I guess this is where i'm at.
The backdrop is fairly straight-forward to me. UConn made the right move out of realignment to take a concerted stab at football. Hindsight is always 20/20 but it was hard to envision things going this way in totality, but at the time it was a good call We had a chance to run a draw play - hopefully basketball kept it's head above water (it did in the short term and won a national title), and football could maintain post-RE. Football didn't. Then the call didn't come. The overtures haven't. Then hoops fell off.
But even with the two teams sagging, you still had a bit of a chance. UConn still brings a lot to the table. But it put them on a real clock. But so long as hoops could hold the water back, they could stay nationally relevant enough to have a shot. Then hoops totally cratered. And with hoops cratering, its really you brand cratering. So that just makes the clock tick faster. And the margin for error less and less.
Football reset after Diaco, RE is back but it's a long road to tow and realistically - any shot of us being really good in a short period of time are slim to none. I hope i'm wrong, but it's just reality. The conference is undoubtedly better if not good in football, but you look at the coaching changeovers in the league and it's kind of stuck between this no-man's land of being clearly better than the rest, but also viewed as a stop off to P5 jobs for coaches. Which makes recuiting more skiddish. And maintaining success will always be more challenging. That's not even getting into the financial constraints. I think that's a whole other can of worms that football has to deal with and that's not even getting into the fact that the Rent has the energy of a hospice home and that the team has been a dog the last four or five years.
SO a jump in football is going to be really hard.
It's STILL OK if hoops hadn't totally fallen apart. First losing season in forever. Looks like we may have another one coming up. We had some decent recruiting classes, but we've lost a ton of guys. We don't have much of an offensive system that's appealing to the team's needs. Ollie looks more like a lame duck by the day and that'll hurt recruiting even more. Add into the fact that despite the conference being better, it's still not high profile enough to be sexy. And even for teams at this level, Cincinnati, Wichita and others look like a more appealing option. Lack of rivals, history and geography has ballooned the budget, hurt attendance and I think more than anything the totality of being left out of conference realginment and traditional rivals has left an even deeper scar that i'm not even sure being competitive in the conference would solve significantly. It's hard to sell tickets to East Carolina, Tulane, Tulsa and the also-rans. We've been non-competitive out of conference against ranked teams and few people want to watch their favorite team get embarrassed.
So you add all that up and I dunno if there's much of a timer left. At most- they can wait until the next round of TV rights for the conference, but I still feel like the return is going to be disappointing for everyone in college sports, never mind the AAC. I just don't know if it's going to yield the results the University is looking for - but it's hard for us to take them to task because we're really the ankle weight right now (along with Memphis, arguably) in that we're the flagship brand and were what the conference built around and we've totally laid and egg overall while everyone else has gotten better.
So then your options are stick it out - which unless we see turnarounds quick could be the end - and faster than we think. The other option is let the hoops program peter out and hope for the best long term with football, hoping a P5 invite or ostensibly power-house mid major status can help fuel enough revenue to get hoops back on track. Another option is to bail on big time football, move programs to the MAC and move everything else to the Big East where you'll definitely increase your revenue, earn a good shot at sparking some renewed interest in the program through rivals and friendlier geographics, and a likely bump in recruiting. But that move means you're pairing up with schools that don't give a hoot about football. That are private when we're a flagship state university. And is filled with a lot of private schools who given the bigger picture could struggle financially to stay afloat at all - never mind stay afloat athletically - in the future. Student loan defaults are on the rise and college debt structures are a disaster. TV rights bubbles are showing all the signs of a hardline burst for everyone, and who knows how that effects the Big East being hoops-only. They likely get hit first and hit the hardest. That could spark another round of raiding the Big East, there's perhaps a possibility that Villanova spooks themselves into FBS football, there's just lots of risk. Then other members are not the king fish in their markets. Wisconsin > Marquette. Northwestern and Illinios > DePaul. Nebraska > Creighton. Xavier and Cincinnati are on a more streamlined level competitively, but Cincinnati is more established. Neither can hold a candle to Ohio State in their own state. Villanova and Georgetown are relatively safe bets to maintain some assemblance of success at the box office... but Georgetown is hardly in a good spot and arguably a little further along in the hardline rebuild we might need to undergo, but are a long ways from out of the weeds. Butler is the little engine that can, but they're also not as revered as Indiana, Notre Dame and Purdue are. It's probably a better situation in the short term - but potentially disasterous in the long term. The last option - which is a nuclear one - is to dump FBS football altogether and go back to pouring everything into Men's hoops and hoping for the best, but that slams the door on a P5 invite forever.
All of them are really risky. Really, really risky.
So to me -
#1 - Seems like for now, the best option, but a decision absolutely needs to be made on 3, 4 and 5 as soon as TV rights negotiations are up.
#2 - I just can't realistically see happening. UConn's built it's brand on two things: Academics and hoops. I can't see the alums being good with it. Football could get better, but that seems so far off that by the time it happens, any appeal we have as a well-rounded potential addition to a P5 are dead. Best you probably hope for is the next round of realignment ends up with the P5's getting super aggressive in picking apart the AAC and we get picked up as a 'screw it, we'll just do it to swallow em up' addition.
#3 - Is the best plan-B I think. I think there's enough cache built up over the years to still make the program an appealing job for a good coach and yeah - I think we could get that coach to stay. It helps protect your baseline for sure. Football takes a huge hit, but it doesn't TOTALLY off your chances at a P5 invite and in the same vein as #2, if the Big East gets targeted, just our having football probably helps relative to the other guys in the conference. The short term bump in revenue shores up our coffers and gives you enough revenue to get over the hump to hopefully have a crack heading forward. But it's also enormously risky if financial trends an the greater economy around colleges and universities keeps trending the way it is. We could just end up right back where we are now in 5-10 years with zero to show for it. Which could end up in
#4 - Football being downgraded and the school all-in bets on hoops. Which eliminates all P5 aspirations altogether but at least cuts enough of the budget to keep the hoops program from totally going down the drain for a little while longer, but is more likely just staving off the inevitable.
The best case scenario is Ollie figures his life out or a new coach turns the program right around fast, but without a Pitino type, that's going to be hard (he sucks, btw he's awful). And that level of a coach is totally unrealistic for a rebuild. That and Edsall gets the team close to or at .500 next year and then a bowl in year 3 during the rights negotiations. Football then washes basketball's hands a bit and buys you time on a rebuild.
But if the TV deal is a dog and that scenario doesn't play out, I think they have to probably pull the trigger on the Big East move with Football going to the MAC or maybe the AAC begrugingly allows us to stay for football only.
But they need to A.) Win (which seems unlikely right now) and show value sooner rather than later and B.) Time to let things play out (which they just don't have nearly as much of anymore, if any at all). That's what makes this so sticky, I think.
So if it's me, I think Ollie's a stuck pig at this point. I'd find a replacement, but they need to go hard in doing it. I hope Edsall figures things out fast. I wait to see what the new AAC deal is. If it sucks, Then i'm pulling the trigger and heading to the Big East as soon as possible and despite the obvious risks, protecting my floor and figuring the rest out later because at that point, you don't have much of a choice if the hope, want and desire is to keep both. It's the only scenario where that works with the best chance at success even though it's not necessarily a 'good' option. To me #4 isn't an option and is panic. #2 would totally shift a decades long focus in the AD an that's not realistic. Plus it'd be nuclear with alums. #1 you can't keep doubling down on when the cards are so blatantly obvious and #3 is probably the route I choose, albeit regretfully.
Sorry for the new testament.
