I believe we've been headed down this path for some time now.  The pandemic's impact on revenues within the sport may only serve to exacerbate this.

If you remove what our own preferences might be, this is logical.  Let each school decide if it can afford to pay the freight.  By that, I mean pay for recruiting, travel, facilities, coaches and administrators, and yes, the players.  Come up with a threshold that must be met.  Within our own conference, we might see Dayton, St. Louis and VCU play for the right to go to the Dance, while GW, Duquesne, Fordham and St. Joe's all annually vie for the NIT (which will become the national tournament for the other 1/2 to 2/3 of Division 1 schools who can't afford to play with the big programs (or who are choosing not to).  Gonzaga and BYU play for the NCAA's while Pacific and Portland do not.  Perhaps Vanderbilt and Northwesters become NIT division schools?  In essence, the NCAA division receives the major television and streaming contracts and is what 98% of college basketball fans will care about and follow?  The other 2% are us, we went to an NIT Division school.  Our dreams of crashing a Final 4 will fade away but we also don't have to be concerned about competing above board against shady, slimy organizations/boosters.  It's not the result that at least some of us would ever want to see, and it may not even be inevitable, but it's perfectly logical and probably, the correct thing to happen at this point.  

Granted this was an odd year, but the NCAA just had a great men´s tournament  (VCU´s unfortunate luck aside). CBS has to be happy with what it paid for, all things considered. The trouble lies in the regular season, where aside from marquee matchups attendance and ratings are down, in part due to the fact that every game is available on some type of platform. TV and sponsors won´t want to kill the goose laying the golden egg (NCAA tounament) and might even want to expand it, But there is a diminishing financial incentive for non-conference games that do not pit teams TV is interested in against each other. So ´Cuse vs UNC? Sure, that massages the wallet. But either of those teams playing Mt St Mary´s? Not so much. Still, will CBS want to shell out the money for a tournament that does (or does not) automatically feature some teams that have built up a following over history?
What is going on in Europe is clearly a money play, although what the "12 big clubs" endgame is I am not clear on. The Champions League predecessor the European Cup used to feature all domestic champions, even those from minnows like Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Albania and Ireland. The Champions League got rid of much of that egalatarianism (relegating that to the Europa League) but it seems not even that is appeasing the big boys nowadays.
In the end it is up to the TV-watching, official sponsor-buying members of the public (i.e. us) to decide if we want a smaller competition of familiar faces or a broader one that may surprise us. Kind of like choosing between the chains at the food court at a mall and the locally-owned dining options available on Main Street (so far, the chains are winning).

FQ, I'll address your point two ways.  With respect to GW competing against the likes of Dayton, SLU, VCU, etc. (which was not my original point but more on that in just a bit), GW enjoyed an 8 year window roughly 25-30 years ago, otherwise known as the Jarvis era, where it effectively competed against the best programs in the A10 for a sustained period of time.  Take this away and what you're left with is a program that has not been able to capitalize upon what limited success it has obtained.  Since Jarvis, Hobbs saw a four year run which featured one NIT appearance followed by three consecutive NCAA appearances.  Unfortunately, Omargate brought upon an enormous rift within the program, blame was ascribed in an ugly manner, and recruiting standards did a 180 making it most difficult to bring in as talented players (and not helped by a petulant coach who took his eye off of recruiting as if to possibly teach the higher-ups a lesson).  Lonergan was well on his way towards transforming GW into a perennial top-level conference team which included an NCAA appearance and an NIT Championship before all of the shit hit the fan.  The adage "GW can't stay out of it's own way" became very appropriate.

Regardless of what the reasons may have been, the bottom line is that the programs in our conference who have larger arena sizes and fan bases, better (and more updated) facilities, more substantial financial contributions to their programs which in turn leads to higher recruiting budgets, chartered flights, etc. have demonstrated, by and large, to have a leg up on those schools who do not.  GW has shown an ability to compete on the basketball court with the top programs in the A10 on a sporadic basis, but not really at all on a consistent basis.  This is not defeatism as much as it is the reality of the situation.

Then again, this was not really my point to begin with.  The point is that schools like Dayton, like SLU, like VCU, possess the financial clout to essentially "play in the big leagues" if this is what they would choose to do.  It's why schools over the years such as Penn State, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Rutgers, Villanova, Pitt, Temple, Xavier and even our one-year member Butler have been able to transition to conferences featuring bigger-budgeted, more competitive members.  My original point was not so much that GW could never compete against these schools; in fact, they sometimes do.  Instead, it was to point out that VCU/Dayton/SLU are in far better financial situations than GW.  With more to spend on their programs, they would be our conference's best candidates to spin off into an NCAA Tournament Division as opposed to the 1/2-2/3 of D1 schools who I pegged for the minor NIT Tournament Division.  Again, there isn't anything defeatist about the thought.  You may cull through years and years of A10 men's basketball revenue and expenditure data and see that GW, like most A10 schools, would be better suited for the lesser regarded of the two divisions I am theorizing about.   It's just reality.

Last edited by Gwmayhem (4/20/2021 8:51 am)

The new League is coming apart. The point is that there were bad guys on all sides. The fans were already pissed at soccer/football for milking them for so much money.