The New Sun Belt Is The Ideal Conference
Geographic ties, natural rivalries and room for new powers to grow. The Sun Belt has the right idea.
The Sun Belt has written the blueprint for running a conference in 2022, both in substance and in approach, and on March 29, it earned its payout.
With the announcement from Conference USA that a divorce with Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss was imminent, with a split set for the end of this academic year – critically, ahead of the 2022 football season. The trio is headed to the Sun Belt, giving it teams 12-14 and (short of an unexpected more) filling it out along with FCS addition James Madison, breaking the league into two seven-team divisions designed largely around geography. Conference USA will play this season with just 11 teams, reshaping its schedule and, if it gets its wish, adding games to week zero to make those shifts work.
That’s not important here. What matters is the new Sun Belt, and the moves made by league commissioner Keith Gill and predecessor Karl Benson to arrive at it. Through more than a decade of work, the Sun Belt has successfully overturned its previously bleak outlet and public perception, piling up valuable programs to create an increasingly interesting football conference in the late 2010s, which is now well on its way to becoming the premier Group of Five league – especially as Cincinnati, Houston and UCF depart from the American, Conference USA collapses and the MAC stands pat as a cohesive but parity stricken and talent deprived league.
The AAC and Mountain West will still have a claim to stake on that front, even with the former sifting through the C-USA to nab replacements for some of the top G5 brands and taking a hit in the process. But, the Sun Belt – as it will gladly showcase this season – has just broken into another league, grabbed three of its most valuable assets (all three of which fit perfectly into the culture and geography of its 11 previously established members), and gotten away with it. The details of the split between the C-USA and those teams are not yet public, but just about any amount of damage control the league will need to undertake because of this will be well worth it.
Gill has built the ideal modern conference, and he’s done so using the exact techniques that, frankly, every league or school administrator should be deploying in the post-NCAA landscape where they now find themselves. There are no more sheriffs and no more laws. You can just do this. It’s cool as hell. The only real backlash you’ll face will come from the whiniest, least important merit badge journalists on the planet.
This is true in all facets of collegiate sports now. The money is made up, as are the rules, and pretending that they aren’t is only playing into the hands of an organization in the NCAA that has as much power over its programs and leagues as I do. Gill understands this and took full advantage of it, grabbing what could very well be the four best possible fits for his league, outside maybe of the currently unattainable (Charlotte, East Carolina, Tulane, UAB) or the forbidden (Liberty, Louisiana Tech).
Now, in substance, the Sun Belt is prepared to build on an already strong foundation. The new divisions are currently unbalanced – the East will be the best division in the G5 this year, the West might produce just two bowl teams – but the cohesion and potential are just phenomenal.
In Marshall, the Sun Belt has grabbed what is essentially another Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina or Georgia Southern, just with an extra 20 years of FBS experience (and a bit less of a pedigree at the FCS level before making that jump). The Thundering Herd have a committed and significant fan base, a complete hold on their town and a structural commitment to football infrastructure.
Joan C. Edwards Stadium seats just under 40,000 – though attendance is in serious need of a boost – which new AD Christian Spears has plans for sprucing up. They erected a $17 million, 102,000 square foot indoor facility in 2014 – the seventh such facility in the league along with Appalachian State, Arkansas State, Georgia State, James Madison, Louisiana and South Alabama (Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern have plans for their own as well; Old Dominion, Southern Miss, Texas State and Troy have extensive football facilities but no indoor field).
Marshall is immediately one of the largest brands in the league and carries with it an extremely obvious rivalry with Appalachian State and the potential for tertiary spats with Coastal Carolina, James Madison and Old Dominion by virtue of its location. Appalachian State was a tiny bit out of place before, but the trio of Marshall, JMU and ODU surround it nicely.
With James Madison, the lone program that the Sun Belt didn’t really have to fight for (because its sparring partner, the Colonial Athletic Association, is about 100 pounds below the Sun Belt’s weight class), it adds another former FCS power with an established fan base and builds out that new Coast wing a little more. Adding football programs with a proven history of winning football games is never, ever going to be a bad thing.
Old Dominion is a little bit more of a stretch than its counterparts in the (relative to the rest of the league) northeast, but its addition makes sense too. The Monarchs are a similarly natural rival for a program like Coastal Carolina (as are the Dukes), which really needed one and have shown a commitment to football despite a much more sparse history. I’m a little concerned about the suddenly FBS overpopulated Carolinas, but not enough to derail the feeling around this addition. Louisiana Tech would have probably been a better pick, but Louisiana Tech is permanently on the Sun Belt’s shit list, and Charlotte got a better offer. This will do just fine as option No. 2.
Lastly, in Southern Miss, the Sun Belt shores up its old guard in hopes of sparking a second, non-Louisiana team in the actual Sun Belt region of the Sun Belt. The Golden Eagles are a beautiful fit with the rest of the deep South reps in the league (Louisiana, Louisiana-Monroe, South Alabama, Troy), and can help to connect Arkansas State into that group in the same way that the Georgia schools connect the league’s East and West coasts.
The fit with Texas State is still extremely, unthinkably bad, but 13/14 puts the Sun Belt among the absolute best of the best for conference construction. I don’t know that another league has this much talent and can pair it with that kind of hit rate of geographical and cultural fits.
The MAC could make a case that it’s 12/12, though Buffalo is a bit of a stretch and the talent is also significantly lower across the board. The Mountain West is probably the top competition here but needs a strong Boise State to keep up.
The SEC has the talent claim, but Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Texas A&M don’t fit no matter how much the league pretends they do. The Pac-12 is 10/12, lacking a connector to the mountain pair of Colorado and Utah.
Meanwhile, Conference USA is a fucking nightmare on both fronts; the AAC is talented but all over the place; the ACC lost its connection to its northern wing with the departure of Maryland; the Big 12 is about to have teams in Ohio, Florida, Utah and West Virginia and the Big Ten has decided to pair Nebraska with Rutgers.
This is what a modern conference, one built around football (they all are) should look like. The Sun Belt has collected interesting and committed football programs, but it hasn’t sacrificed regional ties to do so. Its expansion makes sense and it has connector programs to tie the entire league together. The league has shaped itself around proud fanbases and programs with lots of tradition while embracing new schemes to keep the gameplay fresh. It isn’t afraid to have fun, but hasn’t allowed ESPN to put all of its games on Tuesday night.
This is a foundation that feels stable, and that makes complete sense on both the macro and micro scales. There will be down seasons, allowing for brief leaps in importance from the other Group of Five leagues, but the new Sun Belt looks strong enough to make a serious push beyond its counterparts and into the spot that the AAC previously filled, with the bonus of having literally any connective tissue at all among its programs.
It’s the Sun Belt’s time.