Quote:Conference USA is considering a series of changes to regular-season scheduling and its championships in order to reduce costs because of the expected financial impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Old Dominion athletic director Dr. Wood Selig is chairing the group, called the Futures Planning Committee, which is meeting twice a week online. ...

The committee includes four other athletic directors, a senior women's administrator and a faculty athletic representative. The goal, Selig said, is to present athletic directors from all 14 schools with a series of recommendations by the end of April.

Sources: https://csnbbs.com/thread-897446-post-16...d16767584, which links to this ODU article: https://odusports.com/news/2020/4/2/mini...lig-c.aspx

I still support merging CUSA West and SunBelt West, and CUSA East and SunBelt East, to form two regional conferences. No, Rice is not an academic peer with anyone in either CUSA or SunBelt. But right now we are their athletic peers, at best. And it would seem that we would have a much better chance to develop meaningful athletic relations with Texas State and ULaLa and Arkansas State than with ODU and Charlotte and Middle Tennessee.

They should have included a few athlete representatives on that committee.

(04-07-2020 04:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I still support merging CUSA West and SunBelt West, and CUSA East and SunBelt East, to form two regional conferences. No, Rice is not an academic peer with anyone in either CUSA or SunBelt. But right now we are their athletic peers, at best. And it would seem that we would have a much better chance to develop meaningful athletic relations with Texas State and ULaLa and Arkansas State than with ODU and Charlotte and Middle Tennessee.

Sometimes I wonder if there are industry "experts" who tell the schools that geographically compact conferences are bad.

(04-07-2020 10:26 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(04-07-2020 04:16 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I still support merging CUSA West and SunBelt West, and CUSA East and SunBelt East, to form two regional conferences. No, Rice is not an academic peer with anyone in either CUSA or SunBelt. But right now we are their athletic peers, at best. And it would seem that we would have a much better chance to develop meaningful athletic relations with Texas State and ULaLa and Arkansas State than with ODU and Charlotte and Middle Tennessee.

Sometimes I wonder if there are industry "experts" who tell the schools that geographically compact conferences are bad.

At the P5 level, there is some need to reach out to get TV markets. The B1G's moves to pick up Maryland (DC/Baltimore) and Rutgers (NYC/Philly) fit into that category, as does the Pac-12 moves to pick up Utah (Salt Lake City) and Colorado (Denver). West Virginia to the XII always seemed a curious move to me. IIRC Cincinnati, Louisville, and BYU were available at the time, and would have been geographic extensions, but not as far afield, and would have brought bigger TV markets. Getting your volleyball team home from Morgantown after a Tuesday night game has to be a major hassle.

But at the G5 level, the travel considerations for women's and non-revenue sports would seem to dictate more geographic alignments. Our CUSA TV package sucks. It wouldn't get better for a geographically compact G5 West merger. But it could hardly get worse, and the move makes sense for other reasons. I've done this before, but here's what I would have in mind:

CUSA West
Rice
UTEP
New Mexico State (add)
UTSA
Texas State
North Texas
La Tech
UT-Arlington (non-football)

CUSA East
Arkansas State
ULaLa
Louisiana-Monroe
Southern Miss
UAB
FAU
FIU
UALR (non-football)

SunBelt North
Marshall
ODU
WKY
Appalachian State
Charlotte
Liberty (add)
Howard (men's soccer)

SunBelt South
Troy
South Alabama
Georgia State
Georgia Southern
Coastal Carolina
Middle TN
Central Arkansas (men's soccer)

Arguably, the more logical geographic arrangement would be for the Florida schools could go to SunBelt and the other two Alabama schools to CUSA. The problem with that is that with the SunBelt west schools going to CUSA, that would leave SunBelt with fewer than 6 carryover schools, which would mean loss of their NCAA basketball automatic bid. Or you could let the two Florida schools go to SunBelt with no replacement, move LaTech to CUSA East, and move Middle TN to SunBelt North. Selfishly, I'd like to keep LaTech in CUSA West because it is one of the few CUSA schools with whom we have actually built some kind of rivalry, and I'd also like to keep the Florida schools in CUSA because they bring at least part of the Miami TV market, and I think they are programs that are committed to winning and that would ultimately help the conference. Geographically, Central Arkansas is closer to the CUSA teams, but most of them don't play men's soccer. Given the small number of schools in both proposed leagues that do, it might make sense to have a combined men's soccer conference. Among top 50 TV markets, CUSA would have some penetration in Houston (8), DFW (5), San Antonio (31), Birmingham (44), and Miami (16), and SunBelt would have some penetration in Atlanta (10), Charlotte (21), Nashville (28), Norfolk (42), and possibly DC (7).

CUSA football could play either 8 or 9 conference games--6 in your division, plus either 2 or 3 crossover. Baskeball you could play home-and-home against your division (14 games) plus 4 or 6 crossover games, for a total of 20, or you could play everybody once (15 games) plus 3 or 5 division opponents a second time. Basketball travel partners would be UTEP/NMSU, UTSA/Texas State, UNT/UTA, Rice/La Tech, Arkansas State/UALR, ULaLa/ULM, Southern Miss/UAB, and FIU/FAU.

At the end of the day, I think we would be better off in that alignment. It would cut travel costs (a huge factor given the Rice "business approach" to athletics) and it could potentially generate more revenues since we would be playing football against teams whose alumni live close enough to make the trip. We would pick up NMSU and Texas State as divisional foes, and we would replace Marshall, ODU, Charlotte, WKY and Middle TN as crossover opponents with Arkansas State, ULaLa, and Louisiana-Monroe, We wouldn't be playing "peer institutions" but face it, unless Notre Dame decided that it wanted to be part of a "Magnolia League," there is no conference of "peer institutions" that makes any economic sense at all.

It's always smart policy to examine ways to lower expenses - but at least at Rice I think we have a much larger revenue problem than an expense problem. Of course the expenses are always blamed in this instance - but I think the Big State U's are where the expense fat really is. Some if not most of these programs have 5-10x our revenue and lose money. We might be able to argue that had we been willing to carry a higher expense structure (say like a decade commitment after the McKinsey report) we might have been better competitively and now losing less money.

(04-08-2020 08:43 AM)mebehutchi Wrote:  It's always smart policy to examine ways to lower expenses - but at least at Rice I think we have a much larger revenue problem than an expense problem. Of course the expenses are always blamed in this instance - but I think the Big State U's are where the expense fat really is. Some if not most of these programs have 5-10x our revenue and lose money. We might be able to argue that had we been willing to carry a higher expense structure (say like a decade commitment after the McKinsey report) we might have been better competitively and now losing less money.

Clearly our revenue problem is much bigger than our expense problem. But so far, nobody in the administration seems to realize that, or at least to want to grapple with that.

We're stuck with a sucky TV contract. We're going to be until we move up in the world. And we're not going to move up in the world without dominating CUSA.

The easy answer is for the BOT simply to write checks to cover whatever we need in athletics. That's not going to happen, nor do I particularly want to see that happen. At least, not without a proper business case being made to demonstrate how Rice generates a return on any investment. That requires winning, obviously, but other things also matter.

What can we do? I see a few possibilities:

1) Football - schedule more money games; I know there are lots of complaints that we get too banged up; but we can get banged up playing anybody; we lost one of our best defenders for the season on the first play (or nearly first play) against Nicholls. An extra million or two can really make a difference across the board. Memo to Rice; LSU, aTm, and TexasU are not conference games; we can lose to all three and still go undefeated in conference.
2) Baseball - we need a bell cow sport that gets our name out there, and baseball seems to be the best candidate; get back to Omaha - a lot; with the Rice Endowment scholarship program, we should be much more competitive recruiting; so win
3) Basketball - the long-term key is to get basketball making money; you just can't run a successful athletic program when basketball is the black hole that our program his been for decades
4) UH - it's time to quit turning our noses up at them and try to develop a spirited cross-town rivalry; that is a huge potential revenue source that we are simply ignoring
5) Corporate support - we need to change whatever policy Rice has that limits corporate support or athletics.

OK, you don't like those. So what do you propose instead?

Do those things and then we can make the business case to the BOT to increase the investment in athletics. Until we do those things, we can't.