The Group of Five commissioners are requesting exemption from a number of NCAA regulations because of the financial stress created by COVID-19. There is a path to financial relief in the short-term that might prevent dropping sports at some schools.







Realignment. Not the let’s fill the off-season by making maps and lists. Not “let’s make this geographically perfect”. This would be a temporary deal.

During World War II, the Steelers and Eagles had to merge for a season as a team fans called the Steagles. The coronavirus national emergency may well require such creativity.

Assuming there is a 2020-21 athletic year this need only be for 2020-21 and 2021-22. A year of COVID-19 and a year to get athletic programs back up on their financial feet.

Call it the COVID-Sun-USA or Sun-USA or USA-Sun.

Leave football alone. It’s too late in the game to try to deal with football, assuming we even play football in 2020. When football travels it is by chartered motor coach or chartered aircraft. Tight space exposure to people of unknown health status is fairly uncommon.

We can also avoid dealing with men’s and women’s cross country, indoor and outdoor track & field, and men’s and women’s golf as well as swimming and diving. None of these sports play a league schedule. You make a trip to the conference championship and that’s it. These sports like football all stay where they are now.

In the remaining team sports you start off with all Sun Belt East and CUSA East schools playing together as an ad hoc conference for two years. Sun Belt HQ is the furthest east so the Sun Belt can administer them. Since the SBC would administer call it the Sun-USA for volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball, men’s tennis, women’s tennis, women’s soccer and maybe men's soccer (men’s soccer is messy with affiliate members in both leagues). Sun Belt West and CUSA West can be administered out of the CUSA offices in Irving, call it the USA-Sun.

This greatly reduces the need to fly in sports where chartering flights can be cost prohibitive. If you are UT San Antonio and you are playing FIU in one of these sports you are most likely flying first to Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta, depending on the best deal you can get, and changing planes. That’s two flights out and two flights back where your team is exposed to the public and you have no idea what the health status of any of those passengers is.

You can pair a lot of games making for easier road trips. That's easier road trips on motor coaches where you can control who is a passenger.

The natural order would be

Sun-USA

Marshall, Old Dominion, Charlotte, Appalachian State, Middle Tennessee State, Western Kentucky, Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Florida International, Florida Atlantic, South Alabama and Troy

USA-Sun

UTEP, Rice, Texas State, UTSA, UT-Arlington, North Texas, Louisiana, Louisiana Tech, ULM, Arkansas-Little Rock, Arkansas State, Southern Mississippi and UAB.

That’s two leagues of 13 and awkward. That’s fixable. Just pick your method. You can shift UAB over to the eastern group or shift South Alabama to the western group. If you can’t work it out, then stick with 13 each. Most likely UAB volunteers to go east or USA volunteers to go west and it sorts out fairly well.

Minor details have to be ironed out since groupings probably won’t be the same in every sport because not everyone plays each of the sports so lines may shift a bit on a sport by sport basis.

TV for the sports impacted is simple. Use the contract of the home team. So a UNT home basketball game selected for TV is picked under the CUSA contract and a UTA home game under the Sun Belt agreement.

Football isn’t included so nothing to sort out there with TV or bowls.

The western group will play their basketball tournament under the CUSA contract in Frisco and the eastern group in Pensacola, Florida under the Sun Belt deal.

When UTSA and Texas State square off in hoops, it’ll be a conference game in 2020-21 and 2021-22 but UTSA uniforms will still bear the CUSA patch and Texas State uniforms will still say Sun Belt identifying the permanent homes when things are normal.

Only other issue to resolve is NCAA units and since one group is using CUSA’s auto bid and one is using Sun Belt’s the units earned for just being there will go to the league the bid belonged to if all were normal. If a school gains an at-large or the auto-bid winner advances in the NCAA Tournament, the units belong to the league they came from. So if Western Kentucky wins the eastern tournament in Pensacola and then wins their first game and lose in the round of 32, Sun Belt gets the unit for the auto bid but CUSA earns the unit for advancing and if MTSU gains an at-large out of the east, their units go to CUSA.







The Sun Belt and CUSA do their own distributions of TV and units as if they were all still together.

Once everything settles down, everyone heads back to where they came from and we all have a crazy story about how 24 schools worked together for two years to save sports.