This will be a relatively short post--a Conference with 16 football members and 15 for all sports simply doesn't work because of all the travel involved and the watering down of any existing rivalries. It simply does not make financial sense for East Carolina to send their women's cross country teams to Fresno St for A CONFERENCE GAME! There is also issue of the AQ bid to the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: The Mega Conference would only get one auto bid and as a midmajor, even the king of midmajors, it would be hard to secure a second and third bid for members of the mega conference.
What makes more sense for the two leagues to do is create some sort of pact to not raid each other and coordinate the rebuilding of both leagues. This could also involve negotiating television contracts jointly and/or a series of interleague football match ups between them but a full fledged merger is nonsensical.
Ultimately UTEP will be the determining factor in how the conferences move forward. UTEP is a western outlier in C-USA, even more so now that Houston and Southern Methodist are gone. The members of the MWC are geographically closer than C-USA and UTEP has a history with some of those programs dating back to their WAC days. Ultimately UTEP has to decide if it would rather be in a western league with members in Texas or in a southeastern league with members in Texas. For the sake of exploring both options I will give possibilities for both scenarios in my next posts.
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