Topic: What are your 5 immediate things to improve C-USA?

[elginherd]

His name is Karl Benson, or at least he gets a lot of the credit from what I’ve studied on it. After CUSA raided them last go around, they made excellent choices in regards of membership. He flat out said in an interview that he was happy the Flordia schools left so they could shore up the conference footprint. Also, it was a great decision to stay at 10 teams. The part where really scratch my head is, how in the world do they end up with a better media deal than us?

Part of it is the timing in which the CUSA's contracts expired. When ESPN might have been interested in the CUSA product, the CUSA was under contract with CBSS & Fox, IIRC.

[ThunderValley]

I think the REAL problem with C-USA has to be the lack of leadership.
No one is willing to step up and make hard decisions.
The AD’s are also at fault, step up and tell the problems to Judy and clan, stop sitting on your butts doing nothing. Don’t be afraid move forward.

[herd2win]

1-fire Judy
2-fire Judy
3-fire Judy
4-fire Judy
5-fire Judy

[GreenDaddy]

Part of it is the timing in which the CUSA's contracts expired. When ESPN might have been interested in the CUSA product, the CUSA was under contract with CBSS & Fox, IIRC.

That makes sense. I was thinking that they negotiated around the same time, but I think Benson knew he was retiring soon so he reached out to ESPN to negotiate new long term deal earlier than expected to get it done before he called it quits.

I do like their media deal though. It pays out a little more than ours and everything is under ESPN. With that setup we could hire Keith Morehouse for play by play on the home ESPN+ games and it could resemble the old THN days. It would also be nice to have our CCG broadcast on major network, instead of a channel that isn’t even available in most basic cable packages.

[banker]

The sunbelt improved because they didn’t a chit about markets and took the best football programs they could get. We could have App instead of Charlotte. We could have had Ga Southern instead of ODU.

Anyway, that’s takes me to my list, most already hit on by others:

1. We need better management of the conference. This was apparent from the day 3.0 was formed. Taking a school that didn’t even have a football team and two others with less than 10 years in existence, schools with no fan bases and thinking anyone would pay just because “markets” was beyond ignorant.

2. We have to have a reshuffle with the Belt. This East-West divide will never work with the new realities of college sports. We also have too many mouths to feed. If we can’t realign we need to cut some dead weight.

3. In regard to the dead weight issue, you have to institute some standards, be it attendance, facilities, something. You can’t have an FIU that pulls 3,000 for football and 175 for basketball and still lose at everything. FAU is as bad, but at least they are really working to be good at football.

To me there are no more that aren’t addressed with those three items. You need #1 to even think about anything else. We need to be pressure the administration about change. It’s the Presidents that get rid of the commissioner, not the ADs.

[elginherd]

3. In regard to the dead weight issue, you have to institute some standards, be it attendance, facilities, something. You can’t have an FIU that pulls 3,000 for football and 175 for basketball and still lose at everything. FAU is as bad, but at least they are really working to be good at football.

Good point. I think the standard originally suggested by wfh is a little unrealistic for any G5 conference short of the AAC. But you & wfh are correct, some higher standard is needed.