GoldenWarrior11
Heisman
Posts: 5,628
Joined: Jul 2015
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I Root For: Marquette, BE
Location: Chicago
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RE: UConn loses $40 million in 2018 trying to keep up
(02-14-2019 02:07 PM)Attackcoog Wrote: (02-14-2019 01:29 PM)GoldenWarrior11 Wrote: I think one of the biggest struggles that UConn currently faces is identifying and associating itself with institutional peers, which highlights how unique UConn is in relation to the other schools in the Northeast.
For example, if you look at the school - academically and institutionally - they are a top public school in the Northeast. However, the Northeast is surrounded by high-academic, private, universities from the Ivy League, MIT, Tufts, Brandeis, etc. For similar athletic programs, Rutgers, Syracuse and Boston College (all P5 members) each have higher academic rankings, and Syracuse and BC are both private. Each of those programs invested and promoted football for decades before UConn. UConn is a top-75 national university without an AAU accreditation in a low-populous state. If you were to place UConn in the B1G, they would be dead-last in overall endowment, and second-to-last in enrollment (ahead of only Northwestern). If you pivot towards the ACC, UConn's enrollment matches favorably towards the other members, but only due to the abundance of smaller private schools within the conference (Notre Dame, Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest and Miami); their endowment would also be at the bottom of the conference. It goes without saying that being in the AAC, UConn is isolated in the regard that it is the lone public flagship institution, and one of two Northeast schools, in a conference that is southern-based with non-land grant institutions and metropolitan universities. In the event of a possible Big 12/AAC merger, again, it brings the school nothing close to that desired destination of aligning with institutional and geographic peers.
Taking a step back, both Vermont and Delaware have higher endowments than UConn, and are also top-100 national universities, but both schools have lower student enrollments. Maine and Rhode Island are both behind all three schools in terms of national academic rankings, enrollment and endowments. Obviously, none of those institutions have the same athletic program that UConn has, with none having FBS athletic departments.
It goes without saying that FBS football is a major factor in what separates UConn from the other public flagships in the Northeast. Take football away from UConn, and it suddenly is a lot closer to Vermont, Delaware, Maine and Rhode Island than it is to Syracuse, Rutgers, Boston College and Pittsburgh. However, athletics aside, UConn is already a lot different than those P5-area institutions, so it really puts UConn in a weird spot between those two groups. To emphasize, UConn moving to the Big East does nothing to bring the school closer to their perceived institutional peers; but I think that gap is significantly wider than most are willing to admit. Elevating football in the late 90's was an attempt to become more like latter institutions and separate itself from those perceived lower programs. Today, they appear very much caught between a rock and a hard place.
You have a point. That said---I actually think the AAC has some solid peer institutions for UConn. For instance---all are FBS. All but one are top 200 USNWR universities. Most are high research universities per Carnegie. Tulane, Tulsa, Temple, SMU, are certainly peer academic institutions and most of the others are reasonably in the ball park of academic performance. The real problem for UConn is not so much that it lacks "peer" institutions in the conference---its that it had to expand the geography of the conference radically to find reasonably similar "peer" schools. Its hard for the UConn fans to work up much excitement playing schools spread all over hell's half acre with which they have limited or no history with.
A little push back:
Tulane - for sure, high-academic institution. Top-50 in the country. However, the academic associations that Tulane belongs to - AAU, ORAU, URA, NAICU and SURA - do not share any association with UConn. I imagine that UConn views its association with Tulane through the AAC as a significant academic positive, so I don't think there is a huge divide there (despite significant distance and athletic performance).
For the AAC, the only top-100 academic institution (other than UConn and Tulane) is SMU. Every other school falls outside that grouping. For a few (Wichita State, Memphis, East Carolina), they fall outside the top-200. For reference, West Virginia was also outside the top-200 in USNWR, but I'm guessing (athletically) that association is easier due to geography and proximity. Many of the schools appear between #100 and #175 (Temple, Tulsa, Cincinnati, USF, UCF, Houston).
Of the academic affiliations that UConn belong to (APLU, CUMU and U21), only Houston and Temple are shared group members in those groups. The breakup from the old Big East saw the school lose a number high-academic peers athletically in Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame and Georgetown. Ironically enough, I did not know that UConn and Marquette share an academic association with CUMU - go figure.
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