You don't need to convince me of those things, but as I said in the first sentence of my post: fans underestimate how much university presidents OVERESTIMATE the value of BC. I'm not saying that I personally believe that BC is worth it, but university presidents have come to the conclusion that they are. As I've also said, I thought that the ACC was going to add UConn instead of Louisville from the get go. I pointed out on my blog during the ACC expansion talks that the gap between UConn and Louisville football was not nearly as much as the media was making out to be. However, UConn completely got crushed on selling that viewpoint themselves. I even told some UConn people during that week where the ACC was debating between expansion candidates that UConn was COMPLETELY losing the PR battle, the football quality perception gap (regardless of the actual gap in reality) wasn't even close, and UConn needed to change that perception immediately. It never happened. Props need to go to Louisville AD Tom Jurich on that front - he got it done and was relentless in selling that they were the "football" choice even though Louisville is as much of a basketball school as anyone.
Also, I believe that I underestimated how much of a detriment that the relative youth of UConn playing football at the FBS-level was going to be in the process. It might not be fair, but the pre-FBS football history of UConn (or any other school that has only recently upgraded to FBS football) is looked as non-existent by the power conferences, and that's something that can't be resolved with anything other than the passage of time. In essence, it was more advantageous for a school with a long and historically awful history like Rutgers than to have a short period of good rising prospects like UConn.
Look - I feel for you guys. UConn did pretty much everything that it was supposed to do as an athletic department over the past 15 years. If these realignment moves were being made 10 or 15 years from now, UConn wouldn't have been sweating. However, the timing is that massive changes are occurring now, which makes it more tenuous. You essentially have to hope that the ACC gets poached again (and even as a Big Ten guy that would benefit from that happening, I don't think it's anywhere near as likely as the realignment Armageddon people want to make it out to be).
