So having gotten past some of the initial objections, let's turn our attention to the NCAA D1 manual, and what is actually a legitimate objection that hasn't yet been raised...
...which is this: these schools would not only be part of the same football conference, but would be required to function as a conference for other sports as well.
It works for football. But does it work for basketball? And what about non-revenue sports?
The regulations say that you've got to have at least six members that remain static in any two-year period.
That would be satisfied under this arrangement, since there would only be two of the eight schools being relegated and replaced in any two year period.
But the bigger question is does Rice want to be having to play Northern Illinois in all of these basketball and non-revenue contests?
Surely not.
Well, they wouldn't.
Instead, for non-revenue team sports, the 8-team conference would have 4-team subdivisions aligned according to whether their parent conference is CUSA or MAC. And unless I missed something (the manual is 416 pages, but it's not difficult to search a PDF, of course), those 4 schools are only required to play each other home and away, and then for the 8 to have a post-season tournament.
For non-revenue individual sports, there is latitude to determine the conference champion through whatever means a conference desires to do so... ostensibly, that could be a single conference meet.
For basketball, the requirement is to either play double round-robin with all schools or a minimum of 14 contests. The latter is more ideal than the former in order to limit travel costs, so this is where a little more creativity gets employed.
For basketball season only, the Great Eight of football morphs into the
Great Twelve of basketball.
Here's why.
By instituting automatic additions--the MAC West, MAC East, CUSA West and CUSA East champs from the previous year--to the new conference, scheduling becomes a piece of cake for all involved... teams continue to play conference mates with whom they're more geographically and/or historically tied:
Great Twelve regular season format- 10 (5h/5a) former-MAC vs. former MAC, and 10 (5h/5a) former CUSA vs. former CUSA
- 4 (2h/2a) former-MACs vs. former CUSAs
MAC and CUSA regular season formats- 8 (4h/4a) intradivision
- 6 interdivision: 1 h&a + 2h + 2a
Someone might say, "Yeah, that might work for CUSA where the relationships aren't developed to the degree that you're putting into jeopardy some rivalries, but in the MAC, some schools do have that: Ohio/Miami for instance. If Ohio is in the Great Eight/Twelve, and Miami in the MAC, that's a problem."
But wait. On the other hand, you have 14 conference games, whereas as things are currently constituted, I believe they are committed to 16.
So... you schedule Ohio/Miami home and away, and it nets out to be 16 games overall either way you do it.
And that leads to another advantage to this structure...
That is, every conference has a few games for which there's no particularly palpable interest... and so another thing that's great about this arrangement is that, assuming one is in the G12 and the other in the MAC, Akron doesn't absolutely have to play NIU in basketball.
Closer to home and more importantly to all of us, Marshall doesn't absolutely have to play, for instance, UTSA in basketball. Rice doesn't absolutely have to play Old Dominion. Florida Atlantic doesn't absolutely have to play Louisiana Tech. They might. But they don't have to. There's more room for building a schedule that you want.
(Of course, that's a bigger deal to us in this new widespread CUSA than it would be to the MAC side.)
Advantage, new alliance.
But here's another objection:
What about the tournament... you just aren't going to be able to find a good mid-point location for a tournament that is potentially attempting to attract fans from Buffalo to El Paso.
True.
Simple and easy resolution to that...
The Great Twelve Tournament, except for the championship (which I address below), would take place in two locations... the six former-MAC schools would be seeded 1 through 6 and would play their games in Cleveland (MAC tourney location)... same for the former-CUSA schools, playing their games in whatever city the tournament ends up being in (for now, El Paso). On the calendar, those would precede the MAC and CUSA tournaments.
From those two, then, a former-MAC team and a former-CUSA team would emerge to play in a championship game. Both the MAC and CUSA tournaments currently conclude on Saturdays. The G12 championship would take place on Sunday, in the tournament city of the higher-seeded team (based first on conference record, then on tie-breakers)--e.g., if Southern Miss emerges from the CUSA side, and Akron emerges from the MAC side, the championship would be played in Cleveland if Akron has the higher seeding, and in El Paso or whatever new site is chosen, if Southern Miss has it.
So, the G12 Championship ends up just being an additional one-game nominal money maker pitting a former CUSA school versus a former MAC school.
Which highlights another important advantage to this structure:
Currently, the MAC has 13 schools, CUSA 14 schools. Between them, those two conferences yield TWO champions. (Of course.)
Adding 3 schools to MAC and 2 schools to CUSA provides sufficient membership to carve out and establish this third "co-op" conference of their most elite. And besides satisfying its primary purpose in making it substantially more likely to put one of their schools in a major bowl year-in-year-out, adding just five schools between them makes it possible to
award a THIRD school a championship... and... in doing so, also makes the MAC and CUSA championship more reachable from top-to-bottom in the regular conferences.
I know it's a lot to think about, and seemingly is too out-of-the-box to comprehend actually occurring. Some, no doubt, have skipped all the way to the bottom and this very paragraph, muttering to themselves, "I can't believe he thought all this out, and then wrote all of this." (Yep. I did, and I did... more discretionary time right now than normal.)
The point, for now, is that we have a problem... we are in the
second tier of the second tier of NCAA D1 FBS football...
And we're not alone... the MAC is in the same position.
If we cooperate together, I've demonstrated we
can resolve the problem, and do so in both an innovative and an NCAA-compliant way.
If we refuse that and are content to operate in silos, it doesn't bode well for our future, likely ensuring AAC and MWC's advancement and our own regression.