Nugget's Ghostbuster wrote:“Lower tier G5 Sports fans and college institutions with an affinity for college football cannot help but be concerned over the fate of Conference USA. The conference continues to lose money and burn cash, with no turnaround in sight, as evidenced by its latest forthcoming media rights deal.
CUSA has been losing business to the AAC, Sun Belt and MWC—to mention but a few— which have fared much better than CUSA both in attendance and operating margins.
A series of strategic mistakes, which stretch back over two decades, and have damaged the status of our conference.
In 1995 and 2005, CUSA, made the first strategic mistakes – an aggressive expansion outside its “core” southern football base.
The problem was that these new football directional schools had very few synergies with the true souths traditional core fan base.
The move would welcome its future competitors internally -- like Central Florida, Tulsa and South Florida. -- an opportunity to invade and take over the CUSA brand and market before leaving for more revenue.
In 2013, CUSA made its second mistake: restructuring its operations into several more directional units, run by schools with little legacy or experience. It should come as no surprise that this new wave of teams was doomed to fail, as evidenced by the conferences financial results related to inflated travel expenses and drastically reduced media rights income in recent years.
In the last few years, CUSA made its third strategic mistake – it has failed to update its branding model or clearly define their long term goals. CUSA is missing the same thing as The MAC. Both establishments are antiquated business models. The world is a different place now. Early in its infancy, CUSA was small part of American football life. If you go there now, it’s viewed as a last resort.”
Preface: I think that post-Slive C-USA has been run poorly. There were errors in who we decided to bring in and in the mindset of "more is better," which led to us bringing in some of the dead weight with which we are currently stuck.
That said....if C-USA were run well, do I believe that we would be much better off than we are now? No. To me, mismanagement from the top contributed about 10-15 percent to where we are now. That's significant. We would be slightly better off with more competent leadership....but not much better off. The other 85-90 percent was outside of the conference's control. Conference expansions fueled by increasing money from TV revenues is why this conference (and USM, specifically) is where it is.
On the 2005 expansion: First, USF was an original member of C-USA. They moved up to D1 in football in the early 00's. Second, I never thought of C-USA as having a "Southern base." From its inception, it was a geographically sprawled conference of basketball-first and basketball-only programs lacking any kind of football identity. I'm guilty of this, as well, but I think we tend to romanticize old-CUSA based on what those programs are now and not what they were then. Better than C-USA now? Sure. Not as good as people want to say, though.
Third, UCF and Tulsa using the conference as a platform was an inevitable product of what college athletics (and specifically football) was becoming. Everyone was hoping to use the conference as a springboard. Andre mentioned this before me in the thread--and I agree--that Giannini was probably naive in thinking that everyone wanted to build a conference. I'm not sure it mattered, though. USM has nothing that appealed to the BE or AAC (though we should have tried our asses off). Anyway, our conference was decimated in 2005 and we had to bring teams in. Given that half the programs that came in at that point were called up to the Big East/American, I think that shows we chose some well. Where we went wrong was with expanding TOO much. I didn't like bringing Rice in. I actually didn't like bringing SMU in (that would be my exception to the former members involved in the 05 expansion). I didn't like bringing UTEP in.
Regardless of your view on that expansion that year, college athletics was still different. You could see where it was going but you didn't know how fast it was coming. The SEC-ESPN deal in 2007 (?) hit the fast-forward button on those changes.
2013: I'm more on the same page there. That struck me as a move in which we basically just grabbed whoever we could in a moment of panic to try to appease the Texas schools (that's where Rice and UTEP bit us in the ass) and do whatever we could to get a holding in Florida. By that point, the landscape of college football was clear. This was not a conference was going to be competitive financially and there weren't going to be big TV contracts for the conference. It should have condensed geographically.
I think the biggest question is if this conference would have been better off had it started 10-15 years before and been more established when TV deals became so important. No doubt that big conferences would have raided it....but maybe it would be in the position of the AAC now. As it was created in 1996 with a group of far-flung basketball programs, I don't think it ever had a chance to be successful in the current world of college athletics.
Granted, it focused on basketball, but I think the 30-for-30 on the Big East summarized the approaching storm of big-money college football and how there really wasn't a way to stop it.