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St. Francis (PA) a small, private college and a participant in the Big Dance this year, is dropping to Division III. Citing NIL and the Portal the school says it cannot compete at the Division I level any longer.
I suspect we'll see more of this move from other schools.
I think the SEC and Big 10 will have two super leagues and some type of partnership that basically makes a new D-1A, CFP, whatever they want to call it. It will contain somewhere in the neighborhood of the top 40 blueblood schools. Everyone else will be relegated to a new version of D-1AA, FCS etc. The new top tier will have its own rules with or without the NCAA and will be minor league football in most ways.
All the other current FBS and FCS schools will be in the next tier and the NCAA will continue to treat them like red headed stepchildren because it will be the only place the NCAA has any real power. If there are teams that can't afford to play at this level (less NIL, restricted portal movement unless it's to jump up a tier) then they will go DII or DIII.
There will still be haves and have nots in both tiers, but the divide is already too much for most schools to ever overcome.
College athletics was destroyed by ESPN pushing its woke agenda onto the NCAA and the athletes. It will never be the same again in my lifetime. BTW, we had ample opportunities along the way to make a step up, but when you have Reneau riding herd during the good years with inept athletic directors riding shotgun...this pile of steaming bovine scatum is what you get!
I have said for years that our position is more our own fault than the universe conspiring against us. We prioritized spending more than was required on sports that have no ROI other than pride, we have never in my almost 50 years realized that a concerted effort to reach and treat the small to mid-donors can bring in the overall same amounts of cash but with the added bonus of more people being engaged and at events. We have chased the big donors almost to the point of exclusivity any time we need something, but then lament low attendance, poor alumni relations etc. We have been reactionary in every change that has happened in the college athletics world over the last 40 years, never visionary.
The same can be said in a lot of ways on the academic side of the university as well, but it's not as public facing as the athletics side of the world.
We Jech it up every time, by not just shooting ourselves in the foot, we blow it off with a shotgun.
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Originally Posted by CARTEK
It's easy to find better things to spend money on. While I admire those who still contribute all they can on the low to mid levels, I'm out. Baseball was my last straw.Quote:
Originally Posted by DallasDog
I buy tickets to games my dad wants to go to etc., but I stopped buying season tickets a while back. I stopped LTAC several years ago and started a scholarship in the local school district where we lived for a long time, it went to a couple of kids over the years that wanted to go to Tech, but there weren't always candidates for Tech. I get more communication and outreach from UT on a weekly basis than Tech sends in 6 months, and I just work here and attend a game now and then.
There have always been so many little things we could do to make fans and alumni feel engaged and we very rarely to never have done them. Even, when the ideas I have been taken straight to the AD and/or Prez.