More yada...yada...yada from Stewie:
https://twitter.com/theathleticcfb/status/1762838957082251626?s=12
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Now that UMass and Army have found conferences to call home, how do you see UConn managing football given it doesn’t have the NBC safety net that Notre Dame has? — Andrew W., New York
You’ve got me. Any suggestions? From where I sit, Jim Mora is being handed a losing deck. UConn is the rare, rare school that has opted to prioritize basketball over football in terms of its conference alignment. And it’s hard to argue the results. The men’s program was floundering during its years in the AAC. Since rejoining the Big East, Dan Hurley has won one national title and is contending for another. The Huskies are back where they once belonged in the national conversation. Mission accomplished.
But UConn football is out there on an island, playing a hodgepodge schedule that has a few Power 5 foes (this year: at Maryland, at Duke, Wake Forest and at Syracuse) and a bunch of yawners (Merrimack, FAU, Buffalo, Temple, Rice, Georgia State, at Syracuse and at UMass). In Mora’s first season, the Huskies went 6-6, earning an invite to the Myrtle Beach Bowl. I guess that’s something. But this is the same program that reached the 2010 Fiesta Bowl as a BCS-conference member. And many Huskies fans still hold out hope of returning to the power-conference level.
So UConn is stuck in football purgatory. Joining the MAC, as UMass did, is not desirable to the fan base, even if the MAC were open to taking the Huskies in football only. Which, if you can’t have the men’s and women’s basketball programs, what’s the point? And it’s not like joining the MAC would provide some sort of financial salvation. In 2022, the conference brought in just $35.7 million in revenue, total. That’s less than $3 million per school (and not all that revenue gets distributed to the schools). That’s barely a dent in the reported $35.8 million university subsidy UConn needed to meet its budget in 2023.
So despite the fact UConn and Notre Dame are the only remaining independents, it’s still probably UConn’s only feasible option that wouldn’t jeopardize basketball. The good news is, the school has booked at least 11 opponents each season through 2027. But with no conference championship to play for, and no realistic path to the CFP, it feels like a hollow existence. It frankly would make more sense to drop back down to FCS, where the Huskies memorably reached the playoff quarterfinals in 1998, but the fan base — most notably QB great Dan Orlovsky — would mutiny. <