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C-USA's realignment possibilities take on new twist
From Bonesville.net staff and wire reports
Conference USA may be ready to pull the trigger on an ambitious expansion
plan of its own if it loses several current members to the Big East and the
Atlantic 10.
If a telecast out of Memphis turns out to be correct, the shifts in the landscape
could lead to C-USA slipping a bit in basketball but emerging stronger in football, baseball and regional
rivalries — and with a conference football title game to boot.
Various media accounts have Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and Marquette
leaving C-USA for the Big East, and Charlotte and Saint Louis departing for
the A-10. In addition, football-only member Army announced in July it would withdraw from C-USA
after the 2004 season to rejoin the independent ranks.
A Memphis television station is reporting that C-USA is poised to invite
five schools into the fold, structuring itself into an association of
programs with similar athletic interests, in that all members would field
Division I-A football teams.
Western Athletic Conference members Rice, Southern Methodist and Tulsa, and
Central Florida and Marshall of the Mid-American Conference are set to move
to C-USA if the next round of realignment unfolds as expected, according to
WREG News Channel 3.
Under the C-USA contingency plan, the league would forge ahead with 13 members and would
split into two divisions.
A six-team Western Division would group C-USA holdovers Houston, Texas
Christian and Tulane with WAC targets Rice, Southern Methodist and Tulsa.
The seven-team Eastern Division would include current members East Carolina,
Memphis, Southern Miss, South Florida and UAB, along with newcomers Central
Florida and Marshall from the MAC.
One line of reasoning for having seven teams in the Eastern Division might
be to protect against the unsettling scenario that could develop if one of
that Division's members — East Carolina, Central Florida or South Florida —
is added to the Big East's shopping list for expansion.
In the event of such a move by the Big East — which is not far-fetched
considering the scheduling advantages the Big East could achieve with the
nine-team football alignment that would result — C-USA would still be left
with two stable and evenly dispersed six-team divisions.
The Big East is actively analyzing formulas for reconstituting itself in the
wake of its losses of Miami and Virginia Tech to the Atlantic Coast
Conference.
The defection of marquee programs Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and
Marquette would be seen as a blow to C-USA, particularly in
basketball, but Tulsa would bring the league impressive hoops credentials of
its own.
Significantly, the new conference configuration would offer some distinct
advantages that might help offset the loss of several of its higher-profile
basketball members.
Marshall would be seen as more than offsetting the loss of Louisville's
football stature, while UCF would give C-USA a second bridgehead in the
fertile prep football recruiting grounds of Florida.
Rice and SMU would add to the the market presence Houston and TCU give the
league in Texas, one of the nation's most populated states.
C-USA, already one of the nation's premier college baseball leagues, would
get a substantial further boost on the diamond with the addition of the Owls,
last season's College World Series champions.
With each division devised along geographic lines, travel expenses could be
reigned in somewhat by weighting each school's schedule towards teams in its
own division.
From a revenue perspective, the divisional lineup would meet NCAA
requirements for staging a lucrative conference football championship game.
In addition, the new mix of schools would spawn a number of fan-friendly
rivalries, an ingredient that has for the most part been missing in the
league's far-flung, single-division current alignment.
UCF versus USF could be expected to become an instant rivalry. Houston
versus Rice (both located in Houston) and TCU versus SMU (both
located in Dallas-Fort Worth) would also assume big stakes.
East Carolina and Marshall, whose past meetings have produced two of the
bigger news stories in college football history, would seem to be naturals
to become heated
rivals.
The Thundering Herd, led by current Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Byron
Leftwich, overcame a large halftime deficit to defeat the Pirates 64-61 in
triple overtime in the 2001 Mobile Bowl. That ECU team was quarterbacked by
David Garrard, who is Leftwich's backup with the Jaguars.
On Nov. 14, 1970, after suffering a 17-14 loss at East Carolina, the
Marshall team's return home ended in tragedy. The team plane went down on a
Wayne County, WV, hillside in bad weather on its approach to the Tri-State
Airport, killing all 75 aboard.
Fans of both schools recall the crash as a particularly poignant moment in
the histories of their programs.
©2003 Bonesville.net. All rights reserved. Information from a broadcast by
Memphis television station WREG News Channel 3 was used in compiling this
report.
02.23.07 11:47 AM
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