Wednesday, November 7, 2001

C-USA might disband, athletics administrators say
By Rusty Simmons
Skiff Staff

TCU was left behind when Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech bolted from the now-defunct Southwest Conference in 1994.

TCU was left behind again when the backbone of the Western Athletic Conference (Brigham Young, Colorado State and Utah) splintered off and formed the Mountain West Conference in 1998.

But TCU administrators are taking part in conversations to assure that the university won’t be left behind if Conference USA disbands, athletics administrators from three C-USA schools said.

An athletics administrator from Cincinnati said the university and seven other C-USA schools, including TCU, are making plans to leave the conference within a year. The administration from the schools have become frustrated with the decisions being made in C-USA, the source said.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they didn’t want to hamper further conversations about a possible separation.

TCU Athletics Director Eric Hyman said he has not been contacted about the move, and he has no knowledge of the possible departure.

The other six schools rumored to be part of the separating faction are: Memphis, Louisville, Tulane, Alabama-Birmingham, Houston and South Florida.

Athletics administrators are upset about C-USA’s size (15 teams), the conference’s focus on football instead of basketball and the schedules continually forcing teams to travel to rural locations.

C-USA consists of 14 basketball schools and may include up to 12 football schools by 2003, when South Florida joins as a football member. An athletics administrator from Louisville said the league is getting too large to manage.

“The WAC had 16 teams when it broke up,” the source said. “We are already at 15 teams, and some schools want to add more. That would make scheduling almost impossible.”

Numerous calls to C-USA Commissioner Mike Slive were unreturned Tuesday.

C-USA had a football expansion meeting in September, and Marshall was denied an invitation to join the conference. Adding Marshall would have given C-USA 12 football teams, the minimum required for ABC television to air a $1 million championship game. But the Cincinnati athletics administrator said that just having the meeting shows that C-USA is making decisions based on football alone.

“I guess football is all they care about,” the source said. “They are making decisions at the expense of the basketball programs. We built a lot of our success around the basketball program, and we’re not going to lose sight of that.”

Despite the sources’ focus on basketball programs, the alleged new league would eliminate C-USA teams that don’t play football (DePaul, Marquette, North Carolina-Charlotte and Saint Louis). The new league would also eliminate East Carolina and Southern Mississippi, both football powerhouses which have been ranked among the top 25 football teams in the last two seasons.

The Louisville athletics administrator said his basketball team will play a game in Greenville, N.C., this season, instead of playing a revenue-making home game or getting another nationally-televised game. The source said the addition of rural schools is costing C-USA powerhouses money and exposure.

“We have a good base of teams in good media markets, but traveling to Greenville and Hattiesburg, Miss. isn’t helping us,” the source said.

The alleged new league would also leave out DePaul, which is in Chicago, the nation’s fourth-ranked media market. Larry Leckonby, the interim Athletics Director at Houston, said he hasn’t heard of the possible break from C-USA. He said the alleged new league wouldn’t cut many costs.

“Every athletics director in the nation is talking about cost containment,” he said. “But including South Florida would keep the league too expansive to cut much cost.”

Most conferences list penalties for departing schools in the bylaws. Slive didn’t return phone calls to discuss what the schools would forfeit upon a departure.

Rusty Simmons
j.r.simmons@student.tcu.edu