stever20 wrote:Saw Hurley did in fact leave for UConn.
If nothing else, this totally shows where the A10 is in relation now to the AAC. To have your best coach leave for the AAC is devastating.
The AAC if UConn and Memphis get back to their normal becomes a whole lot more difficult to ignore. Already had 3 top 6 seed year this year.
Stever, the problem at UConn is its devastating drop in attendance in recent years, which is why they were willing to go to the max to get Hurley. If he’s successful, his contract will pay for itself.
Membership in the AAC hurts UConn attendance for a number of reasons, regardless of how the league is rated. So, objective #1 For both Hurley and their AD Benedict has to be to improve attendance. More wins will help a lot but they also need to bolster the schedule with schools that are of more interest to their fan base.
My proposal is that UConn use all of their available OOC games to schedule P6 Northeast teams from the Big East, ACC, and Big Ten. They should accept the fact that the bottom half of the AAC is a group of schools that teams normally schedule in November/December to warm up against. They should therefore lobby the AAC to schedule some conference games in December. In my proposal, they would play high level tournament games in November and go from there with the P6 games, saving some feature games with their old BE rivals for January/February.
This is the old “play any team, any time, any place” Gonzaga attitude with which a team schedules more like an independent than one whose feature games are in conference. Here are the 9 games I propose that they schedule OOC every year:
Boston College
Providence
Syracuse
St. John’s
Seton Hall
Rutgers
Villanova
Maryland
Georgetown
A side benefit would be building relationships with ACC and B1G schools who might eventually help them in their efforts to gain membership in one of these leagues. In this effort, they might prefer to schedule Pitt or Penn State instead of Seton Hall.
Your thoughts?