Leaving the WAC an unwise idea

In response to “Time to go independent” from the Oct. 24 Daily Campus:

With all due respect, Professors Slocum and Steinberg’s strong suggestion that SMU leave the Western Athletic Conference and become an independent, while understandable given their frustration with the football program, is simply untenable.

One need simply scan the very short list of Division IA football independents to begin to understand why such a move is not feasible. There are currently only six: Notre Dame, South Florida, Troy State, Connecticut, Utah State and Navy.

Notre Dame is, of course, sui generis, and unless SMU believes it can attract a national television package on its own, cannot be considered relevant to our situation. The U.S. Naval Academy has always been an independent and has chosen to remain so. South Florida and Connecticut will not long remain independents; they are transitioning into conference memberships with Conference USA and the Big East respectively. Both are in their first years of Division IA football. Utah State has been desperately seeking a conference affiliation, has repeatedly applied to the WAC and will be joining the Sun Belt Conference. That leaves only Troy State, in its second year as a Division IA school.

Thus, for the 2003 football season there will be a grand total of three independents out of a total membership of 117 Division IA football schools. A list of schools that were formerly independent that have joined conferences in recent years includes most of the members of the Big East Conference and even West Point, which two years ago joined Conference USA for football. The Sun Belt Conference transitioned one year ago to football to give former independents a football-playing conference. The trend is unmistakably towards almost universal conference affiliation, precisely the reverse of Slocum and Steinberg’s recommendation.

While few would argue that membership in the far-flung WAC is optimal for SMU over the long term, conference membership for SMU is crucial for any number of reasons. SMU athletics would take a huge financial hit if it chose to leave the WAC. We currently share in revenues from the conference’s ESPN football package, the WAC Basketball Tournament and the WAC-owned NCAA basketball tournament units. While SMU would probably be able to save some expenses in team travel if it left the WAC, there would be nothing to replace those sources of revenue and we would lose the needed television exposure which we receive from the conference ESPN and FOX football and basketball packages.

SMU as an independent would have practically no chance of appearing on national or regional television and receiving the important visibility that the television provides.

Further, as a practical matter, virtually all of the post-season bowl games have conference tie-ins, making it nearly impossible for a mid-major independent to get a bowl bid. On the other hand, if SMU were to finish in the top three in the WAC football standings, we would very likely receive a post-season bowl bid to one of the three bowls with WAC tie-ins

Slocum and Steinberg apparently give no consideration to the impact leaving the WAC would have on our other sports, particularly men’s and women’s basketball. Conference affiliations are equally important for Division I basketball programs and the trend is again decidedly away from independent status. There are currently just seven Division I basketball independents out of a total of about 330 Division I basketball programs. Even Notre Dame, the most famous of football independents, plays basketball in the Big East Conference. New Division I basketball conferences have proliferated in part because it is so difficult for an independent program to receive an at-large bid to the NCAA basketball tournament.

Thus, our men’s program, which has been close to receiving an NCAA bid in recent years, would find it much more difficult to make the tournament as an independent. Our very successful women’s basketball program, which has made the NCAA post-season basketball tournament six out of the last nine years, would be hard pressed to achieve that success as an independent. Scheduling as an independent would become very difficult once conference play begins and conference teams are playing a full slate of conference games. For other non-revenue sports not sufficiently popular to attract television opportunities, conference championships often provide the competitive climax to their seasons.

Slocum and Steinberg argue that SMU has little in common academically with the majority of the universities which make up the WAC. Without disparaging the quality of those universities as Slocum and Steinberg do, it is true that schools like UTEP and Fresno State have very different missions than does SMU. But the reality is that private universities seeking to play Division IA football do not have the luxury of competing in athletics solely with private universities with comparable academic reputations or missions. Private universities do not possess large enough alumni bases or fan followings to match the fan support of state universities several times their size. Stanford, for example, has very little in common with Washington State or Arizona State, Duke has very little in common with Clemson or North Carolina State and Vanderbilt is a far different institution than Mississippi State or South Carolina, but all three have competed in conferences with those schools for many, many years. Moreover, the U.S. Military Academy, historically an independent, has recently chosen to join Conference USA where it competes largely with regional and city universities with which it has little in common.

Our nonconference football scheduling is very important to the financial health of our athletics program, at least until we win consistently and can draw more people to our WAC games. The athletic department understands this and is therefore scheduling, in our view, quite aggressively. This year we played Texas Tech at home and sold out Ford Stadium. Next year we host both Oklahoma State and Baylor. All three have significant alumni bases in the Metroplex who have and will buy tickets at Ford Stadium to cheer on their alma mater. We played Arkansas home and home until they would no longer play us in Dallas. We are continuing to play our traditional rival TCU, even though they are now in a different conference. We have attempted to schedule Texas A&M and the University of Texas but they will not agree to play us.

We have in the past scheduled other private universities such as Tulane and Vanderbilt and found that those opponents did not attract large crowds because of those schools’ small alumni bases in this area. While SMU / Vanderbilt or SMU / Tulane match-ups are appealing from an academics’ point of view, those opponents historically draw disappointingly small crowds

Slocum and Steinberg further overlook how difficult it would be for SMU as an independent to schedule a full slate of competitive games. Next year all but the three independents will be by about mid-October playing their conference schedules, which are controlled by the conferences, making it very difficult for independents to schedule games for the second half of the season. Perhaps we could play Troy State twice a year, home and away, to fill out our independent schedule.

Slocum and Steinberg further argue that we should schedule games against Michigan and Nebraska like some other mid-major programs do. We certainly could do that whether as an independent or a WAC member, but Nebraska and Michigan simply will not schedule the likes of SMU on a home-and-home basis which means that we must send our team to those types of venues on a one-time only basis in exchange for a large pay day. Games such as these would undoubtedly help the athletics department’s bottom line. There are, however, legitimate philosophical and competitive issues
about whether we should schedule a road game just to secure a large financial guarantee for the athletic department, if by doing so we are simply providing cannon fodder for the host to run up a lopsided victory. The current athletic department has chosen not to travel down that road and we applaud them for that decision.

In sum, for SMU to go independent would be an absolute disaster. We would be very quickly seeking another conference affiliation and, if successful, face having to “pony up” a huge multi-million dollar entrance fee while not sharing in the new conference’s revenues for an extended period of time. While the WAC does not have the many advantages of the old Southwest Conference, at present it is the best SMU can do. In order to better our lot, it would be foolhardy to go the independent route; we simply need to achieve greater success on the playing field. Consistently winning programs in our revenue sports will cure much of what ails us.

Leaving the WAC an unwise idea