Conference realignment discussion - v. 2015

[topdog]

Actually, I changed my mind...I think the Really Big East sounds better.

[Bluejay]

Out of curiosity I looked up the following using New York City as the Big East HQ/"center" and used Creighton as a comparable in terms of time and travel distance:

NY to Spokane= 2566 miles/37.5 hrs

NY to Omaha= 1256 miles/19.5 hrs

I played a college sport (tennis) where it could work I believe, but I have no idea about the other olympic sports. I'm sure the powers that be have crunched the numbers endlessly to try and make this work somehow, as the Zags are far and away the best fit. Except for that whole Spokane thing. I could see why Gonzaga would jump at the chance to be in the Big East as it would be considerably more money, better exposure in and around the media capital, open up fertile recruiting grounds in the east, and they would retain their native recruiting grounds (so far away from other conference members) and become that much more attractive to area talent due to their new conference affiliation. I would love to have them in the league, I just don't know how feasible it is.

JA X Alum, here's another way of looking at it:

NY to Omaha = 1160 air miles
NY to Spokane = 2190 air miles.

Modern jets fly at 500-600 mph. So, let's assume 550 mph for this calculation.

NY to Omaha = 2.1 hours
NY to Spokane = 3.9 hours

Charter is the only way that travel to Spokane makes any sense. So, that have to spring for a charter once a year per team of they don't use charters already. Gonzaga on a mid major budget uses charters for all their teams.

Omaha is about half way between NY and Spokane. A NY team that schedules Creighton and Gonzaga Thursday/Saturday would make their normal flight to Creighton on Wednesday. Instead of returning home after the game, they fly approximately the same distance and the same amount of time to Spokane on Friday as they would have spent on the return trip. No added travel. The team then makes the 4 hour flight back home on Sunday. That one-way, 4 hour flight is the only extra travel that's been added for the entire season for that team.

You keep saying these things are facts, when they simply are not.

First of all, I have checked flights from Omaha to Spokane. ALL flights are more than two hours. Every. Single. One.

Second, you are improperly focusing on basketball travel. Basketball travel isn't really the problem as those teams fly charters. The non revenue sports will not fly charters. Read that again. It is just too expensive to load up a baseball or softball team, plus support staff on charters (just the larger numbers alone require bigger planes). I don't think the eastern schools fly these teams on charters to Omaha now, but they will spend the money to fly charters all the way to Spokane?!? They will fly commercial, which means few direct flights, long layovers and significantly greater travel times. Conservatively, you can double the travel times and probably still not be close.

Third, you completely ignore the impact of time zone changes. For example, let's say that St John's baseball team flies out for a weekend series against Gonzaga. The Sunday game might get over about 4:00 pm pdt or so. After showering, getting a bite to eat and getting to the airport lets say it is 5:00. You then have a long flight (we'll assume for the sake of this example you can find a commercial flight that ONLY takes 5 hours to get back to NYC, which would make it 10 pm Pacific time (hopefully you dont encounter any weather delays). Of course, you arent in the Pacific time zone anymore so add three more hours and it is 1 am. After retrieving bags and getting back to campus, it is now 2 am.

[pki1998]

Out of curiosity I looked up the following using New York City as the Big East HQ/"center" and used Creighton as a comparable in terms of time and travel distance:

NY to Spokane= 2566 miles/37.5 hrs

NY to Omaha= 1256 miles/19.5 hrs

I played a college sport (tennis) where it could work I believe, but I have no idea about the other olympic sports. I'm sure the powers that be have crunched the numbers endlessly to try and make this work somehow, as the Zags are far and away the best fit. Except for that whole Spokane thing. I could see why Gonzaga would jump at the chance to be in the Big East as it would be considerably more money, better exposure in and around the media capital, open up fertile recruiting grounds in the east, and they would retain their native recruiting grounds (so far away from other conference members) and become that much more attractive to area talent due to their new conference affiliation. I would love to have them in the league, I just don't know how feasible it is.

JA X Alum, here's another way of looking at it:

NY to Omaha = 1160 air miles
NY to Spokane = 2190 air miles.

Modern jets fly at 500-600 mph. So, let's assume 550 mph for this calculation.

NY to Omaha = 2.1 hours
NY to Spokane = 3.9 hours

Charter is the only way that travel to Spokane makes any sense. So, that have to spring for a charter once a year per team of they don't use charters already. Gonzaga on a mid major budget uses charters for all their teams.

Omaha is about half way between NY and Spokane. A NY team that schedules Creighton and Gonzaga Thursday/Saturday would make their normal flight to Creighton on Wednesday. Instead of returning home after the game, they fly approximately the same distance and the same amount of time to Spokane on Friday as they would have spent on the return trip. No added travel. The team then makes the 4 hour flight back home on Sunday. That one-way, 4 hour flight is the only extra travel that's been added for the entire season for that team.

You keep saying these things are facts, when they simply are not.

First of all, I have checked flights from Omaha to Spokane. ALL flights are more than two hours. Every. Single. One.

Second, you are improperly focusing on basketball travel. Basketball travel isn't really the problem as those teams fly charters. The non revenue sports will not fly charters. Read that again. It is just too expensive to load up a baseball or softball team, plus support staff on charters (just the larger numbers alone require bigger planes). I don't think the eastern schools fly these teams on charters to Omaha now, but they will spend the money to fly charters all the way to Spokane?!? They will fly commercial, which means few direct flights, long layovers and significantly greater travel times. Conservatively, you can double the travel times and probably still not be close.

Third, you completely ignore the impact of time zone changes. For example, let's say that St John's baseball team flies out for a weekend series against Gonzaga. The Sunday game might get over about 4:00 pm pdt or so. After showering, getting a bite to eat and getting to the airport lets say it is 5:00. You then have a long flight (we'll assume for the sake of this example you can find a commercial flight that ONLY takes 5 hours to get back to NYC, which would make it 10 pm Pacific time (hopefully you dont encounter any weather delays). Of course, you arent in the Pacific time zone anymore so add three more hours and it is 1 am. After retrieving bags and getting back to campus, it is now 2 am.

College Kids getting back to their dorms at 2am, pretty sure back in my college days I was ordering my last beer at the time. But I agree with your point, the geography is to much to get over when it comes to Gonzaga.

[BEwannabe]

Second, you are improperly focusing on basketball travel. Basketball travel isn't really the problem as those teams fly charters. The non revenue sports will not fly charters. Read that again. It is just too expensive to load up a baseball or softball team, plus support staff on charters (just the larger numbers alone require bigger planes). I don't think the eastern schools fly these teams on charters to Omaha now, but they will spend the money to fly charters all the way to Spokane?!? They will fly commercial, which means few direct flights, long layovers and significantly greater travel times. Conservatively, you can double the travel times and probably still not be close.

Third, you completely ignore the impact of time zone changes. For example, let's say that St John's baseball team flies out for a weekend series against Gonzaga. The Sunday game might get over about 4:00 pm pdt or so. After showering, getting a bite to eat and getting to the airport lets say it is 5:00. You then have a long flight (we'll assume for the sake of this example you can find a commercial flight that ONLY takes 5 hours to get back to NYC, which would make it 10 pm Pacific time (hopefully you dont encounter any weather delays). Of course, you arent in the Pacific time zone anymore so add three more hours and it is 1 am. After retrieving bags and getting back to campus, it is now 2 am.

While on the right track you're off on your travel time from Spokane to East of the Miss by several hours for all but charter flights. As someone that spent 10 years flying back and forth to the west coast (direct), start to finish (unless you redeye) it takes the better part of your hours awake. First you can't complete a baseball game and get 30 people to the airport in an hour and even if you could you're departure wouldn't be until at least 6pm. Checking flights there is only 1 commercial flight from Spokane to NYC after 6pm and that's a 6:30 flight connecting in Seattle arrives NYC 5:20 am. But the biggest issue isn't with eastern teams taking single road trips to Spokane (even though it would be dreadful and likely have hang over like impact on season) it's the Zags non charter Olympic sports teams regularly making the treks east and back. It would be the end of Zags non Olympic sports teams as parents and kids would soon come to the realization that participating in sports at Gonzaga is not in their best interest and they would simply choose another to take their services elsewhere. So unless the WCC is going to let the Zags compete in basketball only in the Big East and why would they then how are the Zags going to make the Big East work?

[Bill Marsh]

Out of curiosity I looked up the following using New York City as the Big East HQ/"center" and used Creighton as a comparable in terms of time and travel distance:

NY to Spokane= 2566 miles/37.5 hrs

NY to Omaha= 1256 miles/19.5 hrs

I played a college sport (tennis) where it could work I believe, but I have no idea about the other olympic sports. I'm sure the powers that be have crunched the numbers endlessly to try and make this work somehow, as the Zags are far and away the best fit. Except for that whole Spokane thing. I could see why Gonzaga would jump at the chance to be in the Big East as it would be considerably more money, better exposure in and around the media capital, open up fertile recruiting grounds in the east, and they would retain their native recruiting grounds (so far away from other conference members) and become that much more attractive to area talent due to their new conference affiliation. I would love to have them in the league, I just don't know how feasible it is.

JA X Alum, here's another way of looking at it:

NY to Omaha = 1160 air miles
NY to Spokane = 2190 air miles.

Modern jets fly at 500-600 mph. So, let's assume 550 mph for this calculation.

NY to Omaha = 2.1 hours
NY to Spokane = 3.9 hours

Charter is the only way that travel to Spokane makes any sense. So, that have to spring for a charter once a year per team of they don't use charters already. Gonzaga on a mid major budget uses charters for all their teams.

Omaha is about half way between NY and Spokane. A NY team that schedules Creighton and Gonzaga Thursday/Saturday would make their normal flight to Creighton on Wednesday. Instead of returning home after the game, they fly approximately the same distance and the same amount of time to Spokane on Friday as they would have spent on the return trip. No added travel. The team then makes the 4 hour flight back home on Sunday. That one-way, 4 hour flight is the only extra travel that's been added for the entire season for that team.

You keep saying these things are facts, when they simply are not.

First of all, I have checked flights from Omaha to Spokane. ALL flights are more than two hours. Every. Single. One.

Second, you are improperly focusing on basketball travel. Basketball travel isn't really the problem as those teams fly charters. The non revenue sports will not fly charters. Read that again. It is just too expensive to load up a baseball or softball team, plus support staff on charters (just the larger numbers alone require bigger planes). I don't think the eastern schools fly these teams on charters to Omaha now, but they will spend the money to fly charters all the way to Spokane?!? They will fly commercial, which means few direct flights, long layovers and significantly greater travel times. Conservatively, you can double the travel times and probably still not be close.

Third, you completely ignore the impact of time zone changes. For example, let's say that St John's baseball team flies out for a weekend series against Gonzaga. The Sunday game might get over about 4:00 pm pdt or so. After showering, getting a bite to eat and getting to the airport lets say it is 5:00. You then have a long flight (we'll assume for the sake of this example you can find a commercial flight that ONLY takes 5 hours to get back to NYC, which would make it 10 pm Pacific time (hopefully you dont encounter any weather delays). Of course, you arent in the Pacific time zone anymore so add three more hours and it is 1 am. After retrieving bags and getting back to campus, it is now 2 am.

Thanks for providing additional perspective. My thoughts . . .

1. I didn't list times or distances between Omaha and Spokane, so I have no dispute with what you posted. 2+ hours for that flight sounds right to me.

2. I don't see anything "improper" about my focus on basketball travel. That's the primary focus here so that's the example I chose. I appreciate that you are rounding out the conversation. Most of the non-revenue sports will not fly anything because there are a limited number of sports that play round robin schedules and hardly anyone in the conference sponsors teams in all the non-revenue sports. There are as few as teams besides men's bb that we're talking about in a given school and we're talking about one charter flight per year per team. One. That's it. Most of thes teams already have a long road trip or two on their schedules. Let this one replace it.

3. Charters are not prohibitively expensive. They are not. Gonzaga with a mid major budget already flies all their teams on charters. If they can afford it, so can Big East teams with their higher revenues. Again, we're talking one charter flight per year per team. That's all that is necessary. In the East and in the Great Lakes region, we're not used to long distance travel. But they do it out West all the time. We're to re-inventing the wheel here.

4. Conservatively double the times? Nope. Not even on commercial. But I wouldn't propose that anyone do this by commercial. There is certainly additional time associated with travel besides hours in the air, which is what I was reporting. But all of that additional time already exists on shorter flights, so there's no increase.that additional time is one of the reasons to fly charter because it eliminates unnecessary wait time in airports and eliminates transfers to a second plane.

5. You're right to say that I completely ignored time zone changes. You're also right to say that this is the biggest factor in this kind of travel. The West Virginia AD Oliver Luck has strongly emphasized this point in complaining about travel problems for the Mountaineers in the Big XII. But there is a difference - one trip per year per team at a max. That's it. West Virginia encountered that problem on every single road game. They wouldn't have been complaining if it were once a year. With 12 teams in the conference, chances are that the Spokane trip wouldn't be on the the schedule for every year for East Coast teams.

6. No doubt that there are obstacles with a school on the Idaho border. But obstacles are simply problems to be solved. What you're ignoring is that this is not a new or unique problem. The Ivy League has existed since 1954 and those schools had been competing against each other for more than 50 years before that when their looser affiliation included Army and Navy.i gave the example of the 360 mile trip from Penn to Dartmouth. At 60 mph, that's a 6 hour bus trip. Ever try to make that drive without hitting traffic?it quickly becomes 7-8 hours. Imagine that same trip without interstate highways. Imagine it via trains which traveled at slower speeds and made frequent stops in the era before busing. Then imagin that same trip from Annapolis, 100 miles farther down the road, back in the day when Navy was competing against an Ivy League schedule. How did those teams manage that travel?

Challenges of travel in the Ivy League are small problems compared with the Big Ten and PAC-12. I gave examples of trips of over 1000 miles in these conferences. At one time the old PAC-8 included U of Idaho. Imagine an 1120 mile bus trip from LA to Moscow, Idaho. If the problems associated with one trip per year at a max for 6-10 teams per school seem insurmountable, then maybe the Big East needs to bring in consultants from schools that have already been doing it using varying modes of transportation for over a century.

It's a max of once a year per team that we're franking out over. My goodness. Gonzaga is the one that would be facing a real problem, not the rest of the conference. And all reports have been that Gonzaga is a "yes". Why then can't the rest of us figure it out?

[Bill Marsh]

While on the right track you're off on your travel time from Spokane to East of the Miss by several hours for all but charter flights. As someone that spent 10 years flying back and forth to the west coast (direct), start to finish (unless you redeye) it takes the better part of your hours awake. First you can't complete a baseball game and get 30 people to the airport in an hour and even if you could you're departure wouldn't be until at least 6pm. Checking flights there is only 1 commercial flight from Spokane to NYC after 6pm and that's a 6:30 flight connecting in Seattle arrives NYC 5:20 am. But the biggest issue isn't with eastern teams taking single road trips to Spokane (even though it would be dreadful and likely have hang over like impact on season) it's the Zags non charter Olympic sports teams regularly making the treks east and back. It would be the end of Zags non Olympic sports teams as parents and kids would soon come to the realization that participating in sports at Gonzaga is not in their best interest and they would simply choose another to take their services elsewhere. So unless the WCC is going to let the Zags compete in basketball only in the Big East and why would they then how are the Zags going to make the Big East work?

I agree with everything you say except your comments about the Zags.

Charter is the only way to go to do this right. I wouldn't attempt it any other way. Gonzaga already travels long distances both in the WCC and in their big time OOC games to boost their schedule which are often east of the Mississippi. They use charter for all travel for all their teams.

I agree that Gonzaga faces the big problem, but I'll let the speak for themselves. By all reports, they're already on board if they were offered membership.

[BEwannabe]

charter for m/w hoops is not a problem but their not going to charter for baseball, xcountry,soccer,golf,volleyball. their men particpate in 6 sports and the women 8 in wcc so the Big East makes little to no sense for 12 of their 14 teams and it would jeopardize participation in all of their women's and Olympic men's sports unless WCC allows them to play in Big East in their marquee sport. And why would the WCC be inclined to bow to the Zags wishes? It could happen but if the Zags leave then do you think BYU sticks around? I would think the WCC would make the move uncomfortable for the Zags not be accomodating.

[GreatDaneAttorney]

Everyone gets hung up on the travel distance to Spokane, but I don't think Gonzaga would be first on the list anyhow--I still think BYU would be targeted ahead of any other western teams. It has a much larger fan base, it would actually help the league's average attendance, and we all know how well their fans travel.

Would Provo be too far? I assume Salt Lake City has a relatively major airport, especially compared to Spokane. Looking at their destinations list from Wikipedia, they have direct flights to the following Big East cities:

• Butler/Indianapolis (seasonally)
• Creighton/Omaha (seasonally)
• DePaul/Chicago
• Georgetown/Washington
• Villanova/Philadelphia
• St. Johns & Seton Hall/New York
• Xavier/Cincy

The only flights that are not direct at least part of the year are to Marquette/Milwaukee and Providence. Simply in terms of travel, I think BYU would be ahead of Gonzaga.

[Bill Marsh]

charter for m/w hoops is not a problem but their not going to charter for baseball, xcountry,soccer,golf,volleyball. their men particpate in 6 sports and the women 8 in wcc so the Big East makes little to no sense for 12 of their 14 teams and it would jeopardize participation in all of their women's and Olympic men's sports unless WCC allows them to play in Big East in their marquee sport. And why would the WCC be inclined to bow to the Zags wishes? It could happen but if the Zags leave then do you think BYU sticks around? I would think the WCC would make the move uncomfortable for the Zags not be accomodating.

The WCC can't let the Zags take their basketball to the Big East and keep their other sports in the WCC. NCAA rules prohibit that.

Gonzaga already uses charters for their baseball team and all other teams sports.

Gonzaga travel is only an issue for their teams that play round robin schedules, not for all sports. The rest decide a conference championship in a tournament or joint meet.

Whether or not Big East membership makes sense for Gonzaga is up to Gonzaga to decide. All reports have indicated that they would make the move if membership were offered.

[Bill Marsh]

Everyone gets hung up on the travel distance to Spokane, but I don't think Gonzaga would be first on the list anyhow--I still think BYU would be targeted ahead of any other western teams. It has a much larger fan base, it would actually help the league's average attendance, and we all know how well their fans travel.

Would Provo be too far? I assume Salt Lake City has a relatively major airport, especially compared to Spokane. Looking at their destinations list from Wikipedia, they have direct flights to the following Big East cities:

• Butler/Indianapolis (seasonally)
• Creighton/Omaha (seasonally)
• DePaul/Chicago
• Georgetown/Washington
• Villanova/Philadelphia
• St. Johns & Seton Hall/New York
• Xavier/Cincy

The only flights that are not direct at least part of the year are to Marquette/Milwaukee and Providence. Simply in terms of travel, I think BYU would be ahead of Gonzaga.

Early on I thought that BYU and Gonzaga would make perfect travel partners. It seemed that BYU was as serious as Notre Dame about their commitment to independence in football. However, now I'm not so sure. Recent comments by BYU AD, Bruno Mendenhall, seem to suggest that they're looking for membership in a P5 conference. If so, the Big XII would seem to be a natural fit for them. It fell through before, but in today's climate I think they'd work out any of the sticking points such as the Mormons' objection to playing games on Sundays.