UTEP Positioning Itself For Conference Realignment
The dominos are falling again in the highly lucrative world of collegiate athletics.
A bunch of the NCAA’s best teams are jockeying for spots in new conferences, and the shuffling could trickle down to UTEP and Conference USA.
“If this is all taking place, we don’t wanna be left out,” UTEP Athletics Director Bob Stull said Tuesday.
Texas A&M’s impending move to the Southeast Conference, and Texas and Oklahoma’s talk about jumping conferences, has everyone, including UTEP, positioning themselves for the future.
“I think Conference USA and the Mountain West are in similar situations right now,” Stull said.
Because of that, there’s talk of a new 20-plus team, football-only merger between UTEP’s Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference. The champions from each league would play for a spot in the prestigious Bowl Championship Series, which neither has an automatic bid to right now.
“The obvious advantage of that would be you’d probably go television from Honolulu to Orlando, Fla.,” Stull said. “So you’d cover a lot of territory.”
Stull said UTEP has a number of things going for it when it comes to conference realignment, including solid football attendance and nice facilities. The downside, he says, however, is the number of television sets in the area.
“The number of TV sets is remarkably moderate compared to what you’d think would be in this area,” Stull said.
El Paso is 91st-largest market in the country with about 337,000 TV households, a relatively small number compared to the fifth-largest market in Dallas with 2.5 million TV households and the 10th-largest market in Houston with 2.2 million.
“People aren’t expanding for regional reasons at all,” Stull said. “They’re expanding to get additional television sets. It’s all about the money from television.”
Stull added that there’s a lot of uncertainty at this point, but he should know more after attending next week’s Division 1-A athletics director meetings in Dallas.
