(01-23-2020 12:16 PM)mturn017 Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 11:54 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 11:24 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 11:09 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 10:35 AM)Wedge Wrote:  Whether or not teams are good in basketball is absolutely relevant, because the ONLY issue here is basketball tournament money. Without the autobid rules, there’s no restriction at all on the number of autobids.

Also, if the strategy is to get judges to blow up the NCAA’s basketball tournament rules, then blow up all the rules. Get rid of the NCAA rule that requires any Division I team invited to March Madness to either play in the NCAA’s own tournament or no tournament at all. Then Duke, Kentucky, and the other big names can opt out of the NCAA tournament and move to a new tournament where they select the participating teams and those teams split up all the profit, and CBS and Turner can stop paying for the NCAA tournament.

Well according to the ASUN press release this is exactly what they're planning and they reference the C7 directly. Maybe the plan is for CUSA or SB to dissolve in the process. The remaining, mostly western schools probably wouldn't want to leave one or two schools to rebuild another FBS conference and they wouldn't want to pay exit fees or leave their the conferences cash they just collected from the eastern schools leaving. So accept invites to the Sun Belt and vote to dissolve CUSA.

It does sound like what they are planning, but I wouldn't expect the NCAA to green-light it unless the end result is that the number of autobids stays the same.

Even if the idea is to dissolve CUSA or the Sun Belt and effectively take their autobid -- IIRC, both of those conferences turned Liberty down when Liberty wanted in, even when Liberty offered to write an enormous check to get in. So if the theory is that schools who voted against Liberty are now going to pay their current conference an exit fee in order to join Liberty in a different conference, that might not be a solid theory. Maybe they have a list of Sun Belt and CUSA schools who didn't oppose Liberty and those are the schools they are targeting.

Yes, it would seem to be easier to agree to a swap of teams than to do this. With a swap, nobody pays exit fees. And if they are going to take almost all of them all from one conference (creating a mass that can dissolve the conference and eliminate exit fees), then all you do is basically kick out the western wing of CUSA or Sun Belt.

Don’t have the votes. My guess is that the western schools aren’t as keen on the idea. It was apparently discussed at the CUSA conference meetings last year though. There is definitely official interest in the idea.

Maybe the votes are not there today, but a swap is still far easier than a mass exodus, if an east-west reorganization is the goal.

If the A-Sun/Liberty idea is to force CUSA or the Sun Belt to collapse and lose its conference status, that only works if there are not enough FBS programs left between the two of them to have two FBS conferences.

If there are still a total of 16 FBS teams left among the two combined, they have enough to keep both conferences going. CUSA has 14 and the Sun Belt has 10. Either could add NMSU as a full member if needed to meet the minimum. That means, if the idea is to collapse one of the two or force the two to merge, you'd have to convince at least 10 FBS programs to leave CUSA and/or the Sun Belt, in order to force the two conferences to merge and free up one of their basketball autobids. That's too difficult to pull off.