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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1568565, member: 289"] THE SMALL COLLEGES When the NCAA split into divisions in 1973 they got it right: three divisions. There are really three levels of college football: big time, meaning that if you won all your games you’d likely be in the four team playoff or at least a New Year’s Day bowl; small time, meaning true student-athletes who are in it for the degree and just wanted to keep playing football on the side and in-between time: schools who emphasize the sport too much to be small time but lack the resources to be big time. Unfortunately teams were reluctant to move down into Division 2 for reasons of prestige and money: they wanted to play the big time schools for the financial guarantees they could get. Not on ly did some school cling to Division 1 membership but many of the schools that initially dropped down moved back up. Division 1AA, (FCS) was created to allow teams to be “Division 1” yet compete for a title they could win. But the same thing happened. Meanwhile, teams that started out in Division 3 migrated to Division 2 such that there was little difference between the bottom divisions. Meanwhile there was the NAIA, created by none other than Dr. James Naismith back in the 1930’s to provide the smaller basketball schools with a championship they could play for, (it actually pre-dates the NCAA tournament). They started a football tournament, (again well before the NCAA or that Dr. Pepper salesman got into the act) back in the 50’s. Their problem is that with the NCAA running tournaments, there seems little reason for the NAIA to continue to exist and they’ve been losing school to the NCAA for years. What if we combined the NAIA, the NCAA D3 and NCAA D2 into a Division 3, then combined FCS and the non-power conference teams of FBS into Division 2 and left Division 1 to the power conferences. Teams could move up or down depending on their desires and success rates. The NAIA has 87 football schools. NCAA D3 has 249 and NCAA D2 120 so our new Dviso9n 3 would have 506 teams. FCS has 125 teams. I count 63 teams besides Notre Dame that are in FBS but not in power conferences. That would give us 198 teams in our new Division 2. There are 64 power conference teams and Notre Dame makes it 65. How about a 32 team playoff in Division 3, a 16 team playoff in Division 2 and an 8 team playoff in Division 1? All straight invitationals. Here is what it might look like: DIVISON 3 The tournament would have all of: Ashland 10-0 Ferris State 10-0 Johns Hopkins 10-0 Linfield 9-0 Mount Union 10-0 Northwest Missouri 11-0 St. Francis 9-0 St. Norbert 10-0 St. Thomas 10-0 Thomas Moore 10-0 Wabash 10-0 Washington and Lee 10-0 Western New England 10-0 Wheaton 10-0 That’s 14 teams so we’d need 18 of these 31 one loss teams: Albion 9-1 Albright 9-1 Assumption 10-1 Baker 10-1 Doane 10-1 Charleston 10-1 Colorado State-Pueblo 10-1 Framingham State 9-1 Grand View 10-1 Hardin-Simmons 9-1 Henderson State 10-1 Humbolt State 9-1 Huntingdon 9-1 Indianapolis 10-1 Kansas Wesleyan 10-1 Laverne 8-1 Mary Hardin- Baylor 9-1 Midwestern State 9-1 Minnesota State-Mankato 9-1 Montana Tech 9-1 Morningside 10-1 Reinhardt 9-1 Slippery Rock 10-1 St. John’s 9-1 St. Scolastica 9-1 Tabor 10-1 Wesley 9-1 West Georgia 10-1 Whitworth 9-1 Wisconsin-Oshkosh 9-1 Wisconsin Whitewater 9-1 Gee, I’d like to include all those one loss teams. Maybe we could make it 48 teams? We’d have choose 3 of these 26 two loss teams: Augustana 9-2 Bowie State 9-2 Campbellsville 8-2 Carson-Newman 9-2 Catawba 9-2 Cortland State 8-2 Dickinson State 8-2 Dubuque 8-2 Emporia State 9-2 Franklin 8-2 Grand Valley State 9-2 Hendrix 8-2 Indiana (Pa.) 9-2 Lakeland 8-2 Lindsay Wilson 8-2 Marian 8-2 North Alabama 8-2 Ohio Northern 8-2 Point 8-2 St. Lawrence 8-2 Salisbury State 7-2 Sioux Falls 9-2 Southern Oregon 8-2 Tuskegee 8-2 Valdosta State 9-2 Virginia Union 8-2 Or we could go to 64 and only have to exclude 7 of them. Anyway, looking at their records and what they’ve done historically, I think these teams could certainly compete with each other and you wouldn’t get the same two teams winning every title for 10 years like Mount Union-Whitewater in D3. [/QUOTE]

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