We all know that you like to attack my posts. I don't need another post from you to learn that. You have a solution other than #BegHarder?
Yes, don't bury ourselves in mediocrity for a decade or so only to hope that we may emerge one day.
Hope harder appears to be your approach and I do not get it for the life of me (as for the most part you do appear to be pretty intelligent) as grasping at straws, hoping that one actually can be used as a safety tether is not a strategy.
The core problem still is what it has been since the football schools threatened (and backed off the second they were told they wouldn't fully get their way) to leave if they could not build a legitimate football conference a bit more than two decades ago. Were are serving two masters, not serving either well at all and using band-aids to attempt to repair severed limbs in order to keep this thing going.
I did propose an idea a few weeks back:
http://www.the-boneyard.com/threads/maybe-were-looking-at-this-all-wrong.2786/#post-31586
There really isn't a whole lot that we can do here and what could have been done (i did post something in 2005 that was ridiculed by a few, I believe you included) stating that we (the entirety of the football membership) needed to view this as something permanent, like a marriage and at the same time try to model our schools and athletic programs after schools who we knew would always be safe (Michigan, North Carolina, Texas), schools who are attractive both athletically and academically, who have fan bases that will remain during less than stellar seasons. I questioned the intelligence of letting ESPN decide our football schedule (for the few extra dollars this was worth) as developing rivalries through season ending games (the only one we every really utilized was WVU-Pitt) and I complained that the idea that a random (at the time there were two schools that any BE school would not play and only three with return matchups) basketball schedule made any sense (again, for a few extra dollars up front).
If we were thinking long term (twenty, thirty years in the future) we would have had to accept the idea that the hybrid was nothing more than a crutch. We needed to build the UConn-Louisville men's basketball rivalry. We needed to capitalize fully on UConn-Cuse in men's basketball. We should have created two divisions (which we couldn't do as the supposed mantra was that we weren't really two distinct conference's) allowing the football membership to play home and home games with each other (filling out the schedule with some cross division games) and build or strengthen rivalries. This was an opportunity that we let slip by solely because we wanted to pretend that the model we had really was a conference (when in fact it was solely a collection of schools who, for the purposes of men's hoops was merely operating under the premise that it was a conference). During the stretch where our rivalry with Cuse in men's hoops could have been promoted as the new, top rivalry in the sport, We often played them once a season while ESPN promoted UNC-Duke to the point where the remainder of the ACC was left in the dust. We could have (and should have) demanded something back in 2005 (when the two most recent national champions were UConn & Cuse) close to what UNC-Duke received, promoting this rivalry as the marquee of the BE but not wanting to overshadow the catholic schools and taking the few extra upfront television dollars that no control over conference scheduling offered was more important.
We blew it. We didn't just blow it over the past six to eight weeks, this goes back years, decades. Thje most recent idea is a last gasp to keep the catholic schools aligned with the football schools because they are more worried than anyone. The bulk of the successful ones are afraid of being the only ones carrying around the dead weight at the bottom. The dead weight at the bottom is afraid that if they lose the football schools they may not be able to keep enough quality non football members to remain in a major conference. If this proposal (BIG USA) is the best we can do we are screwed, more royally than anything anyone could have predicted in August.
I still believe that this is not over. There will be no expansion beyond fourteen at the moment but shortly after the BCS allows a third school from one conference in a BCS bowl (the SEC has already petitioned for this), expansion to sixteen will quickly follow. This is where our opportunity will arrive as the SEC will move to sixteen and there is no way they will continue expanding west (unless OU can move without OSU).
