Conferences tackling major changes

[MeanGreen61]

Off the MUTS board.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/NEWSV5...516conferwj.htm

Conferences start tackling major changes

By Tom Ensey

Montgomery Advertiser

The Southwestern Athletic Conference has a new television package.

The Southeastern Conference bowl contracts are up at the end of this year.

The Sun Belt Conference has finished expanding for the time being.

The Ohio Valley Conference is looking to market itself on the Web.

The topics covered a broad spectrum of college sports when four league commissioners gathered in Tuscaloosa on Monday and met the press. Mike Slive of the SEC, Jon Steinbrecher of the OVC, Wright Waters of the Sun Belt and Robert Vowells of the SWAC participated in a roundtable discussion and answered questions from members of the Alabama Sports Writers Association at the organization's annual convention.

Vowells announced that as part of the SWAC's new TV deal with ESPN, the league's football champion will meet the winner of the MEAC in a mini bowl game on Dec. 3 at Birmingham's Legion Field. The game will be broadcast on ESPN as part of the programming package that will include a minimum of 24 telecasts on various ESPN networks.

"We hope it will increase our exposure and enrollments at our schools," Vowells said. "That is vital to us. It's been a long time coming."

The bowl tie-ins for the SEC are up this year, and the league is in discussion with current bowl partners and others to determine what the league will do, Slive said.

The SEC has already announced that it will use instant replay in football for the first time next fall. Waters said the Sun Belt will experiment with the process as well, but the reviews of the plays in the booth will not affect the game. The statistics and reviews from the study will be compiled and studied, he said.

Waters also said the expansions and contractions the league has experienced in recent years have stabilized. Idaho, Utah State and New Mexico State are out; Troy, Florida International and Florida Atlantic are officially in.

"We're a 13-team league now and have gotten our geography back where it needs to be," he said. "With the exception of the University of Denver, we stretch from Denton, Texas to Miami and from Bowling Green (Ky.) to Mobile."

Violence by fans and athletes is an issue that never seems to go away, and all conferences are dealing with it in different ways.

Slive said the SEC will sponsor a mentoring program to prevent violence by athletes on and off the field. The SEC was embarrassed last year when a brawl erupted between league member South Carolina and rival Clemson.

"It's a national issue and we want to make a contribution as a conference," he said. "We want to take a leadership role in that area."

Progressive fines of $5,000, $25,000 and $50,000 will be imposed on SEC schools where fan violence erupts, Slive said.

Steinbrecher said the Ohio Valley Conference is looking into a Web-based technology that could make telecasts of league sports events available on the Internet. It's a solution to the fact that smaller schools have a hard time attracting television contracts from networks.

Steinbrecher also said that because OVC schools play football at the NCAA Division I-AA level, league schools will not add a 12th football game in the immediate future. Though Division I-A approved expansion of the schedule, Division I-AA did not.

"A majority of I-AA schools favor adding the 12th game," Steinbrecher said. "It's a flaw in our governance that we didn't get it." He said the OVC and other schools at the I-AA level are working toward adding a 12th game.

While the issues facing big schools and smaller schools vary widely, schools at all levels are coping with the Academic Progress Rate, a new NCAA rule stipulating that athletes must complete specific percentages of their degree requirements or their school could face penalties that can include scholarship reductions and bans on post-season play.

All commissioners agreed that they favored the legislation in principle, but that the rules would need adjusting.

"I think we all acknowledge that there are some issues in (APR)," Waters said. "But at the same time we had to do something."

[MootPoint]

Hmm, I didn't even think about the fact that I-AA didn't add a 12th game. Without those extra games available for the USC's out there, the idea that the big schools will all just add a I-AA to their schedule doesn't really jibe and it forces them to schedule their 12th games against the SBC, MAC, WAC, etc. schools.

[Stan R]

Hmm, I didn't even think about the fact that I-AA didn't add a 12th game.  Without those extra games available for the USC's out there, the idea that the big schools will all just add a I-AA to their schedule doesn't really jibe and it forces them to schedule their 12th games against the SBC, MAC, WAC, etc. schools.

yay.

[PlummMeanGreen]

The SBC will not expand until La Tech runs out of "left on the table" by the new CUSA schools who left the WAC travel money or they decide to go independent. I don't think CUSA will be expanding any time soon, either.

So.............we all need to bloom where planted?

Edited June 16, 2005 by PlummMeanGreen

[MeanGreenBuzz]

Can we trade the WAC Denver for La Tech?

[NT80]

Hmm, I didn't even think about the fact that I-AA didn't add a 12th game.  Without those extra games available for the USC's out there, the idea that the big schools will all just add a I-AA to their schedule doesn't really jibe and it forces them to schedule their 12th games against the SBC, MAC, WAC, etc. schools.

Unfortunately, no. For the 12th game, most BCS conferences with divisions are leaning toward scheduling just another cross-division game to keep the revenue in conference.