(05-16-2022 10:31 AM)eku05 Wrote:  

Quote:They could be added as a member of the football conference despite not offering scholarships. They are already a member of the conference in other sports.

If you want to know why this is basically the worst idea imaginable, just take a look at what UT-Martin did in the late 90s/early 2000s. Here's the scenario:

In the OVC, Morehead State and Austin Peay had already gone non-scholarship and were playing football only in the Pioneer League as Stetson is doing currently. But UT-Martin tried to avoid that...by funding only half of the full scholarship allotment for FCS. They played in the OVC with a team consisting of about 30 scholarship equivalencies, and It. Was. Devastating.

There's almost no way to describe how bad this went for them, and they were dead weight in a conference that wasn't nearly as strong as ASUN football would probably be...and they had like 30 scholarships more than Stetson. This whole notion of somehow playing football in the conference while still being non-scholarship is absolutely crazy.

It would go badly and be embarrassing for the whole conference if they joined without scholarships. But until we hit the magic number of members to keep our playoff bid, I'm not gonna call anything crazy.

Quote:It would go badly and be embarrassing for the whole conference if they joined without scholarships. But until we hit the magic number of members to keep our playoff bid, I'm not gonna call anything crazy.

There are many avenues to the number we need that are desperate, but considerably less desperate than adding a non-scholarship team to the conference in football. It will get done. I've heard from some pretty reputable places that both additional members (who are actually interested) are being considered, and that we've also explored football-only mergers with other conferences. I'm not going to pretend I know what the exact, right solution is, but of all plausible ways we could get back to the auto-bid number, this is by far the worst one.

You'd be better of taking ANY interested D2 program who is willing to fund the scholarships than taking a program that won't. And we only need one at present (and have three years to get there due to the probationary period after JSU leaves).