CUSA basketball is a bit more complex than just saying "it blows." The lower half of the league has been pretty darn bad, and that drags down the league's overall rating.
But the best teams in the league are pretty good. The fact that the league's only representative has gone into the NCAA tournament as a very low seed three years in a row, and has won a first round game (UAB and MTSU twice), proves that. Effectively, the league has advanced to the round of 32 teams in each of the last three years. And that league representative has not totally dominated its CUSA mates at the top of the heap like Memphis used to do, again adding support to the notion that the top 4-5 teams have been pretty good.
These three NCAA wins in a row have earned the conference valuable additional shares from the NCAA tournament pool money that I think last 3 years each. There are plenty of one-and-done mid-major conferences out there over the past three years, but CUSA does not match that profile.
Certainly the league needs to improve, and it is not a Top 25 team producer. There needs to be more parity. It somehow needs to be able to garner more respect come tournament-picking time. But it is a better basketball league right now than a football league.