I need a history lesson

[MUBasketball]

I'm very uneasy about breaking away and forming a new conference from scratch (if that's the plan).

So, for those older than me, what went into forming Conference USA? I know MU was a charter member. Was the conference formed, and then they were asked to join? Or was MU involved in the infancy of the conference? Just wondering what all goes into that. Seems awful risky.

[unclejohn]

You really have to go back to Marquette's days in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, which is now the Horizon. Notre Dame was in it for all sports except basketball, Dayton joined a year before Marquette did, and the conference was hoping to get DePaul. There were differences among the programs of how to proceed. Marquette and Saint Louis were looking at building the conference up into a Midwest version of the Big East. A few of the smaller schools with weaker programs were not so ambitious. Things came to a head when the conference tournament was awarded. The year before Marquette joined, the tournament was in Dayton, as a reward to Dayton for joining. The conference asked for bids to hold the tournament for three years. Dayton bid for three years. Marquette and Saint Louis, who both had big arenas, bid for one year each, as they were scheduled to host the NCAA tournament the following year. So the conference gave it to Dayton, and Marquette and Saint Louis got royally pissed, and since they were, DePaul declined to join. Actually, the big problem was that those schools wanted to raise the profile of the conference and did not much care how long the schools bid for the tournament for, but they did not think the rest of the members were thinking big enough. Soon most of the rest of the schools in the GMC left, leaving only Butler, Detroit, and Loyola behind, and at the time, Butler was terrible.

So Marquette and Saint Louis left, and along with DePaul, decided to form their own conference, the Great Midwest. Cincinnati and Memphis joined as well, leaving the Metro behind. At the time, the Metro did not sponsor football, and it was a widely-spread collection of schools that couldn't fit in anywhere else. Along with Memphis and Cinci, it had Louisville, Tulane, Southern Mississippi, Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Georgia Tech and Florida State. At some point, the latter three broke off to join the ACC and the SEC, but I am not sure of exactly when. In any case, the Metro was not in good shape. It was expected that Louisville would be the sixth team in the GMC, until the conference started discussing making players go to class, at which point, they lost interest and decided to stay in the Metro. So the GMC added UAB, despite the fact that it was nowhere near the Midwest. The Metro then raided the Sunbelt for Charlotte, South Florida, and a couple others.

That is how it went for the next four years. The GMC turned out to be a pretty good conference. The first year, Cincinnati, which had just recently hired Huggy Bear, beat Memphis to advance to the Final Four. After Dayton got their conference tournament for the next two years, they dumped the MCC and joined the GMC. During its brief existence, the GMC consistently put three schools out of six/seven in the tournament every year, and several more in the NIT, which was a bigger deal back then. The final year, six out of the seven went to post-season play. Cincinnati was ranked #1 some of the time. Marquette and Saint Louis both cracked the top 25 several times. Memphis was pretty good a few years. UAB was coached by Gene Bartow, and was usually at least respectable.

Louisville went on to beat up most of the schools in the Metro every year.

Then Cincinnati went undefeated in football one year, and did not get an invitation to anywhere, since they were an independent. The football schools all decided that they needed a conference, so basically, the Metro and GMC merged into a contraption called C-USA. Dayton did not get an invite, and the Metro kicked aside Va. Tech and Va. Commonwealth, which proved to be a mistake when VT played in the national championship game a year or two later. Houston joined a year later, to make it 12. Marquette, DePaul and Saint Louis found themselves playing teams like Southern Miss and Houston. Then the conference started adding football teams, that gradually became full conference members, so Marquette wound up playing East Carolina and TCU.

When the ACC raided the Big East, the big prize was Miami, which was a dominant football team at the time. They also tried to get Syracuse and Boston College. But due to the machinations of the Virginia state legislature and the fact that the president of Maryland was a Notre Dame grad, and wanted to ditch BC to try and talk ND into joining instead, the ACC wound up with Miami and Va. Tech. The next year the ACC, having failed to snag ND, came back for BC, which had promised the rest of the conference of its undying love and loyalty. Well, so much for that. The Big East's former commissioner Mike Tranghese kept the Big East afloat pretty much by the strength of his personality. He talked the remaining teams into raiding C-USA.

Recall that the BE had been formed largely as a basketball conference, had won a number of national championships, and had put three teams in the Final Four one year. Every one of its original members had made the Final Four in the twenty years or so it had existed. The non-football schools were a little tired of adding teams to the conference just because they had football, notably Rutgers, West Virginia, and Va. Tech.
The non-football members also did not like the idea of being left outnumbered, so they insisted on the addition of Marquette and DePaul, who did not have football.
Louisville and Cinci got in as football members. USF, which by this time had added football and was pretty good at it, was admitted as a football-only member until BC left for the ACC, at which point they were admitted as full members and fell on their knees in gratitude. That left the BE with a balance of eight football schools and eight non-football schools.

C-USA kicked out Charlotte and Saint Louis, raided the WAC for more football schools, and became what it probably should have been all along: a group of Southern football schools, mostly second-tier state schools with a few respectable private schools mixed in, playing teams mostly within driving distance. Memphis lobbied like crazy to get into the BE and got turned down. USF at least offered access to the Florida recruiting market, and George Steinbrenner, who lived in Tampa, and some other really rich folks promised to pour lots of money into the program.

And as you no doubt know, the Big East went on to be the best basketball conference ever. But of course, eventually football had to screw everything up. Football is such a stupid game. As a fair-weather Bears fan, every time the Bears lose, I remember what a stupid sport it is.

Hope that helps. Go Bears. Otherwise, football sucks!

[Alan Bykowski, "brewcity77"]

Great post, unclejohn!

[TheSultan]

Yeah, that was fantastic. MU fans can be nervous, but change brings those feelings. MU is obviously seen by its BE peers as a valuable basketball school, and this is going to be a much better conference than what the Big East is becoming.