Courtesy: SB Nation
Not this year. No possibility of shocking the world. The Florida Gulf Coast men’s basketball team isn’t in the Big Dance, bounced out by the Mercer Bears, 68-60, in last Sunday’s conference championship game. The Bears will advance to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in nearly 30 years. The Eagles will head to the NIT.
Outside of the teams’ supporters, few would have cared about the outcome of this game … if it hadn’t been for FGCU’s miraculous run last year. The Eagles were the first 15th seed in NCAA history to get to the Sweet Sixteen. That run put the school on the national basketball map.
Last year FGCU beat Mercer at Mercer to get to the NCAAs. The roles were reversed this time. What a rivalry, huh?! Well, no. Mercer is leaving the American Sun Conference (A-Sun), the third school in two years to opt out. Belmont left last year for The Ohio Valley Conference. Mercer, the conference’s senior member (1978-2014), will head to The Southern Conference next year along with A-Sun partner East Tennessee State. For all three it’s a step-up in peer affiliation and athletic competition.
That’s the big story now. The loss of FGCU’s most competitive conference foes makes it harder for the Eagles to fly high. Harboring high aspirations and playing lower-tier teams is a bad combination. Identity, you see, is connected to the company you keep.
Courtesy: Atlantic Sun Conference
Losing three teams in two years suggests something’s wrong with the A-Sun. Not really. Departing is nothing new. Exiting the A-Sun is an institutional habit: about 25 schools have left the conference since the Trans-America Athletic Conference (as it was called back then) was established in the late ‘70s, Oklahoma City University, a founding member, left after one year. Two schools—Pan American and Nicholls State—left after two.
Why? Most schools exit by design: the A-Sun serves as a transition spot for them—a place for upstarts (like FGCU) to move in and for aspirants (like Central Florida) to move out. The conference continues to serve a stepping stone function.
There’s nothing unique about that role in collegiate sports. Consider the Southern Conference. The SoCon, established in 1921, is the fourth oldest collegiate conference in America. Did you know that some of the most recognizable names in college sports were once members? Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, and Duke are among them. But those schools belonged long ago, most before the ACC and SEC came into being. Today, the SoCon serves the needs of a batch of mid-major schools, including several that have national reputations in football or basketball—Appalachian State, Furman, and Davidson.
The challenge for leagues with shifting memberships is to maintain stability by managing inflow and outflow. That’s a challenge for low-tier league, like the A-Sun. To replenish the ranks the A-Sun has admitted newly established schools with fresh programs (e.g., FGCU started playing men’s basketball in 2002-03); and it has recruited schools moving up in NCAA division rank (e.g., Northern Kentucky, the newest member, moved from D-2 to D-1 recently and began A-Sun member-play in 2012).
Sometimes leagues have more outflow than inflow, and it’s one of the reasons why some of them carry large memberships (e.g., The Southland Conference has 14 members). The A-Sun will be down to eight members next season, the minimum, without institutions to replace the departed schools.
The league’s reconstitution is good for FGCU competitively: it will be the class of the league, along with The University of South Carolina, Upstate. Those two will compete against remaining conference foes: Stetson, Lipscomb, Northern Kentucky, Kennesaw State, North Florida, and historically-relevant Jacksonville, a team that once made The Final Four. But none of those schools is nationally competitive or has a regional athletic presence. That’s a problem for a school, like FGCU, with aspirations.
Courtesy: University of South Carolina Upstate
It’s tough to achieve and maintain a national profile in a league like this. For starters, a team needs to whip through the conference season. Beating Lipscomb by 30 doesn’t mean much, but losing (by any amount) to Kennesaw is a season-killer. And dominating conference competition is an insufficient task. An upstart has to compete well against big-name schools, too. Playing Mississippi at Oxford for a big paycheck—how things used to be for lower-tier teams—isn’t enough these days. It has to win.
The hurdles are high and many. A mid-major has to consistently dominate a lower league, do well against big-name teams in non-conference games, and spring upsets in The Big Dance. Creighton did all of those things. The Blue Jays left The Missouri Valley Conference to play on a bigger stage—the newly reconstituted Big East—competing with other nationally-recognized Catholic schools, like Georgetown.
But there’s another important matter: being wanted. West Virginia is a prime example of a school with good athletic programs that—sad to say—went begging. WVU found itself in a bad spot during the spate of recent conference realignments. The Atlantic Coast Conference (the preferable landing place) picked other former Big East schools—Syracuse and Pitt—over the Mountaineers. The newly formed American Conference seemed low-ball competitively for WVU, and it wasn’t financially attractive either.
That left The Big 12 for WVU. That league got whacked during realignment—losing Nebraska to the Big Ten, Colorado to the Pacific 12, and Missouri and Texas A&M to the Southeastern Conference—and new members TCU and WVU saved The Big 12. But TCU fits the league geographically while WVU does not. Big 12 teams have to travel long distances to play in Morgantown (on average about 2400 miles). How long will (and can) that last? And what will the Mountaineers do then?
Courtesy: Big 12 Conference/West Virginia University
Being wanted may also be an issue for FGCU. While it has strong athletic programs across the board (e.g., men’s and women’s basketball, softball, baseball), it can’t offer a new league what it doesn’t have—football.
For now, at least, Eagle fans jam the stands and local press outlets cover the team extensively. But how long will it take before FGCU v. USC Upstate gets stale, especially as other state teams play big-time games on national TV—Florida-Kentucky and Florida State-Syracuse?
What’s FGCU destination? The answer is unclear. What we do know is this: making the Sweet 16 changes things—what sights it sets and how others look at a school. Not being there this year—after experiencing the hype and circumstance—has an impact, too. The NIT experience will be new, though. It may satisfy competitive urges, at least for a while, especially if a game or two is played at home.
This story is worth following: it’s about a school that came out of nowhere last year to capture the nation’s attention. Will it stay there?
So, Eagles: What company will you keep?
