(12-13-2012 02:27 PM)dbackjon Wrote: Besides Austin Peay, most of the current NEC football members were non-schollie in the not too distant past. Slowing adding schollies.
Stony Brook went all the way to 63 4 years ago. Albany will next year. Rest are at 40
Albany and Stony Brook are both public schools. NEC schools are likely still pulling in a good amount of coin from their programs, and they're roughly on the same level as the non-scholarship teams.
This is the NEC's list of non-conference wins
Sacred Heart - Dartmouth
Robert Morris - Lafayette
Duquesne - Dayton, Valparaiso
St. Francis (PA) - Morehead State
Monmouth - Rhode Island
Albany - Colgate
Wagner - Holy Cross, Colgate (NCAA Tournament)
And, for a better picture, their losses to non-scholarship teams:
Georgetown over Wagner
Lehigh, Cornell over Monmouth
Marist, Bucknell over Bryant
Dayton over Robert Morris
Lehigh over Central Connecticut State
Colgate over Sacred Heart
Rhode Island is one of the worst teams in the country, having lost 13 straight games, and a large part of that is them transitioning down under the NEC's scholarship limit as they get ready to join for football next academic year while still playing a full CAA schedule. But I digress: the NEC had an 8-8 record against non-scholarship teams, and those games comprised 60% of the NEC's non-conference schedule.
I guess my point is that the NEC, from a cost/benefit perspective, isn't a great raison d'etre for scholarship football. If they wanted scholarship football, they would have just gone ahead and fielded a scholarship team in the Big South in the first place.