New Atlantic-10 Commissioner Has a Lot of Work Ahead of Her

The Atlantic 10 is one of those interesting conferences: they sit on the fringe of major status, have some of the smallest schools in the top tier of college hoops and has quite the geographic stretch.

This is a conference that once housed West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Villanova and Rutgers ... and now is made up of 14 schools (10 of which are private schools) and not all of them are on the same page. Once a primarily eastern seaboard league, it now has two members in the Cincinnati area (Dayton, Xavier) and St. Louis. Yet, even those markets barely know the conference exists.

Sporting News' Mike DeCoursey touched on this in a recent column:

Last March, living in an Atlantic 10 city (Cincinnati) and subscribing to just about every satellite and cable package that could expand the college basketball available to my household (ESPN FullCourt, FOX College Sports, CSTV, DirecTV Sports Pack), I could not watch any A-10 tournament games except those involving Xavier and the title game shown on ESPN.

I, also, live in the Cincinnati area and it is tough to see anything A-10 related ... outside of the logo on the floor at the Dayton Arena or Xavier's Cintas Center. There is nothing to hype up the league or to inform anyone who's actually in the conference.

I, also, attended UNC-Charlotte who is a member of the Atlantic-10 as well. Charlotte is ACC country and something like the Atlantic-10 is looked at worse than the USBL. Especially since this was a school that are watching former C-USA rivals in the Big East or in the Final Four. And the 49ers haven't done squat in this league!

This isn't some backwoods conference. This league has markets in Charlotte, Cincinnati (two teams), New York City, Philadelphia (two teams), Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Washington, DC. The problem is that going to an A-10 game doesn't sit very high on the pyramid of "sports things to do" in those cities.

The new commish knows this, since she comes from the ACC. She, Bernadette McGlade, should be able to get the A-10 some exposure. After all, she's been in the most TV-friendly conference in the nation ... and also worked on the $6 billion deal that netted CBS the NCAA Tournament.

However, this league isn't just stretched geographically ... but in ideology as well. The 14 schools seem to each have a different mission for their programs. You have Temple with one foot in the Mid-American Conference; UNC-Charlotte working on feelers for a football program (if they get that, they will bolt as soon as they can); and a growing feeling around the "elite" schools that the league would be better if Fordham and St. Bonaventure were kicked out and league went to just twelve members.

Of course, at the top of the agenda is exposure. The hiring of McGlade should go a long way to doing that. She's shown to be a damn good media person and will/must convince the conference members to schedule more elite games. She takes over a league that saw Xavier have a strong season that ended in a Regional Final. Temple is a known commodity. Dayton, for a while, had an outstanding season. And the conference had one of its most competetive seasons in years.

This is a conference that could burst open in the next few years. Or burst apart.