst, now in her late 50's and who is stepping down this summer, was the Vice-Chancellor of the University System of Georgia and a faculty member at Georgia Tech prior to being named Prez at UConn. If she thought the deep south sector of the ACC (aka football school revolt) was going to support UConn's entry into the ACC, then she was either incredibly naive or lived with her head in the sand for years before moving to Connecticut - both of which are of course possible.

There is a huge divide between athletics and the general faculty that all GT folks know about and beyatch about for decades. So, maybe she really was that naive or ignorant. Then again, maybe she knew full well what was going to be the case against UConn and tried to change the mindsets behind the scenes. Also a possibility I suppose.

(07-08-2019 12:50 PM)Garrettabc Wrote:  This not a thread about going back in time to pick UConn over UL.

I get what you're saying, Garrett. If there's ever a change in the way basketball money is distributed (so that a basketball-only is something to consider) then MAYBE... but of course, if that happens the Huskies would be even more strongly attracted to the Big East anyway.