This was emailed to me by a staunch supporter. He asked me to post it on the board for discussion. It is a strong piece of work that should compel our Athletic Department to think hard about our conference affiliation and make plans accordingly.

I think NJ Alum has asked similar questions about our future. We need to have a plan for where we want to be 2, 5, 10 years from now. And, IIRC, there are a number of people who are hard-pressed to articulate what we have in common with the remaining CAA schools.

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The ten year plan would benefit from adding a study of the College’s ideal conference affiliation.

From the outside looking in it appears that there have been two primary arbiters for W&M athletics in the last 40 years – institutional leadership at the College and the CAA Commissioner. Institutional leadership deserves credit for an important success. These individuals are responsible for W&M’s biggest athletic competitive advantage – scholar athlete outcomes 10, 15, 20 years after athlete graduations. (Parenthetically it would be a bigger advantage if the story of these outcomes could be nudged from the anecdotal to the statistical in the form of hard data generated via outreach, research, and compilation).

The above success notwithstanding, institutional leadership has also acquiesced in allowing the other arbiter of WM athletics, the CAA commissioner, to have outsized influence over sports at the College. As schools (seven in total now) have left the CAA over the years, the band aid repairs/replacements have left W&M student athletes competing in a conference that institutional leadership arguably would never have chosen as a desirable option at the outset, and with prospects for future turmoil/churn.

When pressed in the past about what composition of schools would constitute an ideal conference for W&M, institutional leadership’s response has been that there is no other school like the College. Even if this argument is accepted at face value, however, the counter-argument that there are many schools more similar to W&M than the present CAA composition is also valid.

With as much disruption as W&M has experienced in the CAA since 1979, it’s curious that institutional leadership has never undertaken (or disclosed having undertaken) a study of what W&M’s ideal conference would look like. Such an endeavor would seek to identify those factors that would result in a more logical and better fit for Tribe athletics than the present CAA construct where some
schools are only in for football, some schools don’t play football, and some schools might be contemplating leaving. Such a study might consider within and beyond the CAA on a school by school basis:

o Overall resources dedicated to athletics

o How those resources are divided amongst football, basketball, and non/low revenue sports

o Number of women’s sports/number of men’s sports

o Student body size

o Student activity fees

o Existing/planned facilities

o Entrance requirements

o Stay in school requirements

o Proximity

o Costs, time and attractiveness for athletes and fans to travel to these schools
Orono or DeLand? Hempstead or Greenville?

o Potential ticket sales/increased revenues from visiting fans

o Inclination to move to FBS football

o Cost of attendance intent (1)

It’s wonderful that the College is endeavoring to be more bold on the fund raising front, but additional vision and leadership may be as or more important. Potential conference partners should be sorted, approached, and queried.

 Have other schools performed similar studies?

 What did they learn?

 Have A10 schools found the higher profiles and revenue from one sport worth all the travel to St. Louis and Buffalo?

 If after one successful coach departed, and the men’s basketball program took a step back, would their outlook change?

 For Atlantic Sun, Northeast, and Southern Conference schools – “how do you see your programs evolving?”

It’s unlikely a conference which represents a better fit for W&M will ever come calling. In fact, one suspects such an entity will never exist without an institution like W&M taking the lead in framing a competitive landscape that other similar schools find compelling and welcoming. Assuming a position of leadership to create a more ideal conference might be controversial, but there is no better college than W&M to do so. The college hasn’t compromised itself academically since the early 1950s. The NCAA should welcome such an effort. The College is an institution that makes the NCAA look good (and the NCAA’s reciprocity for the College’s decades of outstanding behavior is a mystery).

The objective of the above examination should be for William and Mary to land in a conference where the members play both football and basketball and are committed to non/low-revenue sports such that the College is not at a competitive disadvantage versus schools which focus on one or two sports. There should be greater commonality of academic standards. There should be a presumption that member institutions consider their conference a long term home where the playing field is level, the time and costs associated with travel are reasonable, and the rivalries will be persistent. And by the way, such a conference should be the shining example of what the rest of the NCAA should resemble.

(1) Even assuming visionaries at the College went to sleep in 1979 and woke up in 2017 and concluded that the CAA had morphed into an organization that had exceeded their wildest expectations, there would still be an argument for compiling the data described above. There is always the possibility that some misguided member institution will choose to leave the CAA and leadership would desire to have objective criteria for finding a replacement. It’s a bit more complicated than in Power 5 situations where the decision hinges on whether the allure of television revenues outweighs the inconvenience (insanity) of the women’s soccer team having to travel from Miami to Syracuse.