Is there a July 1 deadline to add Dayton or SLU?

[marquette]

You probably can't go wrong with most cities in the Midwest. I personally love Milwaukee. I've only lived here a couple of years, but it has everything I could want in a city. If your grand-kids are considering Big East schools then we have Marquette in town, with DePaul less than a 2 hour drive away. For the Horizon League there is UW-Milwaukee, UW-Green Bay less than 2 hours away, and UIC also around 2 hours. We are right in the middle of the Missouri Valley footprint, but not particularly close to any one school. There are also a couple of Big 10 schools nearby should they choose that route. Wisconsin is a 1 hour drive, Northwestern is 2, and Illinois is around 3.5. W have the lakefront, with several nice beaches, a couple of (admittedly mediocre) pro sports teams, and several minor league teams. We have a great nightlife, if that's something you're interested in, with water street, third street, Brady street, and North ave. Our city has a unique culture with festivals ranging from Summerfest (world's largest music festival) to German/Polish/Irish/Italian/any other festival you could possibly think of. Our cost of living is also much lower than Chicago, with apartment prices generally being around 2/3 of what they are in Chicago.

[SLUnatic1]

Everything I've heard is that we are joining the Big East by 2016 fwiw.

[Vill]

Just stay at 10 unless something happens that forces the move to 12.

[BEwannabe]

Just stay at 10 unless something happens that forces the move to 12.

There is no way NBE stays at 10. It's when, who and how many...

[yorost]

How many is 2, any more would be shocking since there just aren't the level of schools out there needed to justify it. Maybe down the road, but no reason to think it'll be happening this next go around.

[SLUnatic1]

How many is 2, any more would be shocking since there just aren't the level of schools out there needed to justify it. Maybe down the road, but no reason to think it'll be happening this next go around.

I feel very confident SLU will be in the NBE as a bridge to Creighton. I'm being told 2016, but nothing confirmed at this point.

[Ball Turret Gunner]

How many is 2, any more would be shocking since there just aren't the level of schools out there needed to justify it. Maybe down the road, but no reason to think it'll be happening this next go around.

I feel very confident SLU will be in the NBE as a bridge to Creighton.

Is that similar to the "bridge to nowhere"?

[DumpsterFireA10]

If it happens, great.

If not, there's always that other league.

And I don't mean the MVC this time.

[tsmithohio1]

By mtripat

Friday,June7th,2013

They do play basketball outside of the big six BCS conferences. Given the importance of the structure of the NCAA tournament the mid major schools often provide some of the most dramatic story lines each year. In this post we want to highlight several non-BCS conference teams that have exceptional fan bases.

Number one on our list is the Dayton Flyers. For the decade from 2001 to 2011, the Flyers averaged over 21 wins per season and made three NCAA tournaments. And while this is a very respectable performance, the Dayton fans provided exceptional support. Dayton plays in a large arena (13,435 seats) and on average over 92% of seats are filled (2005 to 2011). The end result is that Dayton has averaged about three times as much revenue as the average D1 basketball program. The second and third ranked programs were Xavier and Wichita State. Xavier also produces about three times the revenue of the average D1 college by filling their 10,250 seat arena to almost 98% percent of capacity.

There are a number of other non-major conference programs that also come to mind such as Memphis, UNLV and Butler. Butler is an interesting case given their high profile coach and tournament success. However, in the last year available, Butler listed revenues that were still a bit less than the average D1 school. If we look at the full ten year period Butler averaged 24.6 wins but in the last five years only filled about 55% of their available seats. UNLV obviously has a great history but averages less than 12,000 fans (last ten years) in an 18 thousand plus arena. Memphis is another great program. But despite exceptional on-court performance (28 average wins from 2001 to 2011), Memphis only sold about 83% of available seats (this has increased to over 90% over the last several years

[Dew]

Pretty slanted view. Would you rather have a team that played in back to back national title games but doesn't sell out every night or one that sells out but rarely makes the NCAA tournament? The writer prefers the latter whereas every other informed person would prefer the former.