I don't blame Butler for leaving the HL for the A10. That's a good conference, and given what we all know about the Horizon, even with the favoritism that the home team for the conference tournament headquarters regularly received. That was a wise and somewhat gutsy move. The A10 (and later the New Big East) was a good match for them.
WSU's move out of the MVC was much more cynical. They didn't like the MVC because the MVC didn't cater to their demands for everything to be slanted their way. They wanted/expected/demanded the kind of treatment the HL gave to Butler, because they spent more (much of it Koch Brothers money) to win more, and to ultimately get more fans. And every argument came back to the money they were spending-- the arena was refurbished by Koch money, the coach was retained/paid for by Koch money, which allowed more money to go to having more control over their schedule, more money on recruiting, better buy games, etc. They had the budget of a major in a mid-major conference, but they never made the connection or realization that the element that separated them from the rest of the conference was DONATED CASH IN GIANT PILES, and not their inherent brilliance or high basketball IQ or superior effort or fantastic personalities or outrageous good looks.
And so they join a conference that has a whole lot of the SAME OR WORSE DEFICIENCIES they were decrying as intolerable about the MVC ONLY A FEW WEEKS EARLIER: bad attendance (Houston averages less than 4k, Tulane less than 2k, etc.), inconvenient travel to Wichita (Connecticut, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Philadelphia? Really?), athletic programs distracted by football, inferior facilities (Tulane plays in a 4000-seat building from 1933), etc. Most of the teams in the AAC are programs that have been through three or four failed, blown up, or mismatched conferences-- Cincinnati, Memphis, Wichita, and Tulsa kind of deserve each other as schools that were 60s MVC teams that thought they were far too good for the others. It's a conference made up almost entirely of schools that chased the brass ring (football success, higher status, a conference where they decided all the rules) and ended up orphaned by hubris. And that's a commonality that usually doesn't end well.
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