Saint Francis drops from D1 to D3

As Pat Forde pointed out:
"As it stands now, the Florida Atlantic Owls in 2023 are the last real Cinderella Sweet 16 team we’ve had. And guess what happened to the key parts of that team? The Michigan Wolverines got their coach, Dusty May, and starting center, Vlad Goldin. The Florida Gators got guard Alijah Martin. Arkansas got guard Johnell Davis."

So the ghost of the 2023 Florida Atlantic team is back in the Suite 16, playing for P4 schools.

I think a lot of those schools will seriously consider moving to D3 but not all will though there maybe some conference changes and sure, maybe some will drop, but I doubt most will. St. Bonavernture, for example, may find travel costs in the A10 combined with a need to pay basketball players make playing in the A10 prohibitive. I'd bet there are other A10 schools in that boat too. But there are several schools in the New York/New Jersey area whose conferences are probably not going to pay basketball players, or at least not pay them much, that they could join and significantly cut travel costs.

I know Colgate pretty well. The administration there has occasionally floated the idea of going to D3 and joining NESCAC. It's always sent a lot of their alumni, many of whom have a LOT of money, onto the warpath. There would be a significant drop in donations from those folks if Colgate went to D3. Conversely a lot of those alumni would dig a bit deeper if the school needed it to stay in D1.

And again, scholarships aside the Patriot League athletically looks a lot more like D3 than it does D1. Which is why I think American, Holy Cross, and Lafayette will stay in D1 unless the league decides to pay their athletes substantial money. I just can't see that. I could see the Patriot League returning to the days when they did not give athletic scholarships.

They should not be allowed in the Presidents League. I believe in separation of church and state.

I suspect this will not be the last.
A move to D3 could be financially a really good move. Kids who still want to play their sport will pay (or take out loans) which means actual revenue for the university.

The NCAA numbers from 2021-22 show that 27% of the student body at a D3 school are athletes with a range (quite a range) of 2 to 76%. Really curious about the extremes there. The median number of athletes is 294 for schools without football and 561 for schools with football.

80% of D3 schools in the NCAA are private.

The median operating budget without football is $2.4M. If that school has 294 SAs paying tuition of $50K each year (probably on the low end), the revenue would be $14.7M. Athletics at the D3 level is about 5% of university expenditures with an avg expense of about $9000 per athlete.

The short of it is that while people think Power conference universities make money off sports, the real money making is at the D3 level.

At one time the Big East had very good football teams. All but Temple, UConn, and USF are in power 4 conferences now.

I wondered about the grants-in-aid the players were receiving. St Francis has a good FAQ on this. Basically players who stay keep their scholarships. The wrinkle is that for 2028-29 they keep it only if they agree NOT to play.

I am curious how many players have entered the transfer portal.

https://www.francis.edu/D3TransitionFAQ#general%20information

On a smaller scale, this debate has been ongoing at another upstate NY school for many years now. DIII Hobart College, a former lacrosse juggernaut, decided to transition its lacrosse team to DI in the early 90's. The program has struggled mightily and has been largely irrelevant since. It's also been incredibly costly for the small college to maintain a DI lacrosse program. Around 2008, the president and BOT decided to drop the program back down to DIII, but the student body and alumni protested, and the school reversed its decision and kept the lacrosse program DI. Alumni keep spending to keep the program DI. With the addition of the transfer portal and NIL, it seems that smaller schools in rural locations with few graduate programs, like Hobart (even in just lacrosse) or St. Bonaventure, can afford to compete at the DI level.

Around 2008, other DIII schools that fielded DI soccer teams, e.g., Hartwick and Oneonta, dropped their soccer programs down to the DIII level. It's expensive and doesn't make a lot of sense for many schools.

The trend doesn't seem to apply as much to hockey though.

As of now nine of their basketball players are in the transfer portal. I haven't seen anything about football. I doubt if any of their other sports will be affected by this unless they decide to drop some because D3 requires schools to sponsor fewer sports than D1 does. But I see this as unlikely becuase if they aren't giving scholarships in those sports they're making money from those athletes.

This is pure speculation but I think it's possible that the entire world of college sports might be different now if the Big East had accepted Penn State's application to join. At the time the Big East did not sponsor football and evidently they didn't see Penn State would add anything. Had their football schools known that Penn State was going to drop them from their football schedules and let them in I think things would have been very different if they'd had Penn State as a football memeber when the conference sponsored football.

I don't think St. Bonaventure is dropping down. They just hired Woj in response to the changes, so D3 is unlikely for them.

Not really what happened. The football schools left the Big East for acc and Big10, giving BigEast no choice but to be a basketball conference.

Economics of basketball for BE will let them be competitive thru 32-33.

At about that point P4 will leave the ncaa and just have a "college basketball Playoff" of 64 teams. Cinderella will just be bad P4 teams.

The P4 schools don't like the ncaa being involved in cash flow of basketball. They want full control like they now have in football.

re your comment on extremes of participation, my guess would be the high percent ones would be the d3 academies -- MMA and coast guard. fraction of the size of the "west point" type d1 academies, likely the same requirement to either play a sport or intramurals, and since it's small and d3, a willingness to take anyone for varsity. which, the front end of their teams are good, but that unlike some of their NE d3 neighbors, no one gets turned away for a jersey if they want one.

my guess the other direction would be the CUNYAC or indifferent SUNY schools. big d3s like WIAC on enrollment, but few sports and involvement like they could care less.

but those are guesses. i wanna say i've seen something before where USMMA is about 900-1000 with more than half playing d3.

and i think the two ends are close enough geographically together they sometimes bump into each other at something like soccer -- USMMA beat Purchase 11-0 this year.

Could be. Unlike St. Francis they don't have football.

Matt Hatter is closer to the real truth. The Catholic non-FCS schools were about to lose their voting majority and had been fighting to avoid being forced to become money losing big football schools. They effectively left the conference but retained the name and landed a big-TV deal. Jay Wright’s and Villanova’s success made the choice seem brilliant until the transfer portal/NIL killed even the facade that NCAA sports were “College” sports.

How did it go last year & the year before that? & in 2018? & in 2016? You want to take this year out of context when they've had 4 champions in the last 9 years. That's mid major? Still the 4th rated conference this year, ahead of the ACC. Tournament success can be random. SJU was good this year they just don't shoot it great & that caught up with them when their best player was a no show.

I'm not saying money isn't going to influence results for football schools but the BE is basketball centric & their programs are spending the same amount of money to stay competitive, even though that doesn't fit the narrative.

Brian Sell is a lab technician, not a dentist, BTW

This team was an unbelievable conglomeration of talent. Like we genuinely will never see a mid major with this much talent ever again

Highly unlikely that they will save any money on scholarship. The athletic scholarships will be repurposed into adding more academic scholarships. Institutional aid is all the same on paper. It is not real money but instead a discounted price. They will likely make the same amount per kid as they do with athletic money. The real savings will be cheaper travel, smaller operating budgets, and unfortunately potentially fewer sports sponsored. D3 will also be the least affected by the inevitable collapse of the NCAA in the next 2-5 when the top 60 schools take their ball and leave the NCAA.

I agree that the school probably won't save money on scholarships because it has to be donors, not the school itself, funding them. But I expect they decided that paying players if they want to be competitive combined with finding NIL money combined with constantly losing players, especially their best ones, to schools that can afford to pay more, was just too much. I think if they'd stayed in D1 they would essentially be a farm team for bigger, wealthier, schools.

NCAA D3 only allows 4 schools to start the transition process per year.

If there is this "rush" that is predicted then there will be some schools hanging in the wind waiting their turn.