The Thundering Herd football program is the MAC s shining star on a national scale. Marshall s sports programs as a whole, however, rank near the bottom of the 13-team conference. That means finding a home for the rest of the sports. Possibly the Colonial Athletic Association, where East Carolina played in non-football for years. Conference USA commissioner Mike Slive said expansion is on the table but that the league isn t going to take someone just to achieve a 12-team league.
Any new school has to be a good fit.
You want to add at the top, not at the bottom or in the middle. That eagerness to join, however, might have put CUSA in position to look around, knowing that it has Central Florida in a fall-back position. Conference USA might be attractive to Marshall because it offers four bowl bids, rather than the two that the MAC features. Some worry that CUSA expansion could make the league too unwieldy and lead to a breakup, which happened to the Western Athletic Conference, which saw eight schools leave, cutting the conference in half. If that happened to CUSA, though, Marshall might well benefit.