Since they will have played Pinehurst in the morning while you were playing in Westchester, you may want to rethink your revenge. If rethinking revenge is militarily allowed.
Ha.
You joke, but you can not underestimate the influence of the naval academy in all of this. I'm a little bit familiar with Annapolis. The fact that Navy chose the Big East conference, is still mind-numbing to me. They've clearly got a 5 year plan in place, and are quietly going about their business. if you ask me, they learned a ton from the mistakes that they saw Army make in the 1990s, and unlike other conferences out there, the big east is unmolded ball of clay, with incredible growth potential. Just requiring guidance. Army, I don't know, they've got their own issues beyond athletics to deal with in the past 25 years as we've been repeatedly involved in ground combat in Asia and the middle east, and been losing officers left and right. Navy hasn't had the same problem. I don't know anythign about the Air Force academy, except that they've accepted guys for the football program in the past, that are completely beyond the normal height/size of typical pilots. Chad Hennings flew an A-10 in the persian gulf in the early 1990s before playing for Dallas and jimmy johnson, and I'm pretty sure they had to specially modify that cockpit for him to fit. I digress.....
The athletic department at the USNA is a private organization, entirely separate and distinct from the Naval Academy proper, and the United States government. That means that they need to make their own money. I'm not familiar with how the athletics departments at the other service academies are set up, but I'm 100% certain that the NAAA is set up so that there are ZERO federal dollars used for every single one of Navy's sports programs, facilities, coaches salaries, and staff. It's a relationship with the federal government, that allows Navy to stand in front of congress, and make sure that federal dollars allocated to the academy are going to resources that no one in the United States can complain about.
If you let that sink in for a second, you can get an idea of how important, tapping into the revenue streams around media rights for athletics is to the Navy.
and then - let it sink in again, that they picked the Big East. and make no mistake, Navy could have picked anywhere to plop their football program. The navy is invested in the financial success of the Big EAst conference.
we're in good hands as a conference.
As for UConn - when it comes to our athletic department, we need to remain allied with whatever organization is going to deliver our athletic products best to our local media market in CT, NYC, NJ, and New England, remain allied with Notre Dame however convoluted, and we're going to be just fine. The big east conference fits the bill.
And Notre Dame is going nowhere but the Big East with it's sports, and staying independant in football, unless a college football post season format excludes all independants, which right now are BYU, Army, Notre Dame.
