If option one where to pass...Villanova would then be a D1 football school.... the 9th member of the future all sports league would be in place...in eastern member who plays great basketball and is in a huge market.....this may solve a lot of our problems
Jackson
NCAA plans to rethink rules for I-A status
By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
GRAPEVINE, Texas — The NCAA is backing off toughened membership criteria that threaten to bounce Kent State, Ball State and a handful of other schools from college football's most prominent and competitive division.
The association's highest rules-making body, the Division I board of directors, will revise or rescind a controversial requirement that teams average at least 15,000 in home attendance each season to stay in top-tier Division I-A, chairman Robert Hemenway, also the chancellor at Kansas, said Monday.
The board expects to weigh alternatives in April.
One option: erase the I-A designation. Classify current I-A and I-AA schools as Division I, as basketball and every other sport does, and let television and other marketplace influences determine which are big-time and which aren't.
Unofficially, big-time status would come from affiliation with the Bowl Championship Series, which once was limited to the nation's six most powerful conferences but now extends to all 11 leagues in I-A.
The NCAA still would sponsor a playoff for the former I-AA schools, holding them to the same 63-scholarship limit they have today. The current system would change little, in fact, beyond the title change.
"I think some combination of those sorts of thoughts will end up being something we can build consensus around by April," said David Berst, the NCAA's vice president for Division I.
Midlevel schools and conferences in I-A, led by Kent State President Carol Cartwright, who heads the NCAA Executive Committee, had fought feverishly against the new attendance minimum. It's one of several guidelines drawn up three years ago and implemented in August 2004 in response to fears the I-A brand was being diluted by a steady flow of I-AA schools moving up, seeking status or a shot at a bowl.
Other guidelines range from a minimum number of home games vs. other I-A teams (four last season and in 2005, five thereafter) to minimum offerings of scholarships in football and other sports.
Failure to meet any of the provisions would cause a school to enter a 10-year probationary period of sorts. Failure to meet them again in that time would mean being barred that season from playing in a bowl.
Unofficial attendance figures posted by the NCAA show five schools fell beneath the 15,000 cutoff last season: San Jose State (whose average of 6,479 was by far the lowest in Division I-A), Buffalo, Kent State, Middle Tennessee State and Ball State
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