The Commonwealth Conference

While mainstream sports media outlets discuss the return of major college football, Major League Baseball players debate the conditions under which they'll play, and Notre Dame changes its academic calendar to better facilitate a gridiron season, there are consequential decisions at the mid-major collegiate level that have more significant impact on athletes that may never play in front of tens of thousands.

A Zip no more

The Atlantic 10 announced changes to the competition schedule for seven sports in 2020-21, reducing travel and limiting the number of teams that qualify for postseason play. The Mid American Conference (MAC) changed basketball schedules and eliminated postseason tournaments entirely for eight sports. Of note, those changes are initially set for the next four years. That there is what we call a harbinger, kids. The University of Akron eliminated men's golf and cross-country as well as women's tennis (not to mention getting rid of half of the school's academic programs).

The COVID-19 pandemic will have lasting impacts on nearly all areas of our society. Since we only care about a few of those areas and we know things about even fewer, we're focusing our energy today on intercollegiate sports. So what follows are a few predictions based on logic and almost no research, as well as an idea that's so crazy it just might work.

First, the predictions. Every college will be impacted by revenue shortfalls and increased expenses related to lower enrollments and preparing campuses to deal with the new reality of bringing hundreds of young adults together in a world where no vaccine or treatment is likely to be ready for market in the next 12 months. A significant number of those colleges will choose to reduce or eliminate the costs associated with their athletic programs.

Minnesota Duluth has won the past two NCAA
Hockey titles. They compete in Division II
in every sport other than hockey.

And so, we'll see an exodus of mid- and low-major Division I athletic programs to the cozier and more cost-realistic confines of Divisions II and III. We'll also see a relaxing of NCAA rules to allow schools to compete in just one or two Division I sports, just like we see in Men's Volleyball, Hockey, and Lacrosse today, for example. If Hofstra wants to play Division I basketball but compete in Division III in everything else, that'll be an option. They'll still get beat by Daniel Dixon.

We'll also see the consolidation of the current power conferences into a single mega-league with regional divisions. As the Power 65 is no longer constrained by the smaller schools that sought an equal voice at the table, and television networks realize they have even more leverage than before, a semi-pro option becomes reality. The NCAA Tournament keeps its format, because even the Power 65 realize the value of the tradition, but it's even harder for non-Power 65 schools to get in.

All the other schools that still want to play some sort of Division I athletics scurry to join a regional league that allows them reasonable competition and significantly reduced costs. The Sun Belt, which today stretches from Conway, South Carolina to San Marcos, Texas, is toast. So, too Conference USA with its unwieldy Norfolk to El Paso configuration. Our own little Colonial Athletic Association? Well, Boston to Charleston ain't exactly compact.

Which leaves with a modest proposal. ODU has no home if Conference USA implodes. VCU, George Mason and Richmond can't be thrilled with the reduced competition in Olympic sports that's coming for the A-10. W&M and JMU don't have a home in a CAA that doesn't exist. All six of those schools, notably, once competed against each other in the old Colonial. Add a couple of others to get to a round ten (say, Radford, VMI, Towson, and George Washington) and we've got a league with eight Virginia teams and two schools from adjacent jurisdictions.

W&M's getting its first bid to the NCAA Tournament as the auto-qualifier from the Commonwealth Conference. Just might take a while.