Interesting read

[UCFBfan]

Nothing new but a good recap of how realignment has ruined rivalries and college sports. UConn comes in at #6

10 Biggest Rivalries College Sports Realignment Has Crushed

6. UCONN'S SPORTS LOBOTOMY (All Sports)
The somewhat forgotten story of realignment is how it bastardized college basketball for so many fans along the eastern seaboard. The Big East, while still powerful in hoops, doesn't have Syracuse, UConn, or BC, three original members. (Not to mention Pitt, Notre Dame, and West Virginia, three members added over time.) Syracuse playing in the ACC feels weird and stupid, but not as weird and stupid as Maryland playing in the Big Ten. What the hell, realignment?!? And then there's poor UConn, whose athletic brand has been mangled by hitching its wagon to college football, and now its sports teams are all forced to play in a conference where they routinely travel to Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas. UConn's football and men's basketball teams are like the lobotomized Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest — just a weird, sad shell of what they were only a few years ago.

 

[UConnFranklin]

Obviously written with a Texas bias, just as it would be if I wrote it I would write it with a northeast bias. Still Texas vs Texas AM in football just doesn't seem to have the meaning of UConn losing its National Championship brand in basketball.

 

[UCFBfan]

Well it's from a Houston paper so I'd expect it to be heavily Texas slanted. However, I feel they really hit the nail on the head with their description of our plight.

 

[Ha Who]

Very good read

 

[Ldandy]

UConn, whose athletic brand has been mangled by hitching its wagon to college football, and now its sports teams are all forced to play in a conference where they routinely travel to Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas.

The first part of the statement might be true, but the second part is not a matter of where but of who. No one from Uconn would say boo if the locations that the team were traveling to were Chapel Hill, Durham, Tallahassee, or Miami. The strain of travel on schools and their fans is one of the accepted consequences for conferences chasing larger dollar media deals. UConn's issue is that they didn't realign of their own doing. Their previous home fell apart around them. Suddenly they were shoehorned into a conference spread out across 3/4 of the US playing schools they had little to no shared history with. It is arguable that Uconn was dealt the most unfair hand in all of conference realignment.

 

[Waquoit]

Football ended up killing our athletic department, no two ways around it.

 

[Stinger92860]

Football ended up killing our athletic department, no two ways around it.

The lack of a solid football program prior to year 2000 is what killed us.

 

[whaler11]

UConn got left behind on bad leadership and a mediocre fanbase.