Great Midwest
Regular-Season Champions:
Cincinnati (1 outright, 1 tie), DePaul (1 tie), Marquette, Memphis


Conference Tournament Titles:
Cincinnati (4)

VCU (Virginia Commonwealth) was never part of the Metro while we were a member.

University of Cincinnati** Bearcats Cincinnati, Ohio 1819 Public 41,357 1975 1991
Georgia Institute of Technology Yellow Jackets Atlanta, Georgia 1885 Public 21,557 1975 1978
University of Louisville** Cardinals Louisville, Kentucky 1798 Public 22,249 1975 1995
University of Memphis*, 1 Tigers Memphis, Tennessee 1912 Public 22,365 1975 1991
Saint Louis University** Billikens Saint Louis, Missouri 1818 Private 13,785 1975 1982
Tulane University*, 2 Green Wave New Orleans, Louisiana 1834 Private 13,359 1975 1995

Quote:

Metro Conference Remembered: The Proposal Ahead of Its Time
Friday, 30 September 2011
By: Lenny Vangilder
Category: College Football News

The mega-conference concept may seem new to the casual observer, or even to the ardent college sports fan, but in reality, it's not.

In fact, it has been 21 years since a conference that no longer exists actually held meetings about a 16-team football conference that would have included two of the top three teams in the final Associated Press poll from the previous year.

The SEC? Nope. Big Ten? Pac-10? ACC? Wrong on all counts.

Remember the Metro Conference, home to Tulane's programs outside of football from the mid-1970s until 1995?



The Metro was studying a way to double in size and add football in 1990. It was a generation ago when the first mad rush of realignment started - Penn State joined the Big 10, Arkansas headed to the Southeastern Conference and the Southwest and Big Eight conferences first started talking about expansion, both separately and collectively. The Big East had not begun playing football yet, and even the College Football Association was still in control of national television contracts.

The Metro's roster was filled of football independents Tulane, Southern Miss, Florida State, South Carolina, Virginia Tech, Memphis State, Cincinnati and Louisville.

Miami, West Virginia, Rutgers and Temple would have joined the Super Metro in all sports, while Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and East Carolina would have joined the league only for football.

Raycom Inc., who put together the proposal 21 summers ago, cited many of the talking points we are hearing about on a daily basis in expansion talk today's television revenue, expanding the footprint, market share.

Bringing the New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston and Miami television markets on board would have given the Super Metro a presence in 35 percent of the country, nearly twice as much as the second-highest conference, the Big Ten.

And unlike the sometimes covert operations of conference expansion talks that attempt to go on today (see Pittsburgh and Syracuse to the ACC), the Metro went public with its plans in the summer of 1990, even publishing a three-page story detailing the plan in its in-house publication, Metro News.

Sports Business Journal published a story on the Metro's expansion attempt earlier this week, but thanks to my longtime PR colleague and then-Metro News editor Gail Sideman, I got a chance to see how it was presented back then.



The proposed revenue sharing would have allowed schools to keep 90 percent of their earned television dollars. Back in the old days, you might recall, schools were paid per TV appearance.

Those with success rates (like) Florida State and Miami would benefit from membership in our conference and our proposed revenue sharing policy, then-Metro commissioner Ralph McFillen said in the Metro News story.

And with a league office already in place, by expanding rather than forming a separate football alliance, start-up costs would be minimal.

But as we know, the plan did not come to fruition. South Carolina became the SEC's 12th team, Florida State moved to the ACC and Cincinnati and Memphis State left to join the Great Midwest Conference. The Big East added Miami and started football in time for the 1991 season.

Once the Super Metro's plan fell apart, Tulane made a pitch to replace Arkansas in the SWC, but it was denied. Four years later, four SWC members joined the Big 8 to form what is now the Big 12, and the Metro essentially merged with the Great Midwest to form Conference USA.

What if a 16-team Metro had come to pass? Life in college athletics would have been much different, and in all likelihood especially for schools like Tulane and Southern Miss and some of the things we read about today in the world of college sports would have happened much sooner.

FSU went to the ACC.

SCarolina to the SEC.

Great Midwest formed with some of the rest. Metro remained with Louisville as an anchor.

Then CUSA.

Quote:

Idea of superconferences rooted in Raycom Sports' 1990 booklet

PUBLISHED Wednesday, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:00 pm EDT
Michael Smith Sporting News

The idea was to create a super conference of 16 schools overlapping states from the Northeast through the South. Eventually, according to this plan, there would be four superconferences that blanketed the country, and their champions would come together in a playoff to decide the national champ in college football.

“Developing the Super Conference” was the name of the booklet that first proposed the idea in 1990, and its 240 pages held the future of college athletics. It’s just that no one knew how long it would take to get there.


Back in Bobby Bowden's heyday, there was talk of Florida State joining a superconference.
The idea, however, was deemed too radical at the time. (AP Photo)

That plan, the first to suggest the superconference model as the best way to maximize a league’s value, was written by Charlotte-based Raycom Sports for the now-defunct Metro Conference. From that, the concept of a superconference and its merits were born. Based on where conference expansion now appears to be headed, it was an idea well ahead of its time.

“At that point, the superconference concept made so much sense to us,” said Ken Haines, the CEO of Raycom Sports and one of the authors of the report. “We felt like the idea would be captured and implemented by all of the major conferences. We just didn’t know when.”

It was January 1990 when the Metro Conference commissioned Raycom Sports, its media partner, to craft a plan that would help solidify the league’s future. At the time, institutions came and went from the Metro, which ranged from six to nine schools during its run from 1975 to 1995. It wasn’t unlike the fluidity that the current-day Big East has experienced in recent years.

The Metro, under the guidance of commissioner Ralph McFillen, had a base of charter schools from urban areas, such as Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis and Tulane. But the basketball-centric conference didn’t sponsor football and it needed to grow if it intended to survive against the heavies of that time: the SEC, ACC, Southwest Conference, Big Eight, Big Ten and Pac-10.

McFillen asked Raycom how to do that.

Raycom, the dominant TV production company and syndicator of that day, had deals with the Big Eight, Southwest Conference, Big Ten and ACC. It spent six months developing the superconference model, taking into account TV households, conference footprint, alumni bases, regional rivalries and institutional compatibility. The 240 pages included everything from mock schedules and average attendance in football to SAT scores for each school.

Raycom’s plan called for the Metro to expand to 16 football-playing schools with two eight-team divisions or four four-team divisions, similar to what has been discussed by the ACC, the Pac-12 and others in recent weeks. It was compelling enough that at one point that spring in 1990, presidents and ADs from all 16 schools met in Dallas to talk it through.

“It would have changed the face of college athletics,” said Dave Hart, who attended that meeting as the AD at East Carolina, and now serves as the AD at Tennessee. “But the presidents just couldn’t get their arms around it. There were several people who understood the vision and were really excited, but they were outnumbered by those who were just terrified of something so radical. Nobody had ever heard of a super conference before.”

According to Raycom’s plan, the Metro’s members would have come from the North (Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh), the South (Miami, Florida State, South Carolina) and moved west through the middle of the country (Louisville, Memphis, Cincinnati). The original plan also included Penn State, but the Nittany Lions committed to the Big Ten before Raycom could finish the project.

At the time, those schools were independents in football, so the superconference would not have been raiding schools from other conferences, as leagues do now.

The Metro’s footprint would have accounted for more than 35 percent of the nation’s TV households, putting it on par with the Big Ten, while maintaining traditional rivalries, such as Miami-Florida State, by keeping them in the same division. The new structure of the superconference theoretically would have commanded the largest TV dollars available because of its sheer size and the markets it covered.

“A lot of what’s happening now reminds me of 1990,” said Bill Olsen, who back then was the athletic director at Louisville. “Most of us were strongly in favor of doing this and we thought it had a lot of potential. It definitely made the SEC and the ACC stand up and take notice. It got their attention.”

In a 1990 story in USA Today that explored the possibility of massive college realignment, Haines was quoted as saying the superconference model is “cutting edge. … What you’re going to see within the next five years will form the fabric of college sports for the next 50 years.”

Haines missed his five-year assessment, but he was prescient in his estimation that it could form the fabric for the next 50 years. Recently, Cedric Dempsey, the NCAA’s former president and now a college consultant, said this latest round of realignment puts the major college conferences on a path toward creating their own division, perhaps separate from the NCAA.

The six major conferences “for a long time have thought they could govern themselves,” Dempsey said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where we end up, with five or six super conferences that form their own organization.”

In 1990, the super-conference model was grounded in the same basics that are driving conferences to expand now. It went after major markets, it increased the conference footprint to include multiple regions of the country, and it would have captured a significant number of the nation’s TV households. The divisional format maintained geographical rivalries, while the larger conference stretched up and down the East Coast.

“I always felt the super-conference concept would happen at some point, even though this particular model didn’t happen,” Haines said. “This all came about 21 years ago because of the pressure to generate revenue and fund programs. It’s no different today.”

The super-conference idea didn’t work out for the Metro. A year after the study, in 1991, Florida State ended up going to the ACC, South Carolina joined Arkansas as new members of the SEC, and the Big East began playing football, which gave Syracuse, Boston College, Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech and Miami a conference home for football.

Many of the other Metro members migrated to a new league called Conference USA.

“If we had been able to create that superconference, I think it would have turned into four superconferences nationally,” Olsen said. “But it never became a reality.”

Well, not yet.

Michael Smith is a reporter for SportsBusiness Journal, a sister publication of Sporting News.

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