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Conference USA has seen better days. Twenty years ago, the Conference USA champion finished the season ranked sixth in the country. Nine months before that, the league sent six teams to the NCAA Tournament. But Louisville moved on, and so did TCU, Cincinnati, Memphis, Tulane, Houston, Army, and every other university in Conference USA twenty years ago right now. All of them. Every single one. Once one of the nation’s better mid-major conferences, Conference USA managed to lose each of its members to a different home. Now, it’s the worst FBS conference by a mile. It’s even worse—going by the strength of its average team—than one league in the FCS.
Movelor, our model’s rating system, lines up the MVFC and Conference USA as follows, with the number beside each team denoting how many points better or worse said team is compared to the average Division I football team:
- South Dakota State +22.9 (MVFC)
- North Dakota State +18.3 (MVFC)
- Liberty +13.7 (Conference USA)
- South Dakota +11.1 (MVFC)
- Western Kentucky +10.8 (Conference USA)
- Jacksonville State +10.5 (Conference USA)
- Sam Houston +7.7 (Conference USA)
- Delaware +2.7 (CAA, joining Conference USA next year)
- North Dakota +2.1 (MVFC)
- Missouri State +0.3 (MVFC, joining Conference USA next year)
- Illinois State –1.6 (MVFC)
- Southern Illinois –2.4 (MVFC)
- New Mexico State –2.9 (Conference USA)
- Middle Tennessee –5.3 (Conference USA)
- Youngstown State –5.7 (MVFC)
- UTEP –7.5 (Conference USA, joining Mountain West in 2026)
- Louisiana Tech –7.9 (Conference USA)
- Northern Iowa –9.0 (MVFC)
- FIU –10.0 (Conference USA)
- Kennesaw State –15.1 (Conference USA)
- Indiana State –17.7 (MVFC)
- Murray State –21.5 (MVFC)
Hard to parse that list? Yes. Conference USA is basically a good FCS conference without the top-end Dakota State firepower.
Over the last twenty years, Conference USA has turned into the FBS’s waiting room, a purgatorial space between different classes of mid-majors. Missouri State and Delaware will move into Conference USA because that’s where new FBS programs go. UTEP will move out of Conference USA because UTEP managed to find a more permanent home. There are advantages to this halfway house status—the the 60th-best team in the country can make the Fiesta Bowl if enough breaks their way—but it makes for a lot of Tuesday Night Football in a bid for attention. MACtion is charming. Midweek Sun Belt games are respectable. This is neither.
How did Conference USA fall so low?
The best answer is that Conference USA was a basketball conference for schools who also played football. Most of the league’s roots come from the old Metro Conference, a league built of urban, Southern and Southern-adjacent schools. The original Metro 6 consisted of Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Memphis (State), Saint Louis, and Tulane. Over the years, it at least briefly drew Florida State, Virginia Tech, South Carolina, and smaller brands like USF. But it never sponsored football. As norms changed and football independence faded, this became a problem. The solution, in the mid-90’s, was to unify the Metro Conference with the Great Midwest conference, to which Cincinnati and Memphis had departed earlier in the decade. The league would still compose itself mostly of urban schools, and it would still welcome non-football members but it was no longer so South-specific. Marquette and DePaul were founding Conference USA universities.
As college football’s popularity surged and college basketball’s held put, Conference USA’s top-end strength became a vulnerability. Louisville was an obvious target when the Big East needed to backfill Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech. Louisville’s historic ties with Cincinnati and Marquette combined with USF’s then-rising status to make Conference USA an ideal Big East hunting ground. Later, when the Big East split and the AAC now needed football programs, back to the well the AAC went, with Memphis and Tulane more than happy to reunite with their historic peers. With some realignment, it’s easy to point to where the suffering conferences made mistakes. With Conference USA, the only mistake was that it didn’t see the writing on the wall and become today’s Sun Belt before the Sun Belt could pull it off. It’s hard to fault Conference USA even for this. Conference USA’s leading institutions had no need to bolster Conference USA. Their chariot was on its way.
Today’s Conference USA, then, is the proverbial shell of a hermit crab. Schools move in, schools move out, and the league is bad at football, with Conference USA basketball not even an echo of what it once was. This is fine. A waiting room makes sense right now. There’s some utility to Conference USA, and schools’ souls go deeper than those of conferences. But we are going to see some bad Tuesday and Wednesday night games over the rest of October.
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This week’s Conference USA Tuesday matchup is Liberty vs. FIU, and it’s taking place in Lynchburg. Pitbull vs. The Fighting Former Falwells. Conference United States of America, indeed.
Liberty’s a hard team to place right now. Jamey Chadwell has yet to lose a regular season game there, but the Fiesta Bowl demonstrated how low of a level last year’s Flames occupied. With the Appalachian State game canceled by Hurricane Helene, Liberty hasn’t played in two and a half weeks, and their toughest game of the year is currently looking like it’ll be a trip to play Sam Houston on Black Friday. Sam Houston is hardly in Movelor’s national top 100.
Liberty’s a playoff contender, but only in a sense. There’s a scenario where enough teams lose that a 12–0 Liberty can make the field. But having just given this program a Fiesta Bowl opportunity only to see total annihilation at the hands of a shorthanded Oregon, there’s reason to believe the College Football Playoff committee won’t give Liberty a second chance right away unless their hands are really tied. Our model’s probabilities are probably overrating Liberty’s hopes, and even our model only has their playoff likelihood at 1-in-5.
FIU, meanwhile, is bad. The Panthers have had their moments this year—a conference opener win over Louisiana Tech, a jarring beatdown of Central Michigan—but Mike MacIntyre continues to face an uphill battle, even with Mr. Worldwide on board. Two weeks ago, FIU lost to Monmouth, whom Movelor expects to finish 6–6 playing in a second-tier FCS conference. FIU doesn’t move the ball well. FIU doesn’t put much pressure on the offense. FIU does have a little upside, though. At least they’re inconsistent.
Characters to watch:
On the Liberty side, the offense runs through Kaidon Salter, now in his second year as the full-time starter. Favorite target CJ Daniels is off to LSU this fall, but Treon Sibley’s stepped into that role with a little game-breaking ability. Defensive end TJ Bush is back after a freshman All-American campaign and averaging more than a sack per game.
For FIU, Keyone Jenkins is back under center, and so far he’s shown improvement from his freshman year, at least in terms of getting the ball to the endzone. A local kid, Jenkins was a three-star recruit coming out of Miami Central High School, with the 247 composite ranking him the 64th-best quarterback in his class. That might not sound like much, but in Conference USA, it’s not bad. The hope for FIU is that the Pitbull branding and the Miami location can spur some program-wide momentum. The University of Miami is not a public school. It’s not impossible to see FIU getting locals bought in, and it only takes a few to make an NIL impact in the Group of Five.
We’d list some FIU defensive foci, but I’m struggling to pick them out. So many of this defense’s stats are skewed by that Central Michigan game where Chippewa quarterback Joe Labas threw five picks.
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We wrote a lot yesterday about not turning college football into a battle between conferences, but since we led with Conference USA vs. the MVFC, we should probably finish the job. Here’s how every FBS conference stacks up right now in Movelor’s eyes, as well as where the top two FCS leagues slot in. This doesn’t include the Pac-2 or independents. The number beside each league is the conference’s average Movelor rating.
1. SEC +28.9
2. Big Ten +24.0
3. Big 12 +20.2
4. ACC +19.0
5. Sun Belt +7.0
6. Mountain West +6.9
7. American +6.4
8. MAC +1.9
FCS. MVFC –0.3
9. Conference USA –0.6
FCS. Big Sky –4.3
I’m struck by that Power Four/Group of Five gap, which in terms of actual football ability should be informal. I’m also struck by the fact that Conference USA’s closer to the Sun Belt than the Big 12 and ACC are to the SEC. The SEC is going to give us so many great games over the next two months. Conference USA will do its best.
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More later today over at the site, specifically this week’s football futures bets and a look at the state of Notre Dame NIL. Enjoy this bastard MACtion offshoot, if bastard MACtion offshoots are your thing. If not, enjoy the Division Series, where college football should probably learn a little renewed lesson about the thrill of a good local rivalry.
Bark.
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