Boom! 
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I think the schools that the AAC are looking for need to be in large TV markets like the ones they have now, otherwise they are going to make $2M per school like CUSA and the Sun Belt makes now.
Both of those conferences make less than a quarter of that, I think.
Conference USA is market-rich but doesn’t have any good teams. The Sun Belt is market-poor but has ranked teams.
I think you need some of both. You need ranked teams to get people to care about your conference (that’s where App State gets consideration) and you need markets (where UTSA gets consideration).
Norfolk is an underappreciated market, but JMU has a pretty significant alumni base in DC and is more likely to generate interest by being ranked. (I would bet App State has better ratings than Charlotte, for example.)
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The Metric The BIG12 used is the same the AAC Will Probably Use…
The Metric The BIG12 used is the same the AAC Will Probably Use... -
In Depth Info On Potential AAC Candidates…
In Depth Info On Potential AAC Candidates..... -
How Many Schools Should the AAC Add?
How Many Schools Should the AAC Add?
Not our monkey, not our circus.
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CUSA makes about $750k per school and the Sun Belt actually pays to be on ESPN after having to cover production costs
According to this the C-USA teams are splitting just $2 million between them.
“The conference went from a total payout of about $14 million to roughly $2 million, a stunning 86% decrease.”
Why you looking for dirt in other Confs. As someone said not UH concern. Time to look frwd. 
88 posts and 1.4K views says there is an interest.
Just put it on ignore below or don’t read.
Regarding the first one, all of those schools have such big issues that I think outstrip their athletics budget advantage.
Regarding the second, Marshall comes out looking pretty good. My original take was that UAB and Marshall probably had the inside track, but Marshall has not gotten much play at all in the conversation. Solid football, solid basketball, solid attendance, solid TV numbers, solid brand… but no market.
This article does a good job of explaining what I was trying to articulate with regard to how Conference USA’s strategy backfired.
The assumption was that since the conference always punched above its TV weight because of markets before, they should double-down on that… but they went too deep in the “Big market, little interest” well.
Their TV deal is still better than the Belt’s, though.
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Got it!! Looking for ignore button. Enough for me trying to see how the New 4 will unfold in BIG12.
Keep pulling.
Wow! That’s crazy.
The CUSA article makes one important point…a point that I’ve made again and again when people bring up either PAC-12 expansion…or B1G expansion to the West Coast, and that is the following: a conference that is too geographically large/geographically far-flung will generate obscene costs when it comes to flying Olympic sports teams to conference opponents several times per year.
CUSA is facing that very problem right now, and in a conference that generates a relatively low amount of athletic revenue.
That geographic dispersal also makes it harder to develop local/regional rivalries, and you lose any geographic/regional “name branding.”
I doubt that the PAC-12 will make the same mistake. Flying to the AZ schools is already far enough. They certainly won’t want to fly teams all the way to Maryland and New Jersey, and probably won’t want to fly them to Texas, West Virginia, etc. if it can be avoided. Right now, the PAC-12/PAC-12 schools enjoy a regional monopoly, one in which they have true and legitimate regional branding. I can’t imagine they’ll want to give that up.
Given that…it’d truly be a shocker if the PAC-12 or its current members ever look beyond the Rockies for conference brethren.
I don’t think Conference USA’s financial situation is really applicable to the Big Ten (or the Big 12 or even The American).
If the Big Ten is deterred by geography, it’ll be by the headaches of travel and time zones than travel costs. The main question is whether that would be worth the extra money and/or competitive bump would be worth it. I don’t think it would be for them. (But I also believe things out west are unhappy and going to get unhappier, and such things reach breaking points…)
Conference USA programs are strapped, so smaller expenses matter a lot more.
The Term Power 6 apparently only means something to Aresco, not the money brokers at ESPN
Aresco will get to AAC expansion as soon as he finishes applying to the B12 for a management position. (satire)
“The last four teams to leave the AAC were the top four Group of 5 public schools in athletic department revenue, according to figures from USA Today. UConn topped that list, ranking behind 51 Power 5 programs with $80.9 million in revenue in 2018–19. Houston, UCF and Cincinnati are the next three, followed by Air Force in the Mountain West, East Carolina (AAC) and Colorado State (Mountain West).”
UTSA is noncompetitive?
They had a good year last year, but they’re a middling team in a weak conference. (Their C*USA record since joining is a game or two under .500 IIRC.)