I can't see how adding any of these 4 teams wouldn't hurt the bottom line.
They are tiny, tiny markets.
Good at football at the FCS level, but really hard to see how they handle the jump. Most often there are major growing pains, and those are often at the lowest of the low in terms of FBS level.
Extrapolating both of those teams viewership on the one time they made it to ESPN2, a heavily watched channel does no say much. What are their streaming numbers, since I imagine that is how most of their games are broadcast? We can't get those, but I bet the media partners can.
Then it costs each team an extra 5 mil a piece to make the jump. Could they indpendently afford that? Or will the MW have to dip into their funds that has already been promised to the existing members to do so?
All just to expand the conference beyond the minimum for what? adding extra conference games and diluting our overall SOS? ALl while reducing payouts for all exisiting members?
The addition of NIU kinda sucks, and having one travel partner seems to be a must. So I get that.
