The financial stresses of the COVID-19 crisis obviously is going to be felt in college athletics so I think it’s time to ease the requirements on DI conferences regarding the minimum number of sports they offer.

As it stands now, conferences pretty much need to have 8-12 cookie cutter athletic departments that all sponsor the same sports. It’s time to do away with that. Let most of the non-revenue sports become single sport conferences to take advantage of small regional footprints. This also allows athletic departments to diversify and devote their resources to programs the school values. Some schools may want men’s and women’s soccer to be a focal point of their departments while others might prefer lacrosse or hockey, tennis, golf, swimming, etc.

I think this would dramatically help the non-P5 leagues.

Football in one conference, everything else in other conferences will solve most of these problems. Look at Hawaii.

I agree, Football and basketball should probably be lumped together.. Baseball, soccer, tennis, swimming, track, etc should be held in regional conferences. I mean you could even talk me into placing BBall there too since they play over 20 games a season. Football makes enough to travel from Austin to Morgantown. Although I do wish CFB went back to geographical fits of 10-12 teams max.

(04-15-2020 08:08 AM)schmolik Wrote:  Football in one conference, everything else in other conferences will solve most of these problems. Look at Hawaii.

I like the idea of having rivals in all sports.

But there is something to having football separate from the rest. Much of realignment is based on football and so there are some geographically nonsensical alignments.

They would need to look at the definition of a conference. And also how that impacts schools being able to move up to FBS. Few in FBS want that to be easier.

From the NCAA's website on statistics posted in November 2019, these are the number of schools that play each championship sport (in number descending order):

M Basketball - 351
W Basketball - 349
W Cross Country - 348
W Track, Outdoor - 340
W Volleyball - 334
W Soccer - 333
W Track, Indoor - 332
M Cross Country - 317
W Tennis - 312
M Golf - 299
M Baseball - 297
W Softball - 295
M Track, Outdoor - 289
M Track, Indoor - 269
W Golf - 267
M Football - 254
M Tennis - 251
M Soccer - 205
W Swimming & Diving - 194
M Swimming & Diving - 131
W Lacrosse - 116
W Rowing - 88
W Field Hockey - 77
M Wrestling - 75
M Lacrosse - 73
W Gymnastics - 61
W Beach Volleyball - 60
M Ice Hockey - 60
W Ice Hockey - 35
W Bowling - 34
W Water Polo - 33
W Fencing - 26
M Water Polo - 25
W Rifle - 24
M Volleyball - 22
M Fencing - 21
M Rifle - 18
M Gymnastics - 15
W Skiing - 12
M Skiing - 11

These are just raw numbers not taking into consideration recently dropped programs. It would be good to remember there are some non-Division I schools playing Division I sports especially in ice hockey. If looking to make sport-specific conferences versus using "home" conferences, some sports are heavily skewed towards certain geographies so having conferences at all may not be necessary.

But in general, outside FBS, the conferences are pretty compact. There are a few outliers that need to look for a closer home, New Jersey Tech (Atlantic Sun, which was already looking at restructuring), Chicago St. (WAC-both have some need of each other-Chicago St. probably should drop to Div. II), ST. Louis and Dayton (A10), Western Illinois and Purdue-Ft. Wayne (Summit).

FBS is a bit of a mess because of the scramble to get in a conference.

I think at the FCS level, football only conferences should be looked at very strongly regardless of the COVID thing.

For instance, this is just an example of a football only conference in my general region. Call it whatever

North Alabama
Jacksonville State
Chattanooga
Kennesaw State
ETSU
Tennessee Tech
Western Carolina
EKU


Example 2
Murray State
Austin Peay
Tennessee Martin
Missouri State
SE Missouri State
Western Illinois
Eastern Illinois
Central Arkansas

Example 3
Gardner Webb
Charleston Southern
Campbell
Citadel
VMI
Mercer
Hampton
NCA&T

I think it would be good at the FBS level too. Keep the current conferences as football only, or align geographically into something more tight like Sun-USA, and put the olympic sports into even tighter geographically based conferences. It could work really well in Texas since we already have a pretty even divide among our D1 schools with 23 D1 schools. The 12 FBS schools could make one olympic conference and the other 11 schools would be another. Since there's an NCAA tourney to choose a champion the whole eye test SOS thing doesnt really matter like in football since one could simply win their way in so while it may be a down grade in competition for the Big 12 schools it wouldn't affect their chances at a post season. Also they would raise the recruiting profile of the G5 schools to instate recruits simply by being associated with them.

The problem with multiple single sport conferences is you have to maintain some level of infrastructure. Duplicate efforts, unless you group them under a single office, then you are basically back to where you are.

Also, single sport conferences tend to be impermanent.

Conferences exist because they provide stability, permanence, and guaranteed scheduling.

(04-16-2020 11:41 AM)dbackjon Wrote:  The problem with multiple single sport conferences is you have to maintain some level of infrastructure. Duplicate efforts, unless you group them under a single office, then you are basically back to where you are.

Also, single sport conferences tend to be impermanent.

Conferences exist because they provide stability, permanence, and guaranteed scheduling.

The best way to take care of infrastructure and those other concerns for most "Olympic" sports is for those sports to be administered by the sport's national governing body.

Examples: The USTA could administer college tennis, US Soccer could administer college soccer, USA Swimming could administer college swimming and diving. If that happened, the NCAA would not be needed for those sports. The college teams could pay dues to the national governing bodies, to offset the cost of the work they would do, and have them operate collegiate national championship tournaments and maintain rules of the sport, eligibility rules, recruiting rules, etc.

(04-15-2020 10:25 AM)BePcr07 Wrote:  From the NCAA's website on statistics posted in November 2019, these are the number of schools that play each championship sport (in number descending order):

M Basketball - 351
W Basketball - 349
W Cross Country - 348
W Track, Outdoor - 340
W Volleyball - 334
W Soccer - 333
W Track, Indoor - 332
M Cross Country - 317
W Tennis - 312
M Golf - 299
M Baseball - 297
W Softball - 295
M Track, Outdoor - 289
M Track, Indoor - 269
W Golf - 267
M Football - 254
M Tennis - 251
M Soccer - 205
W Swimming & Diving - 194
M Swimming & Diving - 131
W Lacrosse - 116
W Rowing - 88
W Field Hockey - 77
M Wrestling - 75
M Lacrosse - 73
W Gymnastics - 61
W Beach Volleyball - 60
M Ice Hockey - 60
W Ice Hockey - 35
W Bowling - 34
W Water Polo - 33
W Fencing - 26
M Water Polo - 25
W Rifle - 24
M Volleyball - 22
M Fencing - 21
M Rifle - 18
M Gymnastics - 15
W Skiing - 12
M Skiing - 11

These are just raw numbers not taking into consideration recently dropped programs. It would be good to remember there are some non-Division I schools playing Division I sports especially in ice hockey. If looking to make sport-specific conferences versus using "home" conferences, some sports are heavily skewed towards certain geographies so having conferences at all may not be necessary.

M/W Tennis
M/W golf
baseball
softball
M/W swimming and diving
M/W LAX
M/W Rowing
M/W field hockey
M/W wrestling
M/W Gymnastics
W beach volleyball
M/W Ice Hockey
M/W Bowling
M/W water polo
M/W Fencing
M/W rifle
M/W volleyball
M/W skiing

Non-NCAA sports
M/W Rugby
M/W Rodeo
M/W Archery
M/W Badminton

Skiing, Rodeo and archery have D2, D3, NAIA, NJCAA and un-associated schools in the single sports conference. Alaska Pacific was in skiing at D1 when they are unassociated school until they dropped the sports. Santa Rosa College is in archery with the California D1 schools when they are a NJCAA. With the idea with the coronavirus be with us until 2022, I may not mind seeing these lower level schools move up temp for all sports to help scheduling and all that. As it is, there may not be any sports played in California and New York for the rest of this year.

In my opinion, football is the only sport worthy of single sport conferences. If you had football only conferences in Division 1 it would make most olympic sport conferences naturally contract into regional ones and it would save most schools considerably on their travel budgets. I'm all for football only conferences.