(04-01-2021 12:55 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (04-01-2021 11:53 AM)Kit-Cat Wrote: (03-31-2021 07:54 AM)esayem Wrote: St. Joe’s and LaSalle would be crazy to leave. They have a built-in recruiting pitch of playing in a superior league to the MAAC and CAA.
Too small for major conference athletics.
Could win more games in the MAAC than the A10.
We see this argument all of the time, but schools (correctly, IMHO) virtually never *willingly* downgrade conferences.
If a school like LaSalle starts winning more games in the MAAC, then the goal of the athletic department shifts to finding a better conference... like the A-10.
Same thing with lots of different comparisons. Maybe DePaul would win more games in the A-10 or MVC compared to the Big East, but as soon as DePaul starts having success, then the goal would be to get (back) into the Big East!
All of that of course means that it would be insane for those schools to downgrade conferences in the first place because being in the best conference possible *is* the destination in and of itself.
Would Loyola trade in its Final Four to trade places with DePaul to be last place in the Big East? Yes! Would UCF, Houston, Memphis and Cincinnati trade in their access bowl appearances to be last place in a P5 conference? 100 times yes!
Ultimately, the job of a university president is to get into the best conference possible. Period. The predictability of year-to-year revenue from the best conference possible is simply way more important than wins or losses to the *university president* and the buck for the entire school stops there. It's the job of the coaches to manage wins or losses. The athletic department has to manage both sides (conference membership and on-the-field/court performance) as the bridge between the university president and the coaches.
I think that's true if an athletic department is always trying to grind toward its best possible destination, and yeah, no college program to the best of my knowledge has ever done the one-step-back-to-take-two-steps-forward thing.
But take La Salle. Let's say that the president, the AD and some outside experts have hashed it out and come to the conclusion that the best they can ever be is either a) a middle-to-bottom A10 program that occasionally gets the stars to align in such a way that they scratch across an occasional NCAA bid, or b) a consistent contender in a MAAC-level conference with reasonable expectations that they can make the NCAAs multiple times in a given decade.
Then consider how the A10 distributes NCAA share money (75 percent to the program that earned the share, so more of an eat-what-you-kill system than most conferences), and add to that the likelihood that the haves and even the mid-pack programs will continue to pull away in terms of spending and facilities. What you're left with is the reasonable possibility that La Salle's future is a lot more likely to be another Fordham (if it isn't already!) than a program that can produce another Sweet 16 team like it did in 2013.
With that in mind, a move to the MAAC may not be the best optics and would certainly raise hackles among whatever fans and boosters they have, but might be where they belong going forward.
(Note that I don't mention Olympic sports here, primarily because I'm not sure the A10 is much better than the MAAC. At best, the A10 has one, maybe two decent teams in a mediocre conference, and sometimes not even that.)