Did this once last year, decided to check in midway through crossover play.

If the MAC East were its own conference, it would have a Sagarin of 77.60, good for 10th best in the country, behind the Missouri Valley and ahead of C-USA.

If the MAC West were its own conference, it would have a Sagarin of 67.12, ranking it 27th in the nation, sandwiched between the Patriot and the NEC.  Barf.

In the RPI, if the conference were split by division, the East would have an RPI of .5338, which would rank ninth, between the same MVC and C-USA.

The West would come in with a .4441 mark, which would rank 29th, between the Southland and MEAC.

(RPI from http://www.udpride.com/images/rpi.htm)

And O'Shea thought the West was bad.

Why not keep the divisions, but don't have them play each other until the tournament?  It would be like old school MLB.   May have to add one or two more teams to each division to get enough regular season games. 

Same is true for MAC football.  At a minimum the bottom dwellers make the MAC look mediocreor worse.  Since it is obvious nobdy is moving from this conference to another, it only makes sense for the "strong" members to reduce the number of teams in this league so that it gains some respect.  The MAC has, over the years, tended to add teams to the bottom NOT the top.  Thus, the league has been in a slow decline. 

I would say look at the most recent additions and determine whether they have really kept their side of the bargain and grown into the league.  Use the two "major sports" and use objective criteria, standings, attendance, resources committed, etc. and to determine who stays and who goes and lets make the league respectable!

You can look at any conference and say the bottom dwellers are hurting the better teams in these types of scenarios. However, the fact is that we have 13 teams and they won't all be good all the time.

This is true, however, when the bottom-dwellers are consistently and continually the same teams for the best part of a decade, it seems to indicate an institutional problem, rather than the simple regular cycles in this type of environment.

Giacomo has a point, it probably gets more attention because of the perfect divide of East and West.  If we just had 12 teams in 1 combined standing, we probably would barely talk about it.

Part of the problem with any kind of reform is schools like NIU - Tops in Football, worst in hoops.  It is hard to make any kind of decisions as far as kicking members out or bringing new ones in when it affects so much more than just Basketball.  Eastern Michigan is about the only school I can point to and confidently say they just plain suck, have no hope and are killing our conference.  The other 11 schools show me something in the way of success in 1 of the 2 major sports and/or solid fan support potential.  Maybe I'm crazy.

Yes, but the fan support and the dollars won't be there to help build the momentum.