(11-15-2021 09:28 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(11-15-2021 09:19 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(11-15-2021 01:41 AM)Stugray2 Wrote:  WKU and MTSU fans were for the move, WKU administration is fully for the move now or in the future, but MTSU officials are not, and their pullout ended the possibility.

This is the core mystery that I have not been able to untangle. Some voices around here said that the MTSU fan base preferred CUSA because it "looks to the south", but that didn't make sense to me because (a) CUSA is a shambles, a scatterplot, not really any identity of any kind there now, and more importantly, (b) even though it wasn't a random sample, every single MTSU fan I saw post around here and elsewhere seemed to be enthusiastic about leaving the CUSA oil spill and joining the MAC.

So I do not know why the MTSU administrators were against something the fan base seemed to want.

1. To a rough approximation, there is no fanbase. Some students go to games, that's about it. (We can look up ticket sake revenue later).
2. 2 years of conference distribution s in exit fees, and giving up your school's slice of the $45M or so that accumulates in the CUSA bank account the next two years.
Theory: MAC, CUSA, Sun Belt doesn't make that much difference. You still cash College Football Playoff welfare checks.

About the bold, point taken, but then again that's true of a lot G5 teams. IIRC, MTSU's official attendance in 2018 was about 15,000 fans a game. The actual attendance was more like 8,000 fans a game.

Which makes them like a whole lot of MAC and other lower-rung G5. So if we say MTSU doesn't have a fan base, then that's true of many others as well, probably most of their would-be MAC peers.

Fans want to play in the MAC, but the administrators, whose jobs depend on balancing budgets and meeting payrolls and other expenses in the short term, might see more cash in CUSA and those exit fees.