(04-23-2021 01:08 PM)OhioBoilermaker Wrote:  Keep in mind, not all large metro areas are equal. While Detroit is a large metro area, it's not a particularly wealthy. While Denver is a wealthy metro area, it's not particularly large. Nashville is smaller and poorer than Denver. DFW is very large and fairly wealthy.

If you want to attract students, DFW is the clear winner.

That's true as far as it goes, but it smuggles in the big assumption that playing a college basketball game once a year in Arlington in front of 1500 people is a way to attract students.

I'd suspect that it works very differently at the P5 football or major college basketball level than it does at the levels below that. An NCAA tournament run is demonstrated to raise your visibility. I'm very skeptical that being NIT level in a midmajor conference does anything to attract students in the metro areas you play in once a year.

I really want to see how exactly it's supposed to work that bringing UTA into the Missouri Valley Conference ends up bringing, say, 100 DFW students to Evansville or Southern Illinois.