Big East Conference Expansion Ideas and Discussion

[BEwannabe]

Zags don't need NBE and aren't going to expose their student athletes to the hardships the NBE would bring them. As another poster opined, the travels times to the pacific nw are huge, some of you have no clue but the main point is Gonzaga is doing fine in the conference they're in.

[muskienick]

HoosierPal,

Most of us are big girls and boys now and permitted to stay up until midnight even on weekday nights. Others, who may not have that permission, may have DVR's so that they can watch the Gonzaga games at the times of their choice.

Based on what we've been reading from your posts, you will find (or create) some impediment for any member other than the one for whom you favor. I am equally aware that there are posters here, myself probably included, who have a ready-made list of impediments that would bar your favorite potential entry to the Big East. The difference between most others and you is that we are open-minded about most of those being mentioned for #12 while you seem to feel that only one such team is suitable for that privilege. (I did say "most of those being mentioned" since I'm not for a Siena or Canisius to be named, two that were mentioned, but with tongue firmly in cheek, I am sure.) Others that have been mentioned for the next two slots like VCU, Gonzaga, UConn, and SLU have been taking care of business and are very worthy of careful consideration. Most would consider Richmond, Dayton, and Wichita State to be in a next tier down from them assuming that selecting for long-range stability and basketball achievement and excellence are paramount in the invitation process.

Most people would probably favor UConn (should they decide to downsize their FB program) and Gonzaga (as a BB-only member) in a heartbeat to bring our Conference to 12. But those two are unlikely at best. If Fox Sports 1 desires a 14-member Conference for an expanded (19-game) schedule, then Gonzaga might be tempted and that could open the door for the top three remaining programs who would be applying for membership with SLU leading that list.

Muskie Nick, basketball-only members are not allowed by NCAA rules.

As Homer would say: "DOH!!!"

[Bill Marsh]

Zags don't need NBE and aren't going to expose their student athletes to the hardships the NBE would bring them. As another poster opined, the travels times to the pacific nw are huge, some of you have no clue but the main point is Gonzaga is doing fine in the conference they're in.

They're not as great as you think if you're flying on your own plane or by charter, which is how Gonzaga currently does it. It's not like they're in a bus league now.

[FlyJays]

As conference realignment has illustrated over the last 3 or 4 years, geography doesn't really matter. That's why WVU is in the Big 12. It's why UTSA is in the same conference as teams in Virginia.

While I don't think Gonzaga will ever be a member of the Big East, travel expense isn't the reason why.

[marquette]

Gonzaga may have more to lose than gain by joining the Big East, regardless of travel issues. They built a reputation on solid out of conference scheduling, winning a fair amount, then dominating the WCC. If they became an also-ran in the Big East that would hurt them (not saying they would, but it is possible). Then they lose some of their national visibility/prestige. Playing in our markets might also hurt their applications. Hear me out, how many students are interested in leaving NY or D.C. or Philly, Chi, Miltown, Indy, Cinnci, NJ, RI, or Omaha and heading out to Spokane? I doubt very many. Meanwhile they lose some of their visibility on the West Coast by playing half of their games at inconvenient times. They are already in a great institutional fit conference (in this way the WCC is similar to the Big East and MAAC). I have no idea what their t.v. contract is, but who knows if the difference would be enough to defray costs? There are just a lot of question marks involved that I'm not sure Gonzaga wants to think about.

Not a very well laid-out post. Sorry, kind of in a hurry. Hopefully my general points come across.

[HoosierPal]

Gonzaga may have more to lose than gain by joining the Big East, regardless of travel issues. They built a reputation on solid out of conference scheduling, winning a fair amount, then dominating the WCC. If they became an also-ran in the Big East that would hurt them (not saying they would, but it is possible). Then they lose some of their national visibility/prestige. Playing in our markets might also hurt their applications. Hear me out, how many students are interested in leaving NY or D.C. or Philly, Chi, Miltown, Indy, Cinnci, NJ, RI, or Omaha and heading out to Spokane? I doubt very many. Meanwhile they lose some of their visibility on the West Coast by playing half of their games at inconvenient times. They are already in a great institutional fit conference (in this way the WCC is similar to the Big East and MAAC). I have no idea what their t.v. contract is, but who knows if the difference would be enough to defray costs? There are just a lot of question marks involved that I'm not sure Gonzaga wants to think about.

Not a very well laid-out post. Sorry, kind of in a hurry. Hopefully my general points come across.

Some good points in there. Here are some more.

Gonzaga sponsors 16 sports, 8 men and 8 women. While the women's BB team may be able to piggy back on their schedule, and ride a charter with the men, the other 14 sports wouldn't be so lucky. They would have to suffer through commercial flights. Spokane is a nice city, sitting on the scenic Spokane River, but it is not easy to get to. You have to connect through Portland, Seattle, Denver of Salt Lake City. A trip to the East Coast, and back, burns a day each way.

The WCC has a contract with ESPN through 2019. I don't know the value, but do you think ESPN might up the ante if Gonzaga was thinking about leaving? Also, if you look at viewership, Gonzaga would loose a good amount of visibility by having their games on Fox Sports 1 instead of ESPN.

[Bill Marsh]

Gonzaga may have more to lose than gain by joining the Big East, regardless of travel issues. They built a reputation on solid out of conference scheduling, winning a fair amount, then dominating the WCC. If they became an also-ran in the Big East that would hurt them (not saying they would, but it is possible). Then they lose some of their national visibility/prestige. Playing in our markets might also hurt their applications. Hear me out, how many students are interested in leaving NY or D.C. or Philly, Chi, Miltown, Indy, Cinnci, NJ, RI, or Omaha and heading out to Spokane? I doubt very many. Meanwhile they lose some of their visibility on the West Coast by playing half of their games at inconvenient times. They are already in a great institutional fit conference (in this way the WCC is similar to the Big East and MAAC). I have no idea what their t.v. contract is, but who knows if the difference would be enough to defray costs? There are just a lot of question marks involved that I'm not sure Gonzaga wants to think about.

Not a very well laid-out post. Sorry, kind of in a hurry. Hopefully my general points come across.

Excellent points, Marquette. Sometimes exposure in the right markets is more important to a conference than money. That is certainly the case for BYU. They joined the WCC because they already get plenty of exposure for football with the separate deal they have for that sport and the WCC contract gives them better exposure for basketball than the Mountain West would - and in markets that are more desirable for them, I would guess.

The WCC is like the Big East and the MAAC only in that they are mostly Catholic, private, and urban. However, in terms of a TV deal they aren't like either. while no financial terms have been released for their contract with ESPN, I would guess that it's comparable to the A10, which is $40 million for 8 years, $357,000 peers school. The WCC has a few more games, so let's round the number up to $400,000 per school. Gonzaga supplements that with games that are not part of the conference TV package, e.g. the recent game with Memphis. So, maybe they can even get it up to $500,000 at the most optimistic with the caveat that we don't know what the conference's distribution is. They may get favored treatment.

So, if offered a spot in the Big East, they'd have a real dilemma. They can stay in the WCC with lower travel expenses, fewer travel hours for student athletes, and better west coast exposure for the university OR they can make ten times as much money in the Big East in front of bigger crowds and bigger media exposure. Average attendance at WCC games is high school level 2-3 thousand on average.

If I were the folks at Gonzaga, I would heed your advice. The exposure in the territory from which they recruit the general student body is probably more valuable to them.

After agreeing with you, I'm having some 2nd thoughts, Matquette. I want to get your input.

I did some checking and found that about 50% of Gonzaga's students come from inside the state of Washington. Even if GU leaves the WCC, they still have their own instate presence in Washington, so nothing lost there. With Seattle in the WAC, they don't gain any cross state exposure from the WCC.

About 25% of the GU students come from California and Oregon. So, that's an argument for staying in the WCC. Until you realize that another 25% don't come from the west coast. The Big East wouldn't give them exposure to all the places from which the rest of the student body comes, but it would hit some of them. So. The trade off wouldn't be as bad as it first appears.

I think the key may be where the alumni live. If they tend to gravitate to the big urban centers of the west coast, then staying in the WCC is the best plan. But if they're spread around the country, the Big East could be a positive.

Another way to reach those west coast alums would be to schedule home and home series with some of their old WCC rivals to keep themselves in Portland, the Bay Area and So Cal on a regular basis.

[marquette]

Gonzaga may have more to lose than gain by joining the Big East, regardless of travel issues. They built a reputation on solid out of conference scheduling, winning a fair amount, then dominating the WCC. If they became an also-ran in the Big East that would hurt them (not saying they would, but it is possible). Then they lose some of their national visibility/prestige. Playing in our markets might also hurt their applications. Hear me out, how many students are interested in leaving NY or D.C. or Philly, Chi, Miltown, Indy, Cinnci, NJ, RI, or Omaha and heading out to Spokane? I doubt very many. Meanwhile they lose some of their visibility on the West Coast by playing half of their games at inconvenient times. They are already in a great institutional fit conference (in this way the WCC is similar to the Big East and MAAC). I have no idea what their t.v. contract is, but who knows if the difference would be enough to defray costs? There are just a lot of question marks involved that I'm not sure Gonzaga wants to think about.

Not a very well laid-out post. Sorry, kind of in a hurry. Hopefully my general points come across.

Excellent points, Marquette. Sometimes exposure in the right markets is more important to a conference than money. That is certainly the case for BYU. They joined the WCC because they already get plenty of exposure for football with the separate deal they have for that sport and the WCC contract gives them better exposure for basketball than the Mountain West would - and in markets that are more desirable for them, I would guess.

The WCC is like the Big East and the MAAC only in that they are mostly Catholic, private, and urban. However, in terms of a TV deal they aren't like either. while no financial terms have been released for their contract with ESPN, I would guess that it's comparable to the A10, which is $40 million for 8 years, $357,000 peers school. The WCC has a few more games, so let's round the number up to $400,000 per school. Gonzaga supplements that with games that are not part of the conference TV package, e.g. the recent game with Memphis. So, maybe they can even get it up to $500,000 at the most optimistic with the caveat that we don't know what the conference's distribution is. They may get favored treatment.

So, if offered a spot in the Big East, they'd have a real dilemma. They can stay in the WCC with lower travel expenses, fewer travel hours for student athletes, and better west coast exposure for the university OR they can make ten times as much money in the Big East in front of bigger crowds and bigger media exposure. Average attendance at WCC games is high school level 2-3 thousand on average.

If I were the folks at Gonzaga, I would heed your advice. The exposure in the territory from which they recruit the general student body is probably more valuable to them.

In regards to conference similarities I only meant that they had as good institutional fits in the WCC as they would in the Big East. MAAC is just another example of that. Clearly there's a huge separation between the BE and WCC, and nearly as big a separation between the WCC and MAAC. My post was a little hard to read because I was rushing to a seminar. Sorry about that. Ordinarily I would have broken that up into a few paragraphs with a couple of supporting sentences for each point. I think we generally agree that it wouldn't be an easy choice to make if it were given to Gonzaga.

[notkirkcameron]

He has his issues, but I love Knight as an analyst. A question for SLU fans... did it bother you when they (I actually don't recall if Knight ever did this) referred to the team as "slew" or "Saint Louis U" ? I suppose they didn't want to confuse things by saying S-L-U when playing V-C-U but I don't know why they wouldn't just say "Saint Louis"

When I was at SLU, we were talking about how SLU was kind of unique in that there aren't really any other schools who are known by their initials being pronounced as a word, rather than just listing the letters (a la "VCU" or "X") or abbreviating ("UMass" or "UConn"). The only schools we could think of were the SUNY schools in New York.

[Bill Marsh]

Excellent points, Marquette. Sometimes exposure in the right markets is more important to a conference than money. That is certainly the case for BYU. They joined the WCC because they already get plenty of exposure for football with the separate deal they have for that sport and the WCC contract gives them better exposure for basketball than the Mountain West would - and in markets that are more desirable for them, I would guess.

The WCC is like the Big East and the MAAC only in that they are mostly Catholic, private, and urban. However, in terms of a TV deal they aren't like either. while no financial terms have been released for their contract with ESPN, I would guess that it's comparable to the A10, which is $40 million for 8 years, $357,000 peers school. The WCC has a few more games, so let's round the number up to $400,000 per school. Gonzaga supplements that with games that are not part of the conference TV package, e.g. the recent game with Memphis. So, maybe they can even get it up to $500,000 at the most optimistic with the caveat that we don't know what the conference's distribution is. They may get favored treatment.

So, if offered a spot in the Big East, they'd have a real dilemma. They can stay in the WCC with lower travel expenses, fewer travel hours for student athletes, and better west coast exposure for the university OR they can make ten times as much money in the Big East in front of bigger crowds and bigger media exposure. Average attendance at WCC games is high school level 2-3 thousand on average.

If I were the folks at Gonzaga, I would heed your advice. The exposure in the territory from which they recruit the general student body is probably more valuable to them.

In regards to conference similarities I only meant that they had as good institutional fits in the WCC as they would in the Big East. MAAC is just another example of that. Clearly there's a huge separation between the BE and WCC, and nearly as big a separation between the WCC and MAAC. My post was a little hard to read because I was rushing to a seminar. Sorry about that. Ordinarily I would have broken that up into a few paragraphs with a couple of supporting sentences for each point. I think we generally agree that it wouldn't be an easy choice to make if it were given to Gonzaga.

Got it.

I actually think yours was a great post. One of the best I've read. You got wot think about the situation differently. Thank you. Content was much more important than format.

I only mentioned the BE/MAAC comparison to clarify the point about TV revenue. Otherwise I think you were spot on. I've often thought of the WCC as being the west. Coast version of the MAAC - except for BYU. Attendance is pretty similar to what MAAC schools get. In the last 15 years, Gonzaga has gone beyond what any of the other schools aspire to - except for BYU. Siena seems like the most similar school in the MAAC as they are located off by themselves, removed from most of the rest of the conference - though not to the same degree as GU. Siena draws far more in attendance than anyone else in the MAAC. If they could develop into a consistent winner, they could. Ecco me the east Coast version of GU.

It's funny how one of those west coast Catholic schools periodically rises up and dominates. For about a decade in the '50's, San Francisco was as goo as anyone in the country. Santa Clara, Seattle, and Loyola Marymount have all had their moments as well.