https://twitter.com/CollConsulting/status/1471561019206029318

bronto wrote:

Well if Allen and Edward Waters can get in then why not Voorhees?  The NCAA would probaby force them to invest money in athletics they aren't willing to spend in the NAIA, so maybe it would be a good thing for them.

Come to think of it, I suspect this won't happen.  Voorhees has been so unwilling to spend money on athletics - not even a web site or an SID - I think this is a way for the administration to say "see how much it's going to cost?  This is out of the question" and thus put the issue to bed for those who may be pushing for it.

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bronto wrote:

https://twitter.com/CollConsulting/status/1471561019206029318

bronto]

Well if Allen and Edward Waters can get in then why not Voorhees?  The NCAA would probaby force them to invest money in athletics they aren't willing to spend in the NAIA, so maybe it would be a good thing for them.

Come to think of it, I suspect this won't happen.  Voorhees has been so unwilling to spend money on athletics - not even a web site or an SID - I think this is a way for the administration to say "see how much it's going to cost?  This is out of the question" and thus put the issue to bed for those who may be pushing for it.

Not to mention that they aren't even in a confrence.

The Quality of schools in the SIAC seems pretty low though so I guess they could get in there. 

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https://twitter.com/CollConsulting/status/1471561019206029318

this "Consulting Group" ought to be arrested... simple theft.

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northernexplorer wrote:

https://twitter.com/CollConsulting/status/1471561019206029318

this "Consulting Group" ought to be arrested... simple theft.

Collegiate Consulting Group doesn nothing but leech off the NCAA.  If you ever read one of their reports, you will realized that this isn't academic work and isn't worth the $15-20k they are paying.  Most colleges would get better analysis and advise if they allowed a professor to earn a little extra money.

Litterally, its literally surface level analysis of conference possibilities, travel times, and superficial sport fit.  Doesn't seek to understand the clients situation, instititional fit, budgets, or community and  alumni support. 

Many motivated college student can do a better job than these NCAA marketers.

Lyon is stepping down to D3:

https://lyonscots.com/news/2022/2/8/general-important-information-for-lyon-college-athletics.aspx

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Was reading up on Lyon; seems the President resigned (?) after making comments about the 'white supremists' surrounding the campus and community. Seems he thought comments to eastern media wouldn't get back to Arkansas. And he was in the tech business prior to academia.

Interim President is over seeing the transition to D3. Hate to lose anybody, but my guess is the travel, especially to AZ, was too much. I don't think the SAC will suffer too much.

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Vorhees is rebranding to "Vorhees University". Guess they are trying to change their image. 

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Lindenwood is moving from D2 to D1 in the Ohio Valley Conference.

YOUTUBE{Kcr19v69VKk}

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Wish them well

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Ok so I have posed this question on other boards.  Currently Division 1 has the MEAC, Southland, Ohio Valley, Conference USA, and last night there was murmurs the the Northeast could also be added to this list.  These conferences need members or could lose further members to other conferences.  Now the obvious place for D1 to find new replacements to fill the holes in those conferences is to get schools from Division 2 to upgrade.  The part I am wondering that is not discussed is where does Division 2 find replacements?  Generally, very few schools will move from D3 to D2 with some notable exceptions.  So what NAIA schools, would be interested in moving to NCAA Division 2 with all the expenses and bueracracy?

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therealignmentreport1 wrote:

Ok so I have posed this question on other boards.  Currently Division 1 has the MEAC, Southland, Ohio Valley, Conference USA, and last night there was murmurs the the Northeast could also be added to this list.  These conferences need members or could lose further members to other conferences.  Now the obvious place for D1 to find new replacements to fill the holes in those conferences is to get schools from Division 2 to upgrade.  The part I am wondering that is not discussed is where does Division 2 find replacements?  Generally, very few schools will move from D3 to D2 with some notable exceptions.  So what NAIA schools, would be interested in moving to NCAA Division 2 with all the expenses and bueracracy?

I can't imagine there are many options for D2 to pull in. Looking back to the creation of D2, I picture the ideal school for that division being your smaller directional state schools and flagship branch campuses along with some of the bigger private schools that aren't quite D1 material, but are clearly too big for non-scholarship sports. Now that D1 has bloated in size and pulled in a lot of those schools, a lot of the ideal market for D2 has evaporated and it's stuck in an "off-brand D1/overpriced NAIA" no-man's land.

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therealignmentreport1]

Ok so I have posed this question on other boards.  Currently Division 1 has the MEAC, Southland, Ohio Valley, Conference USA, and last night there was murmurs the the Northeast could also be added to this list.  These conferences need members or could lose further members to other conferences.  Now the obvious place for D1 to find new replacements to fill the holes in those conferences is to get schools from Division 2 to upgrade.  The part I am wondering that is not discussed is where does Division 2 find replacements?  Generally, very few schools will move from D3 to D2 with some notable exceptions.  So what NAIA schools, would be interested in moving to NCAA Division 2 with all the expenses and bueracracy?

Well, CUSA and OVC have already re-loaded. CUSA scraped the bottom of the FBS barrel, while the OVC added some D2's (I think the OVC did better, to be honest). I'm not sure the Southland Conference will survive - and really, who cares? Ultimately, if these leagues collapse, there are alternatives and nobody is going to be left in the lurch for long. D2 went through that when the leagues consolidated into larger conferences (and now the cycle is kind of beginning again with teams leaving the GLVC and the MEC/G-MAC conferences emerging). Kind of by definition, D2 is always going to have schools coming and going... it and the NAIA are really in the same boat... schools that can't draw students without athletic scholarships to draw them. The primary difference is what the guy down the street is doing. If you are close to NAIA opponents, you stick with the NAIA, if you aren't, you go D2.

I think the NAIA should be proud of former schools like Lindenwood that grew beyond it, and also pleased that a few schools like Oakland City came back to the NAIA after finding D2 wasn't a fit. If the NAIA continues to market itself and be more agile than the NCAA, I think there's room for it to re-expand in the east... a lot of D3 instability and conference realignment in the mid-Atlantic right now. The CSAC and some of the former NECC schools would be WAY better off in the NAIA than they are in D3. Adding them would probably bring the NAC schools back into the NAIA as well. 

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Looks like bronto's school is going D2...  https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/committees/d2/memb/Mar2022D2Memb_Report.pdf

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inkblot wrote:

Looks like bronto's school is going D2...  https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/committees/d2/memb/Mar2022D2Memb_Report.pdf

Well, it's public now so I can talk. There's a few angles to this:

VSN:

I'm still a fan of the NAIA, and still a fan of Westmont. But after next year there will not be an overlap there. 🙁

Personally:

I am not excited. But I am not depressed either.  AD Dave Odell has assured me and others that we wouldn't be doing this if we weren't going to do this right, and attain similar levels of success at the D2 level.  We'll see about that.  The other former GSAC members in the PacWest have had what we could call "sporadic success".  Both APU and Point Loma have made it to the Final Four, but usually win no more than a game or two in the regionals.  So yes, we'll see.  The silver lining is that we'll be playing our historic rivals again in the PacWest: APU, Biola, Concordia, Fresno Pacific, and Point Loma.

What did I know, and when  did I know it?

I first started hearing questions about NAIA vs D2 from faculty - yes, faculty - after Biola left the NAIA.  There have been many discussions with various people at Westmont since then, ranging from "we might do this" to "I think we're going to do this" following that.  I only got confirmation mid-March of this year following the normal app deadline; I asked Odell if this was the year they applied, and he said that the deadline shifted to March 1 because of the constitutional changes, but that yes they were going to do it.  Up until then i had hope that they wouldn't.  So it's really only a few months that I "knew", and i was told off the record as a "valued alumni", so I couldn't talk about it.

WHY D2???

Throughout the discussions I've had, there were a lot of topics covered.  Some of them are still off the record, and will be for some time .. or ever forever if they never become relevent. But most importantly, it's less about NAIA vs NCAA than GSAC vs CalPac. The GSAC has changed a great deal since our historic rivals started moving away.  In order to recruit new GSAC members, the conference changed their charter to no longer be Christian based... although it's still all private schools.  So that is one reason to stay GSAC gone. The new schools are in Arizona and Northern California, so travel has increased.  Another reason to stay GSAC, gone. With the increased travel, most of the sports moved to a "travel partner" scheduling system, in which games were played on Thursday and Saturday, creating 3-4 day road trips to Nor Cal and Arizona.  That made sense.  But to many of the schools in the GSAC that are struggling financially and had a large chunk of students that are athletes (frequently on road trips), the next logical step was to change the academic schedule to not have school on Fridays. This is when I started hearing things from faculty: this is the althetic tail wagging the academic dog. "Who are we associating ourselves with?". Then came COVID. A few localities within the GSAC footprint, including Santa Barbara County, were super strict about testing and quarantining.  Westmont complied, and was in fact one of the few colleges in California that actually had on campus attendence last year all year. But many schools in the GSAC weren't under such orders, and would not perform any testing even at the worst time to protect their students, and our athletes (in game situations).  So the GSAC had a split schedule, with the testing teams playing each other and the non-testing teams playing each other.  Again, "who are we associating ourselves with?". For 2021/22 and COVID, they still would not test, although the pandemic is milder.  What they did was make any missed games forfeits, not postponements.  This was a blatant engineering of advantage to favor teams that don't test. The only teams that had forfeits last year were teams that tested.  The other teams may very well have played with infected players, but didn't know. I'll add that of the other things that are still off the record, it became obvious that the move was inevitable.

Odell is very optimistic about our chances in D2, and thinks that Westmont will instantly be top 10 academically in D2. That, combined with our location and mission, makes for a unique niche that will help us continue to attract great players. If you know the rules of D2 membership and Westmont's staffing, its obvious some changes will need to be made during the process.  I think I know what those changes will be, and they would be positive even if we stayed NAIA. But I won't talk about them until they are public.

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Well I think this is just awful.  I will always be a NAIA supporter and losing a stalwart like Westmont is terrible.  The vast majority of the GSAC schools that have left have not had success.  Concordia, Fresno Pacific, Biola have not won anything.  Regardless of what Odell says I would expect Westmont to fall into that category.  They won't be able to compete with APU.  I will never understand the desire to be in D2.  I can understand D3 if you don't want to have athletic scholarships but D2 is just a poor step child to D1.  If you think the NCAA is a brand, for get it. It's only a matter of time before the power 5 NCAA D1 schools break off and form their own structure and that is only exacerbated by the NIL.  What happens to D2 then when all that money dries up?  I'm very sorry to see this.

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