(12-09-2020 11:07 AM)CW Fishman Wrote: The only thing I can make of this is that the schools in the new WAC might intend to pursue FBS membership and they know that could never happen in the Southland Conference. Otherwise the additional travel cost would make no sense at all for Sam Houston, SFA and Lamar. This might lead a place for NMSU to land since they are members of the conference in other sports?
Several things...
1) Once Chicago State is out of the league (probably around the time the new schools join), the Texas institutions are going to be able to limit their intra-conference games against the other division and play primarily against the TX schools in their division (six TX schools).
2) In football, you are looking at one flight per year (either SUU or Dixie State) - not much difference than what these school(s) do now outside of a possible guarantee. They'll be able to schedule the SLC schools for non-league games as those schools will prefer bus > air and need reasonably distanced home-and-homes.
3) Soccer and baseball are probably the trickiest of the sports. In softball and volleyball, you could easily do a round-up where the teams converge on one site (once in the west, once in the east) for games against the intra-division opponents over a weekend. You could make it where soccer does home-and-home against its division and then just plays a tournament with seeds based on divisional standings. Baseball, do you really want home-and-home against just division? Not sure.
4) Basketball can be home-and-home against division with a single game against the teams in the other division. The "travel partners" are pretty close in distance outside of Cal Baptist & Seattle.
All in all, travel does not bother me at all especially since the WAC teams (in Texas) will have the "new" Southland to play out of conference across all sports. The travel seems to be more of an excuse than anything for why this league will not. We should see significant improvement in basketball RPI and while it's a bit of a risk, I think a few of these schools have FBS aspirations. Whether it's easier to jump from the WAC to FBS as a league (apparently grandfathered in) or from the WAC to FBS (compared to the SLC) remains to be seen. That could just be one thing in the back of mind or not... time will tell.