Conference USA confident in its future with expansion, new TV deal on horizon (2024)

DALLAS — There’s a whiteboard on the far side of Conference USA commissioner Judy MacLeod’s office, sometimes used for ideas and notes. Some of the notes are old, covered up because the door to the office is typically open. One message on the board stands out.

“TRUST NO ONE!!”

It was written more than a year ago, during a round of conference realignment in which nine of C-USA’s members announced their departure and two more nearly left. It’s not about any one person or a sense of betrayal. It’s a reminder of the evolving landscape of college sports, including changing priorities and a different way of handling relationships. In other words: Don’t take anything at face value.

“That was written very early during realignment and I’ve never erased it,” MacLeod said. “Personally, I’m the kind of person that wants to trust people until they give me a reason not to. But you have to shift your perspective sometimes.”

Conference USA has felt like a random grouping of schools without a collective identity for several years. It had 14 football-playing schools last year. It has 11 this year after Marshall, Southern Miss and Old Dominion sued the conference to leave early for the Sun Belt, and it will have nine next year. Only five of those 14 will remain — Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee, Louisiana Tech, FIU and UTEP — and four new members will join next year: Liberty, New Mexico State, Sam Houston and Jacksonville State. It’s the largest reshaping of a conference since the Big East split in half and became the American Athletic Conference.

Conference USA was founded in 1995 largely as a basketball league, the result of a merger between the Metro Conference and the Great Midwest Conference. None of the original members will remain. It used to be headquartered in Chicago but has since moved to the outskirts of Dallas. There was a period when it was arguably the top non-BCS football conference with teams like TCU, Southern Miss and East Carolina. Now it’s far from the top of the Group of 5 in football, and successful programs like UTSA and UAB are on their way out.

While it appeared from the outside that C-USA was scrambling amid realignment last fall, there was always a plan and a list of scenarios gamed out. The league got farther down that list than it would have liked, but it survived.

“I certainly feel better today than I did last year,” WKU athletic director Todd Stewart said.

Now the conference is on the offensive and trying to be optimistic about the future. It plans to expand, with Kennesaw State a top target and more potential additions to come down the road. It’s also finishing negotiations on a new media rights deal in the next month or two that should provide more exposure than the current collection of sometimes obscure broadcasters that has alienated fans.

“Change is inevitable, but I like the position we’re in right now,” Middle Tennessee head coach Rick Stockstill said.

The conference still stretches across three time zones, but there is a greater sense of unity now, in part because more than half of the future makeup of the league chose to be in it. There is a bit of stability again, even if that feeling can be fleeting, as MacLeod’s whiteboard message reminds her.

“There’s a lot of light at the end of the tunnel and we’re excited for the future,” she said. “It was hard, really hard. But we’ve been resilient.”

Conference expansion

Things truly got dicey for C-USA last year when Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee considered joining the MAC.

Those moves could have dropped C-USA to just three members. Sources in the MAC were mixed about the potential addition of the two schools, but there was some support. In the end, MTSU opted to stay in C-USA, and the MAC had no interest in adding one school in WKU, despite the Hilltoppers’ collective success across multiple sports.

MTSU officials pointed to the money to be gained by the exit fees of departing C-USA members (around $20 million in total to be split up), avoiding its own exit/entrance fees and the fact that its alumni base trends southward, as a school just outside of Nashville.

“We felt like, let’s take that money and apply it to our programs and make them better, and we’re in a position to do that,” said MTSU athletic director Chris Massaro, who noted new facilities plans in the works.

At the same time, C-USA shored itself up by adding Liberty, NMSU, Sam Houston and Jacksonville State, the latter two from the FCS ranks. There were discussions with UConn about joining the conference as a football-only member, multiple sources said, but UConn fans and supporters have been against the move.

That leaves C-USA at nine football-playing members, not a tenable number, especially when it comes to scheduling in what should be a strong basketball league. The conference will expand and has talked with numerous programs over the past year. Dallas Baptist’s strong baseball team joined this past spring for the upcoming season.

Sources around the league have said Kennesaw State is a favorite to join the conference. The Atlanta-based school with an enrollment of nearly 40,000 fits geographically. It’s in a major city and has a successful football program, finishing in the top 10 in the FCS polls in four of the past five years. There are some issues that need to be worked out, however. Fifth Third Bank Stadium seats only 8,300 for football, and FBS membership requires at least 15,000 fans once every two years. Expansion will be needed. The FBS move also requires approval from the University System of Georgia board of regents, and a meeting on the issue is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

Tarleton State (Stephenville, Texas) and Eastern Kentucky are contenders to join Conference USA as well, sources said. Tarleton State is midway through its four-year reclassification from Division II to Division I, but it has a stadium, resources and an aggressive administration. EKU was a finalist to join the Sun Belt in 2015, but the spot went to Coastal Carolina. WKU president and C-USA board chair Tim Caboni said any notion or rumor that WKU would block EKU from joining the conference is “nonsense.”

“That’s not how the conversation works,” Caboni said. “We focus on schools that have strong athletics budgets already, have proven performance and have facilities that match expectations for Conference USA. … Institutional strength really matters.”

Stephen F. Austin and McNeese State have also been in the mix for C-USA, but it’s not believed they have the resources to match the others as serious candidates, according to league sources. Missouri State has not been discussed as much, either.

It’s also not clear if C-USA will add one or three schools. Any more than that is unlikely. Administrators around the league agree that going back to 14 is too many, especially when it comes to travel and dividing up limited money from media rights.

“I think we get to 10 for sure and then the discussions are about 12,” WKU’s Stewart said. “I think 10 in the near-term and maybe a couple more, but probably not as much on the fast track.”

There are debates on both sides. Ten members may provide more revenue for the group, instead of dividing the pie two more ways. (Adding more FCS schools likely wouldn’t increase revenue enough.) But there could also be safety in numbers by going for 12, if any members leave for another conference in the future. One source noted, however, that if C-USA does lose any members, those FCS options will still be there, removing the need to stock up now.

While adding FCS schools can look desperate, one only has to look at the Sun Belt as a successful model. When C-USA raided the Sun Belt a decade ago, the SBC responded by adding FCS powers Appalachian State, Georgia Southern and Coastal Carolina. This year, it added James Madison, which is already ranked 25th in the AP poll. The Sun Belt is now in a strong position moving forward. As fate would have it, C-USA must try to do the same.

“You look at UTSA and Coastal Carolina, App State, the examples are everywhere,” MacLeod said. “That doesn’t scare us, as long as the commitment and the plan is there.”

Final decisions — made by university presidents — may need to happen by the end of the year in order to give a school (or schools) enough time to join C-USA by July 1, 2024.

The next TV deal

More than anything else, the greatest frustration from C-USA fans has been the media rights situation. When Marshall, Southern Miss and Old Dominion announced their moves to the Sun Belt, they specifically mentioned exposure and the ability to watch games as a factor.

“The No. 1 thing we’ve heard from our fans in the current deal is the confusion of where and when we play, and it’s been difficult to find,” Stewart said.

In 2018, C-USA re-upped its deal with CBS Sports Network and formed partnerships with Stadium and Facebook to broadcast games. That came after deals with CBS, ESPN, beIN Sports and American Sports Network.

The patchwork deals have made it frustrating for fans to watch games and for teams to tell families and recruits how to watch them play. Although Stadium and Facebook were accessible to everyone online for free, they weren’t places associated with major sports.

“It sucked,” said a former Conference USA recruiting staffer. “Games on Facebook and Stadium? Bad look.”

School officials across C-USA believe that exposure should be a higher priority than revenue with the next deal, and that may happen. The league has had discussions with ESPN and CBS through its media rights consultant Octagon, sources said. Stadium may still play a role for some streaming and local broadcasts.

“(Exposure) is definitely one consideration at the top of the list of the feedback we heard in talking with conference leadership and the individual institutions,” said William Mao, Octagon’s senior vice president of global media rights. “They want to make sure the discoverability is a key consideration to bear in mind.”

Mao and Octagon did not share details of the ongoing negotiations.

In the Group of 5, ESPN recently expanded its TV deal with the Sun Belt, creating more inventory to put on ESPN+ for streaming. The AAC’s exclusive deal with ESPN also leans heavily on ESPN+ for lesser games. The MAC is heavily involved with ESPN and ESPN+ as well.

“The streaming side, we’ve got to make it easier,” MacLeod said. “We definitely want to get good exposure for our programs.”

That exposure doesn’t just come through the broadcaster. One possibility multiple sources mentioned could be midweek football games. The MAC and Sun Belt already hold midweek games in the second half of the season, but staging them in September or October — when ESPN doesn’t have much midweek linear content before basketball season — was an idea floated by multiple officials.

The bottom line is that C-USA’s recent media deals have not helped the conference even when it has successful teams like UAB, UTSA and WKU. As much as anything else, fixing the availability of games is crucial for the future and the image of the conference.

“It’s critical,” said Stockstill, who pointed to MTSU’s recent win against Miami happening on the ACC Network. “It’s vital in every aspect of your conference and program that your fans, recruits, everybody can be exposed to your team.”

The new members are excited

For all the talk about what it lost, Conference USA feels there is a lot of potential in what has been gained. Rich Rodriguez, Hugh Freeze, Jerry Kill and FCS national championship-winner K.C. Keeler are the four football coaches coming in. That’s a winning track record.

It starts with Liberty, which is 31-12 under Freeze over the past four years, including a 10-1 record in 2020. In an expanded College Football Playoff in which the six highest-ranked conference champions are guaranteed a spot, it’s not unreasonable to think Liberty could get in that mix. The school also has success in other sports.

The Flames have been a football independent since they moved up to the FBS in 2018. Normally, FCS schools need a conference invitation to make the transition, but Liberty received a waiver due to its resources, including some facilities that rival Power 5 schools. Liberty reportedly offered multiple conferences tens of millions of dollars for FBS, but it never came. There were two major reasons for that.

A change in school leadership helped, but the school’s honor code andpolitical involvementremain points of contention, especially the honor code’s stance on LGBTQ issues. The other factor keeping Liberty out of FBS conferences was financial resources. Nobody wanted to invite Liberty into their league if the Flames would spend twice as much as everyone else.

But C-USA’s circ*mstances changed last fall. It had been in conversations with Liberty for years, dating back to the FCS days, and with C-USA in need of schools with a commitment to athletics, Liberty got the invitation.

“I think they’ve addressed some of the things that were concerns in the past,” MacLeod said.

Sam Houston won the spring 2021 FCS national championship, and Keeler has led the program to six top-six finishes since 2014. The coach said during that spring season that he may not want to move to the FBS and would rather the Bearkats play for national championships at the FCS level. The Bearkats joined the WAC in fall 2021 and had hoped the league could eventually get back its FBS status, but when it became clear that wouldn’t happen anytime soon, Sam Houston jumped at the chance to join C-USA. The university has grown so much and the football team has recruited at an FBS level enough that it was time, especially given uncertainty about when the opportunity could come again.

“We’re at 22,000 students and it was 15,000 when I got there,” Keeler said. “This school is exploding in facilities and growth.”

The downside of the move is that Sam Houston (and Jax State, where Rodriguez coaches) is ineligible for the postseason this year. As a result, Sam Houston lost several players to transfers. It’s also redshirting more than 20 players, including 11 starters, to prepare for C-USA next season.

New Mexico State has been among the worst FBS programs, winning more than three games just once since 2011. Kill is in his first season as head coach with a rebuild on his hands. But NMSU has a strong men’s basketball program, reaching the NCAA Tournament nine times in the past 13 seasons. The Aggies have been a football independent since 2018, after they were booted from the Sun Belt with Idaho, which dropped to the FCS. NMSU stayed at the FBS level, hoping a conference invitation would come one day. It finally did.

“Historically, one of the negatives about New Mexico State has been our geographical isolation,” athletic director Mario Moccia said. “But our proximity to UTEP worked out as tremendous travel partners. It finally worked out for us.”

Setting up the future

Conference USA is not sitting around. It’s making moves. It has ideas. But in these situations, it needs someone willing to listen.

The league sent a letter to the AAC last year about potential geographic reorganization amid realignment, but it was swiftly dismissed. C-USA associate commissioner Tre Stallings, a former Ole Miss and NFL offensive lineman and NCAA enforcement official, wants to create a football version of basketball’s Bracket Busters in which the top Group of 5 teams play each other to create big matchups early in the season. But the football schedule is set so far out, limiting the possibility. Stallings said some leagues have been open to it and some have not.

All told, it’s a conference that scrambled to survive, and it has survived.

“Now that the dust has settled, I think the future is bright,” FIU athletic director Scott Carr said.

The dust has settled elsewhere, but not in C-USA yet. The new media rights deal should be done in the near future. Kennesaw State may join soon, and there could be others. It’ll take a few years until the conference gets back to what it considers full strength.

As one commissioner told The Athletic earlier this fall, it’s hard to kill a conference. C-USA has reshaped itself in its nearly three decades of existence. It’s lacked an identity for a while now. An island of misfit toys may not be the ideal identity, but it can be something to rally around in this new landscape.

“Some people wrote us off,” MacLeod said. “So I don’t mind having a little chip on our shoulders as we move forward. We have hungry programs that are ready to prove something.”

(Top photo of Judy MacLeod: Tony Gutierrez / AP)