(12-30-2020 10:45 PM)Foreverandever Wrote:  

(12-30-2020 10:15 PM)GeminiCoog Wrote:  

(12-30-2020 09:52 PM)bullet Wrote:  They were talking to Louisville, Tulsa and Tulane before the Big 12 was formed.

Houston didn't want to participate or they might have been able to form off the SWC instead of the CUSA. Don't know how Louisville and Cincinnati felt about that, but it could have been:
Rice
TCU
SMU
Houston
Tulane
Memphis
Louisville
Cincinnati
Tulsa
UTEPSouthern Miss/UAB
And possibly DePaul and St. Louis for basketball.

That would’ve been a nice ten-team football league, good enough for a nine-game round-robin schedule.

I don't think UTEP for that series of moves, they were pretty locked in with the WAC back then.

Southern Miss would have been more likely as they would have fit nicely with Memphis and Tulane. UAB maybe instead of Southern Miss if basketball was more important. Would have been a solid conference. I was just thinking earlier today with all the Boise talk about what a different world it would have been if the three Texas schools and Tulsa had gone east instead of west.

I know Tulsa was looking at what would become CUSA and the Super WAC at the same time roughly and we favored going with the private Texas schools which ever way they went.

That would have been a good hoops league too.

At least half of the programs I named in my original post have some history with each other, including the four real SWC schools left from the Big 12 merger. Either they've shared a league with the SWC 4 or played them quite a few times before the mid-90s. And even then, schools like UTEP, New Mexico, and NMSU have history together as well.

Here's an example of what I mean: The last conference Houston was in before going Independent (and ultimately joining the SWC) was the Missouri Valley Conference back when it was an all-sports conference. (Currently, the MVFC is a separate entity from the MVC as a whole, though some all-sports MVC members are football members of the football MVC.) From 1957 to 1959, Houston, Cincinnati, North Texas, and Tulsa were in the MVC. (Houston's tenure was from 1951-1959.)