RE: D3 Rowan Still Eyeing D1, Enroollment To 40,000 and $500 million Capital Projects
I read this article a couple of days ago, but now the link is telling me I need a subscription to read the article. If I remember the story correctly, the president of Rowan thinks he is going to double the enrollment, triple the endowment and find $500m in new construction that won't cost the school anything. I don't remember the author doing any fact checking, like asking and confirming what company was in negotiations to build the $100m sports complex that Rowan was going to be the anchor tenant for. I also don't remember any followup questions being addressed, like where exactly do you see this money all coming from, are there major fund raising campaigns currently going on to cover possible future scholarships? Or, in an age when college enrollment nationally and HS enrollment in NJ are seeing significant reductions, where are the additional students coming from? What I read was an article with a lot of "can," "could" in it, but not many facts. It read more like a post on one of the realignment threads.
I wouldn't say this will never happen, because you never know. That being said, I've heard this song before about Montclair State and Kean going back to the early 1980's. New Jersey is not a college sports hot bed the way other states are. Hell, Rutgers and Seton Hall are both members of power conferences and the two of them barely get any local press. Rowan would need a D1 conference invite, so the NJIT rout is out. Rowan could still have a shot, because it is located way South of all the other D1 schools, so there COULD be a niche for it.
A public, R1 research university with 40k students does not fit the profile of the NEC, MAAC or Patriot (even though all three are headquartered locally). They are overwhelmingly populated with small, private, liberal arts colleges. In each case at a projected 40k, Rowan would have a bigger enrollment than the next three largest schools combined. So chances of an invite to any of them is really slim. The CAA which at least has large state schools as members, already has market saturation with UDel, Monmouth, Drexel/Nova in that area. The AAC has become an increasingly southern focused conference, that as the self-proclaimed P6 isn't going to take a recent D1 call-up as a member. That leaves only the AEC as a possible landing spot, with football parked in the Big South or membership in a desperate MEAC.
As for the waiver idea that's just message board fantasy. There are at least three different D2 conferences with members in NJ or PA that Rowan could join as it tries to transition. So that means if everything goes as planned with no hiccups and a conference invite, we are looking at ten years before Rowan could be D1.
(This post was last modified: 06-21-2022 08:21 PM by mikeinsec127.)
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