It’s true — Shenandoah’s move to the ODAC for 2012-13 doesn’t immediately put the USA South’s automatic bid to the football playoffs in jeopardy. However, there are surely more moves to come.
Even with no more changes, the USAC will have seven football-playing members in 2012, the minimum required to maintain an automatic bid, because Maryville is an associate member of the league. However, the departure of Shenandoah from the league means there are just six teams remaining in the other men’s sports in the conference: Averett, Christopher Newport, Ferrum, Greensboro, Methodist and North Carolina Wesleyan. After a two-year waiting period, the conference would lose its automatic bid in baseball, men’s basketball and other sports in 2014-15, unless additions are made.
Now, I went into this in more detail on the D3hoops.com Daily Dose, but I’ll whittle it down to bullet points for the football-focused discussion.
- The USA South needs more men’s members.
- The nearest available schools are from the Great South, which does not sponsor football.
- Adding those schools greatly reshapes the footprint of the conference.
- That would make Christopher Newport an extreme geographic outlier in the northeast corner of the league.
- CNU could then decide to leave for reasons of travel costs, same as Shenandoah did.
- Therefore, change might be even more urgent.
Here’s a couple of things that could happen. The USA South could choose to bring in Huntingdon and LaGrange as associate members in football as well, bringing the league to nine schools, although the conference really needs at least one full member with men. (The league has three women’s-only schools.) Piedmont is the closest school of the Great South to USAC country, but doesn’t have football. Huntingdon is a few hours further away. A full USAC-GSAC merger is possible but fairly large for women’s sports and perhaps unwieldy for men’s sports, although a divisional setup is possible as two other non-football schools in Georgia work their way into the GSAC.
Bottom line: Huntingdon and LaGrange could still be out in the cold. But if Christopher Newport leaves for all sports and finds football affiliate membership somewhere besides the USA South, the conference will need them.
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I have always thought that full affiliation of the GSAC Men into the USA South was the right thing to do. A division format with the GSAC (USA South- South Division) Men with 5-6 teams and USA South North Division at 6-7 teams is closer to do-able as a conference. Both “Women’s” conference seem strong enough, and geographically diverse to stand alone, and maintain their AQ’s.
CNU’s moving the Capital now seems more likely.
We have not heard whether Berry GA is will join the GSAC. Their endowment is more like the SCAC, but they do not have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
ralph – i’m with you, but from what i understand there were talks of a usasac/gsac merger this summer – the usasac knew that su was looking for a new home and did not feel the need to merge with the gsac…seems short-sighted to me, but perhaps they know something i don’t (or perhaps the rumors of those conversations happening weren’t true) – either way, a usasac/gsac merger makes too much sense