(02-12-2022 12:14 AM)TOPSTRAIGHT Wrote: WKU left to go to a conf. with more bowls, much higher media dollars, and rival 100 miles away along with much better FB and BB rankings-- ANY other SBC team at the time would have taken the invite
I certainly would have liked to have seen Troy in CUSA when it looked like this:
East Carolina
Marshall
Southern Miss
Rice
Tulane
Tulsa
UAB
UTEP
La Tech
UTSA
North Texas
But CUSA wound up adding FIU... which was
strange.... and then UNC-Charlotte which had just started football, wasn't even winning, and had awful attendance... and that was
strange.
And then Tulane, ECU, and Tulsa bolted... and next thing you know, CUSA is just a weird, geographically unfriendly version of the Sun Belt. It became unattractive pretty quickly.
The fact the Sun Belt was able to hang on to their best football programs, and add App State, Georgia Southern, and Coastal on top of that created a new beast. After that point, no Sun Belt school had any desire to move to CUSA... and now we're here, where the script has flipped, and the Sun Belt has actually taken from CUSA.
I can't help but believe that if CUSA had taken the more established programs (Arkansas State, Troy, WKU, MTSU, La Tech, App State, Georgia Southern, Louisiana), that would have kept the geography complaints down, kept revenue up, and it would've kept schools happy. If we're being honest, this past CUSA/SBC realignment would not have occurred if CUSA looked that way. The divisions would have been very centralized, with many traditional rivalries. Would not have been a league that leaned overly toward Texas.
As we all know, CUSA instead chose a markets route, and it was one of the worst realignment moves ever.
But again, I hated to see WKU leave... they were the biggest loss for the SBC. I'm sure their admin left on good terms. Most of their fans here did. I respect WKU and what they did in the SBC.