Though the Sun Belt Conference considered inviting Liberty into the league, it wrapped up its spring meetings Wednesday without adding a 12th member. As a result, it will play the 2014 football season with 11 schools and won’t have the minimum number necessary to host a championship game.
“There’s no sense of urgency,” conference commissioner Karl Benson said on a teleconference Wednesday.
That doesn’t mean the conference won’t add a team. Benson said that several schools submitted applications for membership and that the conference likely will revisit the issue in the fall. The conference added Georgia State last year and Georgia Southern and Appalachian State earlier this year. The Sun Belt has also lost several schools, most recently Western Kentucky to Conference USA. The Hilltoppers are leaving the Sun Belt in 2014.
“It’s more about adding the right team,” Georgia State athletic director Cheryl Levick said. “It was a very positive meeting.”
Benson said the next addition likely will come from the FCS ranks, from where his conference added the Panthers, Mountaineers and Eagles as part of seven additions during a 12-month period.
Troy University Chancellor Dr. Jack Hawkins Jr., who serves as Sun Belt president, said the settling of realignment in the other conferences enabled the Sun Belt to carefully review what it wants to do next. He stressed that the conference wants to retain its geographic footprint, which in football will stretch from Idaho to Statesboro for the 2014 season.
“It’s no longer a numbers game,” Hawkins said. “It’s a matter of quality and institutions that can add value to our membership.”
The conference took steps to make it more difficult for schools to leave, changing its bylaws during the meeting to require a notice of one year before a school can depart. Benson said that time frame is non-negotiable. The conference lost Middle Tennessee State earlier this year within a few months of announcing its new policy. The Blue Raiders also left to join Conference USA.
The Sun Belt maintained its exit fee of $1 million, but amended its bylaws to require a school to provide at least 15 months notification. Anything less than that time frame will result in an exit fee of $1.5 million.
Benson didn’t seem concerned about the possibility of the loss of revenue by not having a championship game in football in 2014. He pointed out that the conference will receive at least $12 million as part of the new playoff system, which the schools will split evenly. Georgia State will receive at least $800,000 of that after the 2014-15 season.
Football teams will play eight conference games in 2014. Benson said he is working on creating as many as four bowl tie-ins for 2014 and said he was confident the league would add at least a third by September. The league has two bowl tie-ins with the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl and the GoDaddy.com Bowl in Mobile, Ala.
Basketball news: The conference announced the 2013 tournaments will feature the league's top eight teams. The top-two seeds will receive byes to the semifinals. The third- and fourth-seeds will receive byes to the quarterfinals. The women's tournament will have a traditional eight-team bracket.
Starting with the 2014-15 season, teams will play a double round-robin format for 18 conference games.
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