Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 29, 1990 TAG: 9006290775
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTE, N.C. LENGTH: Long
After admittedly starting with more modest expansion aspirations, the Metro emerged from a two-day meeting with eight other football independents with the goal of bringing everyone at the table into a conference that could command the largest percentage of television homes of any Division I league.
Metro Commissioner Ralph McFillen said the league's expansion concept has been narrowed to an all-sports conference for 12 schools, with four others - three locked into Big East Conference basketball - competing only in Metro football.
Under the proposal, which emerged from a consultant's study on Metro expansion by Raycom Sports & Entertainment, the eight Metro schools hope to add Miami, West Virginia, Temple and Rutgers for all sports, with Syracuse, Pitt, Boston College and East Carolina joining the league during the football season.
McFillen said divisional competition would be played in all sports, probably split on a North-South basis. Although no division alignments have been decided, one Metro athletic director said the likely basketball groupings would include Virginia Tech, Louisville, Cincinnati, West Virginia, Temple and Rutgers in one division and Florida State, Memphis State, Miami, South Carolina, Southern Mississippi and Tulane in the other.
Ken Haines, Raycom's executive vice president, would not divulge the potential revenue figures for the proposed 16-team Metro. A source said the expanded conference could produce about $12 million in shared revenue annually, primarily from TV networks and syndicators and bowl ties.
A divisional format with at least 12 teams would give the proposed Metro an opportunity to play a championship football game, a lucrative 12th date for two schools. A 12-team basketball league also could create two more sessions and another day for the league's basketball tournament, which may have eight schools for the last time in March at the Roanoke Civic Center.
The next step, McFillen said, is for athletic administrators who attended the meeting to inform the chief executive officers of their institutions on the plan. The presidents of the interested schools will meet within the next two months to discuss the Metro concept and determine whether the league will expand.
"By the end of the summer or early fall, we expect to have some commitments from the institutions that wish to continue to pursue the 16-team concept," McFillen said. "We haven't gotten any commitments yet and we haven't asked for any. But we are expecting those to occur within a reasonable period of time after meetings with the chief executive officers."
Haines said the Charlotte-based marketing firm suggested the 12-16 concept "because it's the type of conference in which there's an upside for everyone involved. The Big East schools can maintain what has been successful for them in basketball, and they'll also benefit in a football alignment that could be very powerful.
"The others would benefit in both football and basketball. It's a plan that makes a lot of sense."
Under the plan, East Carolina would remain as a member of the Colonial Athletic Association in basketball and non-revenue sports. Miami is an independent in all sports. WVU, Rutgers and Temple would forsake the Atlantic 10 Conference, which already is losing Penn State to the Big Ten, for the Metro.
Haines said if the Metro's proposed 16-team football league materializes, the conference would have a TV universe in excess of 35 percent of the nation's homes, utilizing the existing markets of teams and adjacent markets.
"That would make it, by far, the largest TV universe for a football conference in the U.S.," Haines said. "The basketball, with the 12 schools we're talking about, would be in over 15 percent of the nation's TV universe."
The only existing conferences with larger basketball telecast impact are the Big Ten and Big East, at 19 percent. The ACC has 10 percent; the current Metro 9 percent.
McFillen said the announced intentions of the SEC and ACC to consider expansion "might have moved the agenda up, and that may be good." The Metro began to discuss expansion in October 1989, and the early notion was that the league would add two schools and play football.
Then, Raycom urged the Metro to combine its expansion desires with the ongoing talks of a group of athletic directors from Eastern Seaboard schools to come up with the 16-team scenario.
"We really like the potential with this plan because it helps us in the Eastern corridor," said Virginia Tech athletic director Dave Braine, whose school has more than 70 percent of its alumni living northeast of its Blacksburg campus. "It would also allow us to continue to maintain the rivalries we have, with Virginia and other schools, and we'd be in a league with West Virginia."
Under the 16-team proposal, each school would play seven of its 11 football games against conference divisional foes.
by CNB