[Just for fun] Your Outside-the-Box Expansion Ideas

[ohiohsbball]

Coastal Carolina should be given strong consideration. Visiting Myrtle Beach this time of year would be fun. Maybe have the BE tournament on an outdoor court by the beach?

[notkirkcameron]

Outside-the-box expansion idea? Go X-Men: Days of Future Past-style on Mike Tranghese. Have his present-consciousnesses sent back in time to his former body in 2002 (pre-ACC raid #1). Have him convince Duke, North Carolina, NC State and Wake Forest that the ACC and Tobacco Road is on the brink of implosion. Add the ACC schools to keep the football schools (Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston College, etc.) happy, and still add DePaul, Marquette, Xavier, Creighton and Butler to create a mega-conference for elite basketball.

Egad....assuming no other movement following those acquisitions, that would be a 23-team basketball conference, and a 12-team football conference...13 if the Big East never kicks football-only member Temple out.

Creighton
Marquette
DePaul
Notre Dame
Butler
Xavier
Miami
Duke
North Carolina
NC State
Wake Forest
West Virginia
Virginia Tech
Georgetown
Villanova
Pittsburgh
Seton Hall
Rutgers
Syracuse
St. John's
Providence
Connecticut
Boston College

[whiteandblue77]

Cool Division:
Butler
Creighton
DePaul
Georgetown
Marquette
Providence
St. Johns
Seton Hall
Villanova
Xavier

D-Bag Division:
Drake
Kentucky
Miami
North Carolina
Syracuse
Southern Illinois
Nebraska
Wichita State
Wisconsin
VCU

[butlerchris]

How's this for out of the box. Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forrest - historically, all 4 have been weak in football. They could put their FB in the MAC and play BB with us!

[muskienick]

Forget the non-basketball-related restrictive criteria and stick with only these: good fan base; strong winning tradition; excellent facilities; frequent appearances in the polls and NCAA Tourney, and at least reasonable geographical sense ---

Under those circumstances, there seems little outside-the-box wiggle room:

Wichita State and VCU

But like others have said, I really like the 10-member set-up we enjoy now.

[mpwalsh8]

How's this for out of the box. Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forrest - historically, all 4 have been weak in football. They could put their FB in the MAC and play BB with us!

This is the best suggestion among the three pages of drivel. If you're gonna dream, dream big but at least base it on some semblance of reality. All four of those schools would be a slam dunk if any of them wanted to get off the big time college football parade.

[Frank the Tank]

People like to speculate on teams #11 and #12, sticking close to the Big East footprint, trying to find institutions with cultural fit. But very rarely do we see outside-the-box ideas, and when we do, the ideas are often not presented in a very structured way. Ideas in this thread should be posted in the following format:

What teams were added?
Team A, Team B

What do they bring to the table?
Huge new markets

What circumstances led to their inclusion?
The south rose again

What, if anything, would change about the league with these teams?
Zilch

To start things off, I'll add my own idea.

What teams were added?
St. Louis, Gonzaga, BYU, Loyola (Los Angeles)

What do they bring to the table?
3 of 4 have large fan bases, all bring new potential TV markets. Loyola-Los Angeles is a large Jesuit university in a great city; it's a "project" school that currently does not compete at the same level as the other institutions. All Big East schools remain private institutions of high academic caliber.

What circumstances led to their inclusion?
Fox Sports 1 worked with the Big East to sweeten the deal with more teams for more TV inventory. Fox likes stealing Gonzaga and BYU's basketball games from ESPN.

What, if anything, would change about the league with these teams?
A preseason conference tournament would be played in Los Angeles at the Staples Center. All Big East teams would play 2 games that count toward the conference standings. The 2-day event would feature back-to-back-to-back games all day long (7 each day). The Big East preseason tournament becomes a heavily promoted event on the west coast akin to the tourney at MSG.

I think it's agreat idea. One of the things it has going for it is that LA has no pro football. So, once the colege football is season is over, there wouldn't be much competition for fan interest in LA at that point - as long as the tournament avoided the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. In fact, if it were scheduled right before the Rose Bowl, it might actually become an attraction since there are so many extra people in LA at that time and some of them might buy tickets to see some good college basketball.

BTW, I assume you're talking about Loyola-Marymount? They would definitely be a project, but so was Seton Hall when the Bog East was first formed. Having a commitment from them to upgrade the program would be a "must". At least they have a huge market. Imagining a conference with teams in NY, LA, and Chicago would have to be very tempting.

On a side note, I think that too much is made of adding "new" markets. No team "delivers" it's home market. Each team has it's fan base as well as others who are fans of college basketball, but no one delivers the home market the way a pro team does. Adding another team within a market intensifies interest within that market and expands the penetration of that market. Thus, adding a St. Joe's, for example, in the Philly market would be a plus. Same thing with adding Dayton in southwest Ohio as another example.

LA doesn't have much competition for fan interest?! UCLA might be down this year, but they're a blue blood basketball program. USC is still in-town and all of the Pac-12 schools send a ton of alums to LA (similar to how Big Ten grads gravitate to Chicago). Plus, the NFL doesn't matter: LA is a *Lakers* town above all else (even when they're horrible like right now). The fact that the Clippers are actually very good on top of it means that LA is the top market for the NBA. We're not even including the 2 NHL teams in the market, which features the Kings that have won 2 of the last 3 Stanley Cup championships. If anything, LA is the most competitive winter sports market in the country.

Regardless, SLU has to be included in any Big East expansion scenario. To exclude them just doesn't make sense based on institutional fit, market size, facilities, geography and history (and I have zero personal connection with SLU). Anyone trying to exclude SLU isn't looking at the factors that truly drive conference realignment.

So, the question is who comes with SLU. The outside of the box options for me are one of either Boston University (who someone else has already mentioned) or Northeastern. Whoever shows more consistency over the next 5 years on-the-court (not necessarily excellence) would get the nod. The private school presence in the Boston market is a key component. The way the Big East should look at one of the Boston schools is the way that the Big Ten looked at Rutgers: the actual fan base and performance of the expansion candidate is secondary compared to giving the alums of the other current members a home base in that market. The value of Rutgers in the Big Ten isn't Rutgers itself - instead, the value is that Rutgers is the vehicle to consolidate all of the Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State and other Big Ten alums that live in the NYC market. The Big East should have that same type of presence in the Boston market for the alums from Providence, Georgetown, Villanova and other members. It's simply way too large of a market on the East Coast (particularly for a conference like the Big East) to leave that open to essentially just Boston College in the ACC even with the fact that it's a weak college sports fan market overall.

[Hall2012]

How's this for out of the box. Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forrest - historically, all 4 have been weak in football. They could put their FB in the MAC and play BB with us!

This is the best suggestion among the three pages of drivel. If you're gonna dream, dream big but at least base it on some semblance of reality. All four of those schools would be a slam dunk if any of them wanted to get off the big time college football parade.

Reality? Who said anything about reality? I thought the purpose of this thread was to give the most outlandish expansion ideas possible!

[Frank the Tank]

How's this for out of the box. Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forrest - historically, all 4 have been weak in football. They could put their FB in the MAC and play BB with us!

This is the best suggestion among the three pages of drivel. If you're gonna dream, dream big but at least base it on some semblance of reality. All four of those schools would be a slam dunk if any of them wanted to get off the big time college football parade.

Heh - it's "reality" in the Jurassic Park sense that, in theory, I can find dinosaur DNA in mosquitoes trapped in amber and then started breeding velociraptors.

Think of it this way: when the Big Ten signs its new TV contract in a couple of years, Northwestern will be making more TV money than the vast majority of MLB, NBA and NHL franchises. That alone should tell you that they (and no other power conference school) would get off the big time college football parade even if they lose every single game on-the-field for the next 20 years.

Now, targeting non-power conference FBS schools with great basketball resources would be a better example of a "dream big" proposal with a dose of semi-plausibility. Think UConn, UMass, BYU, UNLV, San Diego State, etc.

[NJRedman]

How's this for out of the box. Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forrest - historically, all 4 have been weak in football. They could put their FB in the MAC and play BB with us!

This is the best suggestion among the three pages of drivel. If you're gonna dream, dream big but at least base it on some semblance of reality. All four of those schools would be a slam dunk if any of them wanted to get off the big time college football parade.

Heh - it's "reality" in the Jurassic Park sense that, in theory, I can find dinosaur DNA in mosquitoes trapped in amber and then started breeding velociraptors.

Think of it this way: when the Big Ten signs its new TV contract in a couple of years, Northwestern will be making more TV money than the vast majority of MLB, NBA and NHL franchises. That alone should tell you that they (and no other power conference school) would get off the big time college football parade even if they lose every single game on-the-field for the next 20 years.

Now, targeting non-power conference FBS schools with great basketball resources would be a better example of a "dream big" proposal with a dose of semi-plausibility. Think UConn, UMass, BYU, UNLV, San Diego State, etc.

Well it IS an outside the box thread.

I like the idea of wooing the private schools of the FB5. Duke, WF, Vandy, NW, ND and Stanford. The latter to be paired with fellow west coast privates like Gonzaga and BYU to form a mighty 18 team goliath of private school BBall dominance! hahaha