Yea it sounded a lot more juicy before MMM slid that little piece of factual info in there.

At the very least it's a very cogent move for Howard to move a bunch of associate sports to a conference that will have better travel than their old conferences.

(07-06-2020 01:05 PM)monarx Wrote:  The one thing that may save the MEAC is the two great basketball recruits that recently committed to Howard and NSU respectively. Maybe the MEAC should drop football and go all in on basketball.

1) They'd lose their Celebration Bowl spot, which entails ABC coverage and a $1 million payout. But more importantly ...
2. If they dropped football, they'd no longer qualify as a Division 1 conference. A D1 conference needs to sponsor men's basketball and either football or two other team sports. Remove football from the equation and the only team sport they offer is baseball, and even that's going to be tenuous after next season as they go from nine teams to six. And there's no obvious path to a second sport. Howard is the only school with men's soccer. There's no men's volleyball or lacrosse programs (Hampton has lacrosse but is now in the Big South).

Dropping football wouldn't save the MEAC, it'd literally kill it.

(07-06-2020 01:22 PM)Blue_Trombone Wrote:  At the very least it's a very cogent move for Howard to move a bunch of associate sports to a conference that will have better travel than their old conferences.

Plus Howard was in the Sun Belt for men's soccer, and with Appalachian State dropping its program, the Belt was down to five teams (two of them affiliates), so the writing was on the wall for soccer as a conference sport.

as a little added nugget, the Patriot League (John Feinstein and I argue about this) could have been the choice, that league sponsors those same sports, but Howard chose the NEC.

(07-06-2020 12:00 PM)HeadsetGuy Wrote:  Howard makes some moves

@HUBisonSports
has accepted an invitation to join the Northeast Conference as an associate member in six sports [Man swimming Womens swimming mens Soccer Womens golfing womens Soccer womens Lacrosse].

per NEC conference tweet

less and less of the MEAC

The NEC should fire whoever writes their tweets. That is some pretty embarrassing grammar.

its not their fault, its mine, when I copied and pasted their tweet, they had used emojis for all the sports; I didn't check the grammar very carefully when the computer replaced the emojis with words