(08-02-2019 11:29 AM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(08-02-2019 09:58 AM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote:  

(07-31-2019 03:53 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  I always refer to it as 1981 because the vote was in late 1981 but it in no way, shape, nor form was related to 1978's creation of I-A/I-AA.

1981 was NCAA crassness at its prime. The powers in Shawnee Mission wanted OU and UGA to drop the anti-trust lawsuit, they wanted the CFA to quit trying to do its own TV.

The solution they came up with was change the "or" in the I-A criteria between sport sponsorship and attendance criteria to an "and" to eliminate a bunch of schools.

The NCAA tried to sugar coat making the following promises. There would be more post-season opportunities, there would be a minimum amount of TV coverage, and there would be no changes that would interfere with schools continuing to play each other if they ended up on different sides of the split.

Horse manure all around.
In short order post-season was deregulated in I-A and every FBS league ended up having more post-season opportunities than any FCS.
The TV deal couldn't be delivered because the NCAA lost the lawsuits and the TV contract.
Before the decade ended the 6-5 bowl eligibility rule was adopted and initially no wins over I-AA would count then it was only one win every four years.

That final change broke the camels back and spurred a dash of schools rushing to I-A. In short order, Akron, LaTech, AState and Nevada were all in or back in I-A and it didn't help when schools regularly playing them said they would no longer play because the bowl eligibility rules.

The schools forced into I-AA got screwed 10 ways to Sunday as the NCAA didn't deliver on the promises and failed the primary missing on keeping the power school using the NCAA to negotiate the TV deal.

I think this is a really radical mischaracterization of what actually happened.

You are portraying it like the evil stepmother NCAA somehow tricked half its member schools into accepting indentured servitude. That’s just completely ridiculous.

Ask yourself, who exactly is the NCAA and where exactly does it derive its power? Further, how did all these rules get passed in the first place?

Because member schools voted on them!

The NCAA is a membership organization. It is not some outside entity that somehow works outside the purview of its member schools. The “NCAA” is just a term for a collection of schools that agree to play by a certain set of rules. As such, the NCAA does what its members want it to do.

If there was a split between the haves and the have-note in the late 70s and early 80s, it was only because the majority of that organization’s membership obviously wanted that split to happen.

What happened in the late 70s and early 80s was that a lot of schools – especially the Ivy League schools that had initially dominated the college football landscape but had steadily lost ground over the decades — had lost their appetite for continually pouring resources into the college athletics black hole because they felt that it was coming at the direct expense of their core academic mission and also because they saw no end in sight to the arms race.

However, they still wanted to compete in high-level athletics.

In other words, a heck of a lot of teams that opted for 1-AA/FCS did so because they were very happy stabilize their extracurricular spending. You will note that the NCAA has not disbanded FCS, which obviously would have happened if everyone - or even the majority of schools- truly hated it.

However, the game-changer happened a few years later when Oklahoma and Georgia won their television lawsuit against the NCAA. That changed the calculus entirely and ultimately paved the way for the super-conference era that has in turn spawned the current dynamic with an organized postseason, conference raiding, conference dedicated television networks, and just an enormous amount of money coming into the haves at the direct expense of the have nots.

The reason we have a burgeoning amount of schools in FBS now is that it is difficult for even small FBS programs like my alma mater, Ohio University, to pass up the money that FBS membership provides. That lure has proven too much for schools like Old Dominion and Liberty and I’m sure others will follow.

Also, some of the schools in the smaller FBS leagues look at the obscene gobs of money continually being pulled in by the schools in the major conferences and of course they want to piece of that pie as well.

Take the AAC, for example. Fans/trustees of every single one of the schools in that league thinks their team is eventually going to be invited into the Big 12, the ACC, etc. why else do you think there’s been a facilities boom in that league? Do you think UCF would have a new stadium without the promise that it’s the start of something very special? What about Houston? Until recently, Connecticut? Cincinnati?

None of those facilities get anywhere near the amount of money they’ve gotten if there wasn’t a firm belief that it will one day pay off in the form of competing at the highest level of the sport – which is obviously not happening now.

Now, obviously those schools are more than worthy of doing that. This is not an indictment of the quality of those schools or their programs, but rather an acknowledgment of the nature of the system.

I suggest you read the articles of the time that talk of NCAA staff and leadership trying to stop the litigation.

The NCAA staff stated that the forcibly reclassified would be given their own mini-TV package, expanded post-season access, and would be able to schedule I-A opponents exactly as they had before.

Those three promises plus the desire to avoid the destruction of the TV deal cornerstoned the vote. You can search the NCAA News archives as well as other major publications and read it all yourself.

The vote was taken with expectations regarding the treatment of the reclassified that were false.

Compare similar situations since that time and the collegial outcome of insuring no one gets kicked out has been the rule ever since.

I think UCF would have built a new stadium since they were playing in Legion Field East (a pre-renovation Citrus Bowl in a sketchy neighborhood). I doubt they would have gone straight to a 45,000 seat stadium, though.