This is true, but the flipside of that is that is also showed the limitations of the CUSA market model. UNCC and ODU haven’t done anything in b-ball or football and the CUSA has a severely degraded tv contract, which is due to their small fan bases overall.ah59396 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2019 10:30 amI don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here, I’d just remind you that these were all the similar arguments we made when we got ignored by CUSA in favor of ODU & UNCC when they both had like 2 bad FCS seasons under their belt.hotrod2001 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:29 amIf the AAC is determined to be the 6th member of the Power 5, they're not going to add any of those teams...they're going to want heavy hitting football programs which boost up the quality of the conference's strength. And granted three out of the four teams you listed are on the rise, none of them have a long history of success like what we have...if I'm looking at the records right, there's only one conference championship won between all of them (UAB last year)ah59396 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2019 4:49 pmI just don’t see it.
Our athletic funding is nowhere near competitive with the rest of the AAC.
Most AAC schools are large market/commuter type institutions.
Houston
Cincinnati
UCF
USF
Memphis
SMU
Temple
Tulane
Tulsa
All in large cities.
ECU & Navy the only outliers. Greenville still has 100k people and Annapolis is a borderline suburb of DC.
I’d love it, I just don’t see it.
If I had to bet, I’d put my money on one of:
ODU
Ga State
UNCC
UAB
With probably Ga State leading the pack. Especially if they keep improving in football over the next couple years. They’d fill a giant void in Georgia. Huge enrollment. Good basketball. Massive stadium.
Hope I’m wrong.
In regards to the TV market argument, when you compile up the markets App resides in, that would put us about 6th or 7th among their current members, and geographically there is not an AAC team through the I-85 corridor so one could maybe make an argument that having App in the conference would open up fans of both App and the other conference teams who reside in Atlanta, Charlotte, Triad and RTP who don't want to have drive all the way out to Greenville, Memphis or Cincinnati to catch a game. Yeah, Georgia State or Charlotte could also make that claim, but we have them beat in terms of butts in the seats and eyes on the screens...in fact our attendance averages are better than all four of those teams (in 2018 we were ranked #86, all the others are in the 120's.
Hopefully we get a look, if not we'll probably just have to settle for Boise State East. Like I said before one way to make a statement is pack BOA full with black and gold when we play ECU and show the AAC how well the App State fan base travels to neutral sites and how big of a presence the team has in the #23 television market.
I’ll hope for the best but again, I think we’ve seen how this kind of thing already works.
Advents like ESPN+, cord cutting, ESPN3, NBCSN,etc have been a net boon for App. Now the actual size of your fan base matters, not just the amount of people living in the same zip code of the school.