BJWilliams wrote:WinthropEagleFan wrote:Yeah, I see no need to bring them (or anyone else) in for all sports... To me, if you aren't able to make money off of a TV deal or get the publicity/$$$ of having multiple teams make the NCAA tournament, it makes no sense for the league to really be any bigger than it is now. 8-10 teams is perfect for the Big South as long as you are pretty certain you won't drop below 8 anytime soon (and aside from you guys, is anyone else really looking to move right now?). Why split the already-small pie into even smaller slices? Why make it harder for all of the sports at your school to get an auto bid? It isn't like adding teams adds any money/publicity to the conference.
And call me old-fashioned, but once you aren't able to play everyone twice in basketball each season (and/or everyone once in football), then your league has too many teams.
My point to this part of what you said WEF is no conference should ever be set up to where you have no ability to schedule out of conference.
Its high school I know, but here in Tidewater we have a district that has 11 teams in it and the entirety of their schedules (with the occasional exception) is simply playing the other 10 teams in the district. Could you imagine the backlash if a D1 conference did that?
Oh yeah, you have to have non-conference games...which is why I think there's no reason a college conference needs to be >10 teams. For football, if everyone fielded a team, that gives you a 9-game schedule, and allows you 2-3 non-conference games. Once you get too big to be able to play everyone else, it leads to issues where you don't have balanced conference schedules and you start to get disconnected with the rest of the league when you don't play certain teams in certain years. So no, I'm not advocating for elimination of non-conference games, I'm just advocating for leagues to not get over 10 teams (which I know is unrealistic, especially at the P5 level, but I see no need for FCS leagues to be bigger than that).