Uab Dental School, Small schools...
There's one left in the NCAA Tournament, Butler, and one left in the
NIT, UAB. Are we seeing a permanent shift in college basketball,
where the smaller schools are totally incapable of competing with the
Majors, or is this just an aberration? It looks like a trend to me.
The last team outside of the Big Six Football Conferences to reach the
Final Four was Utah in 1998. Now it looks like the B6 may be taking
over the NIT, too.
If you're counting UAB then you need to count Marquette. And isn't Temple
still alive as well? They're Big Six in football (for now) but not in
basketball.
Butler is the only one of these I would consider a smaller school, for all
intents and purposes I think C-USA and the A10 are major conferences in basketball.
When we're talking basketball, the smallness of a school generally
refers to the amount of emphasis placed on basketball and the level of
competition the school plays at. For example, Providence has 5,300
students, Wayne State has 31,000. Wayne State doesn't even play D-I ball. Basketball
is a low-expense sport, relatively speaking, as you say below, so there's
not a lot of correlation between "actual size" and "'basketball' size", so to
speak.
The original poster used UAB as an example of a small school while not using
Marquette as an example of same, while these two schools are in the same
conference. That's all I was trying to point out. Your exposition below is
part of another thread I think.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make below. You are presenting a
lot of facts but it's unclear to me what conclusions you're trying to draw or
what you're suggesting should be changed (if anything).