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Basically a lot more questions than answers from the Atlanta meetings. Looking at campus sites for championship games. Each athletic director assigned a sport. League office site not selected yet. Maybe a month before a commissioner is chosen. Read below.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20130409/B ... -remaining

XU----- you can now count me in on doubting if the C7 had this planned all along.


If this article is correct. It looks a lot like things were less previously thought out then I would expect. I am also alarmed that their are still details of the tv deal that are still sketchy. I'm shocked that we have gone so far and the details haven't been worked out. However as this source is an AD, its more credible then some. So at this point i'm surprised. Definitely not a business plan i would recommend.

they way this article is written it looks like the Presidents made a basketball only decision and are just now thinking about logistics of running a conference... " you mean we have to arrange scheduling for women's tennis to?" I would like to think they put a little more thought into the operation of the conference but hell what do i know.

On a side note. While Fox's details with the Big East apparently are sketchy, Fox has signed a deal with ECAC lacrosse. So i get my Bellarmine games on one way or another now. http://www.laxpower.com/laxnews/news.php?story=32752

This has been a long time concern of mine in talking to my source at Creighton. Really it seems a lot of really important things are happening way to late. They clearly need to start hiring people to manage these things at least on a temporary basis, AD's don't seem like the best solution to manage each sport. It almost feels like no real work was done in January and February.

Not too surprising that a list of items have to be accomplished, other than I would have thought they would have focused on a commissioner long before this. It's also a tradeoff- if there were a lot of details discussed at the time, as suggested there should be, there definitely wouldn't have been the ability to keep things under wraps as they did. This was one of the best kept secrets ( Jesuits should be good at that) and I believe there were feelers out to the schools but that no way were they aware of actual invites until late in the game. Better to have the AD's address these issues than Univ Presidents. A lot of work ahead, but I do like that the "common thinking" will make things smoother- as the Presidents hoped would be the case when they decided to form this league.

“You come out of the meetings and say, 'What did we get accomplished?'” Rasmussen said. “I don't know if we got anything accomplished much beyond coming up with an outline of questions we have to have decided as we go forward.

This is not exactly reassuring.

Starting a new conference is hard work, we already knew this. Some schools have different sports than others, we knew this. Adding sports or members or associate members will be necessary, we knew this. This conference is still young and they have until August to get things together. This article isn't too surprising, and it's not really that concerning either. If this is still the case come July, then we have a problem.

I like that each school gets a sport. Keeps every school active and being part of decision making. Campus conference tourneys, outside of mens hoops, make sense initially. This group of schools ran the Big East successfully for 33 years, so it's not like all of this is new to us. We're way ahead of where i thought we'd be at this point. I mean, how long does it really take to put together a womens field hockey schedule?

bilbillyjack wrote:I like that each school gets a sport. Keeps every school active and being part of decision making. Campus conference tourneys, outside of mens hoops, make sense initially. This group of schools ran the Big East successfully for 33 years, so it's not like all of this is new to us. We're way ahead of where i thought we'd be at this point. I mean, how long does it really take to put together a womens field hockey schedule?

You might be surprised on how hard it is to make a schedule. Especially when you are missing the number of teams to field the schedule. Schools like to use non-revs as leverage to bring in quality opponents for the revenue producing sports. since the BE wisely chose 10 schools it will potentially be at the mercy of other schools in filling up its non rev schedules. Now in order to fill you field hockey schedule you need to coordinate with your basketball team and explain to them why they now have an away game at little sisters of the poor simply because no school would play your women's field hockey squad unless it got a home and home with the mens basketball team.

The problem is with these 10 schools while they make a great 10 team round robin basketball conference they have a non-uniform non-rev sports alignment. The non-revs in the BE will be a logistical nightmare as they have to scramble to fill dates in the fall. Some of the sports they need to add associate members or give up and tell the colleges they have to find new conferences for those sports.


I guess they could solve this problem by adding SLU and Richmond as associate members for all sports except for basketball

Heres an article with Marquette's AD Larry Williams(no relation to Buzz) on some of the conference issues overall pretty shallow information though:
http://painttouches.com/2013/04/12/larr ... e-success/
But there is talk about unit sharing as well as headquarters seems like New York but sounds like they wont have a permanent location necessarily for a few years. Commissioner within a month it sounds like.

MUSeashells&Balloons wrote:Heres an article with Marquette's AD Larry Williams(no relation to Buzz) on some of the conference issues overall pretty shallow information though:
http://painttouches.com/2013/04/12/larr ... e-success/
But there is talk about unit sharing as well as headquarters seems like New York but sounds like they wont have a permanent location necessarily for a few years. Commissioner within a month it sounds like.

Thanks for sharing that. Glad to hear distribution will be equal among other info he shared.