(Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
OK, so maybe a more accurate headline would be, "Expand or Stagnate" or "Expand or Wilt," but those are not nearly as attention-getting and I need your attention.
This is important.
You need to expand as soon as possible after the FBS upgrade moratorium is lifted.
It may seem like things are going great for the conference and the conference has finally turned the corner. After all, the conference has had enough teams to play a full schedule for a couple years now.
You guys have the numbers to push out Denver and to not sweat over the possible loss of New Orleans over budgetary concerns. South Alabama will start league football play in 2013.
Things look great...but really they aren't.
How many of your schools are happy being in the Sunbelt?
Who is happy?
No one in the conference is happy with the travel. Every football playing school plays body bag games to cover the travel shortfalls, and still, most of the programs struggle to stay within budget.
Middle Tennessee State and Western Kentucky would likely prefer being in the MAC. Their travel costs would be significantly less and, as I understand it, there were some talks along those lines at one point.
Louisiana Layfatte has a world of distaste for Louisiana Monroe over the "University of Louisiana" name and would love to be in a different conference if it made sense.
With their team's football dominance, Troy fans probably feel like they have already outgrown the Sun Belt, and they likely dream of affiliation with schools like UAB in Conference USA. South Alabama would also love to be in the same conference as UAB and Southern Miss.
Florida International and Florida Atlantic would jump at the chance to be in the same conference as Central Florida. Both schools have enormous enrollments and alumni bases and are potential TV draws in Miami. Additionally, both schools' stadium issues will be resolved soon. If either program becomes one of the stronger ones in the Sun Belt, it could easily be recruited by C-USA.
Arkansas Little Rock and New Orleans probably wonder when they will be forced out for football playing members. They may jump to another conference to protect themselves from that scenario.
Even lowly North Texas can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
UNT fans don't care for the Sun Belt. The conference is viewed as strictly a way station by UNT fans.
It is plainly clear in the attendance numbers for the last five years, with occasional exceptions for season openers and the like, UNT draws 17,000 for almost any conference opponent, just like it does for most out of conference opponents, but draws 22-30,000 for any opponent from Texas.
I think you could argue that UNT fans generally like Arky State and ULL, but the rest of the Sun Belt doesn't draw crowds in Denton.
UNT's new 30,000 stadium, the nation's first LEED (green) stadium is scheduled to be completed in time for the 2011 season and it appears it could be the key to escaping the Sun Belt.
It is the last piece of a decade-long effort by the UNT athletic director to upgrade all of the university's sports facilities. UNT turned down WAC membership over travel costs that would have devastated its athletic budget at the time, bleeding competitiveness out of the program, and apparently only lost out to UTEP to become the 12th member of C-USA because of out-of-date and inadequate facilities.
The UNT student referendum to fund half of the stadium costs also created a $10 per credit hour fee that can be raised each year without going through another student referendum. The state caps student athletic fees at public schools at $20.
With essentially a $3 athletic fee, UNT's reported athletic budget was $15.8M in 2007. UNT has an enrollment of 34,000. At $10 per credit hour, each full-time student would be contributing another $210 per year for a total increase to the athletic budget of a little over $7 million dollars annually, to about $23 million.
UNT will have by far the largest athletic budget in the conference when the fee goes into effect in 2011.
It is likely that by 2025-2030 the fee will reach the state maximum. Ignoring UNT's growth curve, that would add another $10.2M to the athletic budget bringing UNT's budget to $33M. Today a $33M athletic budget would exceed the budgets of every school in C-USA and would trail only TCU's budget in the Mountain West.
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