To better understand why William & Mary (or for that matter, any college or university) would consider joining the Patriot League, take a look at the landscape of NCAA Division I conferences. When teams move between conferences, there are usually four issues:
1. Money; a factor largely among the top conferences. When Maryland and Rutgers moved to the Big Ten, for example, it wasn't about tradition.
2. Location. Some schools find that, over time, the conference they joined isn't the conference they remain in. When New Mexico State joined the WAC in 2005, they played alongside Boise St., Fresno St., Hawaii, Louisiana Tech, San Jose St., Utah State, Nevada, and Idaho. Fifteen years later, none of these other schools are there anymore.
3. Competitiveness. As a school changes competitively, a new conference offers more opportunities to grow and to succeed. TCU could have never joined the Big 12 without its growth from the WAC to Conference USA to the Mountain West.
4. Opportunity. A sudden spark on the national scene can draw a lot of interest to make a move, even if it does not prove altogether successful. George Mason's move to the Atlantic-10 is one, Butler to the Big East is another.
As it relates to this discussion, forget the money. There isn't a financial incentive in the Patriot League the way there is in the Big East, plain and simple. But the other categories offer some clues as to why this may be in the consideration set for a school like W&M:
Location, Location, Location. When W&M joined the CAA, it was, for the most part, a compact group of schools in the Mid-Atlantic corridor: American, George Mason, Richmond, Old Dominion, JMU, East Carolina, UNC-Wilmington. Today's CAA stretches from Boston to Charleston and while the PL isn't exactly compact either, three of its all-sports schools are within three hours of Williamsburg and three more are within six hours--not an inconsequential number when the costs of travel for sports other than football and men's basketball start to add up.
There's another factor here. As a state-run institution, W&M maintains about two thirds of its admissions spaces for students from the commonwealth of Virginia. Of the one third from out of state, nearly half (230 of 505) come from just five states: Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts - the PL's corridor. Admissions- wise, having the Tribe compete where the applicants are can't hurt.
Competitiveness. There's also the issue of competitiveness, and things haven't been good for the Tribe over the years. In 2019, a strategic planning document issued by the College declared that by 2025 it seeks to "win at least 35 [CAA] championships, including a combined total of five championships in the three key community building sports, football and men’s and women’s basketball." Even the most loyal of Tribe fan would see this as a major challenge in the CAA.
The most successful of the three "community building sports" is, football, averaging 8,622 per game or fourth in the CAA behind JMU, Delaware, and New Hampshire.
It last qualified for the NCAA I-AA/FCS playoffs in 2015. Recent renovations to Zable Stadium, the former Cary Field, make it one of the best in the region and while W&M isn't welcoming the University of Virginia to Williamsburg, it's still strong enough a program to play at Charlottesville in 2021 and 2023.
The story isn't as strong for the W&M men's basketball team. The Tribe has never qualified for the NCAA tournament, nor have the women. (Ever.) The men's team has appeared in nine conference finals dating back to their days in the Southern Conference, and lost all nine. In 2019-20, the Tribe entered the CAA tournament with a 21-10 record and a second seed, and lost in the quarterfinals.
If there is any possibility of the Tribe winning five conference titles in these sports by 2030, much less 2025, it may not be with the current CAA alignment and this is why the Patriot League has a possibility in future strategic thinking: the path to the NCAA tournament is easier in the PL, and the cost to compete proportionately less. That doesn't mean W&M has to leave the CAA, and there are good reasons why it would like to stay where it was a charter member.
A backstory behind W&M's recent troubles around the planned reduction of seven sports was an effort by then-athletic director Samantha Huge to reallocate more money from so-called "Olympic" sports (namely, volleyball, men's and women's gymnastics, swimming, men's indoor and outdoor track and field) to better support football and basketball. Huge's departure and the resultant outcry from students, faculty and alumni will likely save all or most of these sports, but still does not address a financial path to better compete for conference championships and the resultant NCAA tournament revenue that could be afforded the school, win or lose.
"If all these efforts result in more championships in the ‘Burg (without compromising our ethics and academic standards), we’re all for it," wrote the independent W&M Sports Blog in 2019. A year later, it wrote this about the PL:
"Through following a similar model and having stated goals for success in both the classroom and on the playing field, W&M leadership has made it publicly known that they intend to become what we’re calling the Stanford of the FCS. But is this actually a doable goal? Especially as it relates to the three sports that the school has chosen to prioritize: football, men's basketball, and women's basketball. Although rare, programs boasting both elite academics and “successful” athletics (defining “successful” here as sustained championship-caliber sports) do exist at the FBS level...To us, the two [FCS] leagues that stand out most in this regard are the Ivy League and the Patriot League."
For football at the very least and likely for all its sports, the Patriot League stands as a viable consideration. And there are others, too, if you scratch the surface.
The Real HU (And The Other One, Too): For the Patriot League to break out of the guilded cage it has found itself in, it needs to consider schools who meet three criteria: 1) strong academics, 2) a good regional fit, and 3) those to whom their current conference membership is not ideal. Add a fourth, a century-old rivalry, and two schools stand out.
The next battleground of college realignment is not the Big 12 or the SEC, but in the fraternity of schools known as the HBCU's, historically black colleges and universities. Until 2017, all but one Division I HBCU belonged to one of two conferences: the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), stretching from Texas to Alabama, and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), from Maryland to Florida. (The outlier is Tennessee State, of the Ohio Valley). The conferences enjoyed a friendly rivalry in football, with the lucrative Celebration Bowl bringing large crowds to Atlanta for a de facto black college football championship. The MEAC enjoyed four decades of relative stability, but no more.
In 2017, Savannah State University opted to drop to Division II. A year later, Hampton University announced it would join a non-HBCU conference, the Big South, to better support its football program. Within the past year, North Carolina A&T, Florida A&M, and Bethune-Cookman have all announced plans to leave. By 2021, the MEAC will be at the NCAA minimum six schools for football, with no logical candidates with which to expand, and certainly not in today's economic climate. Just this past week, Norfolk State University's board set a December call to discuss the viability of staying in the MEAC, to which it has belonged since upgrading from Division II in 1997.
Here is the gambit for the Patriot League: only two HBCU's can conceivably fit the PL academic model and complete in the same mid-Atlantic footprint: Howard University in Washington, DC and Hampton University in the Tidewater, three hours south. The 95 game series between the two dates to 1908 in football, while its academic profiles each place in the top three among Division I HBCU's nationwide.
HBCU pride is strong at these schools but the MEAC is coming apart and not every school has a lifeline. Would a unified Patriot League bring them back together?
Regionally, the opportunity for additional cross-region rivalries in such a scenario is no less apparent: W&M and Hampton are 30 miles apart, Georgetown and Howard just four miles. And while no one expects a commensurate level of interest in Hampton versus Holy Cross or Colgate, the regionalization of a PL schedule with William & Mary, Howard, Hampton, and Georgetown opens the door for future divisional play.
It also sets the table for something the Patriot League has lacked since its founding: acknowledging rivalry games outside the Lehigh Valley. The PL has protected the Lafayette-Lehigh game at the expense of longtime rivalries like Colgate-Holy Cross and, to a lesser extent, Fordham-Holy Cross and Fordham-Georgetown, as these games no longer carry any particular gravitas in the final week of the season. A 10 team arrangement sets up at least four rivalry games for the final week of the calendar: Lafayette-Lehigh, Howard-Hampton, Colgate-Holy Cross, and Georgetown-Fordham, leaving the door open for W&M to continue to play Richmond in the oldest football rivalry in the South, dating to 1898.
Another Football-Only Member? While we're talking about it, there's always been a line of discussion that the Patriot League's affection for William & Mary, Richmond, and Villanova is unrequited.
Much like William & Mary, Richmond has steered clear of the Patriot League over its scholarship policy, its redshirt policy, and the perception that the Patriot League was a declining league in terms of football. The Patriot League also suffered from a perception of a deemphasis of football, or "where programs go to die". Trading Towson for Georgetown in the early 2000's didn't change this perception.
When Richmond officials left the CAA for the Atlantic 10 in 2005 and sent up a trial balloon of moving football to the PL during the presidency of William Cooper, it set off an alumni revolt. Cooper backed off the plan and left the UR presidency two years later. In 2008, Richmond won the I-AA national championship, something it would never have done in a non-scholarship Patriot League. Scholarships aren't the issue anymore, but any move by W&M would be watched closely at Richmond.
The Spiders aren't looking to pull up stakes for now, but it's worth watching down the road if a move from the Tribe brings success.
A ten team Patriot League in football is a tall order, but a tempting one: Colgate, Holy Cross, Fordham, Lafayette and Lehigh on the northern side of the ledger; Bucknell, Georgetown, Hampton, Howard and William & Mary to the other. In basketball, a 13 team setup might seem a bit unwieldy, but tailor made for divisions, with Army, Boston U, Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette and Lehigh to the north, American, Howard, Hampton, Loyola, Navy, and William & Mary to the south.
Whether it's one, two, or three schools, now is an optimum time to discuss expansion. And with this is mind, one more point.
The Georgetown Question: For all the incongruity between Georgetown football and the Patriot League, the PL has been a gracious host. It accepted a school in 2001 whose budget for football wasn't competitive with the other schools, and still isn't. It accepted a loose plan for a new stadium in Washington that arrived 20 years late and at half the size of any other PL facility. It renews the membership of an associate member that doesn't offer football scholarships and has no interest in doing so. And, the obvious-- it has rarely been a serious factor in the football race, with a combined record of 23-92 in league play.
A larger and stronger Patriot League has a little more leverage to encourage Georgetown to be more competitive. It doesn't mean that the PL has to call the question on football scholarships at Georgetown, because the answer hasn't changed. It may mean, however, that the PL expects Georgetown to increase its commitments in financial aid equivalencies to bring it closer in line with the scholarship thresholds at other PL football schools, where every program but Georgetown has eligibility to schedule games with major college teams. It could expect better in scheduling, such as avoiding games with Division III schools and perhaps assist in identifying opportunities against more established I-AA/FCS opponents. For its part, Georgetown could do more in promoting the Patriot League outside the campus gates and within Washington, and to schedule opponents with a measure of local interest.
Eight, nine, or even ten teams can be good for a stronger Patriot League. That alone should be an opportunity for a football future which might surprise some people.
