Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning presented by Will Ga...
1) If you missed it, I talked with Mizzou AD Laird Veatch last week. I'm going to start with some leftover thoughts from that conversation because it's the first extended interview he's done and because there's really not all that much going on right now. A few things that stood out (I'm breaking these into a thought for each one because it's not always easy to come up with ten things in June):
Nobody really knows any specifics of much of anything right now. I didn't go in expecting Veatch to be able to give me concrete answers and a road map at Mizzou. But the one thing that Missouri fans need to know above all else is whatever is next, Mizzou plans to be a part of it.
"If you're going to be at a school of this magnitude in this conference, we're going to compete. Now we gotta figure out how," he said.
That's really the whole thing. You gonna be in or you gonna be out? Pretty much everyone in the SEC is going to be in. The only school that you could see opting out of the next round of revenue sharing and even more money is Vanderbilt. I'd assume Vandy will be in too. In the Big Ten, the only possible exception would be Northwestern, but they've spent eleventy billion dollars on facilities in the last few years which indicates they're in, not out.
The question then becomes who joins them? Most of the national people I've heard have said there are 30 to 40 schools who can really afford to play the next round of realignment/breakaway/whatever's gonna happen. The Big Ten and SEC alone make up 34. So, yes, it's possible those schools are on one level and pretty much everyone else is on another. But I think there are more that will want to play this game.
ACC: It's tough to see Clemson, Florida State, Miami, Louisville, UNC and NC State not playing this game. Then you've got places like Pitt, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Duke (maybe even throw Syracuse and Georgia Tech in there) that have long histories and I'd think would want to be a part of it but I'm not absolutely certain.
Big 12: This is the interesting one. It's tough for me to see Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, West Virginia and Texas Tech not being a part of any next level of college sports. They've played at the highest level for so long that I don't know how you just bow out. While they may not have the sheer amount of dollars as some of the rest, those places have passionate fanbases who are used to being a part of the big time. The rest of the Big 12 though, they were mid-major schools for a long time until very recently (except for maybe Baylor, and I'm not sure into which category I'd put the Bears). UCF probably tries to level up, but I'm not sure Cincinnati, Houston and the others do.
Whatever's next, you're looking probably somewhere between 40 and 60 schools that are fully committed to doing it. The only thing that matters to you guys is that Missouri is one of them.
2) What happens with the mainly basketball schools? Here I'm talking Syracuse, Duke, Connecticut, Gonzaga, etc. They're big-time basketball programs. The football programs are less so (UCONN especially). Everyone knows football drives the bus. You can't play at the next level without big-time football. With Syracuse and Duke, they have power conference football programs. Maybe they're not great at it, but they play on that level. Because the basketball programs are historically bigger than most, you'd think they can go ahead and level up.
But places like UCONN, Gonzaga, Villanova, Marquette, etc? It's tough to see them being a part of it. On one hand, they've never had big time football and hoops has done just fine so maybe they can keep doing just fine. But when all these other schools are going to have football money pouring in that allows them to theoretically raise the level of other programs, does it get more difficult for schools that rely on basketball as the bell cow to compete? I don't know. But I think it's a consideration. And I think it's a thing Dan Hurley is probably weighing as he decides whether he wants to chase a three-peat in Storrs or jump to the Los Angeles Lakers.
3) Back to my conversation with Veatch, I made sure to ask him about baseball.
"But you've also got to invest," he said. "You have to invest in programs and that's an area, just candidly speaking, from a facility standpoint, where we haven't here at Mizzou invested to the level of many of our counterparts. We're going to have to find ways to do that in time. We're in a place in time now where we need to focus on this Memorial Stadium improvement project, the North end zone, and we need to invest in football for all the reasons we've talked about and what that does for the overall operation, but we're going to have to find ways to help Kerrick and help and invest in our baseball program to get us up to a level where we can expect to be where many of those SEC schools are."
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