C-USA provides competition, rivals
In case you didn’t know already, Rice has said goodbye to the Western Athletic Conference after nine seasons and will now compete in Conference USA. Now, you may have a few questions about this move — some big, some small. You may not have any questions at all. But if you do have questions, hopefully they will all be answered here.
Why did we leave the WAC in the first place? Well, I would like to say it was because we were tired of competing against weak teams in the major sports (a.k.a. football and basketball) or because our athletes were tired of traveling to such far away towns as Boise, Idaho and Fresno, Calif. In reality, we would have probably left the WAC years ago for these reasons if given the opportunity.
However, it took a large domino effect involving a whole bunch of schools switching multiple conferences for us to be afforded that chance. I could get into all the little details about which schools moved to which conference and why, but that would take so much time that I’d probably miss my deadline. I’ll just write that it all started with three big-time football schools — Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, to be exact — deciding to leave the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference a couple years ago. Seven Division I-A conferences re-aligned due to that decision, and C-USA was one of them. Hey, who could turn down the chance to go from the weak, low-exposure WAC to a stronger conference? Rice sure couldn’t.
Who will Rice compete against in this new conference? There are 11 schools in all. The Western division (of which Rice is a part) will consist of a few schools that should be familiar to us all: the University of Houston, the University of Texas-El Paso, Southern Methodist University, Tulane University and the University of Tulsa. The road trips to those schools will be brief compared to where we’ve been traveling in years past.
The schools in the new Eastern division may be a little less familiar: Marshall University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Central Florida, East Carolina University, the University of Memphis and the University of Southern Mississippi. While this lineup will not (and should not) remind you of the Big XII, the SEC or the Pac-10, it is still an improvement. In the old WAC, Fresno State’s men basketball team couldn’t win a game without committing some NCAA violation, and San Jose State just couldn’t win at all. Besides, think of all the great places Rice’s athletic teams will go now. Goodbye, Honolulu, Hawaii. Hello, Hattiesburg, Miss. and Greenville, North Carolina.
Are these other schools closer to Rice academically than the schools in the WAC? Allow me to give a brief answer to this: No. True, the schools that will join us in the western division — namely Tulane, Tulsa, and SMU — are decent private schools. No one, though, ever mistook UAB or Central Florida for Harvard or Stanford.
What effect, if any, will the move have on the way we view athletic events on campus? Will more people attend Rice home games because we’re in C-USA now? Will the quality of life at Rice change at all? Quit asking multi-part questions. While you probably don’t feel any differently than you did at this time last year, the teams that come to Rice to compete will change a little bit. The C-USA soccer, volleyball and baseball tournaments will be held on our campus this year, and the swimming and indoor track and field championships will be at nearby UH. This should give you plenty of opportunities to go out and cheer on your Owls as they strive for conference championships. Speaking of UH, we’ll play them more frequently in most varsity sports. It’s not like we didn’t compete against them enough in football, baseball and track, but now we’re guaranteed to play the Cougars at least once each year during the men’s and women’s basketball seasons, which hasn’t happened since the old days of the Southwest Conference.
Well, that’s all for this little guide to C-USA. It should give you the background you need as we move through this 2005-‘06 season. If you still aren’t familiar with our move to this conference, then I guess you don’t read this sports section too much, do you?
Stephen Whitfield is a Sid Richardson College sophomore and co-sports editor.
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