Birmingham-Southern, welcome to D-III

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Birmingham-Southern fans, coaches, student-athletes:

Welcome to Division III.

We don’t harbor any delusions that you want to be here. From the outside, Division III doesn’t compare very favorably to Division I. But let’s be honest: Birimgham-Southern wasn’t a Division I power, and the trip from Division I mid-major to Division III isn’t as far as you might think.

Your school is giving scholarship money to more than 200 people solely based on athletic ability. When that stops, your institution will be able to redirect that money to award need-based or academic-based aid. That will raise the level of the student body and, in fact, will increase the value of your degree.

You may not think much of your likely new fellow conference members, but let’s be honest — it’s not like the Big South is populated by well-known names. High Point? UNC Asheville? Radford? Winthrop? Rhodes, Trinity University, Austin College, Colorado College and others have stellar reputations, and they are not based on being on the 13, 14 or 15 line every March … or by being the brainchild of a televangelist.

Coaches and administrators: I expect you have no desire to be in Division III. If you are at all conflicted about the Division III mission, I would suggest leaving. You can’t be half-hearted about Division III. It’s a challenge. But if you’ve ever faced a halfway-decent Division III program you know one thing: This is not glorified high school ball.

A further discussion of the issues is posted in our Q&A with Birmingham-Southern president David Pollick.

41 thoughts on “Birmingham-Southern, welcome to D-III”

  2. Peterson’s lists the male:female ratio to be 44:56. That is about 150 more women than men on a student body of 1324.

    The gender equalization argument for football had to be in the consideration of the Board. If the school can add another 100 men, then the school almost equalizes at 50:50, especially when one considers that some studies show that 20 extra males enroll for every 100 football players with the addition of football.

  3. BSC faithful:

    It’s always nice to make new friends and follow new programs.

    Welcome to the party…we’re glad to have you.

  5. Ralph, methinks the coach is confused, not you.

    MUC: 2,205 students, $27K tuition, room & board
    Augustana: 1,714, $24K
    BSC: 1,356, $31K

    When’s the last time Augustana was a power, anyway?

    From the article it’s possible this will dilute Huntingdon’s recruiting a bit, but that’s OK … plenty of athletes in the state to support two D3 schools.

  6. Hey Ron,

    Take a look at Auggie’s record over the last 25 years. I tell you that many colleges don’t want Augustana on their schedule. CCIW is not a weak conference. Next time do some homework!

  7. Ron, I would say that there is so much good quality “non-D1A sized” talent in Alabama, that having three D3 playing football programs in the area (LaGrange GA is only 15 miles inside the GA-AL border and less than 50 miles east of Auburn up I-85) will heighten the profile of D3 sports in the South. I think that the net effect is that more graduating Alabama high school seniors will choose to play college football.

    The key is what Piedmont and, to a lesser degree, Oglethorpe do about football. I don’t find Piedmont College in Demorest, GA or Oglethorpe in the “Peterson’s”, so I don’t know the male:female ratio or other pertinent information.

  9. Ralph, methinks the coach is confused, not you.

    MUC: 2,205 students, $27K tuition, room & board
    Augustana: 1,714, $24K
    BSC: 1,356, $31K

    Ron,

    In baptist life they call that “ministerially speaking”. 😉

  12. The latest from the Birmingham Times: “What are BSC coaches supposed to do?”

    http://www.al.com/sports/birminghamnews/kscarbinsky.ssf?/base/sports/114880804844790.xml&coll=2

    It’s obvious that Mr. Scarbinsky is one of these “if it ain’t Division I, it ain’t sh*t” types. Then there was this snide comment:

    BSC President David Pollick didn’t have time to meet with the school’s student-athletes last week. He didn’t make time to meet with the coaches and athletic department staff members after Friday’s vote.

    He did find time Friday night to do a phone interview with someone from a Web site called D3sports.

    Of course, he got that wrong, too.

  13. I wrote a letter to the editor on that one.

    Not just a “letter to the editor” but an e-mail to the sports editor.

    Of course, Pollick only had 20 minutes to spend with me. I highly doubt that either coaches or student-athletes would have gotten much out of a 20-minute meeting with Pollick.

  14. Good to see not much has changed at D3football.com in the off-season- I still see Booger and PCole attacking bloggers for not agreeing with their point of view. We could have had the trifecta if Keef would of laid into him as well.

    Booger, you had to expect a reaction to your Augustana statement, and as soon as you get one you slam the guy- you could of responded to his remarks without belittling him. Maybe you could of responded to him by clarifying your definition of a D3 “power”?

  15. “Powers” usually are constant challengers for the title and put in more than one playoff appearance in four seasons, thus the question “when was the LAST time Augustana was a power.” Getting posterized in the second round by Mount Union hardly makes a team a power. All those championships are significant but the Division III landscape has changed dramatically since 1986, the last time Augie made an appearance in the Stagg Bowl.

    As regards your “attack” comments, at least some of us who make assertions have the courage to stand behind them, as opposed to cowering behind a pseudonym.

  16. Rigg0123, any reason you felt it necessary to re-register? Who’s belittling whom exactly?

    _——————-
    # rigg0123 Says:
    The 6th of December, 2005 at 9:23 am

    bvboom-

    You’re an idiot– the 2 WIAC statements prove that.

    Re- “Chris Warren was a transfer from D1 UVA, nice try knucklehead.
    WIAC has and always will have the best players in D3.
    p.s. WIAC is toughest and best D3 conference. “

    Unlike today, in “those” days you could only transfer to a D3 school without sitting out a year.

    So from your logic- Brett Elliot should be disqualified from receiving the Gagliardi Trophy?

    GO WESLEY!!!

  18. Okay Ron,

    Agree to disagree on the definition of power. MUC is the power of DIII based on their performance in the Stagg Bowls. But does that mean that every other team that makes the playoffs is just lucky to make it there. I take a look at powers by conferences. Augustana, Wheaton, Concordia-Moorhead, Oxy, Coe, Central, Wartburg, UW-Whitewater, UW-Lacrosse, Ithaca, Rowan, Hardin Simmons. Your telling me that you would not consider any of these teams powers on a national level since they haven’t won a Stagg Bowl in the past 5 years. Would you want to play these teams on a regular basis? Not powers huh! So only St. Johns, Linfield and MHBU are powers because they have won a Stagg Bowl recently. Your perception is narrow minded. Get past the fact that MUC is the greatest thing that happened to DIII and think of it as a whole division. Does DI have only one national power? What is it just Texas now? USC doesn’t count because they lost? Give me a break. Hey go find a D III team in search of a head coach and schedule any of the teams that I listed. Get ready for a 0-10 season! Sorry but Larry Kehres hasn’t retired yet!

  19. I think this is what Ron said:

    “Powers” usually are constant challengers for the title and put in more than one playoff appearance in four seasons, thus the question “when was the LAST time Augustana was a power.”

    Here’s what you said:

    Your (sic) telling me that you would not consider any of these teams powers on a national level since they haven’t won a Stagg Bowl in the past 5 years.

    Challengers for the title are not limited to those who win the national title game. Anyone who isn’t overreacting can probably figure that out. It’s one thing to disagree, but you’re really distorting his position here, and that is problematic.

  21. Let me take this blog back to the original subject…

    The Birmingham News reporters did a very good job with their reporting, fact finding and coverage of the stories associated with BSC’s moving up to D3.

    I do have a real problem with the opinion pieces by Messrs. Scarbinski and Melick. I don’t want to “diss” 2 columnists from a prominent daily newspaper, but did they and I read the same reports in the Birmingham News?

    Mr Scarbinski’s columns seem to be most accurately described by Ron Boerger, “If you ain’t D1 you ain’t sheee-yut.” (We Southerners sometimes make this Old English term for feces into a 2-syllable word.)

    He doesn’t deal with any of the financial data presented to the Board of Trustees, the mature adults who have to answer for decisions that affect bond ratings and other fiduciary institutional obligations. The dirty little secret in Alabama is that the Sugar Daddy at Troy (formerly known as “State”) University is not happy with how long it is taking for the Troy Trojans, who play at Movie Gallery Stadium (nice naming opportunity, isn’t it), to win big time in football.

    We had to deal with Mr Scarbinsky’s comprehension of the difference between “Freedom of the Press” and “if you don’t tell all the stuff that you, the SID at BSC, know, then you ain’t sheee-yut”.

    My current frustration is the lack of introspection that went into Mr Melick’s article, and the apparent paucity of serious questioning of Joe Dean, Jr, the son of the former SEC AD. (You know that you don’t want to ask the hard questions of someone who might be a future AD at Bama). With that pedigree, I would expect Mr Dean to have considerable insight into the BSC challenges at hand.

    Let’s consider these “hardball” quesitons in interviewing the BSC AD about what happened at the only D1 program to move up to D3 in the last 25 years.

    Mr Dean,

    How long had you known that the annual BSC athletic expenditures were $2-3M worse than the projections in the 1999 study?

    How many years did you report to President Berte and to President Pollick and the Trustees that your athletic budget overrides were as much as 100% more than the 1999 projections?

    How many years did you fail to raise the monies to compensate for what the 1999 projections said would be needed not to damage the economic health of the university?

    Did the President ever say that your fund-raising efforts were dismally poor, and that you had failed to follow-up on key contacts, and that you had failed to find new funding in the range of $2-3M per year?

    Which Fortune 500 corporate sugar daddy did you fail to get, to replace HealthSouth after the Scrushy-Striplin money dried up?

    Noting these dramatic perennial budget shortfalls, were you ever threatened by either President to be replaced by an AD that could get this job done? After all, Wofford was raising $2.3M each year to stay in the Southern Conference.

    Knowing the resources and community as well as you do, did you have any idea where the money was coming from to make up the budget deficits from the insufficient corporate sponsorships, major gifts and revenues in the athletic program?

    So you mean to tell me that you were just happily sitting in your office, presiding over a department at a D1 institution that was hemorrhaging, er losing, $5M per year and not know that this could not go on forever?

    Those questions are absurd.

    Let’s consider some really absurd questions for the basketball coach, Duane Reboul…

    In the absence of a football program at BSC, the men’s basketball program is expected to be the cash cow. Now that we know the state of the finances of the BSC athletic department since its move to D1, how did you fail to make basketball the cash cow to avert this move to D1? Why were attendance and ticket sales revenue at BSC basketball games so disappointing? Wasn’t the athletic department was counting on big bucks from annual appearances in the NCAA D1 Tournament?

    Or we ask the same questions of the baseball coach, Brain Shoop.

    Rather, I submit that these individuals were doing everything that they could to avert this situation. They did everything in their powers, with the job descriptions and the latitude that they were given, to try to make the move from the NAIA to D1AAA work.

    Any serious evaluation of the BSC dilemma suggests that these individuals behaved in a professional manner. With the resources that they had, the funds and corporate support that they surely tried their hardest to cultivate, we can see that it was not going to succeed.

    Why then does Mr Melick take President Pollick and Board Chairman James T. Stephens to task for analyzing the situation, understanding the constraints and moratorium that were present, and avoiding the innuedo, intrigue and specualtion that would have killed the athletic department had the vote been to remain D1? Don’t you know the word on the street would have been, “Don’t go to BSC…They are talking about giving up scholarships!” BSC would have died a slow death. Mr Melick does not recognize the hard challenges that faced the men and women of the BSC adminsitration and trustees.

    The President and Board should be commended for the professionalism with which they made what is likely to be the hardest decision that faces the school in the early 21st Century.

    I am not disrespecting Messrs. Scarbinsky and Melick. Their job is to keep the editor and the owners of the Birmingham News happy. They are hired to write opinion pieces and commentaries.

    It appears that neither investigated the dynamics of D3 athletics and the impact that the D3 model has (1) on male:female ratios, (2) diversity, (3) the allocation of scholarship funds for “need”. Nor did they discuss the impact on the university community by (4) the amateur student-athlete, (5) or how 100 tuiton-paying football playing student-athletes is (a) not as expensive as one thinks and (b) restores the male:female ratio closer to 50:50, (6) or how having “pay-for-play” for student-athletes in the D3 model can improve a university’s bottomline. There is a tidy little outline to summarize the benefits of the BSC decision to move up to D3.

    I would have hoped that Messrs. Scarbinsky and Melick would have tried to explain the challenges that faced the vitality of BSC and the BSC community.

    Instead, they seemed to use the “BSC case study” (to use “MBA-school” terminology) to fall back on the simple and easy whine, “You are D3. You ain’t worth sheee-yut!”

  22. You’ve distorted my position twice in a row now. I don’t argue with people who twist my words to suit their meaning. In any case, this blog is supposed to be about Birmingham-Southern possibly joining a conference with a bunch of other non-powers.

    Have a nice season.

  23. As a ‘Southern alum I wanted to say “thanks” for the welcome that y’all are giving us to DIII football. Dr. Pollick is having to weather a bit of a firestormed created by the present athletic director and coaches, yet at the end of the day the College will be better for the move. The best analysis that I’ve seen on your post is by Ralph Turner, and to it all I would add is “Amen”. And as I told someone @ my local waterin’ hole last night, @ ‘Southern we want scholar athletes, not merely student athletes. I just hope that sometime in the near future we can beat Trinity; I went to the web site, and good god, they got some players – and a lot of them!

    Go Panthers!

  24. JSG53, thanks for the kind words, and welcome aboard.

    I encourage the BSC community to become active on the D3 boards.

    These are really the “new media” and the quality of the message boards and blogs are outstanding.

    The pertinent blogs on the D3Hoops boards are #186 and #189.

  25. Welcome, JSG63. There’s more to SCAC football these days than Trinity; DePauw has been coming on strong and has been *thisclose* to getting that elusive first win the last few times they’ve played. Also keep an eye on Huntingdon, a program in its fourth season in ’07-’08 and one which likely would have been in the playoffs as an independent had they not been upset in their final game of last season. HC almost upset Trinity last season in San Antonio; they are a great example of how to build a program from scratch in an area underserved by Division III football programs. Several American Southwest Conference schools (the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, East Texas Baptist, and Texas Lutheran) have also built strong programs in a short timespan.

    I hope the SCAC leadership gives BSC’s membership request the attention it deserves. From what I have seen, the school would fit right in as a member.

  26. And, of course, that should say “Welcome, JSG53.” Sorry! Feel free to join us on the SCAC boards, which are usually pretty quiet this time of year.

  27. Birmingham-Southern has posted a FAQ which explains further the thought processes behind the move and why they are submitting a request to join the SCAC.

    Significantly, the FAQ states that the SCAC wants an eighth football school, and that football will be a major factor in determining the twelfth (and final) SCAC member.

    Sorry for all the entries today.

  28. With the addition of Austin College in 2006 and Colorado College in 2007, the SCAC has 8 football-playing members lined up.

    The projected nine-team conference only leaves 2 non-conference dates to fill, which may help Millsaps more than anyone.

  29. Pumkinhead,
    re: “We could have had the trifecta if Keef would of laid into him as well.”

    Actually, at first glace, I agreed with d3quarterback … looked to me like was dissing an Augustana that’s plenty powerful, at least until they have to play the OAC champ. 🙂

    I like to respect the “off” in offseason and barely check the blog during this time. Since I won’t be around to hear you call me out, joking or otherwise, I’d appreciate it if you keep my name out your mouth until August or so.

  30. The poll on the web page at http://www.al.com/sports/ shows that the results to the question “In which division should Birmingham-Southern athlteics participate?” Rounded to nearest whole number the current results are now D1 30%, D2 30% and D3 40%.

    After two week’s consideration of the articles written by reporters and columnists and a round of letters to the editor, that is remarkable.

  31. Ray Melick’s Column on Buckets of Cash and “Diploma Mills”

    Mr Melick was an early and “less than D3 friendly” commentator on the move by BSC to Division III.

    Today Mr. Melick covers the “profit distribution” by the SEC and how much it has grown since 1980. The column also discusses eligibility of student-athletes.

    I have excerpted the last few paragraphs below.

    _______________________________-
    ” But the truth is, eligibility is the only value an athlete brings to the school. So if Slive rules an athlete ineligible, that athlete can pretty much kiss any scholarship offer goodbye.

    The money will continue, regardless of which athletes get into school and which do not.

    But it’s getting harder and harder to see where college sports is about “the kids.” ”
    ____________________________

    Now we D3 fans are probably the most committed fans in the US with respect to the ideal of the student-athlete, both from our conversations and in the mission statement of NCAA D3 athletics.

    However, I read Mr Melick’s article and wonder if he has even explored “what D3 is about”. My un-gentlemanly, un-Christianlike “gotcha” mentality would see the “perfect world” in which Dr David Pollick at BSC would respond to today’s column with the profundities of the simple truth that motivates us D3 fans. It is about the student who is also an athlete.

    If he/she qualifies for aid, then aid is available (according to the guidelines of the school) to him/her to complete his/her education. Eligibility is ostensibly and solely dependent on being accepted to that school as it meets his/her educational needs, not the needs of the sports program and its attempts to get back to the BCS or the Big Dance.

    The Birmingham-Southern “Case Study” is certainly one that will be used by numerous students in graduate courses in Higher Education Management. I can also see additional pressure coming on D3 to accept qualified universities who wish to move the D3. As I currently understand it, there is a pending moratorium on new schools applying for membership in D3. With the financial pressures that are coming to bear on D1’s and D2’s, I believe that the D3 model will get more investigation, and be recogonized as the most viable answer for student-athletes for the greatest number of universities and colleges.

  32. And the SEC profit in Mr Melick’s article has gone up closer to “2900%” (or about 2832%) since 1980!

  33. Ray Melick needs to earn some continuing education credits on D3 athletics. I suggest that Webmeister Pat and Ralph Turner arrange to give him an intense tutorial on the subject ….

  34. As expected:

    BIRMINGHAM-SOUTHERN BECOMES 12TH MEMBER OF THE SCAC

    SUWANEE, Ga. – Birmingham-Southern (Ala.) College was unanimously confirmed as the 12th member of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) in a vote of the league’s presidents yesterday.

    For the complete release, click to: http://www.scac-online.org

    (note: as of 1705 CDT there was no release posted yet).

  35. I love that 1938 BSC v. Auburn program cover on Pat’s front page. It shows a classic leather-helmeted, pads to the opponent’s midsection block … and accomplished sans use of arms. A far cry from what passes for blocking nowadays …. 🙁

  37. I’d not known there was an Alabama institution named after William Faulkner … wasn’t Ole Miss his home base? 😉

  39. Actually this Faulkner is Dr James Faulkner of Bay Minette, AL, in Baldwin County AL (think Gulf Shores/Fairhope/Point Clear, AL). There is also Faulkner State Community College in Bay Minette, AL.

    Faulkner was formerly known as Alabama Christian College, and appears to have a theological affiliation with the Church of Christ denomination, such as David Lipscomb TN, Abilene Christian University TX, Harding AR or Pepperdine University.

    Maybe a very distant cousin… 🙂

  40. Hmm … Faulkner already has a 2:1 m:f athlete ratio and only offers three women’s sports* to four for men; football would make five and tilt the ratio even further. When does Title IX come into play?

    * – they list cheerleading as a fourth women’s sport, but it’s coed.

  41. The Montgomery Advertiser has some additional information behind the decision to add football at (NAIA) Faulkner University in Montgomery.

    It is all about adding students. The author is off on his percentage increase. Adding 350 students to a 650 student campus is increasing the student body by 54%, not 35%.

    Goals for Faulkner Football

    Ron Boerger, there are three points that might interest you.

    1) The Male:Female ratio at Faulkner may be skewed by non-traditional students, taking courses at the satellite campuses.

    2) Huntingdon is adding a band!

    3) As for Title IX concerns, Faulkner is considering adding Women’s Basketball.

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