NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK
The first time the Patriot League asked, Villanova University (VU) said no. And the second time.
And the third.
The league has been trying to get the Wildcats as a member “for the history” of the 40-year-old confederation, according to commissioner Jennifer Heppel.
Nova wasn’t trying to gain a negotiating advantage or anything by refusing the invitations. It just wasn’t ready to join. And the Patriot League wasn’t ready for the Wildcats.
“We said no,” head coach Mark Ferrante says. “There were a lot more restrictions and parameters.”
Over the past several years, the Patriot League has loosened up considerably. While it still considers itself something of an Ivy League Junior, thanks to the robust academic profiles of its member institutions, the league has instituted scholarships, expanded its roster limits and changed its admissions index.
“The more that we learned about how they operate in the Patriot League, the more we felt comfortable with it,” Villanova athletic director Eric Roedl says.
This time, when the Patriot League asked whether Villanova wanted in, the answer was a resounding yes. Last June, VU announced it would be leaving the Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) and joining the Patriot, which has been in existence since 1986 and whose members are more geographically appropriate for ‘Nova’s budget and whose institutional missions align with VU’s. The 10-team league, which added Richmond as a football member last year and welcomed the Wildcats and William & Mary (W & M) in late July, extends from Massachusetts to Virginia and will allow Villanova to bus to many of its Patriot road games. For an FCS (NCAA Division 1 Football Championship Subdivision) team that gets very little TV money and doesn’t draw huge crowds, that’s important.
“The biggest benefit is the travel and the expense of traveling versus the other league,” Ferrante says. “It’s also similar-sized schools and similar roster sizes. I also think it will be more enjoyable for our alumni for home games and when we go to New York to play Fordham, the Lehigh Valley or when we go to D.C. to play Georgetown.”
The “other league” to which Ferrante refers is the CAA, which has had three different incarnations over the past 80 years and which the ‘Cats were members of for just under four decades. In its original designation as the Yankee Conference, it featured teams exclusively in New England, but it expanded to include VU, [University of] Delaware (UD) and W&M, Richmond and James Madison (JMU). However, as schools either dropped football, moved to other conferences or jumped up to the FBS level (Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football in the United States), the CAA brought on new members that did not fit VU’s institutional focus.
Campbell, Stony Brook, North Carolina A&T, Hampton and Monmouth are fine schools, but they lack a connection beyond the gridiron with Villanova.
“[CAA Commissioner Joe D’Antonio] had to start bringing in members that agreed to be full members,” Ferrante says, referring to schools who would take part in the other sports the CAA sponsors, beyond football. “When all the conferences started doing major expansions, he was trying to strengthen the overall CAA conference. That affected the football side of it.”
It’s not like ‘Nova had to leave the CAA because the conference lacked punch. The Wildcats won a national title in 2009, and so did former members Delaware, JMU and Richmond. At one point, the CAA was getting four or five invitations to the NCAA grid tournament. But Delaware and JMU are now in the FBS classification, and Richmond left before last season. As the years went by, the conference ‘Nova had been a part of for decades looked less and less familiar. Not that it wasn’t a good spot for VU football.
“The CAA has been a great home for Villanova for a long time,” Roedl says. “We had a lot of success in that league.”
While the move to the Patriot League will take some adjusting to new surroundings and different rivals, it will also give Villanova a stable home for its football program, which is one of the school’s only sports that isn’t in the Big East Conference. (The women’s water polo team competes in the Metro Conference, and its women’s rowing squad is part of the CAA.) And the school has some recent history with the Patriot. The Wildcats defeated charter member Lehigh last year in the second round of last year’s FCS playoffs, 14-7. For those worrying about whether the league will provide a sufficient level of competition for the ‘Cats, especially since the CAA has been one of the nation’s top FCS leagues for many years, Heppel offers some evidence to assuage those fears.
“We have had multiple bids to the playoffs before,” she says. “We’ve had proven post-season success, so competitively, this makes a lot of sense. Our recent success does align. The national championships and tradition Villanova and Richmond bring are impressive.”
Though Ferrante is happy that ‘Nova’s road mileage will drop now that it has joined the Patriot League, some of his players aren’t too concerned about whether they can get to road games on a two-hour bus ride or by plane to Texas.
“It doesn’t matter where we are scheduled to play,” sophomore linebacker Omari Bursey says. “Our chin straps will be on tight, and our cleats will be laced up. The location doesn’t matter.”
While Bursey’s attitude is exactly what any coach would love to see from a team member, he does admit that it will be nice to have more fans able to see more games. Since most of ‘Nova’s roster is made of players from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland, games against most of the Patriot rivals are manageable drives.
“Family and friends are a lot closer and will be able to go to games, like at Lafayette and Lehigh or in New York against Fordham,” Bursey says.
The Patriot’s expansion to 10 teams, after it was at seven for much of its existence, will impact scheduling, since each school will now play nine league games instead of six. That should make putting together a non-conference slate easier for the Old Guard, which in the past had to find five and even six contests outside of the neighborhood boundaries. It’s not a big change for VU, which played eight conference games in the CAA.
The Wildcats will still play a road “money” game each year and travel to an FBS team in return for a sizeable check. In September, ‘Nova played at Louisville. Last year, Villanova absorbed a 52-6 beating from Penn State in return for a big payday and some national TV exposure on FS1. But don’t expect the Patriot ranks to swell any more, at least not in the near future.
“Beyond 10, we have to break into divisions,” Heppel says. “That dilutes the conference competitively. The schools have decided these are the teams they want to compete against.”
Heppel shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss expansion, simply because of the volatile nature of the college sports realignment climate. Many will scoff at the idea that if the Big Ten goes to 20 teams, or the SEC picks up a couple more members, that somehow the Patriot will be affected. They should remember that when Delaware (Conference USA) and James Madison (Sun Belt) moved up to the FBS level from the CAA, and ‘Nova, Richmond and William & Mary left for the Patriot, the CAA raided the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference for Hampton and North Carolina A&T, the Big South for Campbell and the Northeast Conference for Sacred Heart. There is a trickle-down impact.
While it’s unlikely any of the 10 Patriot members will make a move to the FBS ranks, few thought UD and JMU would do it. And as the CAA changes its personality, perhaps some of its members might be looking for new homes.
As for Villanova, it is positioned well in the FCS ranks and happy to be in the Patriot League.
“The academic profile and the institutional profile of the Patriot League are really strong and fit really well with Villanova’s academic and institutional profiles,” Roedl says. “It’s something we looked at, and we feel really good about the quality of the student-athletes in the Patriot League.”
At last.
