(05-10-2022 04:00 PM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(05-10-2022 01:50 PM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(05-10-2022 08:58 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(05-10-2022 07:01 AM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(05-09-2022 07:16 PM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  It's easy to just say "who cares about alienating ECU and Marshall since ECU was leaving anyway" with the benefit of hindsight, but trust me as an ECU fan I remember that time very well and it was not an inevitability ECU was getting in the Big East. ECU would have also had a lot of power in the league office at that time and any horse-trading around getting certain candidates would have required accommodating ECU in some way, same as you'd have needed to accommodate USM/Tulane/UAB (the other remaining C-USA 1.0 members). Charlotte was not really ECU's idea, they were an original C-USA 1.0 all-sports member (less football of course) and from everything I heard at the time were told if they ever started football they'd pretty much get back into C-USA when they were "booted" back in the day. Now yes ODU was Terry Holland's pet project, he fought hard to convince ODU to want to move up and to convince C-USA to add them and to go above and beyond 12 members. However, what doomed C-USA had little to do with who they added or the number of schools added and everything to do with leaving ESPN and nuking the bridge on the way out the door. Lord Britton deserves far more blame for the demise of C-USA than Hot Wheels Judy does, really by the time she took over the damage was done. He was smart enough to quit before the revised TV deal was signed, but best believe he knew what that deal was gonna look like when he left.

The bolded part is false. Though it wasn't the defining factor, I would rate it as the second biggest factor. CUSA moved SoMiss and UAB to the west leaving Marshall alone with 6 new schools we had no history with. We lost SoMiss, UAB, UCF and ECU! Those are teams our fans cared about and had an emotional investment in. When those schools left we or were moved to the West we had no rivals left. Fans started to not care as they didn't know these new teams at all. Ticket sales started to stagnate and fan engagement started to wane. Combining that with not being on ESPN and the casual fan not being able to find the games was not a recipe for success. I leave out my comments regarding CUSA HQ and their love affair with everything Texas.

The bolded part isn't really false. If C-USA still had a good relationship with ESPN and hadn't nuked that bridge ESPN likely doesn't make it financially viable to move from C-USA to the Sun-Belt. C-USA could have added whoever would have been deemed the more "preferred" picks, but because they nuked the ESPN relationship the TV deal the league was getting was doomed to be a disaster no matter what.

It's false as in it wasn't the only reason. There were combinations of issues... No ESPN, Lack of Rivalries, CUSA HQ decisons.

Lack of rivalries pretty much existed from day 1 of C-USA, it's a feature not a bug. All of the other issues you've mentioned are reasons you guys were unhappy in C-USA, and I don't blame you they were valid reasons to be unhappy. However, the only reason C-USA was in a position to be raided by the Sun-Belt was because they pissed off ESPN so badly. If C-USA never leaves the ESPN bubble they are probably valued pretty similarly to the Sun-Belt as a league over the last decade or so and ESPN doesn't reward or push for the Sun-Belt to raid C-USA. That's not to say I think you guys would have been "happier" in C-USA had they stayed an ESPN entity, I think you'd have likely thought it sucked just as much, but ESPN wouldn't have made it an option for you to go anywhere else because they would have already owned your inventory for basically the same price and there would have been no incentive for them to have paid more.

Marshall viewed ECU, UCF, SoMiss and UAB as rivalries at the time. But on everything else you mentioned, yes I agree. Worked out best for Marshall in the end with the SBC.