Southern Miss won’t lament departure from aimless C-USA

By Stan Caldwell

stanmansportsfan.com

It was at the Conference USA Baseball Tournament in 2005 in the old press box at Pete Taylor Park when I heard the most apt – and damning – description of the league.

“Colleges and universities scattered aimlessly,” said some press box wag.

It may have been said in a joking manner, but in those five words, it pretty much summed up everything about Conference USA, especially the aimless part. If/when the league finally peters out, that will be its epitaph.

So, then, it appears that the association between C-USA and the University of Southern Mississippi is nearing an end.

For once – finally – Southern Miss finds itself a wanted property in the latest conference shuffle that is currently ongoing.

The Sun Belt Conference is expanding, and all reports indicate that it has invited USM to join, beginning play perhaps as soon as 2023. The only thing that’s missing is the official announcement from the university.

Of course, the Sun Belt is just one of the dominoes in the line that falls during these periodic conference shuffles that have altered the world of college athletics, especially football, over the past 30 years.

This shuffling has largely left Southern Miss standing with hat in hand, waiting for a call that has never come, supposedly biding its time in Conference USA while watching its peers move onward and upward into better situations.

It is good at this point to go back and look at how this all started, especially where it concerns Southern Miss.

There was a moment in time when USM was tantalizingly close to the big time in college athletics. It was the late 1980s and there were already rumblings of movement in what had been a static situation in college football for almost 20 years.

In 1987, the landscape of college football was thus: the Big Ten (which really had 10 teams in those days), the Southeastern Conference (10 teams), the Atlantic Coast Conference (eight teams), the Big 8, the Pac-10 and the Southwest Conference: eight Texas universities and the University of Arkansas.

In addition to the conferences, there were the independent programs, and there were far more of those then than there are now, where Notre Dame and BYU are the only ones currently doing business as indies, and it appears that BYU is headed to the Big 12.

These independents included such national championship programs as Penn State and Miami, as well as the colleges in the Metro Conference, a non-football league that was formed in 1975.

By the end of the 1980s, the Metro Conference consisted of Cincinnati, Florida State, Louisville, Memphis State, South Carolina, Tulane, Virginia Tech and … Southern Mississippi, which joined in 1982.

The hallmark achievement in the tenure of Rolland Dale as athletic director at USM, getting into the Metro Conference gave Southern Miss athletics as a whole a cachet it had never had before as a small-college independent.

M.K. Turk was the first Golden Eagle coach to use the Metro to build a winning program in men’s basketball, and he was followed closely by Kay James in women’s hoops and Hill Denson in baseball.

By around 1987-89, many of the schools that made up the Metro were formidable teams on the football field, and there was always persistent talk of the league adding football, then trying to wedge its way into the rigid upper hierarchy of college football.

Whether anyone associated with the Metro Conference ever seriously considered adding football is beyond my pay grade, but the bar talk among fans about it was brisk, a what-if scenario.

At any rate, nothing ever came of such talk, and the reasons cited by fans range from Denny Crum (the former Louisville basketball coaching legend) wanting basketball to remain the league’s marquee sport to Bobby Bowden (the late FSU football legend) wanting to keep his program’s scheduling options as an independent open (or perhaps they were waiting for a better offer).

Any lingering notion of a Metro Conference in football ended in 1991 when South Carolina joined the SEC (along with Arkansas) and FSU was invited to the ACC.

In short order, Virginia Tech and Miami went to the Big East, which started playing football in the early 90s, and later moved to the ACC. Penn State joined the Big Ten and the Big 8 scavenged the best of the disintegrated SWC (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor) to become the Big 12.

The Metro carried on through the early 1990s, but by the middle of the decade, it was clear to those at schools such as Southern Miss and Houston that they needed to join a football conference if they were to get anywhere.

Conference USA was born in 1995 out of the wreckage of the Metro and Great Midwest conferences, beginning with basketball, then adding football in the fall of ’96.

From the start, it was an odd creature. C-USA began with 12 schools, only six of whom played football: Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville, Memphis, USM and Tulane.

However, the six non-football schools (Charlotte, DePaul, Marquette, Saint Louis, South Florida and UAB) brought the league immediate credibility in basketball and other sports.

East Carolina came on as a football-only member in 1997 (later to become a member in all sports), Army was also a football-only team beginning in ’98, UAB started football in 2000, USF began its program in 2003, a year after TCU came into the league for a moment or two.

Under the leadership of Mike Slive, the conference had something of a golden age in the late 1990s, with multiple NCAA Tournament bids in men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball, along with strong teams in football, of which USM was prominent.

But Slive left C-USA for the more lucrative pastures of the SEC, and those who followed as conference commissioner have lacked Slive’s vision and ability to get what he wanted done. In fact, that leadership void has been a major factor in the league’s decline.

It was in 2005 that the revolving door that has become standard for Conference USA began in earnest. Louisville, Cincinnati, TCU, USF and Army left the conference. UL, Cincy, TCU moved to better situations, and USF soon bettered itself as well.

Throughout all the comings and goings of schools and programs in Conference USA over the past 15 years, the once constant has been Southern Miss. UAB is the only other school that has stayed in C-USA from the beginning, but not in the same way as USM.

Golden Eagle fans thought that the program might get a call in 2013-14 from the American Athletic Conference when that league poached Memphis, SMU, UCF and Houston in 2013, and Tulane, ECU and Tulsa in ’14.

The reasons that have been raised for USM’s exclusion from a more prominent league is the school’s location in South Mississippi, with its limited population, passive behavior from leaders in the university’s athletic department, poor timing or all of the above in some measure.

But now the dominoes are falling again in college football, and this time USM is right in the middle of it.

This latest round of expansion/realignment began earlier this year when it came out that the SEC was courting Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12, and a formal invitation and acceptance followed.

The Big 12 has moved quickly to add four schools to get to 12 members again, bringing in BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF. The AAC is reportedly ready to take Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UTSA and UAB from Conference USA.

Now, it seems that the Sun Belt Conference is aggressively moving to expand as well and has zeroed in on Southern Miss, Marshall, Old Dominion and either James Madison or Liberty to get to 14 teams for football (16 for other sports).

Again, nothing is official, and long-suffering Southern Miss fans can be excused if they feel like Charlie Brown with Lucy holding that football, promising that this time she’ll let Charlie Brown kick that football across the field.

Ten years ago, a move to the Sun Belt Conference would have been seen as a step down for Southern Miss.

But the SBC has been shrewdly building up its resume, especially in football. Under the longtime leadership of now-retired Commissioner Karl Benson, the Sun Belt has maintained a modest profile while creating associations with up-and-coming programs in the South.

With the recent additions of Coastal Carolina, Appalachian State and a few others, the SBC has become at least the second-best of the Group of Five conferences, right behind the American, and they are taking aim at surpassing the AAC with these moves.

For USM, the Sun Belt has suddenly become a beacon of hope that could redirect the school’s athletic fortunes.

For one thing, many of the schools in the SBC are peers: Troy, App State, Coastal, and a few others, schools located in smaller cities like Hattiesburg, not associated with metropolitan areas. However, the league also has teams in Atlanta, Mobile, Alabama, and Lafayette, Louisiana.

For another, Southern Miss already has rivalries with many schools in the Sun Belt in football, as well as other sports, especially baseball, in which the SBC figures to be a perennial multi-bid conference.

Can you imagine a late-season SBC baseball series at Pete Taylor Park between USM and Louisiana-Lafayette, with first place in the league on the line? And the Golden Eagles have already played South Alabama and Troy in football this season.

Many of the potential league rivals are drivable for Southern Miss fans: Troy, USA, ULL, UL-Monroe, Georgia State are all within a six-hour drive from Hattiesburg. App State and Georgia Southern are probably 8-9 hours and the longest trip is probably Marshall, Coastal or the schools in Virginia.

The irony is that joining the Sun Belt under current conditions positions Southern Miss in as good a position to perhaps compete for a hypothetical spot in the College Football Playoff than even in the American.

Yes, I know that’s an unlikely outcome, but it would certainly have a better chance of happening in the SBC than in Conference USA.

To me, and most Southern Miss fans that I’m aware of, this is something that needs to happen, a no-brainer.

Conference USA is never going to be more than what it is: colleges and universities scattered aimlessly. Southern Miss fans have waited 25 years for the league to amount to something, and that wait has been largely for nothing.

If and when the Sun Belt Conference formally comes forward with an invitation to join, it shouldn’t take university president Rodney Bennett and athletic director Jeremy McClain long to say yes.

If this is the end for Southern Miss in Conference USA, I think I speak for most in the Golden Eagle universe in saying good riddance to bad rubbish.

Stan Caldwell is a veteran sportswriter with more than 35 years in the Hattiesburg area.