CAA Conference Talent Level Drop

[Tommy Boy]

Overall the level of basketball athletes enrolling into all CAA teams is dropping from the time Elon initially joined the conference. I can recall the CAA was rated between the 8th-9th best NCAA basketball conference in the nation. (not only my opinion but national publications) I enjoyed the step up in competition as a fan from the Southern Conference. Elon had at least one pro like talent coming into Alumni Area with nearly every opponent; we played. I recently went through each conference looking with rose colored glasses giving Elon opponents every benefit of doubt and derived the CAA at best is the 16th or lower best basketball conference in the NCAA. (a case could be made CAA is possibly as low as 26 of 32 NCAA D-1 Conferences) Also I tried to forget the past two seasons with a drop in conference basketball talent we have finished last or next to last the past two seasons in the CAA. Why is this tend occurring?

[euphoenix99]

Just my opinion and a little bit of a rant, but I think it has a lot to do with the current conference leadership. It’s just not very good. There were obviously a lot of big losses prior to us joining that hurt the conference overall and as much as I love Elon, losing ODU, Mason and VCU and replacing them with Elon and Charleston is not an equal tradeoff.

However, since we have joined the tv package (or lack thereof) is just awful. They went from at least having a weekly hoops game on NBCSN to a streaming only option on a mediocre to bad platform. Ultimately little to no exposure. You can easily find Big South, MAAC, Horizon, MEAC, etc games on ESPN2 and ESPNU each week, but unless you are specifically looking as a casual viewer you’d have no clue CAA games are being played. Same can be said for football. Unless the school is taking the lead to get their own tv deal, the conference is doing the bare minimum.

I really don’t know what the commissioner is doing for the conference right now. Aside from the bad streaming deal and picking a location for the men’s hoops tourney, what else is there? I know baseball doesn’t get the same focus, but even that just rotates around to different campus locations. The SoCon baseball tourney was/is just a better event hands down and the Big South is moving to the new Fayetteville ballpark this year.

I have no issue with our peers in the CAA and like being part of this group, but it would seem the conference office is run out of someone’s basement.

Go Phoenix!