[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
“In the not-too-distant past, your conference was where you lived, but with all the illogical itinerancy that’s certainly not true anymore.” –Kyle Whelliston
With those words in the Season 9 Epilogue – combined with his previously-stated, now-confirmed decision that “we’re doing away with the Red Line after this season, because it’s both an outdated concept and an endless source of meaningless debate…[s]o we’re leaving the line-drawing to each of you next season” – the creator and founder of the Mid-Majority has, I think, given his blessing to those of us who believe teams like Butler and Creighton shouldn’t automatically be cast out of the Mid-Majority’s final season, #TMMX, just because they’re now in the same conference as teams like Georgetown and Marquette. In my personal view, if and when those schools eventually obtain the budgetary advantages of their new conference compatriots, then we wish them well as former members of the Mid-Majority. But until that happens, I think we can still claim them as part of Our Game.
So, with that said, here is my proposed Red Line for 2013-14, doing away with the concept of “your conference is where you live” and replacing it with a school-centric concept:
- If your athletic budget is under $25,000,000, you’re a mid.
- If your athletic budget is over $40,000,000, you’re not a mid.
- If your athletic budget is between $25,000,000 and $40,000,000, that means you’re a straddler, and we look at your men’s basketball budget to determine your ultimate status. If it’s under $4,000,000, you’re a mid. If it’s $4,000,000 or greater, you’re not a mid.
I think these numbers are pretty logical (not to mention round), and not purely a kludge designed to achieve a specific set of results. That said, the results they achieve largely “make sense,” in my view. More on that in a moment.
Naturally, I’ve created a Google Doc spreadsheet to show the impact of my proposal. It shows a red line separating majors (athletic budgets >$40,000,000) from mids & straddlers, and a yellow line separating the straddlers from the all-mids list (athletic budgets <$25,000,000). In between the red and yellow lines, in the “straddler” zone, there are some mids and some majors. Each individual school’s spreadsheet cells on are shaded either pink (major) or light green (mid).
Crucially, sub-$40M “straddlers” that obviously, instinctively don’t belong in the Mid-Majority, like Cincinnati (athletic budget $39M), Georgetown ($34M), Villanova ($31M) and Marquette ($27M), are properly kicked back up into “major” status by their basketball budgets ($5.9M, $10.0M, $6.4M and $9.9M, respectively). Other excluded straddlers: Temple, San Diego State, St. John’s, Tulsa, and New Mexico (sorry, @albolte). Meanwhile, “straddlers” that obviously, instinctively do belong in the Mid-Majority, like James Madison (athletic budget $35M), Liberty ($30M), Lehigh ($28M) and *cough* Denver ($26M) are properly kept in the ranks of the #mids by their smaller basketball budgets ($2.3M, $2.3M, $1.4M and $2.5M, respectively). All of that “feels” right, IMHO.
There are a few weird outliers that might rub some people the wrong way, but only a few, and they are tolerable IMHO. The big ones: Welcome to the Mid-Majority, DePaul, Providence and Seton Hall! Yes, these three non-football-playing “New Big East” teams, with their athletic budgets of $24M, $23M and $21M, respectively, join Hoops Nation because they’re below the $25M cutoff for overall athletic budgets, and thus their large hoops budgets of $6.7M, $6.1M and $6.4M don’t come into play.
Good news for those who detest this idea: we’ll probably lose DePaul and Providence soon enough, once inflation and those new TV dollars kick in. They’re pretty close to the $25M athletic-budget cutoff already. As soon as they reach it, and they become straddlers, their hoops budgets will immediately make them majors. However, with an athletic budget of just $20.9M (which puts it between Princeton and Ball State), Seton Hall may be here to stay, at least for a while.
My take on the DePaul/Providence/Seton Hall “problem”? Whatever. (Or, if you prefer, Bqhatevwr.) As long as Georgetown, Marquette and Villanova remain majors, which they do, I don’t think it’s any huge sin (no “Catholic 7” pun intended!) to call those other guys mids, for now, in this brave new world of conference realignment.
That said, we could solve the “problem” by lowering the $25M athletic-budget threshold to $20M. But then we’d lose Rhode Island (athletic budget $23.5M, hoops budget $4.7M) and Gonzaga ($21.5M, $6.1M), and very likely Wichita State ($19.6M, $4.6M), VCU ($22M, $3.8M), Richmond ($22M, $3.97M) and Dayton ($21M, $3.98M) once the new budget figures are published. Not worth it, in my view. Gonzaga is a debatable case, but losing URI, Wichita, VCU, Richmond and Dayton?! No way. Plus, such a change would unnecessarily hasten the eventually-inevitable departures of Butler, Creighton and Xavier once all that Big East money starts pouring in. So, nope. I’m sticking with $25M for now.
Apropos of that, a chief advantage – at least, I think it’s an advantage – of my new proposed Red Line is that we don’t lose nearly as many mid-major teams to conference realignment next season as we would under the old system. And we gain a bunch of new friends to boot.
Specifically, under the old system, assuming there would be 9 above-the-Red-Line conferences next year – SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, ACC, new Big East (i.e., Catholic 7), American (Old Big East), Mountain West, and Conference USA – and everybody else below the Red Line, we would have lost the following unlucky 13 teams, all newly “realigned” into “major” conferences. I’ve listed them in order from largest to smallest athletic budgets:
- Temple (A-10 to American)
- Old Dominion (CAA to C-USA)
- Florida International (Sun Belt to C-USA)
- San Jose State (WAC to MWC)
- Middle Tennessee (Sun Belt to C-USA)
- Utah State (WAC to MWC)
- North Texas (Sun Belt to C-USA)
- Florida Atlantic (Sun Belt to C-USA)
- Louisiana Tech (WAC to C-USA)
- Creighton (MVC to Big East)
- Xavier (A-10 to Big East)
- Butler (A-10 to Big East)
- Charlotte (A-10 to C-USA)
Under my system, by contrast, we only lose one of those teams – Temple – and also one additional team, BYU, whose $48.3M athletic budget and $5.7M basketball budget have always been a weird fit for the WCC. Many apologies to @zbloxham, @RealDSean and other #TMM-following Cougar fans. Love you guys (bro-hug…#NOH8), but those budget numbers just don’t work in a school-by-school Red Line world. (Case in point: it’s mathematically impossible, without an “exception,” to keep BYU in the #TMM fold without also including Ole Miss, which has smaller athletic and basketball budgets than BYU. Obviously, the notion of an SEC “mid-major” is intrinsically absurd, and the possibility of Marshall Henderson as Mid-Majority Baller of the Week is inconceivable. So we can’t have that. Sorry, BYU.)
Meanwhile, even as we lose just 2 schools instead of 13, we also gain 17 new friends, all from the lower-budget portions of C-USA, the MWC and the Big East(s). We’ve already discussed DePaul, Providence and Seton Hall. Here are the other 14 newly admitted members of the Mid-Majority, under my system:
- Central Florida
- East Carolina
- Houston
- Wyoming
- Rice
- Tulane
- Fresno State
- UAB
- Boise State
- Colorado State
- Marshall
- UTEP
- Southern Miss
- Nevada
And actually, you can add a 15th new friend, too: Air Force. For some reason, the budgets for Army, Navy and Air Force aren’t included in the report where these numbers come from, but I think we can safely assume that the Falcons – judged by their own budget rather than their conference’s average – would qualify as a #mid.
Most of those 15 schools “feel” pretty “Mid-Majority-ish,” don’t they? A number of them even were Mid-Majority teams during Conference USA’s one-year sojourn below the Red Line in #TMM7. Others, like Wyoming, Boise and CSU, are the sort of teams that often make people say, “Wait, that’s a Red Line Upset?” when they’re defeated by a #mid – and not just because people confuse “mid-major” with “bad,” but because those schools’ budgets are small enough to make the confusion reasonable. Indeed, even to me, it has always felt odd that, in a community where we supposedly use budgetary criteria (rather than success on the court) to judge a team’s status as a mid or a major, it would be considered a “Red Line Upset” if Denver ($26M athletic budget, $2.5M hoops) were to beat Colorado State ($25M, $2.4M), for instance.
So anyway, as I was saying, a bunch of the 15 “new” TMM teams have always felt to me like they belong below the Red Line, at least as much as long-time mid-major powers such as Butler, Gonzaga, Xavier and Creighton “belong.” Now, under my system, these “Mid-Majority-ish” teams are, well, actual Mid-Majority teams. As they should be, IMHO.
We’ll probably lose UCF, East Carolina and Houston soon enough, as their budgets swell due to the influx of American-Style Football Cash from joining The American (old Big East). Same goes for “New Big East” straddlers DePaul and Providence, and possibly Seton Hall too, as I mentioned earlier. But as for the rest, I say welcome to the party. Try the horchata. There are guacos in the fridge.
My system does create some new anxieties for a few teams that, while presently below the New Red Line, are uncomfortably close to it. Chief among these are Penn ($37.6M athletic budget) and Yale ($37.4M). Relatively small budget increases would put them above the $40M line, where their tiny basketball budgets ($1.1M, $831K) couldn’t save them from Mid-Majority exile. If that happens, it would be a pretty absurd result, but I think we can deal with it as needed, either by (1) adjusting the $40M line for inflation, or (2) instituting a rule that anybody below (say) $1.5M in hoops budget is automatically a mid-major regardless of their athletic budget, or (3) simply by creating an “Ivy League exception.” But we can cross that bridge if and when we come to it.
For now, I think the numbers work. $25M makes sense as an update of the old $20M line, given inflation in the economy generally and within the #sportsbubble particularly. Schools at the top of the heap have seen their budgets soar, so schools in the low $20s are at a similar disadvantage (when compared to the top-tier majors) to the disadvantage that teams in the high $10s used to face. $40M, meanwhile, is a nice round number, double the old Red Line, and accounts for the gobs of money that many non-BCS and even non-FBS football schools make from the pigskin without much trickle-down benefit to their basketball programs. I also like using $4M as the hoops-budget cutoff for “straddlers,” because it’s one-tenth of $40M, which matches the old Red Line tradition of $20M/$2M. And, as I explained above, it seems to “work” and “make sense,” for the most part, when put in practice. Adjust either number up or down right now, and things start to “feel” more illogical, whether by including teams like Ole Miss ($43M, $2.5M) or by excluding teams like Fordham ($25M, $3.3M) and Rhode Island ($23M, $4.7M).
So, in conclusion, I invite anyone who likes this New Red Line system to use it next season. I invite anyone who doesn’t like it to propose something else, and use that. And then, once we’ve each decided what we’re going to do, let’s all agree, in keeping with Kyle’s exhortation, to “please kindly then STFU about it” and enjoy the ride in #TMMX. 🙂
Again, you can find my spreadsheet at http://bit.ly/MyRedLine.
UPDATE: FWIW, the “official” Mid-Majority ruling on this issue – at least for purposes of Games! Of! The! Night!, Ballers of the Week, and so forth – is as follows: “the red line is dead… [TMM] will be bringing you news about all the teams that have been covered here the previous nine years.”
As a practical matter, the differences between this rule and “my Red Line” in 2013-14 are relatively small.
- Included by TMM, excluded by me: Temple, BYU
- Included by me, excluded by TMM: DePaul, Providence, Seton Hall, Colorado State, Wyoming
Of course, per Kyle’s edict, you’re free to follow whatever system you prefer – or no system at all – for differentiating mids from non-mids. For my part, I will confess that I don’t really consider DePaul, Providence or Seton Hall mids, despite what my system says. On the other hand, if CSU or Wyoming makes a run in March, I will totally rally ‘round the mid-major flag behind them. The same goes for Temple or BYU. #AOUEOU