ColonialBulldog wrote:
If you're in Cincinnati and you're not a fan of the Bearcats or Xavier, then you're probably a Louisville, Kentucky, or Ohio State fan. Even Dayton is right there. The idea with adding markets is to add exposure. I'm not sure how adding NKU gets the Valley any exposure if they're NKU is the eighth fiddle in their own neighborhood. UIC and UTA get a different look because they are in metropolitan areas that are some of the world's largest.
That's not entirely true. According to Wikipedia, there are 455K people in the contiguous Kentucky counties across the Ohio from Cincinnati. NKU is the only D-1 school on that side of the river. While it is a Cincinnati suburb, Northern KY does have somewhat of its own identity. The Cincinnati media understands this and does a very good job of covering them. Much, much better than what we get in our other major markets like Chicago and Nashville. Their attendance is already ahead of several of our schools and the arena would easily be top 5.
Without MSU, I see no benefit to UT-A at this point on either side. Why would they want to join a conference where the closest school (Murray) is 650 miles away? Despite being in a major market, they don't get a lot of coverage and what little they do get, I can't imagine plants a lot of appeal to playing a bunch of mid-majors 700, 800 or more miles away. We aren't the Big 10, none of our schools can move the needle that far away.
Lipscomb should also be off the table. We are completely ignored in Nashville now, why would we want to double down on another school with no fans in that market?
By the very nature of this conference, geography and basketball is what keeps us together. We need to stick to that if we are going to survive in this form. Someone on one of the school boards posted a list of our schools and the various conferences we are involved in....MVC, MVFC, Pioneer and of course, no football. We have to be the only conference that is fragmented this severely between basketball and football. With football driving the realignments, we could be in for a very shaky ride.
