(05-19-2020 05:32 PM)ken d Wrote: (05-19-2020 03:45 PM)Statefan Wrote: Baseball and Football are the two sacred cows at ECU.
So, serious question. I think I know the answer, but I can't readily find where it is written.
Is it possible for a school to be in D-I and not play men's basketball?
For a Division 1 conference member, in rummaging around the by-laws, it LOOKS LIKE (I may have overlooked something) it is in effect no, but it is indirect ...
... a multi-sport conference must sponsor basketball, while a school must sponsor a minimum number of team sports, and typically the conference won't let you be a member unless you play basketball in the conference. Certainly if ECU wanted to be a Division 1 FBS school that did not play basketball, it would have to go independent, since none of the FBS conferences would let you join without playing basketball.
So drop back to a FB-only affiliate in the AAC and play the balance of their sports as a Division 1 independent (a reverse-mirror-image of Notre Dame).
Now IIRC, to do that you would HAVE TO play three men's team sports ... the ability to only sponsor two men's teams sports if explicitly if they are FB & Basketball ... so in dropping Basketball, they would have to add ANOTHER men's team sport, which would substantially cut down any savings on MBB travel if it's a team sport where they have to go scratching (as an independent) for some affiliate position in some conference.
And the same people who would yell about baseball being dropped would yell about baseball withdrawing from the AAC, which is a pretty good baseball conference.
Easier to sacrifice Men & Women's cross country (which saves one or more coaching positions within the track coaching system, and saves on travel to Fall cross-country tri-meets, which would often be M&W anyway) and "study" cutting some of the cheap to sponsor sports which likely partly pay their own way with tuition payments of their walk-ons and quarter ride students.
The "extra" women's team sports are de-facto costs of all of those FB scholarships under Title IX. And unlike Akron's restarted baseball team, which seems like it will have exactly as many scholarships to hand out as Akron baseball supporters are able to endow (making the "tuition subsidy" an actual net contributor to the university education budget), if the Pirates have a competitive baseball team, they'll be giving out more than the minimum number of men's baseball scholarships, which could well be why they started up women's lacrosse in the "Northeastern private school girls" enrollment magnet it is normally used for.