Coastal Carolina Prez: We would accept a Sun Belt invite.

[APPdiesel]

I admit I'm not up to speed on the state of the entire SHSU athletic department but their football program is doing very well. Knowing football drives expansion (and not pretending it's anything else) that is what I based my hypothesis on. That, and placing at least one FCS upstart in the west so it's not entirely old vs new sunbelt. Idaho is a stinker that we need to drop like a bad habit. They do nothing to improve the conference.

[asu66]

The new" wrinkle" so-to-so-speak is that Benson wants a full menu, three-dimensional conference--not just a football league. He wants men's baseball and women's softball, men's and women's soccer, and volleyball to be highly competitive. He wants to build men's and women's basketball into marquee sports worthy of top 25 caliber teams year in and year out. He also wants Sun Belt football to push other G5 teams and the occasional P5 team all over the field; and win. He believes he can elevate the league beyond all expectations.

One of the keys to make that happen is to bring in a men's basketball program that's already making noise at the national level. He thought he had a chance to get UAB when they initially dropped football. As you know, that didn't last for very long. However, one has to look no further than Las Cruces, NM to find Pistol Pete and the Aggies of NMSU. They're recruiting giants from all over the world to play and are having great success at it. Some of them are honors students as undergrads. Recently, the Aggies have taken four WAC Tournament Championships and four NCAA Tournament berths--in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014. The 2013-14 team finished with a 26-10 record and will be absolutely loaded in 2015-16.

Take a look at their roster for the upcoming season. They can play big or small. When they play big, they can choose from 7-3, 335 Soph; 6-11, 207 RFrosh; 6-8 217 RFrosh; 6-8 211 RFrosh; 6-7,200 RFrosh; 6-11 260 RFrosh; 6-9 230 Soph; and 6-10 225 Soph.

http://www.nmstatesports.com/SportSelec ... SPSID=9579

This will be quite a challenge.

[EastHallApp]

New Mexico State is indeed a good basketball program and would be among the best ones in the Sun Belt. I don't think they'd exactly dominate, though. They've dominated an increasingly weak WAC (seriously, go look at the league's basketball membership and tell me you knew more than half of them played D1 basketball).

New Mexico St. has made the last four NCAA Tournaments, but they've been seeded 13, 13, 13 and 15 and lost in the first round each time, only once by single digits. Their last NCAA Tournament win was in 1993.

None of which is to say they wouldn't strengthen the Sun Belt's basketball profile - they absolutely would. But I expect the league's better programs would be on equal footing with them, at least.

[asu66]

New Mexico State is indeed a good basketball program and would be among the best ones in the Sun Belt. I don't think they'd exactly dominate, though. They've dominated an increasingly weak WAC (seriously, go look at the league's basketball membership and tell me you knew more than half of them played D1 basketball).

New Mexico St. has made the last four NCAA Tournaments, but they've been seeded 13, 13, 13 and 15 and lost in the first round each time, only once by single digits. Their last NCAA Tournament win was in 1993.

None of which is to say they wouldn't strengthen the Sun Belt's basketball profile - they absolutely would. But I expect the league's better programs would be on equal footing with them, at least.

Agree on all your points. Still, they are very young and extremely big. I don't know how Fox could counter those 7-3, 6-11, 6-10, 6-9 guys unless they're so slow afoot that we could run circles around 'em for 40 minutes. Maybe that's the case. Otherwise, they'd just play the game over our heads--literally and figuratively.

Dale Brown's LSU team did that to Cremins' ASU team in the '79 Mid-West Regionals in Bloomington. Cremins had the best basketball TEAM on the floor. Brown had the biggest PLAYERS on the floor. After struggling for a while, his guys finally got a five point lead--and they played the remainder of the game over our heads. We made them squirm a lot; but in the end we had no answer for their 7-4 Aussie center. He made 6-7 Mel Hubbard (the SoCon three-time high jump champion) look like a toddler in the center circle and in the lane.

[hotrod2001]

Looking at that map, we could really use a team in Tennessee. It's a shame that Chattanooga doesn't want to move up because they would fill the map out nicely.