Originally Posted by UACFlyer
Brew, what would you say about the A10 in five years? That's what matters to Dayton. Loss of Dayton and/or VCU would be devastating for the A10. Seems to me that unless the A10 commissioner is asleep the move the AAC made should be a little disturbing.
In my opinion, a good time for UD to apply some meaningful pressure focused on improvement of the A10. Indeed, such pressure might be even more effective if applied by an A10 member that's serious about BB but does not pose a threat to leave, e.g., St. Joes, URI.
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I'm not sure, but if I had to guess I'd say it'll look similar to what it does now.
There are things about the A10 that drive me nuts. One is the way the league shares tournament revenue. I've seen people mention that the team who earns the units gets 75 percent of them. I've seen no evidence that is how it's done, though. See the link below. You'll have to scroll down to the MAKERS AND TAKERS BY CONFERENCE tab, and click on the EARNED VS RECEIVED. You then need to scroll over the little bars, which represent the A10 teams from 1991. The revenue distribution in the A10 is so out of whack that it's almost comical.
You have
Duquesne, who has earned zero units in the entire history of the conference, but is receiving 12.3 units. You have Dayton, who had earned 9 units the last time this was updated (it is now 11), and has only received 9.3 units.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2...sketball-fund/
HOW IN THE HELL IS DUQUESNE GETING MORE THAN DAYTON?? I don't know, but they are. That is what drove me crazy.
Xavier seemed to receive less than the majority of the league, even though they earned the most. I wish they were getting 75 percent of what they earned. That's what I've heard people on here say. But, I've seen no report that indicates that's how it works, nor have I heard from anyone connected to the conference saying that's how it works. All they say is that it's complicated. Well, yeah. I'd say so.
That leads into something else that always drove me nuts about the A10. It was more of a cluster than a conference. At times it felt like a junk yard. By that I mean if you sifted through everything, you could find some high quality stuff. But, at the end of the day, it was still a collective junk yard. You have programs that don't take basketball seriously and don't commit to it at the level that Dayton and Xavier did. There's nothing wrong with not committing to basketball in and of itself, but there is something wrong with being in a league with schools that do, and then taking a bigger share of the NCAA Tournament revenue than what the schools who do commit to basketball and earn the revenue get. Now, to be fair to
Fordham and Duquesne, in the last two years I think both have hired good coaches. Fordham has shown improvement, and I think Duquense will start to improve under Dambrot, but for multiple decades it felt like there were teams that just didn't put anything into basketball, and drug the league down, and took a bigger piece of the pie. That made me insane. I still think this is occurs, and I still think it will be occurring in five years.
Last, and certainly not least, is the A10's beyond ridiculous and beyond pathetic TV deal. There is really no excuse for it. The league is in big markets, and even though it's not a power conference it's still among the very few conferences (I'd say nine or ten) that regularly puts multiple teams in the NCAA Tournament, always (with the exception of one season) has its first place team inside the bubble.
It's a basketball centric conference in big markets with multiple NCAA Tournament caliber teams every year. Why is the TV deal so unbelievably ****ty?? It's crap money, and it's even crappier exposure. The Missouri Valley isn't as good as the A10, even with Wichita State. Yet, those schools make close to twice as much per school on TV revenue as what the A10 gets. That is flat out absurd. The A10 basically equally shares $500k amongst all its members every year. And, they actually had it in the contract at one point that they were not allowed to play on free to air networks. Why in the world would anyone with any sense agree to that?? My best guess is that the reason the networks wanted that was to strong arm people into having to subscribe to NBC Sports and CBS Sports, or to buy some other premium package in order to watch the games. When CBS showed the A10 championship game, I believe ESPN had the rights to it and sold it to CBS, and they actually had to obtain permission to show the game from the other entities that made up the TV network because CBS is a free to air network.
Back in X's A10 days, I didn't so much want into the Big East as I wanted out of the A10. I figured the A10 had a solid core of teams that would have been much better served going out on their own. X, UD,
SLU, Butler, VCU, and
Richmond could have joined up with any two three other teams and had a much better league than the cluster that was the A10 with much better revenue sharing and a much better TV deal. Add Wichita and Creighton to that and that's a **** good eight team basketball conference. I really didn't want to wait for the Big East at the time. I guess it worked out rather nicely for X, so I can't complain too much, but at the time I just wanted out of the A10 and saw no reason to just wait for the BE. I still feel that way about the A10, and still think there are a core of teams that would do better on their own, but to be honest, it's harder for me to care now for obvious reasons. If you get the chance to go to the AAC I think you should do it, but that's just me. If people disagree it's no skin off my nose.
