EatLeadCommie
Tommy Elrod
Regionalism makes sense when you're talking about the Sun Belt and Conference USA, but it doesn't make sense for schools in the American and it is entirely because of athletic department budgets. If you look at the expenses reported for the public school athletic departments, the schools in the American spend in the range of $50M-$60M per year on their athletic departments while teams in the Sun Belt and C-USA both typically spend in the $30M-$40M range. So while it would make geographical sense to combine all three of those conferences and divvy them out by region you're going to wind up with conferences where USF has an athletic department budget of $53M playing FIU and FAU who each have athletic department budgets near $36M. Worse yet, the three lowest spenders in the three conferences (ULM, LaTech, & Southern Miss - combined budget of $65M) would likely all wind up in the same conference as Memphis ($55M).
I'd be curious to know how different that is within the P5 conferences. For example, do other schools in the Big 12 spend as much as Texas and OU? What about Vandy vs the rest of the SEC? Wake and the ACC?