BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

FTFY

 

News conference with the presidents and ADs of Washington State and Oregon State. It's long (1:14) but many questions are answered to the best of their ability at this time.

 

Interesting angle on realignment, and why administrators at so many schools have been pushing for it. It pushes costly out-of-state enrollment.

The University of Oregon President finally said the quiet part out loud (while waving his arms) (substack.com)

Interesting story on state-supported schools that mostly cater to out-of-state students at the expense of in-state applicants:

State University No More: Out-of-State Enrollment and the Growing Exclusion of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students at Public Flagship Universities - Jack Kent Cooke Foundation (jkcf.org)

 

I'm sure we'll get some discussion about administrative bloat and the exponential increase in tuition costs, but these trends are also connected to increasingly smaller allotments of funding from state governments.

I know my alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill, is capped on how many undergrads it can take from out-of-state (18 percent), which is phenomenal for in-state students, and our state constitution requires tuition to be "free as practicable" which keeps tuition relatively low, but it also makes the university reliant on an increasingly adversarial general assembly to provide funding or to raise money like a private institution. I'm not asking for broken hearts for my alma mater - it's largely figured out how to get through it all - but the same can't be said for every university in the system.

It wasn't that long ago that the University of Virginia attempted to become a private institution because legislative support had become so small.

On a sorta related note: My favorite sport is wrestling. The sport, not the teevee soap opera. The sport is in the middle of an exponential growth phase - after having been largely in retraction for most of my life - thanks in large part to women's wrestling finally taking off. As the sport has been growing, NAIA, DIII and DII schools have been adding wrestling programs left and right - some bringing on both men's and women's, some adding women's to an existing program, and some just adding women's wrestling without a men's program. In almost every case, it's driven by university admins seeing an opportunity to bring in 25-30 more full tuition paying students who just want to continue in the sport. That's intriguing to me as at any FBS school that's a negligible difference, but for small colleges it's keeping a little money flowing in.

 

USC did this more than 40 years ago for water polo. It was going to be cut, but the players and their parents put together an argument just like this. Here is a sport that has 25 in the program on 5 scholarships. That means there are 20 on full tuition, and most of them (being competitive swimmers) are high-scholar students. It worked.

 

The schools that bailed on the PAC-12 are now suing to prevent the 2PAC from getting the assets they left behind. Talk about kicking someone when they're down.

Washington pushes to dismiss WSU, OSU lawsuit vs. Pac-12

"The University of Washington and the other nine outgoing members of the Pac-12 have struck back at Oregon State and Washington State in a series of briefs and motions filed on Monday and obtained by The Athletic. Here’s what you need to know:

• On Monday, UW filed a motion to intervene in the litigation between Washington State and Oregon State and the Pac-12 conference, arguing that it is involved in the lawsuit but its interests are not adequately represented by any existing party.
• If granted, UW would then ask Whitman County (Wash.) Superior Court to grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
• The nine outgoing Pac-12 schools filed a brief to support UW and support its motion to dismiss. They also said they’ve entered into a mediation process with WSU and OSU that is currently ongoing and scheduled through October.
  

 

Area Division III schools George Fox and Pacific brought back football in this century to increase male enrollment. Lewis & Clark re-committed to football to grow male enrollment. Area power Linfield regularly has more than 100 kids on its roster, nobody gets turned away.

The NCAA's rule preventing DI basketball schools from sponsoring DIII football is short-sighted, IMHO. Many smaller, private/public schools could sponsor DIII football and play a regional schedule and grow male enrollment.

And yes, in many cases schools are forced to seek more high-paying OOS students to make up for the cuts in state appropriations.

 

BU dropped football in 1997. Northeastern dropped it about 15 years ago. BU cited the cost of playing in I-AA. Said they would've kept a D-3 program but couldn't because of NCAA rules.

 

The workaround for those schools is playing in the non-scholarship Pioneer League. I'm fairly certain the league subsidizes the travel, which is good since it spans from San Diego to Stetson to Marist to St. Thomas in Minnesota. The league champ gets an invite to the FCS playoffs but usually struggles to compete.

 

The Patriot League was non-scholarship, at least for a while. Holy Cross gives them out now, so I'm assuming the league changed the rules?

 

I think they're limited scholarship, maybe 40 tops. Northeast Conference is the same. It's why Monmouth, Bryant, Albany and Robert Morris left, because they wanted to give the full 60.

 

The area had no interest in football. I've never met anyone who talked fondly about their BU or NE football teams. The schools' settings didn't help. And both schools have de-emphasized sports in general outside of hockey.