In 2004, Conference USA sent six teams to the NCAA Tournament in men’s basketball and contributed four to that tournament’s second round—one eighth of the teams remaining at that point. This was not surprising. In 2003, the league had sent four teams dancing. In 2002, three. Every year from its inception in 1996 through the 2006 season, Conference USA sent multiple teams dancing, and rarely was it just two. Since 2006, Conference USA has only twice been a multi-bid conference, and in both of those instances, now-long-departed Memphis received one of the bids.
What happened?
Well, the Big East came calling. After the 2005 season, Cincinnati, Louisville, Marquette, and DePaul—each in at-large bid territory at least twice in their Conference USA stint (this number is weighed down by DePaul)—went to the superconference. South Florida went with them. (As an aside: Remind me to figure out why the Big East ended up with South Florida given all the other teams who were available for BCS conference spots.) TCU, a five-seed in 1998, left for the Mountain West. Saint Louis, a two-time Conference USA tournament representative, jumped for the Atlantic 10. Eventually, Memphis and Houston got off the boat themselves, rejoining Cincinnati, South Florida, and for a year Louisville in the Ghost Big East, soon to be renamed the American Athletic Conference. Now, of everyone who played a single basketball season in Conference USA between 1996 and 2005, only Southern Miss and UAB remain in the league.
Part of the story here, or perhaps the real story, is this:
It’s hard to be a mid-major.
College sports naturally separate high-majors from low-majors. If you’re good, high-major leagues want you, and your current conference’s TV deal isn’t going to bring you as much money as one that involves Texas, or USC, or Alabama, or North Carolina, or Ohio State, or Villanova, and that TV deal was signed further in advance, I believe?, than conference membership deals (also, the brand of a conference is rather important).
In this way, I guess, college sports kind of has promotion and relegation. It’s financial and sometimes cultural promotion and relegation, but it’s promotion and relegation in a lot of ways.
But that’s all a matter for another time. The point of this is that Conference USA was a solid basketball league for a relatively long time.
