The Hilltoppers left the Sun Belt behind in hopes for greener pastures, but the conference experienced massive growth in the years since as C-USA stagnated. The program’s move to C-USA so many years ago was viewed favorably at the time.
LIBERTY UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT CRACKED
“I think over time, a lot of factors, TV revenue maybe not being as large as thought, a lot of the travel costs and basketball kind of remaining a one-bid league, I think all that combined probably made people realize that maybe Conference USA wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” “Definitely on the front end it was like, ‘yay, Conference USA is going to be better than the Sun Belt’,” Bishop continued. “There was definitely a lot of excitement at the time of the move.” “I think the thinking was, great, we’re in a league now that maybe values basketball a bit more, maybe there’ll be a lot better TV revenue, maybe there’ll be some better rivalries with Middle Tennessee and UAB and Old Dominion and Marshall,” Bishop said. How did WKU end up in C-USA?Ĭhad Bishop, a former reporter for the Bowling Green Daily News who covered WKU Athletics when the Hilltoppers first joined the league, explained some of the decision making that led the Hilltoppers to leave the Sun Belt Conference and join C-USA in the first place.
What followed was a week of stressful waiting, watching and speculating – there seemed to be no clear indication which way the move would go, but it was clear many fans did not want to stick around in C-USA. This could be the Hilltoppers’ chance to extract themselves from C-USA once and for all. Word started to circulate in early November that the Mid-American Conference presidents would meet to discuss taking on WKU and rival MTSU as new members. Soon after, C-USA lost three more of its members to the Sun Belt Conference, and WKU sat untouched. Six C-USA schools were picked to move to the AAC on Oct. This meant that the AAC might look in C-USA’s direction to build its roster back up. Things remained relatively quiet throughout August, but the American Athletic Conference lost three members, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida, to the Big 12 on Sept. This left a vacancy in the Big 12 Conference, and the question of which programs would fill the gap was on the brain of every athletic department in the nation. Texas and Oklahoma accepted invitations to join the SEC on July 30. This would change when the domino effect of realignment kicked into overdrive. At the start of the 2021-22 academic year, its membership numbered 14 programs. WKU has called Conference USA home since 2014. 2021’s realignment saga touched every corner of the college sports world, including up on the Hill.
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