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It's looking like Oklahoma and Texas are heading to the SEC. Unless the Big 12 members all leave and the conference dissolves, my guess is they take at least 2 AAC schools to replace them. My guess is that the Big 12 extends invitations to UCF, Houston, Memphis, and Boise State. The AAC would then be down to eight basketball and football members and most certainly they would look to add back some members. I can see them adding four schools (two non football and two full members). The full membership school could be something like Liberty, UAB, Marshall, or Charlotte. The non football members is where I see the A10 being affected. If they add two non football schools, it's foreseeable that programs like VCU, Dayton, Davidson get a call. Of course, this could all fall flat and OU and UT stay in the Big 12, but if they do leave we could see a long list of domino's falling as a result!
Last edited by GW18 (7/23/2021 11:03 am)
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I think we need an anti-trust investigation of the power 5. And the ESPN-SEC relationship needs a congressional investigation (with 0 southerners on the committee.)
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Per ESPN reports, looks like no A-10 school
Is moving to the AAC. Charlotte, North Texas, Rice, UAB, Florida Atlantic and UTSA will be making the move.
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With those teams moving into the AAC, Temple looks more and more like a huge outlier in that conference. Time for them to come home to the A-10 just like UConn did with the Big East!
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ColonialNY wrote:
With those teams moving into the AAC, Temple looks more and more like a huge outlier in that conference. Time for them to come home to the A-10 just like UConn did with the Big East!
Assuming football is the biggest revenue generator at Temple like it is at most schools, no chance, sadly.
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My guess is that the A10's biggest threat (and I'm not sure there's a close second) would be if the Big East had an interest in becoming a superconference. Without big time football, this would be more of an ego play than anything else, as in if the SEC becomes 16 schools and say other conferences get to that number or close to that number, then the Big East may feel it can't stay at 11 and feel relevant.
To get to 14, you could add Dayton (which Xavier might object to though the two co-existed for many years in our conference) and SLU which could join a west division along with Butler, Creighton, DePaul, Marquette and Xavier. This adds the 23rd and 65th largest US markets for the conference. You would then need one more school for the eastern region and that could theoretically be either Davidson (#22 largest market), VCU or Richmond (though it would more likely be VCU, #56 largest market) or as a longshot, UMASS (116 in market size but the way these things sometimes get figured, the flawed logic might be that with BC out of the conference, UMASS will bring the Boston market back into play, even if this in reality would have a marginal impact). Of course to reach 16, then Dayton, SLU, Davidson, VCU and UMASS could all go, with one of these schools designated as a west division school.
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Gwmayhem wrote:
My guess is that the A10's biggest threat (and I'm not sure there's a close second) would be if the Big East had an interest in becoming a superconference. Without big time football, this would be more of an ego play than anything else, as in if the SEC becomes 16 schools and say other conferences get to that number or close to that number, then the Big East may feel it can't stay at 11 and feel relevant.
To get to 14, you could add Dayton (which Xavier might object to though the two co-existed for many years in our conference) and SLU which could join a west division along with Butler, Creighton, DePaul, Marquette and Xavier. This adds the 23rd and 65th largest US markets for the conference. You would then need one more school for the eastern region and that could theoretically be either Davidson (#22 largest market), VCU or Richmond (though it would more likely be VCU, #56 largest market) or as a longshot, UMASS (116 in market size but the way these things sometimes get figured, the flawed logic might be that with BC out of the conference, UMASS will bring the Boston market back into play, even if this in reality would have a marginal impact). Of course to reach 16, then Dayton, SLU, Davidson, VCU and UMASS could all go, with one of these schools designated as a west division school.
Let's say this happens - what's next for the A10? raiding the CAA/America East? Not fun to envision