UALR was already there. They weren't going anywhere. UTA allows you to balance UALR, gives TXST a travel partner, gets you back in DFW, and gives you some halfway decent basketball and baseball.
I'm usually against non-football members, but this makes sense (much more sense than adding Seattle to the WAC).
By the way, this was in UTA's student paper yesterday:
http://www.theshorthorn.com/index.ph...tic-conference