Revive The Magnolia League!!

I'm in a re-districting mood, and recall a blurb I ran across about someone at Vanderbilt in the 1960's who tried (unsuccessfully) to create a "Magnolia League" made up of more academically-minded (read athletically-challenged) universities.

In the spirit of re-organizatioin, I am therefore presenting my "Magnolia League"...which should be invoked immediately.  Of course, there will be some collateral damage to the milktoast conferences from which these schools are currently affiliated--but who cares?  Geographic propinquity has been thrown a little out the window with the Magnolia League, which would naturally add to team travel costs...but distance shouldn't be the criteria (as long as we're talking the domestic US), and the following match-ups would blow their existing conference matchups out-of-the-water.

Here are the founding members of the "Magnolia League":

1.  Vanderbilt

2.  Stanford

3.  Notre Dame

4.  Northwestern

5.  Duke

6.  Johns Hopkins (if it didn't go Ivy, due to squatter UPenn)

7.  UVA

8.  Univ. of Chicago

 

Some close runner-ups would be... UC Berkeley, Emory or Rice, maybe even Univ. of Michigan or Washington U in St. Louis.  Cal Tech, if excluded, could behave like MIT does towards the Ivies...like a competitor who doesn't compete.

Naturally, there would be some spilled milk.  Duke would bitch and moan, claiming it'd "miss" its current conference rivalry with UNC (they love to fight over the color blue), but I posit that UNC's real Hatfield-McCoy brethren should be the Wolfpack of NC State (a like-minded, more jockish, state school), not Duke.  And leaving the ACC wouldn't preclude Duke from still playing UNC outside of conference (so myopic diehards wouldn't be disappointed).  Duke has a similar problem that Vanderbilt does...who claims to have a heated rivalry with a lesser, inadequate state school--namely the Univ. of Tennessee.  I guarantee, that if Vanderbilt and Duke up-and-bailed on their respective, crappy, deficient athletic conferences, that they wouldn't actually miss them.

Of course, my sincere apologies go out to the Big 10, the SEC, the ACC and the Pac-10 for removing their dependable bitches from their dumb conferences.  But, c'mon, who really cares what happens to those inferior, academic conferences anyway?

And Penn, if demoted from the Ivies (which it should be), wouldn't be invited into the Magnolia League Conference either.  It should be taken out to the woodshed, and accidentally forgotten next to the chainsaw and rusted pruning sheers.

My apologies also go out to the following folks who didn't make the cut...Purdue, SMU, UNC, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, blah blah blah...