Maybe this is where we are heading....down the road some.

[upstater]

About 25% of the teams in the current P5 are dead wood or overlaps. Four teams in North Carolina, 2 in Virginia, 2 in Mississippi, 2 in Kentucky, 2 in Tennessee, 2 in Iowa, 5 in Texas, etc.

The real appeal of March Madness is the entire country is involved. A 32 to 40 team league in football and basketball will reduce fan interest significantly as the generations go by. The competition for fan interest is the NFL and the NBA. The college presidents and AD’s don’t understand this fact.

If the college presidents could kill the whole entire thing, they would. But they can't be seen with blood on their hands. That's their biggest problem.

 

[billybud]

This is just absolutely and totally wrong. The criteria are defined and announced. There are new schools invited in, and schools that can't cut it kicked out.

I don't really think of Santa Cruz, Boston U. and the University of Utah as part of any old boys network. They are just up and coming schools.

Well...maybe the requirements for AAU are not a straight relationship to academics...Call Santa Cruz is ranked bu USNWR behind Miami, FSU, Clemson, VT, UConn...among others.

Changes AAU had made in its membership criteria put more emphasis on the volume of federally sponsored science and engineering research and put particularly a premium on biomedical studies.

That limits membership...example...FSU has a medical school, but one chartered by the legislature to produce Family Practice physicians....UF and USF were chartered by the Legislature for med research. ........but FSU has a ton of research from the National High Magnetic Lab to the formulation of the anti cancer drug Taxol.

FSU receives the highest award of any Florida school from the National Science Foundation...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institute of Health.

 

[upstater]

Well...maybe the requirements for AAU are not a straight relationship to academics...Call Santa Cruz is ranked bu USNWR behind Miami, FSU, Clemson, VT, UConn...among others.

Changes AAU had made in its membership criteria put more emphasis on the volume of federally sponsored science and engineering research and put particularly a premium on biomedical studies.

That limits membership...example...FSU has a medical school, but one chartered by the legislature to produce Family Practice physicians....UF and USF were chartered by the Legislature for med research. ........but FSU has a ton of research from the National High Magnetic Lab to the formulation of the anti cancer drug Taxol.

FSU receives the highest award of any Florida school from the National Science Foundation...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institute of Health.

You're actually saying that you trust USNWR more than people who use millions and millions of dollars to study departments and breakdown research and scholarship according to the number and quality of projects / publications / patents, etc. USNWR collates data from a survey, and the biggest factors in that survey are admissions rate + reputational scores as judged by university presidents. Your former president at FSU is actually infamous for once dropping schools like Cornell and Boston College to the third tier while ramping up directional state schools and his former jobs into the first tier. It's absurd.

Trust me, the AAU people know what they're doing.