(04-20-2021 11:34 PM)Attackcoog Wrote: (04-20-2021 11:05 PM)DFW HOYA Wrote: (04-20-2021 06:02 PM)Attackcoog Wrote: As long as university presidents are doing the voting---you can bet academics will count. If athletics was all that mattered, the AAC presidents would never have selected Tulane in 2011. Its not like Tulane dominated the NOLA TV market or was a football power at the time---but school presidents have always liked the idea of associating their schools with schools with strong academic reputations. I think they see these conference associations with schools boasting strong academic reputations as reflecting well on their own university's academic perception. Its just how these presidents see the world.
It was the promotion of Tulane that led the Big East basketball schools to jump ship.
Thats a popular belief, but I dont see how it could be true. If you look at which members actually still had voting privileges at the time (just UConn, USF, Cinci, and the C7), the only way for Tulane to get an invite in late fall of 2012 was to capture no less than 5 of the 7 Catholic school votes. These are schools that were perfectly comfortable voting "no" at the same meeting when it came to giving ECU a full membership. So, they werent timid little souls. There may have been a C7 school that was unhappy with Tulane---but most of them seemed ok with it as the vast majority of the C7 clearly voted to give them an invite.
My personal opinion is the C7 had been looking into a separation since that summer (heard rumors of it in summer of 2012). My guess is they looked at it more as a backup plan at that time and had some ballpark idea of what they could earn as a new league. When all hell broke loose in the fall mass exodus of 2012---and the expected AAC TV dollars didnt materialize---that was when they got serious. I dont think Tulane had much to do with it. I think they were just an easy target for one C7 AD.
My belief is that both you and the popular opinion are correct. First, you are correct in that to issue the invitation, a clear majority of C7 schools had to vote to do it. There's just no getting around that fact.
But on the other hand, especially in a stressful chaotic situation, people can do things one day and regret doing them a few days later - see the furious backpedaling by the soccer "Super League" teams that joined Sunday and are bailing now. The vote to admit ECU and Tulane may have been carried out under these circumstances, with Rutgers and Louisville leaving, and maybe with events swirling the C7 looked to the conference leadership for guidance as to who to invite rather than thinking it through for themselves. Speculation, sure, but maybe. Conferences don't only do what presidents want, conference presidents hire commissioners and other leaders to ... lead. They are paying them for their advice about what to do so it is silly to think they ignore it and are not influenced by it. Just look at today's AAC - that is IMO obviously an "Aresco led" league. Aresco doesn't just do what the member presidents want, he's obviously an active strategizer who they rely on to lead them.
I think that what happened after Tulane and ECU were admitted, and Louisville left, the C7 schools were able to step back, and take a look at the new landscape and say "what have we done"? And they didn't like the look of the new Big East, especially with regards to hoops, now with Louisville gone and new additions ECU and Tulane and Boise (who was still on board) having bad basketball. And like with the Super League, these opinions could have been shaped partially by the media, which IIRC had a negative reaction to inviting Tulane. This caused minds to change about what had just been done.
I also think Tulane was singled out unfairly. Tulane was not the "cause" of the C7 leaving, more like, in the new appraisal described above, the "straw that broke the back", just one element in a long string of collapses that cumulatively led to the bail out. E.g., if in early 2011, when the Big East was intact, Tulane had been invited, no way do the C7 leave over that, that would be crazy. Even as a "final blow", the real culprit was the final raid by the ACC and B1G to take Rutgers and Louisville.
So that aspect of the popular opinion, the notion that save for the invite to Tulane, the C7 would have stayed, is IMO wrong. Inviting Tulane contributed to the C7 exit, but wasn't a sufficient condition for it. The real cause was the overall collapse of the conference caused by ACC raids, and its reconstitution (inevitable) with schools that were more football-focused and had nothing in common culturally or historically with the C7. But, I also think the C7 had a genuine change in attitude about Tulane, from the time they voted to the time they left two or so weeks later.