You make it sound so easy and are dismissing the relevance of basketball centric programs like Villanova, Marquette, Georgetown, PC, and St. Johns.Blue Man wrote: ↑3 months agoJust because the "unanimous" voting is what the public sees, doesn't mean that's the reality.Jersey77 wrote: ↑3 months agoBlue Man I know we will always disagree on this issue and of course Loyola.Blue Man wrote: ↑3 months ago
Nah the A10 is terrible.
It's not jealousy, it's anger because those were A10 programs, the best of which was a A10 member for almost 2 decades. And our leadership - who for some reason is still in place - did a horrendous job in incentivizing them to stay, finding suitable replacements, or being inventive enough to thrive in the re-alignment era. While other conferences that we were similar to or ahead of, surpass us.
Yeah our good teams need to do a better job in the OOC, but you can't tell me that our bubble teams - Dayton the last 2 years and 4 years ago, St Louis the last 2 years, VCU 2 and 4 years ago, Richmond 5 years ago, etc - they'd all be in with better metrics aka having really bad conference teams on their schedule.
I didn't look too deep across the conference - but those examples represent at a minimum $16M to the conference that we lost out on because having horrendous Q3 and Q4 teams on their schedule.
This "awesome" new TV contract didn't release any financial data - only the "trust us it's a HUGE increase" tagline.
And then remember that number has to be split now 15 times, and I'm sure soon 16 times since there's no shortage of historically underfunded, underperforming programs the battleaxe is thirsty to add to our conference.
We're in the midst of a steady decline, from a high of 6 in 2015 (coming off the wave of having a top flight conference with Butler and Xavier), to 3 for 4 years, then down to 2 for the subsequent 3 years, and now we're a 1 bid league - both last year and probably this year as well.
That's not the definition of a good conference. That's a 1 bid. Who cares if our conference ranking is top 10 if you can only get 1 team with a double digit seed into the dance? It's like a Baron team - good enough for some excitement, but not good enough to accomplish anything meaningful.
Don't get hung up on the financials because neither of us were involved with that decision nor are we accountable for the balance sheet.
I don't think the presidents and AD's were totally ignorant to all the facts and of course they weighed all the pluses against the negatives. We didn't sit in on those meetings, so we have to trust their judgement and it seemed to be a very easy one for them.
Teams leave and we never had the money or the drawing power of the BE blue-blood programs to keep them.
So many conferences have been affected and poached, shit happens.
The P12 is gone, they arrogantly declined an ESPN $30M/school contract even after UCLA and USC decided to leave.
The B12 loses top programs Texas and Oklahoma to the B10.
Then they poach the AAC who in turn poaches the C-USA, etc, etc.
The financials are really all that matter because that's why re-alignment is happening.
I dislike the defeatist attitude that "we never had the money or drawing power" to keep programs.
The Catholic 7 was dogshit. Villanova looked like they were coming down to Earth. Marquette lost Buzz Williams, PC was trash. Seton Hall was middling average. St Johns was irrelevant. Georgetown was a perpetual NCAA flame-out. DePaul is Fordham.
The best program in the new Big East was Xavier. An A10 school. The 2nd best add was Butler, an A10 school at the time.
We had the programs - any inventive leader could've thrown a multitude of offers about restructuring the NCAA payouts, the scheduling, etc - OR GONE AND PITCHED A BETTER TV CONTRACT OPTION TO BRING IN MORE MONEY TO THE CONFERENCE.
But we did not.
And this is less about Loyola, and far more about La Salle, Duquesne, Fordham, and George Mason who've contributed nothing but still exist here.
Of course, Xavier and Butler were going to bolt along with Creighton once given the opportunity, nothing was going to change that.
The whole situation for them made perfect sense, the deal was on the table, and that is how it played out.
Everything else is pure made-up speculation, that didn't have any legs.
We can keep rehashing the past and trying to recreate make believe, but it all happened and now we have to move on.