Boston University's move to the Patriot League is a perplexing one. Conventional wisdom tells me that their is a simple, short answer for this move and then there is also a longer, more diabolical one.
The simple answer is that BU sees the AmEast as fragile due to the moves by the CAA and while BU is in contention for a CAA upgrade the school is cheap when it comes to athletics and doesn't want to have the increased cost to their athletic department budget by adding additional travel that comes with a league upgrade. Hockey is that school's sport and hockey is unaffected by the move. The Patriot also gives them a boost academically.
The longer, sinister one is that something is brewing in the CAA and the football schools are losing ground in the expansion talks and somehow the Patriot League and/or BU was tipped off. The Patriot could be positioning itself to grab some additional football programs in the shift. William and Mary is the first to come to mind but Towson and Stony Brook could also be in play for the Patriot. This scenario probably is the product of someone in the CAA (JMU or Delaware) joining UMass in FBS leaving everyone else scrambling. New Hampshire and Maine probably get stuck in the NEC.
Patriot League might end up looking like this:
Boston U.
Holy Cross*
Army
Stony Brook*
Colgate*
Bucknell*
Lehigh*
Lafayette*
American
Navy
Towson*
William and Mary*
Football affiliates
Georgetown
Richmond
Villanova
In your second paragraph you suggest the Patriot would provide Boston University an academic upgrade. Could you explain a bit more about how this would upgrade BU's academics and also do D-I conferences really have an academic stigma attached to them? i.e. Does the Big 10 have a better academic reputation than say the ACC?
ReplyDeleteThe Patriot League is a tremendous upgrade in academic prestige over the AmEast for the Terriers. While academics has increasingly lost importance in college athletics in favor of other metrics such as market value, the Patriot League is a conference founded on the premise of academic eliteness. These schools are essentially Little Ivies and are well represented in US News and World Report's top universities lists. In football, the Ivies almost exclusively play Patriot League squads because the Patriot has similar stringent academic standards for their athletes. BU most certainly will benefit from being associated with great schools like Lehigh, Colgate, Bucknell, West Point, and the US Naval Academy.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Big Ten and ACC the Big Ten most certainly is more academically prestigious. Sure the ACC has academic powerhouses like Virginia, North Carolina, Duke, and Georgia Tech but the Big Ten boasts 11 members in the elite academic consortium, the Association of American Universities (AAU). The only non-member, Nebraska, is a former AAU member and only recently lost AAU membership and that was simply a matter of semantics because UN's medical school is technically attached the UN satellite campus in Omaha and one of the major things the AAU looks at is research dollars and the medical school makes up a huge chunk of UN's research expenditures.