Trying To Improve Your Lot In Life

Tulane is on the move up from C-USA to the Big East.  Upgrade? (Photo via NOLA.com)

One of the things we as humans attempt to accomplish is to move up in life.  Always looking for something better, in all facets.  This basic human notion is not lost on the landscape of college sports, as we all have seen recently.  However, the movement between Mountain West, Big East, and Conference USA schools have us wondering... at what point is it improvement, and at what point is all of this just nonsense?

In our own lives, we like to try to improve on everything, almost to a fault.  Girlfriend sucks?  FIND A BETTER ONE!  Job sucks?  FIND A BETTER ONE!!  There are limits to what you can do.  For example, in order to improve your job, you are limited by your education.  Or in order to find a new girlfriend, you have to look in places you didn't before.  We've seen these scenarios play out already.  Mizzou wants a better conference, it's partners keep looking around and leaving it.  So what do they do?  They look somewhere they've never before, and find a new partner in the SEC.  TCU wants to improve their conference status?  They invest in better facilities and coaches, then get the invite to the Big East... only to be invited on up to the Big XII.

So we see how our lives and our efforts to improve it can be parallel to the changing landscape of college athletics.  There's the other side of the picture here to examine, though.

The things you can accomplish in life all have limits.  You are limited by various factors, look, prestige, networking, education, geography, etc.  Here's where we find the strange situation of the Mountain West, Big East, Conference USA, and the Sun Belt.  Each of these teams are dependent on other factors, and over the next couple of weeks, we're going to investigate them.  Just as competition and geography killed the WAC, we'll examine the futures of each program and their respective conferences, and try to foresee what the future has in store for them.