I don't think it could be interpreted any other way.
Delany grew up in New Jersey and is clearly a smart guy, so to me there's absolutely no way he's confusing Southern New England for anything but Connecticut.
The question is why would he be so specific to say Northern Virginia and Southern New England instead of Washington DC and NYC?
You're obviously one of the no BS users on here, any ideas? For the life of me it just seems strange. Not that I think he's implying a potential UConn invite, but he's clearly referring to us. Thoughts?
Yeah, but we all thought that Aresco's comments couldn't be interpreted another way and we were wrong. We are all trying to hard and overanalyzing every tiny bit of information. I'm taking a new approach from now on. Try to see things through the eyes of the conference commissioners. When I went back and did that for the ACC, I can see how they picked UL. They are landlocked by the SEC and B1G. There are almost no pieces left on the board, and one of them was also in the B12 threat range...a league with only ten members. They wanted to take that piece off of the board. This is a game of Risk more than anything.
Now do the same for the other leagues. Ignore the noise. Be objective about each school.
The Pac is immune due to isolation. They only need to keep the MWC weak. Utah helped.
The B1G was landlocked. They made an incursion right at the mason-dixon line. That's no accident. They just isolated Syracuse and BC from their southern neighbors. In battle, you wouldn't advance south after such a move, you'd take out the opposition north of your line.
The SEC moved into B12 territory bigtime (first with Arkansas years ago) with MO and A&M, and into ACC territory with SC. They can't move north, but east or west are open to attack. But they only need two schools. UT and OU would be prizes, and UNC and UVA would be prizes.
The Big12 has battles to the north and southeast that it cannot win. Vulnerabilities on both sides. Small footprint and the west is wide open. Do they go after the east, or just leave it and go west? They are basically waiting for the next move.