Imagine my surprise when I returned home after an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of day Wednesday to learn that St. Francis College was downgrading its athletic programs to Division III.
This came mere days after the school’s men’s basketball program had played in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament for the first time since 1991.
I was surprised at this move, but I guess I shouldn’t have been.
The compression of Division I sports into a few massive conferences, the embrace of outright free agency via the transfer portal, and the abandonment of amateur status by allowing players to rake in millions of dollars in Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) revenue, all have combined to change big-time college sports into semi-pro sports.
Some will call it progress, or embracing reality. I see it as sad.
I’ve read several articles recently pointing to this year’s NCAA Tournament, devoid of any mid-major or below Cinderalla stories as we reach the Sweet 16 round tomorrow. Instead, we see an abundance of teams from major conferences.
One writer went so far as to pronounce the death of any mid-major programs being able to make it several rounds in future tournaments.
These programs see their star players plucked by bigger programs and the offer of increased exposure and massive NIL money.
Where once these teams kept players for four or five seasons and molded teams, now they serve as farm teams for the big guys, who missed some of these talented players when it came to recruiting them out of high school.
The mid-majors take an unfinished prospect, mold him or her into a producer, and then lose them to the big boys. It’s often the same with the coaches.
St. Francis looked at the reality of the current landscape and pulled the Division I plug.
I’ve covered a lot of NCAA Division III games through the years, along with Division II and plenty of NAIA contests, those last being similar to NCAA Division II and III.
The games can be exciting and entertaining. Sometimes, they have a player or two who could perform on the Division I level.
But it’s not the same as Division I.
Then again, the overly commercial, mercenary, semi-pro product now being proffered as Division I by the NCAA while clinging to its absurd “student-athlete” mantra, isn’t exactly your grandfather’s Division I, either.
St. Francis has stepped down athletically to where it probably should have been for some time. That it felt compelled to do so under the duress of the moment is unfortunate.
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