If we stay in a diminished BE my question is what would be the recruiting fallout if any?
I don't think anyone knows. Let's imagine the worst case scenario where WVU leaves in addition to SU & Pitt. I guess I could add UL leaving as well, but I don't see any takers with them, so let's just stick with WVU added to the 2 others. If the BE FB/BB and BB only programs stay intact for the immediate future, the conference will still be a formidable BB conference. UConn, GU, Nova, Cinci, ND (assuming they're still here), UL and SJU were all NCAA tournament teams. That's still pretty damn good!
I still think the BE will continue to get a good enough TV deal to keep its top teams on TV. If it looks like that would change, then I'd expect recruiting to take a solid hit.
Now once there becomes a concern that the BCS conferences might break away from the NCAAs and if the BE is no longer a BCS conference (i.e. not getting an automatic BCS FB invitaton) then we should start to worry.
I realize that Purvis mentioned his concern, but I really didn't buy it as a reason he chose NCSU.
IMO, for now the impact will be minimal impact. Once Pitt & SU leave for the ACC, the conference BB wise will obviously be weakened, but UConn can easily counter that by adding a slightly more difficult...
hum, in this year's case significanlty more difficult ... out-of-conference schedule to counter the competition drop off. I've been recently thinking about how the unbalanced BE schedule where we are no longer playing many of the top BE programs twice makes a move to the ACC more appealing, where they would likely go to 2 divisions where we play the northern teams twice in BB and southern teams once. In a separate post, I will dive into this topic, though someone might have already brought this up.