Navy football fans line up on both sides of the should-we-have-joined-a-conference debate. One side just got a bunch more ammunition. The Big East, which will be the home of the Mids come 2015, reportedly has been offered a deal by the NBC Sports Network that would be worth between $20 and $23 million a season. That works out to less than $2 million per school, and likely would be even less for the football-only Naval Academy. But it will be much, much less than previous estimates. In December, before seven of the league’s nonfootball members took their legacy basketball programs…
Browsing: conference expansion
During the Jan. 24 teleconference that welcomed Navy football into the Big East starting in 2015, conference commissioner John Marinatto was pretty clear: “I’m not done with regard to our expansion efforts.” Less than a month later, he’s apparently made good. Multiple reports, including one from USA Today, have Memphis joining the conference in all sports as of 2013. If the rest of the conferences’ arrivals and departures go off as scheduled, Navy will enter a 12-team football league, likely split into two to-be-determined divisions, in 2015. Memphis leaves Conference USA to join the Big East, creating a reunion of…
As the rumblings of Navy and Air Force joining the Big East as football-only members become more than rumblings, some fans might wonder why Army has been the odd service academy out. Why wouldn’t the Black Knights want to become a football-only member of a conference without a regional identity? Well, it didn’t work last time. Army finished 10-2 in 1996, with a 10-1 regular-season record tarnished only by a road loss to Syracuse and an up-and-coming Chunky soup spokesman. The next year, the Black Knights announced they’d begin play in Conference USA in 1998. From 1998 to 2004, the…
The storm clouds that lurked over the Big 12 have dissipated and the NCAA’s current conference setup has remained, for the most part, intact. Just a month ago it looked like the Pac-10 and Big-10 would pick the Big 12 apart. In the end, though, only Nebraska and Colorado bolted the Big 12, while the Mountain West Conference’s Utah dashed off to the Pac-10. The month-long muscle flex by the respective commissioners told us a lot about who has the power in college sports and it could help show where the three service academies stand. First and foremost, we learned…
