SMU’s core ACC opponents are Stanford and Cal. They will play them regularly. They are 2 time zones & 1730 miles away. They also will travel to Miami, Boston & Syracuse. They have ZERO nearby rivals.
Their closest conference mate is Georgia Tech, 780 miles away. Every other member of the ACC is in a different time zone.
I call that ridiculous travel for a college athletic program.
This.
The money for SMU is a slight increase I’ve been told and they went to donors to get commitments to offset any losses up to a certain point and get some seed money for the move.
This isn’t counting the $200 million in facilities upgrades to bring their place up to ACC standards. If you count that, it’s a fool’s errand. Especially since other schools in the ACC are planning on tearing down some of those “upgrades” on their own campus.
SMU’s move is about getting to R1 status and it will be much easier and perhaps faster in the ACC.
The folly of the athletics arrangement is revealed in why they were selected over others, which proves they are no better than the American and everyone knows it. Their biggest drawing point was cheap, plentiful airfare to SFO for non-football sports and their willingness to control costs and a reasonable plan to take on and control debt if added, while agreeing not to dilute certain conference shares for a long period until they’ve added value up to that amount. IOW, the exact criteria to enter the AAC years ago.
The issue with student travel isn’t connecting flights or travel time. It’s cost as well as availability of flights and locations. Kids can’t miss class or tests. If you are flying in and out of small airports like you do most college towns, if that last flight is cancelled after the game, kids are stuck there. And class and practice schedules suffer. During spring rains, it can take days to get out of some towns, including Tulsa.
FSU used to keep a couple of vans on campus to shuttle opposing teams to JAX to work around cancelled or delayed flights at TLH. So there’s work arounds. But there’s no work around $850 a piece to fly to BOI from DFW and only $350 to fly to SFO. Non football programs work on small margins and coaches aren’t interested in giving Delta airlines any more than they have to. From their perspective, that comes out of their recruiting budget or couple be spent on increasing their compensation.
It's a phenomenal tournament. Bueckers went to HS a couple burbs over from us and I've followed her in college. In HS, she'd go into gyms that usually had 20 fans at a girls' game and the gym would be full with overflow crowd in the lobby. She'd stay until she had signed every autograph and talked to every person who wanted to talk to her. As a HS senior who was the #1 recruit in the country. I was always impressed by that. 