Lacrosse conferences born

After years of rumors, a Big East lacrosse conference will be announced this week. The seven member teams will be Georgetown (formerly of the ECAC), Notre Dame (GWLL), Providence (MAAC), Rutgers (ECAC), St. John's (ECAC), Syracuse (ending years of playing as an independent) and Villanova (CAA). Syracuse is expected to continue its annual game with Cornell. To those who care about the overall health of the sport at the collegiate level, the most promising aspect of the Big East's formation is the implied institutional commitment from Providence and Villanova. The Big East launches next season.

Last month, another new Division I men's conference was born: the Northeast Conference. Member teams will be Mount St. Mary's (grabbed from the MAAC), Quinnipiac (GWLL), Robert Morris (CAA), Sacred Heart (CAA), Wagner (MAAC) and D-I newbies Bryant. The NEC will debut in 2011.

Both conferences have enough members to earn their champions an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

The dispersal of CAA, ECAC, GWLL and MAAC teams will spark a frenzy of shopping and courtship as the teams left behind seek new conference affiliations.

Wow. Cool. One down, one to go. Now if only we could do something about the ACC.

Wow, I'm surprised that SU was willing to forego their status as an independent (and its accompanying ability to pick and choose their schedule so as to virtually guarantee an at-large bid) in favor of conference schedule commitments to six schools.

Hillel, how will this affect the tournament picture, both next year and a few years down the road after the NEC starts play? Does it seem more likely that the schools who are now unaffiliated after the breakup of those four conferences will get pulled into existing conferences, or that we might see new conferences formed? (Including, I suppose, the possibility that Penn State and Ohio State might push for more Big Ten schools to take up lacrosse, with both now unaffiliated?)

There seem to be enough schools left over that the remnants of the CAA, ECAC and MAAC could form two more new conferences, with one picking up the Northern refugees (Hofstra, Hobart, UMass, Fairfield, Canisius, Manhattan,
Siena and Marist) and another picking up the new Southern unaffiliateds (Drexel, Delaware, Towson, Loyola, VMI, Saint Joe's - this actually seems pretty likely, with six being what you need for an autobid). The NEC might grab a couple of those, and I could see America East being interested in one or two as well, but there doesn't seem to be any overriding reason for the Ivy League, ACC, Patriot League or Big East to move beyond schools that they're already affiliated with in other sports.

The schools who are most out in the cold seem to be Denver, Air Force and Bellarmine. Unless they can find some more Western schools, they're going to have a tough time landing a conference. Air Force maybe has some cachet (especially in a sport that Army and Navy also play), but Denver's is basically limited to hockey AFAIK and Bellarmine has none at all. (Out of all these schools, they're the only one I actually had to look up to find out what state they're in.) Their best bet among existing schools would seem to be to sell PSU and OSU on a new, non-Big Ten conference and grab one more of the unaffiliated schools.

Sorry for the rambling.

DeltaOne81
Wow. Cool. One down, one to go. Now if only we could do something about the ACC.

What can you do about them, really, though? There's no reason for them to change (from their perspective), and even if you were to somehow force them to abandon their conference because it's not big enough, they'd still just put together the same schedules as they do now.

Josh '99

DeltaOne81
Wow. Cool. One down, one to go. Now if only we could do something about the ACC.

What can you do about them, really, though? There's no reason for them to change (from their perspective), and even if you were to somehow force them to abandon their conference because it's not big enough, they'd still just put together the same schedules as they do now.

I know, just dreaming.