CollegeCard Wrote:I like leaders trying to improve situations through creative solutions. In this case though, if I were a CUSA fan I wouldn't approve of this specific measure. Who wants a 12 team conference with only 5 games, and where you could literally go a decade without seeing 50% of the conference teams, assuming the league stayed together and you didn't see that team in the title game.
Now, if it was shockingly passed by CUSA, it became clear the 16 team Big East was sticking together, and no favorable 9th football only was available for 8 games, a Navy/ECU combo could be looked it. The chances of CUSA passing that are so slim however that it isn't worth serious consideration until they approve it.
Oh, I agree. But if my assumption is correct and that this initiative from TH sprang from the possibility of it being a Navy/ECU scheduling thing with the BE - which, I realize is a BIG IF - then if the football schools were thinking out of the box, they could counterpropose a 3-3-2 scheduling arrangement of ND-Navy-ECU.
ND would always be three and Navy and ECU could switch-up sometimes being 3 and sometimes being 2 dependent upon their scheduling needs.
Or, perhaps Army didn't want to do 4, but would be willing to do 2.
This could free up ND to have 1 of its 3 games always against Pitt (which is likely to happen anyway), and then have ND for 2, Navy for 2, Army for 2 and ECU for 2.
No bowl affiliations would need to be looked at for such a minimal scheduling arrangement with Army and Navy. ECU wouldn't need bowl affiliation since they are in C-USA with their own bowl arrangements.
This would solve the scheduling problem short term and give ECU a chance to either grow into an acceptable candidate or not by 2015 or so. It solves ECU's problem of not having to worry about where to put all of its other sports in a BE football-only situation while still giving BE institutions an idea of what their value might be. And even with an 8-game C-USA schedule, I think ECU could perhaps find room for 2 BE teams for its 4 OOC games.
And that's just out-of-the-box thinking for this one example.
There is other out-of-the-box thinking that involves other potential candidates that might be taking place, if the minds were willing.
Cheers,
Neil