Much needed.
There are several schools in CUSA with a pretty good basketball history for non-power conference teams.
UAB
Charlotte
UTEP
ODU
WKU
These schools combined have more NCAA tournament appearances than the best 5 in most other non-power conferences.
Throw in programs with a lot of recent success like MT, USM, and LA Tech that have newfound success and interest in basketball, yet keep getting screwed, and the scales may finally be tipping in favor of pushing CUSA officials to make changes and a more concerted effort to improve basketball.
The league lost several schools where basketball was sort of an afterthought. We obviously gained some of those too, but I think the number of teams in the league that care about their basketball programs is higher than it was in CUSA 2.0.
Agreed. Tulsa really hurt everyone by playing such a brutal schedule, but teams like La Tech, MTSU and Southern Miss need to find ways to schedule fewer 300+ teams and more 150+ type teams (though Southern Miss’ scheduling wasn’t so bad, just needed maybe one more tough road game in place of Houston Baptist or Jackson St).
ECU and Tulane leaving will help. And we really need Rice, FAU, Marshall to hit on their coaching searches to at least become decent (and UTSA to either get their crap together OOC or get a new coach too).
I do hope the Niners stop helping their conference mates so much too. I don’t really want to count how many years we’ve done ok OOC, then underachieved in conference play (helping everyone else) since we entered the A10.