I don't believe it had anything to do with geography nor CT Yankee. The choice was a defensive move to placate FSU and to keep Louisville out of the B12. The choice was made easier by Louisville selling their programs and improving academics while our Admin low keyed it.
Those are certainly ideas that should be considered as factors causing the decision makers to choose the way they did. I just wouldn't necessarily presuppose that everyone of the decision makers in this process come from the same place as you.
Human decision making, especially when the stakes are high, frequently involves a lot of input. So it is likely that many of the points that we are all making on the internet were discussed by the various parties who had to make the final decisions. Exactly what points were factored by which of the decision makers is impossible to determine. A president from X university may have been more interested in A argument while the president from Y university may have been more interested in the B, C arguments.
Look at the diversity of opinion within this forum. Each of us have our ideas. We then come to our conclusions sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. But we seldom come to conclusions universally. Those universal conclusions are primarily in situations surrounding extremely horrible or extremely positive events. And even in those situations the reasons underlying our universal collective agreement vary.
In an anonymous forum we can say pretty much anything we want without fear of consequences. No one knows us. And our asses are not on the line if our ideas prove wrong. That makes it easy for us to argue our thinking with one another. The people who have to make the decisions don't have that luxury. They have to be concerned with what the public thinks. So frequently they will state that their decision making process was the result of certain factors even though those factors were not ones they considered or factored strongly. They have to do this because that's the way our culture works. People want to hear their decision makers state their needs and opinions as opposed to listening to counter arguments, even if these arguments countering their thinking are plausible.
The reason for this is that our ideas are integrated with our physical being. A disagreement with our idea can, and frequently is, considered to be an attack on our bodies and gets the same reaction as someone physically assaulting us.
Enough. I won't even bother about the subconscious and how it factors in our decision making.
