Daily Archives: October 19, 2005

Insider: Irish at Augie

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There are always a few extra activities going on surrounding homecoming week, and this year’s homecoming was no exception. We were fortunate enough to have former Notre Dame head football coach, Jerry Faust speak on campus and attend a Thursday afternoon practice.

Having a man who once held such a prestigious position address the team after our practice was quite an honor. He handed our program plenty of genuine compliments and it was a thrill to see him get fired up as he stressed to us the importance of team ball. I was impressed with the amount of knowledge he had of our program from over the years and it was flattering to hear him say that he would be following us in the paper in the following weeks. We were fortunate enough to have had the experience of meeting Coach Faust as it was a positive note heading into Week 8 as we took on Illinois Wesleyan University.

The Titans came to Rock Island with a 1-4 record, but records are thrown out the window bearing in mind the tradition this game has held throughout the years. Though Augustana has won 18 of the last 24 meetings, including the last four contests, Coach Barnes was quick to remind us that Wesleyan is the only school in our conference that still has the edge over us in the overall win-loss column.

As the defense played well again, the game broke open in the second half as fullback Mike Guzman tied a school record when he made his way to the end zone from 97 yards out. The final score was 41-15 as the senior class walked away knowing they were one of a few Augie classes that had never lost to IWU.

This Saturday we head down to Decatur to take on the Big Blue of Millikin. I have been looking forward to this game because one, they are a tough team with plenty of athletes, and two, one of my good friends from high school plays for them. Max Warner, our high school quarterback has found himself on the other side of the ball at Millikin and since then there has been plenty of good natured trash talk.

As a team we look forward to the challenge Millikin brings us this Saturday as every game from here on out is our biggest game yet. There is no doubt this will be a hard fought game on both sides of the ball. Just hope no flags get thrown if I meet Max on the field.

More talk about realignment

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Geography, philosophy, competitiveness, rivalry.

All of these factor in to how a school selects its conference affiliation and how conferences select members. And with movement starting back up in the past six months and more rumbling barely beneath the surface, it’s worth some rumination of the ramifications.

I’m sure any moment now, Post Patterns hall of famer Ralph Turner will comment with his thoughts about automatic bids spurring conference consolidation and predicting doom and gloom for Pool B in, say, 2013. But I’ll leave that to him. He can copy and paste it, I’m sure. 🙂

Let’s instead just take a look at where teams could go. This latest round of shuffling is still part of the aftershocks of the breakup of the Freedom Football Conference. After the 2003 season, the teams spread to the four winds, with teams heading to the NJAC, UCAA, E8 and Plymouth State left as an independent. The UCAA took on Worcester Polytech, Kings Point and Coast Guard and changed its name to the Liberty League. Then Coast Guard took its liberty of the organization after a year, announcing that after its second year it was heading to the New England Football Conference.

While the Liberty League maintains enough members to keep its automatic bid, it could use an eighth member as a buffer against losing it, which is where the Susquehanna rumors come in. Juniata and Moravian are talked about as heading to the Centennial, which is something that league has been looking at for a while in the name of ease of scheduling. Bringing the conference to nine teams would leave midseason open dates or non-conference games, but would require each school to schedule just one non-conference game, whereas the remaining eight MAC schools could schedule a full round-robin without fear of having the title decided on a tiebreaker.

So what’s next? If the Centennial wants to have 10 football programs, it could look to Catholic, which is within the general geography of the conference (40 minutes from Johns Hopkins and McDaniel, two hours from Gettysburg, slightly further from Dickinson and Franklin and Marshall). Catholic could also go to the MAC, which was a possibility back in the mid-90s when Upsala folded. Allentown (now called DeSales) eventually took the open spot. Juniata and Susquehanna’s departure would presumably open up spots in the MAC’s Commonwealth League (the MAC is split in some sports and unified in others, essentially scamming Division III out of as many automatic bids as possible). The Commonwealth is slightly better travelwise.

Washington and Lee has made little secret of desiring to compete in the Centennial. It sees itself academically as a peer of those schools and already competes in the league for wrestling. But it’s a long trip from W&L to anywhere in the league.

Elsewhere, Buffalo State is in its last year in the ACFC before moving to the NJAC. SUNY-Morrisville, which is a two-year school currently but going to four-year status, is said to be looking at the NJAC and would be a fit philosophically.

That’s the sticking point, usually, that word “philosophically.” In most parts of the country there are overlapping conferences geographically — in the Mid-Atlantic it’s the MAC and Centennial, in New York it’s the Empire 8 and Liberty League, in Ohio it’s the OAC and NCAC, etc. This is almost always because schools that think highly of themselves academically want to associate with other such schools, in hopes of what they think is leveling the playing field. (How level some of those fields are is a subject for the offseason.) So when people say, “why can’t we have one Upstate New York superleague?” and similarly in Ohio and such, that’s the reason. It’s just not going to happen. Heck, in Ohio it used to be that way, with Wittenberg and others in the OAC before breaking off and forming the NCAC. (Similarly with Centennial schools seceding from the MAC.)

But the bottom line remains — the Liberty League is a very insecure group, in terms of the automatic bid. There are just five full Liberty League members which play football, and that includes Rochester, which is evenly split between the Liberty League and University Athletic Association. Hamilton is in the league but plays football in the NESCAC. Kings Point and Worcester Polytech belong to the Skyline and NEWMAC in other sports. And the likelihood of Clarkson, Skidmore or Vassar adding football seems remote. The league needs two associate members for football to maintain an automatic bid unless Susquehanna can fill one of them.

And that’s just one part of the country. There are changes in the works elsewhere as well, with Rose-Hulman pulling out of the SCAC and returning to the Heartland. The SCAC is also safe at eight teams for now and for 2006, but is looking for more football programs. The ASC has nine football programs still after Austin’s departure for the SCAC. The Presidents might be done with their rapid expansion from five to eight (Thomas More, St. Vincent, Geneva), although Seton Hill is still sitting on the NAIA/D-III fence and doesn’t have to declare until next August or so.

With a proposal on the table to facilitate changes in conference membership without losing automatic bids, expect more movement to take place in future years.

Now we throw the floor open.