Technically they do not offer Football scholarships. They do offer scholarships in other sports and tend to focus more of their $ towards the "olympic" sports, so you end up with some really good teams in other sports...Drake is in the MVC for their other sports and has historically had a great track program, Butler has their great basketball team, Valpo has had success in Basketball periodically, I think a couple of those schools have pretty good baseball teams, etc. We'd essentially be torpedo-ing our Football program to stay Div. I. Likely if we did that, we would go Pioneer League in football and stay Summit League in other sports. With only probably 3 schools close enough to bus to (Drake, Valpo, Butler) we'd be likely flying everywhere else and all over the country...San Diego, Jacksonville (in Florida), Marist is in New York State, just north from NYC a bit.wiu712 wrote:There are 11 teams in the Pioneer League:ST_Lawson wrote:One issue with dropping to the Pioneer League is that travel costs would jump a bit. In-conference games in San Diego and Florida among other places.
Dayton
San Diego
Morehead State
Jacksonville
Marist
Campbell
Drake
Butler
Valparaiso
Stetson
Davidson
Unlike most other FCS conferences, the Pioneer League does not have athletic scholarships.
Morehead State is the only public school in the conference.
At that point, I'm not sure it's saving us much, if any money. Sure we're spending less for football scholarships, but if the increase in travel costs is close to the same or more than the cost of football scholarships, then we're not really doing any good.
There's the previously mentioned option of just dropping a few sports...likely targets would be Tennis, Swimming/Diving, maybe Cross Country...and focus that money towards the more "high profile" sports...Football, M&W Basketball...I'd also probably include Soccer and Volleyball in that.
And the "nuclear" option...dropping to Div. II. I'd hate to see things to that way, but I don't know if it wouldn't be better than the "going Pioneer League Football" option. If we did go that route, we'd probably try to get into the Great Lakes Valley Conference. Covers IL, MO, WI, IN, and KY. Currently 16 members (in East/West divisions) for olympic sports, 7 full-member teams sponsor football w/ 2 affiliate football members (so 9 total football schools). 6 of the schools are public, with the rest private. The furthest school away would be Bellarmine University at about 6 hours, 20 minutes to drive, with the furthest football school being Southwest Baptist at 5 hours (southwestern Missouri). 3 schools are in the St. Louis area, 2 are roughly in the Chicago area and local schools Quincy University, Truman State, and UI Springfield are in the GLVC. IF we did go this route, we would be the second largest school in the GLVC (behind Missouri-St. Louis) and have the largest football stadium by a factor of 2 (second would be Missouri S&T's 8k seat stadium).
As I said...I'd hate for things to go this way, but it would allow us to save significant scholarship money (here's a chart that shows scholarship limits per division) and probably save a lot on travel costs as well. I do not have any idea what this would do to our revenue from ticket sales, donations, and merchandise sales, or what it would do to our overall institution visibility (and possible loss of enrollment due to reduced visibility).
I don't really know what the answer is...it's a scary situation all around. I do know that there's a "flow chart" floating around that shows the various cost-saving measures that are being seriously looked at at this time and I don't believe that athletics is listed on there as something to be "dealt with"...so maybe they won't do anything at this time...I don't really know.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
