Finding a suitable conference has long been an issue for UC
04/25/13 at 1:54pm by Bill Koch

I spent some time this week talking to Bill Schnier, the long-time men’s track and cross country coachat UC who will retire on June 30 after 33 years at the school.

Schnier has had a very successful career at UC. He’s also very perceptive and honest, which is why I wanted to talk to him about the direction that college athletics have taken in recent years. He didn’t disappoint. The resulting story is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper, with Schnier’s thoughts on what conference realignment and the emphasis on television money have done to college sports.


Bill Schnier

During our conversation, Schnier told me that he had recently come across an Enquirer article from the early 1970s when UC was leaving the Missouri Valley Conference to become an independent. The reason given was that the schools in the MVC were too far away from UC. After a few years as an independent, UC helped form the Metro Conference. Since then, the Bearcats have played in the Great Midwest, Conference USA, the Big East and now the American Athletic Conference.

Why has it been such an ongoing struggle for the Bearcats to find a conference that fits them? According to Schnier, much of it has to do with UC’s location.

“If you look at the prototype of the big-time college program in Division I, it usually is in a college town, set aside for that university, centered around that university,” Schnier said. “In most cases, they are the flagship school of the state. That forms the heart and soul of college sports.

“We’re in-between . We’re in a larger city. We have lots of competition. We don’t even have the whole attention of our whole community because there’s also Xavier. There’s also Miami. There’s also Ohio State. So when you look at our fan base, to an extent, we’re painted into a corner and the corner is divided by the state lines. Three miles from here they switch over to UK. Fifteen miles from here they switch over to Indiana. Twenty-five miles from here they switch over to Dayton in baseball and in about 25 miles they’re completely switched over to Ohio State in everything else.”

The solution for UC, Schnier believes, is for school officials to work to make UC as attractive as possible and hope that somebody notices. That seems to be the path that athletic director Whit Babcock is taking.

“The answer is always do your best,” Schnier said, “do the right thing and become attractive in your own community. To a great extent that’s happened. We are better off than we were at one time.

“It’s very frustrating, but if you look at the days when we were in Conference USA trying to get somewhere else and then made it into the Big East, that has to be our model for the future. I think the way that we did that was we had winning teams in football and basketball. We also had a promise of new facilities.

“What really helped us get into the Big East was a campaign to publicize our university and the excellence of the university and why this is worthy to be in a conference with Georgetown and Villanova and Notre Dame. First they became excellent and then they told people why they were excellent and then you became attractive so conferences would seek them out.”

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/uc/2013/04/2...ue-for-uc/

At this point I'd love to have that old Metro Conference still intact.

UC, Ga Tech, Louisville, Memphis, Florida St, Va Tech, South Carolina, South Florida, Tulane, St Louis

That was a heck of a good conference.

(04-29-2013 09:38 AM)nachoman91 Wrote:  At this point I'd love to have that old Metro Conference still intact.

UC, Ga Tech, Louisville, Memphis, Florida St, Va Tech, South Carolina, South Florida, Tulane, St Louis

That was a heck of a good conference.

The conference never did sponsor football, which is what killed it.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nca...e/1965393/
McFillen saw the future. He wanted the Metro to sponsor football and even laid out a plan in 1990 for the first "Super Conference" that would have invited schools like Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Temple, Rutgers and West Virginia, all of whom were playing football as independents at the time.

But a dividing line had been drawn within his own conference. The basketball powers such as Memphis, Cincinnati and Louisville kept the NCAA Tournament money they earned instead of splitting it up, which is how conferences have traditionally operated. As a result, there wasn't much reason for South Carolina and Florida State to consider joining for football, and eventually they got invitations to the SEC and ACC, respectively.

McFillen's superconference plan, which would have changed the course of college sports history, never got off the ground. And by 1995, it was too late. With football independence no longer viable for most programs in the college athletics, the remnants of the Metro and the Great Midwest merged to form the hybrid Conference USA.

"The football people were saying to the basketball folks, primarily, you keep your basketball money and we'll keep our football programs independent. Then the basketball schools resented the football schools for not wanting to play football (in the Metro)," McFillen said. "That was a distinction that made the Metro unique, so to speak, which only resulted in the demise of the conference."

Goin: UC must ‘drive forward’ despite setback
05/01/13 at 11:52am by Bill Koch

Former UC athletic director Bob Goin, who orchestrated UC’s move to the Big East in 2003, has some advice for UC as it moves forward in the American Athletic Conference after being shunned by the Atlantic Coast Conference: If you’re going to be in a conference that is not perceived to be one of the five major conferences in the country, you’d better excel at the one you’re in.

“It’s a great university,” Goin said. “Drive forward. Be as good as you can be. If you’re in that league, then win that damn thing. Do the best you can and knock the heck out of people and keep improving. This isn’t forever, but it is a setback. You’ve got those cards. Go play them.”

Now is not the time to pull back, Goin said.

“It’s just does somebody want to add to the house?” Goin said. “Is this the time you add another room onto the house? When you look at it, is there somebody who wants to do that? That’s what they’re confronted with.”

Goin said he has great confidence in current AD Whit Babcock and UC president Santa Ono.

“Whit has worked every day on it and Ono has worked every day on it,” Goin said. “Somebody has to add now. When you’re counting on somebody else to make the move and you’re not in control, that’s a bad situation.”

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/uc/2013/05/0...e-setback/

I love Bob Goin. He should be on the payroll as AD Emeritus helping Whit and Santa get us into one of the Power 5.

(05-02-2013 01:01 PM)RedRocker Wrote:  I love Bob Goin. He should be on the payroll as AD Emeritus helping Whit and Santa get us into one of the Power 5.

No doubt. Got FSU into the ACC and UC into the Big East. Record speaks for itself.