Re: The New WCHA, 2014 Offseason: See-ya, Bruce
If UAA and UAF were so self-sufficient, why did they shackle themselves to this seemingly low revenue and backward thinking WCHA?
UAA and UAF's league fate has never been in their own hands. Geographic isolation from the other 57 teams does that. FFS, Huntsville, Alabama is broadly considered to be "too far away" from the rest of the college hockey world and it nearly cost them their program. UAA and UAF have two things going for them which would keep them from folding without a league.
They are the only major college sports in the state. Operational funding for them isn't a difficult political thing. Secondly, both schools are used to heavily subsidizing travel (sometimes FULLY paying travel and hotels) for nearly every team that has ever visited to joint to play hockey and combined with the fact that playing there doesn't count against the 34 game limit makes it less than too difficult to find willing opponents. Not being in a league would almost certainly water down the rosters talent-wise which would be the main problem. Getting games wouldn't be nearly as big a problem.
Surely there were multiple other leagues that would have been falling all over themselves to admit two financial juggernauts like that.
Here's the part where you feel insulted. Rather than seriously engaging the topic as you pretend to do with your first sentence, you introduce a completely ludicrous strawman; apparetnly, for some vague self-pleasuring sarcastic reason.
Making the topic me (as the typical reactionary forum fascists do) instead of what the topic is: the continual whining and moaning from WCHA fans who post here regarding "revenue" ... the only league-issue to which they'll never have a solution or even be able to constructively engage because all of those revenue numbers are simply not accessible. The result of which is that every noob who comes along to participate in this forum comes up with "travel expenses and travel difficulty to Alaska" as their virtual only idea.
And as for the state schools lobbying for more money, none of the other 8 teams have the benefit of being the largest schools in their systems. All of them are fighting with schools like Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State, and Alabama for those funding dollars, and athletic expenditures are not very high on the priority lists in those states.
Not a problem for UAA and UAF as I've described above. They are the flagship state schools playing the flagship team sport. So again, if those state schools in the WCHA want more money then they'll have to buckle down and find political solutions. There is no money in a WCHA bucket to save them. What part of that is so difficult for you people here to grasp?
I would also think that one of the ways to save the most amount of money in short order is to avoid 1 or 2 trips to Alaska every year. So let's try and build some constructive partnerships, rather than outlandish statements like the quote which we all know has not one shred of sense in it.
You should try to stay away from engaging me directly in the future as most of the other noobs here do. Also, never put words in my mouth.