In a football conference where seemingly nothing changes, Tuesday's announcement of the arrival of the University of Richmond to the Patriot League in 2025 is surprising as it is revelatory. It is surprising, because it plays against character of the PL as the place where no one wanted to be a member there, and revelatory because it exposes many of the issues under the cover within FCS schools today.
Unlike the major conference schools that move for money, FCS schools are now facing a different calling: the company you keep. In that sense, we really should have seen this coming, and spy a couple more down the road.
Georgetown University, preternaturally trained to look north in all things, may not know much about the Richmond football program. It's a very successful program and one which, had the University peeked on the other side of the river over the years, might have done well to emulate.
Its football team took the field the same as Georgetown did, 1881, but with access to a few more programs in an around the state, such as Randolph-Macon, Hampden-Sydney, VMI, VPI, Washington & Lee, and its eventual rival, the College of William & Mary. Following the split of the Southern Conference that sent 13 schools to form the Southeastern Conference, Richmond joined that conference in 1936, along with Davidson, William & Mary, and Wake Forest. The Southern split again in 1953 to form the Atlantic Coast Conference, but continued on with the likes of West Virginia, Virginia Tech, George Washington (through 1966), Davidson, The Citadel, Furman, VMI, Richmond, and William & Mary.
By the 1970's, Richmond saw the upcoming split of the I-A and I-AA schools and wanted to stay with the former, as the Southern was increasingly a collection of the latter. Richmond had been in discussions for a new conference which looked much like the ill-fated Metro Conference in football, to include Virginia Tech, Florida State, West Virginia, South Carolina, and East Carolina, among others, but without TV support (the NCAA owned all college football TV contracts until 1984), it went nowhere.
Richmond began a run as a Division I-A independent before accepting a relegation to I-AA in 1983. In 1986, it joined Delaware as the first schools south of New England to join the Yankee Conference. Two years later, Villanova followed, with William & Mary and James Madison in 1993, Over four decades and three name changes, what is now the Coastal Athletic Conference because the best FCS conference east of the Mississippi. Over those years, Richmond won eight conference titles, earned 12 NCAA playoff appearances and won the 2008 national championship. It has suffered only two losing seasons since 2004, and built its first ever on-campus stadium, the 8,271 seat E. Claiborne Robins Stadium, in 2010. Times were good.
So what changed? The clues were in plain sight.
The CAA of 2023 was not the CAA of old. The conference had survived change when three teams dropped football (Hofstra, Northeastern, Boston U) and two Yankee entrants upgraded to FBS (Connecticut, Massachusetts) . By 2021, the CAA was expanding for expansion's sake, bringing in schools far less compatible with the model Richmond had joined for: Campbell, Hampton, Monmouth, , North Carolina A&T and most recently, Bryant. The loss of longtime rivals James Madison and, most recently, Delaware, led Richmond officials to ask, much as they may have done in the 1970's, if this was the home for them, especially as a football-only member.
By reports, Richmond kicked the proverbial tires on a return to the Southern Conference. Just three of the 10 members were around when the Spiders last played there, and the conference had moved west to outposts in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. The Southern does not have any associate members in football, and Richmond was not trading in its A-10 membership for that. The Patriot League, once toxic to expansion candidates over its no-scholarship policy, could offer associate membership, a return to the A-10 footprint seen in other UR sports, and a more visible TV deal with ESPN+ than the onerous FloSports deal that the CAA had subscribed to. It also did not hurt that Richmond was one of three schools long given special consideration by PL authorities when it came to future expansion, if only they were interested.
Now, they were.
“Why leave?”, writes the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Perhaps the more pertinent question was “Why stay?”
"Energy and interest among UR fans diminished in 2023, and that was noticed in the Robins Center offices of athletics decision-makers," writes columnist John O'Connor. "Richmond had longstanding invites – the Patriot League and Southern Conference – and chose the Patriot League because UR’s student and alumni base is in the northeast and those schools align with UR. It’s a step down in FCS competition level, though that clearly didn’t weigh as much to Richmond as other factors."
And the predicate of the story: "There seems to be hope at UR that Patriot League expansion is not done."
Remember those two other programs with most-favored-nation status at the PL offices? Both are UR rivals, both are in the CAA, and both see the same changes in the conference ahead of them. By 2025, they will be among just five of 15 schools that were in the conference at its debut as the CAA, along with Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. They are also among the two of the most visible FCS programs in the region William & Mary and Villanova.
This is the home-run scenario, mixed sports metaphors notwithstanding, long wished in the narrow corridors of the PL offices. William & Mary, a strong football program that is nonetheless one of four original Division I schools to have never qualified for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, could see the PL as a new beginning. Villanova, of course, could park its football program as Georgetown does and reduce its costs, with four league opponents within two hours of its campus. The days of a one-bid PL could vanish if 10 PL teams were performing at a high level and the CAA continued to atrophy.
A period of discovery awaits in Williamsburg and the Main Line.
Once the second strongest program among the Virginia state schools, W&M has been passed by in the public perception by Virginia Tech, Old Dominion, and now James Madison. Does it consider a move upward to FBS as a means to address this, revisit the Southern, or take a move to the PL against schools that, for the most part, it is not an institutional fit with?
And whither Villanova? Its major CAA rival, Delaware, is gone, and Richmond is out the door. Unlike Georgetown, Villanova football still carries institutional credibility as a potential FBS entrant-- it was a week removed from an trustee vote whether to join the Big East in football before the FBS schools announced their exits. If the ACC comes apart, would Villanova be on a short list among those who remain? A more pertinent question may be whether a perceived deemphasis in the Patriot League affects any of this, or whether football been tacitly realigned within that university as a secondary program, much as it has at Georgetown? The Wildcats won 10 games last fall and averaged just 4,334 a game. Would the fans care if home games with Elon, Rhode Island, and Stony Brook were traded for Bucknell, Lafayette, and Fordham?
And perhaps the unasked question in PL scenario planning returns us to Washington.
When it accepted an invite to join the Patriot League in 2000, the last such school to do before yesterday, the league said that Georgetown has "an outstanding tradition of athletic and academic excellence, which reflects the core values of the Patriot League," said then-commissioner Carolyn Schlie Femovich. "Their desire to compete at the level of our programs makes them a very attractive member for our football league."
The Washington Post also added, " The move, which will be announced today, represents a step up in competitive level from Georgetown's present football affiliation, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, but keeps the team in a conference that does not allow athletic scholarships for football players."
Times have changed.
In a practical sense, Georgetown was invited because Towson was leaving and the PL didn't want to be at risk of further departures, including Fordham. To some cynical fans, Georgetown was as an insurance policy of sorts to prevent the PL from going below six schools and forfeiting its at-large bid to the playoffs. Holy Cross fans may not have liked Georgetown, but they needed the Hoyas for scheduling purposes. If three nationally prominent teams join the club, the future value of its least successful program, and the only one which never added scholarships, becomes an uncomfortable question.
In a 2000 Post article titled " Georgetown's Move to Patriot League Comes at a Price," athletic director Joe Lang responded to question about budgets that "We'll do this in a very measured way . . . by growing ourselves to fund the program the way we need to fund it to be competitive."
A quarter-century later, the arrival of at least one new entrant will raise that question once again.
