Is the Big South a Sinking Ship?
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”307"]
Is the Big South’s obsession with football eventually going to kill the conference?[/caption]
Big South Kyle Kallander has watched a ship sink before. In 1996 he was the commissioner of the old Southwest Conference which dissolved that year. Since his tenure their he has been with the Big South and is currently in his seventeenth year at the conference.
I’ve been saying since Longwood joined that the conference that eventually realignment dominoes were going to hit the Big South and that the conference needs to be the preemptive aggressor before the war hits our front-yard. Guess what? The army of the Southern Conference and the CAA is now at are gates.
The CAA is bleeding members and its not over yet. I think the conference has a pivotal decision to make, do they want to be a northern conference or a southern conference. Simply put, their current geographic footprint is certainly not sustainable long-term.
Football is certainly the driver in expansion and the Big South is hanging on by a thread. The Big South has seven football schools with the addition of Monmouth as an associate member, you need six schools for an auto-bid into the FCS playoff. The CAA is knocking on the Southern Conference’s door and threatening to steal more schools like Davidson, Furman, or Elon. Sooner or later the SoCon is going to have to replenish and they are going to look at the Big South and the Atlantic Sun.
The Big South shouldn’t simply rollover and takes its beating from the Southern Conference. After losing three members this year and more on the horizon, what makes the Southern Conference a more attractive destination then the Big South?
All of this could be avoided if the Big South fortified itself with one member, Kennesaw State or Mercer. Both have aspiring football programs and could slip in to take Liberty’s place when someone finally gives them a home on the FBS level. But instead of being aggressive, our conference is sitting back and waiting to be pillaged. The Big South could very easily be with Liberty and Coastal Carolina within the next couple of years and maybe even VMI.
Should Longwood care? Half of the Big South’s membership doesn’t even play football for the conference. The fear of being left out in the dust certainly isn’t a comfortable notion.
My question is, why keep chasing the carrot that is football? How much of a revenue driver can it be for a conference that may just feature Presbyterian, VMI, Monmouth, and Gardner-Webb in a couple of years?
Perhaps it is time for the schools in the Big South and SoCon who do not play football for either conference to get around a table and talk about starting a geographic conference of their own where basketball is the flagship and their is no constant fear of a sport you don’t even sponsor being a driver? What might that look like: Longwood, Radford, Campbell, High Point, UNC Asheville, Winthrop, Davidson, UNC Greensboro. At that point, you could even argue that UNC Wilmington and the College of Charleston could find the idea more enticing then their ever fluid situation in the CAA.
It’s just an idea and more fantasy than reality. But now is the time to be aggressive, actually last year was the time to be aggressive, and not the time to sit back and just wait to see how thing shake out.
