(04-12-2017 02:21 PM)teamvsn Wrote:  

(04-12-2017 01:35 PM)MplsBison Wrote:  Why would a DII go to NAIA?? If anything, I've seen the trend as the opposite in the upper midwest.

That trend has pretty much slowed to a trickle, as the schools that can adapt to D2 have already gone, and those that can't adapt but went anyway have not had good experiences.

Lots of schools that fit into the NAIA's sweet spot would consider going NAIA. The NAIA's sweet spot is for running a high quality athletics program on a lower budget than D2 or even D3. Schools under 3000 students, especially private schools, without huge endowments. There are huge disadvantages in D2 for such schools, like requiring a lot of administrative overhead, compliance rules that make sense for elite athletes but zero sense for normal student athletes, budget flexibility on a year by year basis (for example no scholarship minimums), recruiting rule advantages (year round, international ineligibility, etc.), and a more accommodating approach to coach-athlete relationships that fosters mentoring and leadership development. And many of the "leading institutions" in the NAIA being religiously oriented, there's more of a sense that politics of the organization won't be hostile to them. Only about 25% (a guess) of current NAIA membership are public schools.

Look at it this way: if you are a school of between 1500 and 2000 students, private and religious, don't have the money to fully fund your scholarship levels, and haven't seen national tournaments on a regular basis in decades, why would you want to stay in the NCAA? You could take all the money you spend on administration & compliance, focus it on a few targeted sports and have better teams than you had in the NCAA, win more games, have more championship appearances, more excitement on campus, and perhaps do a better job of developing students into leaders. Or you could have a blue disc on your web site.

Davenport moved to to D2 because they have over 10,000 students enrolled. I noticed the that many of the schools that went back to NAIA are small schools. I also think it have to be schools in a large populated areas that these schools that move up to D2 was more for exposure for being an NCAA member. I know a lot of people never heard of NAIA before and think all the NAIA schools belong to the NCAA.

Which large student population schools from the NAIA like Davenport could make a move to the NAIA to become successful like Arkansas Tech, UCA and so forth that moved up?