expansion candidates are more about what market they are in for recruiting reasons. Grab 3 schools in Texas to make sure you still retain a strong Texas presence. Grab a school in Florida to ensure you still get games in Florida. And then grab a school in Charlotte that is located in a relatively large market in the Carolinas.

Unfortunately, these sorts of moves remind me of when the WAC expanded to 16 teams. Add a bunch of teams to "capture" different markets. The problem is the teams you grabbed in those markets are teams that nobody cares about.

At the end of the day, what this has resulted in is that the American Conference of today is the Conference USA of yesterday. Outside of Temple and Navy, every other member of the new American Conference is a former member of Conference USA.

I guess technically that was the case before with Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF, but the point remains that 11 of the 14 teams in this new alignment for them were members of Conference USA within the last 10 years.