On July 21, 2021, a story was leaked to the Houston Chronicle that two schools in the Big 12 conference were secretly negotiating with the Southeastern Conference about future membership. Within six months, one out of every eight members of the Division I membership announced plans to realign in new conferences over the next four years. One in eight.
Restructure was not reserved to the big schools, however. Changes to the WAC, ASUN, Southland, Ohio Valley, Colonial, Big South, Big Sky, and MEAC will all reshuffle the deck of the Division I-AA/FCS assortment of schools.. These conferences did not see changes due to schools chasing after TV contracts or playoff berths. In many cases, it was a realization that the governing models which had held their leagues together were no longer sufficient to manage a changing landscape for their schools, particularly in football. To those schools, it was not a case of jumping for the brass ring, but a more fundamental need: innovate, or atrophy.
Such was (not) the case with the Patriot League, to whom atrophy is a clear and present danger to its football programs, Georgetown included.
It's been two decades since the Patriot League was a significant national player in FCS football. When Georgetown arrived to the PL in 2001, flush with the promise of continued success gained from its MAC Football days, it was not uncommon for the PL to field Top 10 teams nationally--that season, Lehigh was ranked #5 nationally. Two years later, with two Top 25 teams among its roster, Colgate advanced to the championship game, having defeated UMass, Western Illinois, and Florida Atlantic before falling to Delaware. The PL's mix of regional identity and not-quite-Ivy League recruiting was a potent mix to secure regular playoff appearances and recruit some of the top talent in the Northeast who were not headed to major college programs.
But in 2022, many of these same guardrails have combined to run the PL off the road of competitive FCS football. In 2021, the Patriot was a combined 9-27 (.250) out of conference, compared to 20-17 (.540) a decade earlier. The move to scholarship football in 2012 (except at Georgetown, of course) failed to address the continued decline in recruiting and results, not only against a revived Ivy League, but against the regional conferences the PL was once comparable with or superior to. Among the 14 FCS conferences, the PL is no better than ninth or tenth of the 14 today, with a continued decline in its sights.
The league is ossified by recruiting restrictions rules which date back to the 1980's, ostensibly to curry favor with the Ivy League, a league that cares less and less about what the PL is up to in 2022. And because football rules falls under the league as a whole, many of the advantages other conferences offer in areas such as redshirting, graduate transfers, and equivalency grants run afoul of the league as a whole, which is determined to play its other sports as a decidedly lower state of competitive performance.
Further contributing to its squeeze is the lack of growth. Despite six of its schools being in the top 20 in FCS football spending, the PL has not added a new school to football since Georgetown in 2001. Its reputation in some circles as "the place where programs go to die" scare some well known suitors away; to others, the excessive rules and restrictions are simply not worth the effort. Therein lies a risk of its own--the PL is only one school above the NCAA minimum for a conference. If two schools leave, the PL is defunct; furthermore, if as few as one of the full members (Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh) leave, the PL is defunct as well, putting Georgetown's tepid commitment to football at danger in more competitive waters.
There is an argument to be made for Georgetown to consider other conference opportunities, but this is not the column for that. Instead, the football fortunes of the PL need a new approach, one mirrored by the most successful conference in FCS: the Missouri Valley.
Today's ten team MVC contains just seven schools which play football, and not all at the same competitive level. Valparaiso, for example, is not competitive with Northern Iowa, any more than Bucknell is competitive with Army. Just five compete at a scholarship level, which would not be enough, on its own, to be an authorized conference.
The Missouri Valley maintains and administers a separate football conference under its auspices: the Missouri Valley Football Conference, which not only serves as a home to the five all-sport members, but has also attracted some of the region's strongest programs, among them North Dakota, North Dakota State, South Dakota, South Dakota State, and Youngstown State, combining for 13 national championships among them.
This arrangement gives the all-sport MVC schools a common conference experience without the need to add more schools for other sports. (Three new schools will enter the conference in 2022, but only one plays football.)
This is the future, if it chooses to look beyond its myopia, for the Patriot League. A Patriot Football Conference (PFC) would be administered from the PL office but be permitted to govern itself in football outside the league's all-sports umbrella: namely, allowing equivalency scholarships, recruiting outside an Academic Index, redshirting, allowing graduate transfers, and ending restrictive roster limits--in short, doing what every other conference in Eastern football outside the Ivy already does.
Let's cut to the chase: there are probably ten schools, namely, Villanova, Richmond, and William & Mary, but also the likes of Delaware, Monmouth, Towson, Rhode Island, Albany, Maine and New Hampshire, to whom a compact, self-governing, football-only conference in the Northeast could be a reasonable option were it not for the strings attached with Patriot League membership.
Many of these teams are situated in the CAA for football, but that conference was reshaped by realignment, with future additions from North Carolina A&T, Hampton, Monmouth, and Stony Brook. A league that stretches from Greensboro to Orono, with enrollments ranging from 3,500 to 26,000, may not be the best future to some of these schools in football, especially as they play other sports in more compact conferences. Does a Villanova see synergies playing Holy Cross and Lehigh, or traveling to Elon and NC A&T? How long does Hampton want to travel to games in New Hampshire?
But for now the Patriot isn't a realistic alternative. There's a reason why Villanova or Richmond or William & Mary aren't in the PL: they have rejected the competitive limitations the PL thrusts upon its membership. A school which aspires to the FCS national championship will not find those opportunities in today's PL, which is now a one-bid conference. A new governing body for football doesn't mean the PL is abandoning academics, but it does signal that with proper governance and vision, the PL can meet the best of both worlds while providing for the kind of competitive experiences its own institutions expect out of a college football program.
This approach raises the case for a "PFC" to a more competitive state with schools outside the Ivy League, and sends a message that it open for business to welcome other Eastern schools who see benefits in the conference, but not the PL's all-sports governance. It also goes without saying that as more competitive programs enter the conversation, the opportunities for the conference rise to follow, and certainly the potential for renewed interest.
A PFC doesn't make things any easier competitively for Georgetown--far from it. But a new look at how FCS football is governed could help Georgetown shake off two decades of slumber in I-AA and give it the tools it needs to compete: first and foremost, the ability to recruit outside a prescriptive SAT range that makes it prohibitive to recruit talented players. If a recruit is good enough to be admitted at Navy or Villanova, he ought to be good enough to be admitted at Georgetown--but it's not allowed in the current setup. For the other six schools, they get a fair chance to put their Top 20 spending to seek Top 20 status on the field, not merely limp to a 5-6 record to seek an autobid.
Properly envisioned, the Patriot Football Conference could be as impactful to Eastern football as the MVFC is in the Midwest. Without it, the PL is just one realignment removed from its own demise.
