Making it easier for UConn to become an AAU university would have been one of the benefits of a better location. How many other major college flagships are located in the middle of nowhere? Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, UCLA, Cal, all in or near a big city. There are some remote main campuses, like Penn State, but the majority of premier public universities are in urban areas. Few are in areas so remote and isolated that the location is considered a joke within the state.
Through the 80's, all the Northeastern state schools suffered from the problem of being in a region flooded with private schools there were the alma maters of many of the people deciding how much money the state schools were going to get. For the first 100+ years of Europeans being in the Northeast, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Princeton were the colleges of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York City, upstate New York and New Jersey respectively. Other elite and kind-of-elite colleges grew up in the area, and by the time the state schools really started to become important after World War I, and really after World War II, UConn and the other Northeastern schools had to run a gauntlet of Ivy and Little Ivy and other private school graduates in their respective state houses, and their constituents, that did not feel like the state needed to invest in their own public universities. That didn't really change until the 90's. I went to UConn in the 90's, and while its reputation was improving rapidly, prior to UConn 2000 in 1995 or 1996, the campus looked like a place that no one cared about. UConn was not put out in some empty forest 15 miles from the nearest highway because anyone thought it was a good idea to put it there. UConn was put out in Storrs because no one cared where it went. The reality is that without the basketball programs exploding on the national scene in the early 1990's, UConn would not have gotten the funding to become the major university that it is today.
Ideas like "investing millions more into the football program in the 60's" sound fun, but the money was never there for that kind of investment. Arguing for investing in a New England state college football program in the 60's is like arguing for investing in unicorns and time travel. It would be fun if it was remotely possible. If you keep the dollars relatively even over the last 60 years, one of the few decisions that would have really made a difference for UConn, and the state of Connecticut, would have been to move the main campus to Hartford in the 90's.
Were UConn fans happy and following the team when it was in the Yankee Conference? What would have happened to your athletic department if you had stayed there? Would the fans have continued to support it when all the football moves took place. I think your basketball program would still become the outstanding success it is, but what about football?
