RICO
My wife and I relocated to Chicago from Houston. We have been able to maintain CO OP status by leveraging connections in Detroit & Memphis on NW. Although you have to put up with NW's crap. I don't mind MEM but hate DTW.

My wife is Platinum. She's flies ORD-EWR or ORD-IAH 3-4 times a month. When going to EWR she usually flies NW via Detroit to get 4 segments roundtrip. Platinum came easy doing that over & over. She usually flies ORD-IAH direct on CO. Her business trips are East or Gulf Coast so CO works for her. She also goes to Europe periodically and the new CLE to LGW services works great.

I'm Silver but only because my business trips are all over the place and sometimes CO can't get me from here to there without a lot of pain so I'm forced onto DL or AA. (I've sworn off UA completely!). CLE doesn't have good West Coast flights as someone mentioned earlier I believe.

Bottom line, if you are willing to use NW hubs in MPS, DTW or MEM you can really rack up segments on CO to get higher status. It works for us.