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NN, I'll assume that you live on the East Coast based off of your name, so your thoughts on UCONN will be different than persons living in the heart of Big 10 Country. While I am 100% behind bringing in more Eastern Teams, a large portion of the Midwest Base favors no expansion, contraction, or Western expansion. The handful of fans that visit here are not indicative of the majority viewpoint. If you remove the AAU and Contiguous arguments, it gives these people one less arrow in their quiver against Eastern expansion. JMO.
Seriously - it is what UCONN has become. The Ivy's de-emphasized in the 1960's and then in the 1970's the NCAA started building actual divisions around football. It affected the dozens and dozens and schools in the northeast footprint. We gave up or 50 year history with the Yankee Conference (New England land grant colleges) and sold ourselves to the big time in 1978-1979 - and hinged it on an urban center catholic school basketball league. Joe Paterno was adamant about building a division 1A all sports conference in the Northeast footprint. Dave Gavitt's league got in the way. UCONN - has no natural geographic all sports division 1A athletic department conference in our natural geographic footprint, and Penn State was an outlier in Big 10 for 20 years, because of it. Hockey East was founded in 1983 - another hodgepodge.