If we come out of this with the only substantial Hoops addition being Temple I'm gonna puke.
Throw in Xavier and I won't miss Pitt or Cuse in the least.
It saves the conference. That's the bottom line here.
if you don't add football schools - and good ones - the conference is done. Finished. Kaput. Rutgers, UConn, Louisville, Cincy, WVU will all be gone. You will have a better A-10.
I get that we don't care about football. And I get that we don't really care about Rutgers or Cincy so much in basketball.
But the bottom line here is that if you don't have a football conference, you don't have a conference, period.
The next step in this evolution will be that the remaining conferences are going to have their own football tournament AND their own basketball tournament, and tell the NCAA to go sit on an egg and rotate.
Do you want to be in the "other" tournament with the A-10, CUSA, the MAAC, the NEC, and whoever else? Do you think anybody is going to care about a tournament without North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, etc etc etc?
So while what we WANT is a good basketball conference, the first step is saving the conference as a major conference. And to do that, you have to add teams that will satisfy your existing football/basketball schools and dissuade them from leaving.
If you add Boise, Navy, and Air Force, your football schools are likely not going anywhere (and at that point it might be for more reason than that nobody invited them to a better party). Those 3 schools not only replace what you lost, they substantially improve upon it. Temple's football program is a filler, you're taking them for basketball.
You don't have to play any of those schools in basketball, other than Temple.
Then you can go ask some basketball school without a football program (Butler?) if they want to come play in the Big East.
Moreover, by adding Boise and the academies, you improve your currently non-existent chances that when the day comes that ND has to join a football conference - and that day is going to come - that they will join yours.
Sometimes you gotta take the medicine. Doing what's necessary and saving the conference as a football conference first, then worrying about replacing the basketball programs, is what has to be done.
And as others have pointed out, maybe some programs that haven't been historically good will develop or another entry will be a nice basketball addition (Memphis, Houston, SMU are not Syracuse or Pitt, but they're not awful. UCF might develop into a pleasant surprise, too. Eastern Carolina, I have no defense for).
I also think that you have to look down the road as much as at the past. When Boeheim retires, Syracuse may fall and not get up for a long time. BC hasn't exactly made noise in that conference. Jamie Dixon might not stay at Pitt forever, and Pitt has been known to disappear for a decade at a time, too. What you're losing today, you might not miss tomorrow.
Yes, I know - another too-long LMF post.
