(11-17-2013 05:44 PM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  

(11-14-2013 10:05 PM)College Basketball Fan Wrote:  

(11-14-2013 09:26 PM)gosports1 Wrote:  FWIW Denver isnt Catholic although i would still include them
Id suggest instead of Loyola maybe Portland or if Bradley is included maybe Drake or even Detroit.

For my bad teams I was mostly looking at the potential to improve. My main criteria were:

1. Endowment: An endowment is a good measure of a school's ability to fund their programs
2. Nearby metro areas: Chicago and Denver are big enough that they offer some recruiting advantage
3. History: Shows that teams have been there before and have the potential to build a quality program

That is why Loyola-Chicago was included in my potential schools. They meet all three criteria, whereas other schools meet 2 or less. Denver doesn't have the history, Bradley isn't in a major metro area.

While I considered Drake and Detroit, they each had problems in those regards. Detroit has an endowment of only $26 million, which indicates that they may not have the ability to get much better. Drake has a slightly larger endowment ($149M) and they have some history (a Final Four), but Bradley's endowment and history were better (Des Moines is slightly better than Peoria but not enough). Portland is a nice fit, a quality metro area, and a decent endowment; the problem is that the basketball program has never been great and the endowment isn't big enough to convince me that they can much better.

(11-14-2013 09:47 PM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  BYU is an obvious choice.

Their basketball program IS an obvious choice. But what comes with it makes it a little harder to justify. This conference has tried to avoid instability and football is the biggest cause of conference instability.

Money is the root of all evil - including conference instability. It's not football per se. To the degree that football factored into the instability of the old Big
East, it became a problem only when football was allowed to grow to 8 members. When there were only a couple, it wasn't an issue.

BYU is much like Notre Dame, making a commitment to football independence. They are currently in the West Coast Conference, a group dominated by small Catholic schools and things are working fine. Ring a bell? Do you think if there were a chance to get Notre Dame, the conference wouldn't jump at it and seize the opportunity?

I think Notre Dame is legitimately committed to independence. BYU, on the other hand, would still much prefer to be in a power conference (most likely the Big 12 as a viable option since the Pac-12 won't invite them for political reasons). It's just that independence is better for BYU than being in a Group of Five conference, so they're making the best of their situation now.

It wasn't the number of football schools that the Big East had that was the problem - it was the fact that those schools were prime targets for poaching by others, which caused instability. The Big East, now that it has finally achieved stability, doesn't want to add anyone that would (a) ultimately rather be elsewhere and (b) actually has a decent shot of getting that invite elsewhere. That makes BYU and UConn, despite being great all-sports additions to the Big East on paper, untenable, as they immediately place the Big East back into the instability that the Catholic 7 wanted to get away from in the first place. The Big East doesn't want anything to do with the headaches of rumors about BYU going to the Big 12 or UConn going to the ACC or Big Ten - if they wanted to do that, they might as well have just not split at all and kept playing UConn and other solid basketball schools like Memphis, Cincinnati, Temple, etc.

That's why institutional fit matters so much to university presidents, especially in the case of the Big East. They just went through a messy divorce and don't want any chance of inviting back in the same problems that led to that divorce. Long-term stability is extremely valuable in conference realignment that, in many ways, outweighs short-term revenue or competitive gains. The Big East has almost ironclad stability in its lane: it has its pick of any non-FBS school that it wants (which is arguably more than what even the Big Ten or SEC can say in their FBS lane). In the non-FBS world, there is no conference that is more desirable than the Big East financially and branding-wise. However, FBS schools inherently aren't going to see the Big East as a true destination conference in the way that they see the power conferences, so that instability simply isn't worth it no matter how much those programs might bring to the table on the basketball court.