Football drives the bus in college sports. If you are going to step up from the G5 to the P5, you need to have some sort of football "hook" to make you enticing to a P5 conference. That means either your program is in a major TV market, your program is in a part of the country that has lots of P5 high school talent, it is a "Boise" type program where it has some media power on the G5 level and can go mano a mano with many mid and high level P5 teams, or combinations of the above. Basketball programs are nice but they do not really factor into P5 conference invitations.Bad football team in a small market means none of the big conferences want to go out of their way for them. But why aren't the in the Big East for everything except for football?
UConn football does not meet any of the categories that a P5 program is looking for. They are in college sports purgatory at this point. They have a dominant women's basketball program but that is irrelevant to P5 consideration. Their men's hoops is mediocre to poor at this point. Hurley may bring it back but at the end of the day it honestly doesn't do much for the P5 argument. It's a nice "to have" but not a "need to have" for P5 admission. The football team? No one cares about it, it is in bad shape, not in a football recruiting hotbed, major media market or a "Boise" type program. It just isn't. In fact I can think of three (3) programs in the AAC that meet more of the "requirements" than UConn does at this point...Temple, UCF and SMU. I think any of those programs are more likely to jump to P5 status before UConn ever gets there.