[...]Blue Chip Stories | MrSEC.com[...]…

[...]Blue Chip Stories | MrSEC.com[...]…

If I don't respond to questions and posts — I'm a bad person.

If I do respond but do it just as nastily as the original poster — I'm a bad person.

And if — as was the case in this situation — I simply respond in a friendly way to someone making suggestion, explain that a change wouldn't make much difference, and then tell him to have at it if he likes… it's misinterpreted as me being angry or rude and — I'm a bad person.

There are no inflections in posts, but I sure didn't mean the above as any kind of nasty response.

So — once again — I'm going to try to stop responding to any/all posts. Can't win. And of course, when I don't respond, I'll be ripped for thinking I'm too good to talk to our readers.

John

And that's quite an interesting factoid in itself. Speaks to some extent how being seen in more areas can increase applications (and students and alumni and donors), which we mentioned in one of our earlier Expansion By The Numbers pieces.

John

We have almost doubled enrollment since joining the SEC.

Again, we used the enrollment figures provided by the schools to US News and World Report. It's just for comparison's sake anyway. Having 23,500 vs 24,500 vs 18,500 really doesn't matter that much.

Thanks for reading, as always,
John

I'm going to guess that if you want to change from city numbers of 300,000 to metro numbers with about an 800,000 cut-off, you'll find that the same schools would likely be viewed as non-fits.

And if you want to look up the metro populations for each of the 35 schools we're comparing, have at it.

Thanks for reading,
John

List of SEC cities by METRO AREA according to the 2010 census.

1. Nashville – 1,582,000
2. Baton Rouge – 802,000
3. Knoxville – 800,000
4. Columbia – 744,000
5. Lexington – 472,000
6. Fayetteville – 463,000
7. Gainesville – 258,000
8. Tuscaloosa – 211,000
9. Athens – 189,000
10. Auburn – 130,500
11. Starkville – 24,000
12. Oxford – 11,000

A further measure would be Combined Statistical Area, which takes into account pretty much everywhere that gets a city's newspaper and television stations. In this case Knoxville would have 1,050,000 people. So to use just city limits is very misleading. You know which Southern city has the largest physical city limits? Jacksonville. So it would appear to be larger than, say, Tampa. But it's not. MSA or CSA is a true measure of size.

I might have added a column for "Burns Furniture" to see who fits better, Mizzou or WVU.

How many SEC schools are located in cities featuring major competition for the entertainment dollar? Only Vanderbilt is located in a city with professional franchises.

I think the lack of commuter schools is telling. Jackie Sherrill — who coached at Texas A&M and Mississippi State — recently said that A&M's campus life is a fit with the SEC. The same could be said for 11 of the SEC's 12 institutions.

But that's just my take.

Thanks for reading,
John

Read the piece and you'll see why we've included so many schools… that we know from Day One would not be SEC targets.

John

The main difference between SEC schools and those in the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 is that they are focused more on undergraduate work than post-graduate research. That helps to form the perception that SEC institutions — or schools like West Virginia, for that matter — aren't acclaimed universities.

You're correct, it's a perception thing. And you're also correct that the SEC presidents are sensitive to that notion… as proven by their decision to overrule their football coaches and nix — to some extent — oversigning.

Thanks for reading,
John

Please, no links on the site. We get too many ads and too many people touting their own blogs.

That said, in the interest of using ONE source, we went by US News' most recent listings and they have Duke as a school with Methodist ties. I don't think anyone thinks of Duke as a Methodist school, but a listing is a listing and that was our source.

But Duke won't be joining the SEC anyway. For one, a Top 10 institution wouldn't leave the ACC for a league that's looked down upon by the high-brows in its current conference… and it's also a private institution. So it wouldn't fit the league's "profile" anyway. (Even though the SEC would love to land the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels if it could.)

But thanks for the comment. Just try to refrain from linkage.

All the best,
John

Many of these schools are absurd. And yet we continue to get requests or more schools. "What about Sewanee?"

We included Penn State simply because Joe Paterno last month referenced talk that maybe Penn State would explore moving. (He's long wanted an Eastern partner for PSU in the Big Ten.)

I would say of the 35 schools on our list, about 10 would even be remote possibilities. But the bigger the selection, the more we see how schools stack up in a number of areas.

Thanks for reading,
John

Love the content of the site. Thx for all the info.

SEC already knows they have the best athletic product, and now they want to raise the academic perception. Makes total sense.

In some ways, this category is less subjective. If you examine the existing SEC membership and arrive at the same "profile" that we did, the goal is to simply check yea or nay on whether a school matches in certain areas.

However, as we stated in the piece, the idea was to give just a general idea of a school's academic reputation and "fit."

Thanks for reading,
John

As we tried to explain in the article, the presidents of those schools with higher rankings than all other SEC schools (save Vanderbilt) will likely want to stay in their current high-brow leagues. So those schools got a "YES" they would fit, but they're not a "PERFECT" fit the profile of the league's current schools.

Thanks for reading the site,
John

Of course, my agenda here as a Bama born (and fan) UVA grad is to promote UVA – which I realize will never happen in real life so no flames please. We've been ranked above VT in pretty much every category here. A fact I'm enjoying.

My take is they want to move the academic average to the plus side, so AAU status becomes a big factor. The gap between WVU -yes and A&M, Mizzou-Perfect is actually huge.

I would add another column and give points for having AAU status.