re: Kansas over Virginia Schools

Markets are key probably

So UNC or Duke for their basketball..they get high freaking ratings

Vtech fits in with the SEC in that they have passionate fans and a big market so would make sense

Houston is very populated so would make sense..

My guesses are.
1, UNC
2. Duke
3. Vtech
4. Houston

Attaboy, rooster.

Well done.

Because nothing says south and east lie Kansas.

As a Carolina alum, I also stand in solidarity with our Missouri brethren against the scourge that is Kansas.

frick those guys.

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Add Kansas, North Carolina and Virginia

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You truly do not get the SEC.

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You truly do not get the SEC.

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It's not a matter of "getting" the SEC. College football is in a time of disruption. Sankey is trying to help the league navigate that. There are existential factors going on. Pleasing the SEC fanbase 100% is simply not the priority you seem to think it is. Surviving and succeeding as a league and helping the member institutions do so is the priority. Whether that includes other schools joining or not is not my place to say. But the possibility absolutely exists. I enjoy speculating on that possibility

I'll also say I have no desire to "get" the SEC. I consider you guys beneath me and the program I root for. Except Alabama. But here we are, a marriage of convenience. I don't care if you like us - or me. I find it entertaining you don't like us - or me.

There is no SEC anymore. There are no conferences anymore. It’s all just one super conference they just haven’t called it that yet.

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There is no SEC anymore. There are no conferences anymore. It’s all just one super conference they just haven’t called it that yet.

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Pretty much my view. I'm not being an advocate, either.

I am actually very grateful for Texas joining the SEC. There's no question in my mind that Texas needed the SEC more than the SEC needed Texas. But it would not have been good for the SEC if Texas and OU had joined Big 10/Fox.

Future decisions are not going to be based on preferences or fit. They're going to be based on what is best for the member teams in the long run.

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I've never understood any link between athletics and academics.

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It wouldn't seem to make sense.

Here's the thing. There's a massive cognitive dissonance we all go through as college sports fans. At the end of the day these are academic institutions, with huge multibillion dollar sport franchise operations contained within them. It wasn't always this way. But that's what it has evolved into.

But the chain of command has a hierarchy, and that hierarchy doesn't actually end at the athletic department head. They report to somebody - usually the president, but at Texas the person really running the show when it comes to athletics is the chairman of the board of regents, Kevin Eltife. That changes depending on the power structure, but he's the main person calling the shots currently.

At many places, the person calling the shots is the school president. Certainly they tend to be the ones present at the meeting having their voice heard and casting a vote. Sometimes they're making the best decision available to them. Sometimes they're making a decision someone else has made for them. But nonetheless the president of the university on paper is the one choosing a direction for the school, and the athletic program.

Some presidents don't care about academics all that much. But some do. The Big 10 famously didn't consider any non AAU schools for membership. They had a famous research consortium with amounts of money at stake that dwarfed college sports. It wasn't just a sports affiliated group of schools. There were academic focused synergies extant as well.

When they admitted Nebraska it was a big deal for the school presidents, because they didn't think Nebraska had the academic clout to join the club. It was a big deal when they made an exception.

Texas always had resistance from the Bay Area schools in the Pac 12 because Stanford didn't like the idea of bringing in yet another school that wasn't academically elite. Never mind that the Venn diagram of schools at Stanford's caliber who competed at a high level in college sports - especially football - was zero.

Texas was resistant to ever considering joining the SEC for decades for two reasons. One, it's a collection of academic backwaters from a prestige perspective. Vanderbilt is elite. Florida is a comparable research institute to Texas. After that it can become slim pickings from an overall prestige perspective, although if I'm being honest and not trolling, all the schools do good work and certainly produce quality graduates. Just not at the level Texas does, and that has mattered in the past. Second, there has always been the perception that the SEC schools as a whole cheat in football in ways the rest of the country does not. There was a strong desire not to be associated with that.

In other words, academics has played a part in the past. But that is now all coming to an end. For the Big 10 and SEC it's all about those powerful television deals with Fox and Co./ESPN, and coalescing power so any new methods for governing sports address their concerns as the top priority. Without a membership in one of those two conferences, there are a lot of meetings and a lot of decisions that programs are going to be on the outside looking in. Even in the ACC/Big 12.

I still think academics can play a residual factor, but it's mostly about making a decision to invite or not, and then using academics as an excuse to buttress the original decision. But really it's all about the benjamins. But you know that.

lol. Texas fans are so delusional. You think you’re Stanford academically and Alabama in football. You’re neither. Academically, you’re good but not great. You’re on par with UGA. You have a similar ranking to UGA in the US News and Report. UGA has a 32% acceptance rate and Texas has a 31% acceptance rate. The only reason we aren’t in the AAU is because Emory and GA Tech are blocking us. Plus our graduates aren’t dildo waiving homosexuals.