(06-28-2019 08:25 PM)cmett003 Wrote:  Schools like BYU, Army, ODU, Boise St, Liberty and Air Force among others have been thrown out as potential AAC expansion candidates. All have different positives and negatives. Rank your top 10 criteria points based on importance. These are currently in no particular order (stick to just 10)

- Football stadium size - This is essentially meaningless as a bare statistic. What’s important here is a demonstrated willingness to invest in the program through investing in the stadium. For example, “what percentage of seats are considered premium?” Another good one would be, what is the average distance to the nearest accessible restroom?”
- Football attendance - This statistic is meaningless because it just isn’t an apples to apples comparison. Why does Mississippi State sell so many more tickets than Southern Miss? That one is easy to answer: just look at the home schedules. You also have issues with artificial inflation.
- Bowl appearances - In terms of the AAC, this is a meaningless statistic. Recent bowl appearances against Cartel teams might have some small meaning.
- Athletic Budget - Overall budgets have little useful meaning because they are heavily subject to inflation by a variety of factors. One example is tuition costs. Under standard double entry bookkeeping, this should be a zero sum. Because of the system advocated by the NCAA, tuition costs actually count twice as a credit with no debit to balance it out. Thus, schools with high tuition costs (private schools that sponsor a lot of sports) tend to look like the spend a lot more money than they actually do. Another example is on-campus versus off-campus. On-campus facilities often have many of their expenses covered by academics. Because off-campus facilities are essentially not part of the university and are used exclusively for the athletic function, their expenses all count against the athletic department budget. The closest apples to apples comparison you will find would be in recruiting budgets. Even then, it’s only useful as a measure of willingness to invest, not as a measure of performance.
- Market size - Market size as a tool of evaluation is heavily dependent on market penetration. Memphis has done a decent job in capturing the attention of their market. Tulane...not so much.
- Student population - I assume this means enrollment. Not a bad comparative tool in itself, but it’s heavily subject to varying rates of participation. No one cares if you have 50,000 students if almost none of them are investing in your program.
- School prestige - What exactly is this supposed to be? There aren’t any blue bloods lining up to join the AAC, and the closest you’d get to the Ivy League is Rice, who is admittedly pretty close.
- Geographic Location - this one is important, but it shouldn’t outrank athletic and academic performance indicators. Use it to narrow the field of peers from whom to consider, then forget about it.
- School academics - This one often gets set aside during realignment, but most of the potential candidates are t1 academic institutions and some are also r1 Carnegie research institutes. It’s probably no more than a tiebreaker in the end.
- Brand/name recognition - important for value in the media deal, but very difficult to accurately assess.
- Athletics History - Historically strong athletic performers simply haven’t been favored during realignment.
- Basketball Attendance - same issues as with football, only less important.
- Basketball arena size - same issues as with football, only less important
- NCAA Tournament appearances - this is about 50% on the athletic department making an investment in the program and 50% on the coach the department hires. That makes it about 50% relevant.
- Potential Rivalries/travel partners - This should be far more important than it is, but, in today’s tv oriented conferences, no one cares about rivalry anymore.
- Competition and Practice Facilities - Practice facilities are a means of leveling the field. They won’t make a good program great or a bad program mediocre, but they can provide a ways toward the means. They are just tools that an athletic department can use to become more competitive. As comparative tools, they are especially useless: A poorly run athletic department can have great facilities, and still be bad. A well run athletic department is going to be competitive no matter what facilities it has.
- Olympic sports success -probably an even bigger non-factor in realignment than your local Avon lady’s opinion on realignment.
- Recent TV Appearances - everybody is on tv now
- Located in good recruiting area -this doesn’t hurt and might even be used to break a tie, but recruiting budgets are more important
- Other