Student Publications
University of Houston
151C Communications Bldg
Houston, TX 77204-4015
713.743.5350

©1991-2007
Student Publications,
All rights reserved.

Last modified:

Contact:
ktruitt@uh.edu

Sports

Competition in C-USA not up to par yet

New schools joining the conference could add excitment

Off the Wall

Tom Carpenter

Politics represents only the most transparent venue where double-speak thrives and hyperbole reigns. A close scrutiny of the "About Us" page on the Conference USA Web site, www.conferenceusa.com/about, provides wonderful examples of creative writing as the conference extols its virtues to the casual reader; but sports fans are anything but casual readers.

C-USA emerged 10 years ago from the swirling flotsam of teams left without a league when the major conferences did a quick reshuffle and the corrupt Southwest Conference imploded, as opposed to the declaration on the Web site that claims the conference creation was "hailed as a bold move in the world on intercollegiate sports."

The same gentlemen that brought college football the Bowl Championship Series dealt out winning hands to colleges and universities with connections like Baylor, which somehow slipped into the Big 12 and quickly became the laughingstock of the league because a small private school can't compete on the playing field with gargantuan cash cows like Oklahoma and Texas. 

Schools without leverage, like UH, Rice, Southern Methodist and Texas Christian coalesced into new leagues simply because gravity pulls masses together and athletic directors hate vacuums, especially in football stadiums.

In its 10 years of existence, Conference USA has failed to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with among the four major sports of college athletics: football, track and field, men's basketball and baseball. 

On the measuring stick of success, national championships, C-USA has a perfect game shut-out being hurled against it by the six major conferences, the leagues that have "Big" in them: the Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East; and the leagues that denote distinct geographic areas: the Southeast Conference, Pac-10 and Atlantic Coast Conference.

According to the C-USA Web site, men's basketball has produced one Final Four team, but no NCAA champion. No C-USA football, track and field or baseball team has captured a single NCAA championship, although Tulane opens baseball season ranked No. 1 in the country. 

Member schools wait only for the siren's call from another, more prestigious league, before they hurl the wedding bouquet over their departing shoulders to the maids-in-waiting still searching for their soul mates.

In 2001, I took off my shoe and pounded it on the podium, metaphorically speaking, in a damning diatribe against the far-flung domain of the impotent conference, advocating that UH abandon the woeful C-USA to go it alone as an independent or create a league with teams from the Southwest. 

The name remains Conference USA, but the league took a definite Southwest tilt when it added Rice, SMU, Tulsa and Texas-El Paso to replace the departing -- defection is too strong a word to use for schools killing time while looking for another conference -- current members Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville, Marquette and South Florida to the Big East, and Charlotte and Saint Louis to the Atlantic 10.

TCU, for reasons known only to the vagabond Horned Frogs (four conferences in six years), joins the Mountain West Conference next season, but look for the Horned Frogs to hop back to a new and improved C-USA in a few years. 

Marshall and the University of Central Florida join the league after the 2004-05 academic year, while Army takes the independent route so it can down-size its schedule and be competitive on the playing field, maybe.

Eight schools plan to leave the conference, and six schools will join C-USA in the next year, not exactly a ringing endorsement supporting the conference's claim espoused on the web site of "A proud history; a strong identity." 

But, in my opinion, the mass defections and recent converts produced a much more interesting conference for fans of Texas football; so the league can skate on exercising writers' largess with its spin about the success of the conference.

Send comments to dcsports@mail.uh.edu