The author completely ignores the fact that basketball no longers matters if a school has P5 aspirations, like every member of the AAC. To illustrate the point, UCONN's ACC snub was all about football, and Rutgers never would have been invited to join the Big 10 if basketball had anything to do with that decision.
For now, it's obvious the school administration hasn't given up on the effort to eventually get into a P5 league. Since that's the direction being taken, rightly or wrongly, then what happens with the men's BB program, as sacrilegious as it may seem to say it, is largely irrelevant. He could have saved having to write his 10,000 word essay by realizing that fact before hitting his keyboard.
For football purposes, we are exactly where we need to be conference wise. It does hurt on the BB side, but that's largely because the majority of schools in the league are football first schools, being largely southern based. Those schools have recognized that BB is taking them nowhere in the CR sweepstakes, so they're not going to waste much money or resources trying to make a big push to improve. SMU and Houston have made strides, but the two Florida schools, ECU, Tulsa and Tulane will likely remain about what they have been.
The author also fails to discuss getting our Tier 3 rights back, and the abysmal TV ratings FOX gets for Big East basketball. But none of that matters anyway, because the sad truth is basketball no longer matters, a difficult pill for Husky BB fans to swallow. The only way it does going forward is if the school abandons all hope of getting a P5 invite, downgrading or eliminating football. State politics likely won't allow that to happen, because it leaves a 90 million dollar taxpayer funded white elephant empty in East Hartford.
