(07-20-2021 11:05 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 10:08 AM)SMUstang Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 09:31 AM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 08:32 AM)SMUstang Wrote:  Schools added to the AAC since 2011 include SMU, Houston, Memphis in 2013, Tulane, East Carolina, and Tulsa in 2014. That being said, Rice is where they should be given their athletic budget.

Except their budget is larger than Tulsa and Tulane.

I'm not going to argue, maybe the AAC was going for markets at that time. But why ECU?

If I recall, ECU was added first as a football-only affiliate, and then when the American under it's prior branding was raided again, it got an upgrade.

Perhaps they ran out of candidates that added the kinds of markets that they were looking for and were forced to look for schools that demonstrated an ability to get people to pay attention in the market they happened to be in.

ECU had been doing pretty well at the time. They won CUSA just a few years earlier (2009) and had the largest attendance figures of any G5 east of the Rockies. That said--the FBS spring spewing well known big market G5 schools with at least some brand value was running pretty dry by that point.

When Boise and SDSU pulled out of the Big East western expansion, it pretty much eliminated the western half of the nation from the selection board---leaving the 2013 Big East/AAC in a space where there were no longer any perfect expansion options left on the board. The last "all sports" school the AAC added was Tulsa----a tiny private school who had just won CUSA at the time and had been a fairly consistent solid team in the CUSA western division. Tulsa also provided good academic and a solid basketball program that earned NCAA bid's fairly consistently in the 1990's and early 2000's.

The current AAC expansion situation is very similar to 2013---but with somewhat less motivation to replace the lost member. If Rice had been a football powerhouse in CUSA West for the last 6 years and was coming off a CUSA championship---with a reputation for having solid basketball---they might already be the 12th member of the AAC (despite being yet another small private school and increasing the "CUSA 2011" perception to the AAC).