(09-12-2021 07:41 PM)All4One Wrote: I'd be interested to know about AAC voting potential.
Do you feel the following AAC schools would block the corresponding candidates?
1. Memphis blocks Arkansas State
2. Tulane blocks Louisiana Tech & Louisiana-Lafayette
3. SMU blocks North Texas
4. East Carolina blocks Appalachian State
5. South Florida blocks Florida Atlantic & Florida International
Is blocking power overrated? You hear about it often when in-state or nearby schools to current members are involved as expansion candidates.
Blocking power definitely isn't overrated. If anything, fans underrate it in conference realignment.
Sure, Texas A&M couldn't block Texas from getting into the SEC... but, of course, UT is the single most valuable school in conference realignment.
Otherwise, if an in-state/market rival can't show that it's clearly above non-rivals, the egos and territorial nature of schools are VERY much important. Everyone wants to believe that they're above their in-state/market rivals and conference membership is a big part of that calculation. Look at the Big East where Dayton (a super basketball program both on-the-court and off-the-court) can't get a sniff right in the middle of the conference footprint because Xavier wants nothing to do with them in the league.
I think that's a challenge for the AAC here. Many of the better current football programs that are candidates being discussed here are in-state competitors to current members and who knows how well they'll perform in the long-term because they're virtually all *young* FBS programs. If I'm running East Carolina that has had a strong football fan base for multiple decades, there's NFW that I want to elevate schools like Appalachian State and Charlotte that haven't even played FBS football for a *single* decade. Absolutely not.
By the way, I think a lot of people are also REALLY underrating the *young* part of this equation. How much stock can you put into on-the-field records with schools whose FBS histories are, in some cases, literally younger than the existence of the AAC itself? I just don't think any university president realistically can here. History and pedigree (and even a poor on-the-field one like, say, Rice) really does matter a lot in the pecking order in conference realignment, particularly when the AAC has a lot of schools with a lot of history and pedigree.
The Sun Belt can take newbie programs fliers because they have absolutely nothing to lose and there's no connective tissue in the league other than simply being an open spot to play football. I think the AAC thinks that it's more than that - maybe it can't ever be "P6", but it doesn't have to be a bunch of random schools without any broader off-the-field connections, either.