Everything I'm hearing about the UAC/ASUN/OVC and other mid-major realignment

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last week, the wheels of mid-major conference realignment took yet another spin. On Friday, Little Rock announced it plans to depart the Ohio Valley Conference and join the United Athletic Conference, effective July 1.

As realignment decisions go, this wasn’t a complete surprise. The UAC has been aggressively courting new membership around its current geographic footprint, and rumors that ULR, along with fellow OVC members Southeast Missouri State and Tennessee-Martin, would join the UAC have been floating around college football internet for a few weeks.

I’ve been hitting the phones over the past two weeks, talking to folks with direct familiarity with Little Rock’s thought process behind the decision, as well as athletic directors and industry consultants across the country, to better understand why this happened, what it means for future expansion in the UAC and where the OVC goes from here.

So why did Little Rock decide to leave the Ohio Valley and join a league that unabashedly really cares about football?

There were several reasons, I’m told, including some that I didn’t truly appreciate.

Not everything about mid-major conference affiliation is even directly about sports. For example, while Little Rock gets the vast majority of its students from the state of Arkansas, I’m told its second-largest source of students is the Dallas-Ft. Worth region.

The university wanted to find a conference that would allow the program to make regular visits to Texas, both to engage with Little Rock alumni and to improve out-of-state student recruitment efforts. University leadership also believed, I’m told, that Little Rock was a better “institutional fit,” both athletically and academically, with schools like Eastern Kentucky, Austin Peay and North Alabama.

Plus, getting a new in-state rival in Central Arkansas? A bonus.

Sources told me that the move to the UAC was not in direct response to Tennessee Tech’s decision to leave the OVC and join the SoCon. In fact, I’m told that initial conversations between Little Rock and the UAC/ASUN began well before that realignment decision was finalized.

But it didn’t hurt, of course.

Because the other thing I’ve been hearing is that the OVC has some real problems.

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