The Richmond Spiders’ Patriot League Tale, Part Four: In the Wake Of I-AA Reclassification, An Upstart League Tries To Form

(This is Part Four of my series detailing the Richmond Spiders’ journey to the Patriot League. You can read part one here, which describes Richmond’s decision to leave the SoCon shortly after the NCAA split into Divisions I, II, and III, you can read part two here, which describes how Richmond navigated Division I’s split into I-A and I-AA, and you can read part three here, how Richmond found I-AA to be their home.)

BETHLEHEM, PA – Few would have predicted that the sole remnant of the Yankee Conference would become a cradle of I-AA and FCS National Championships, but for a long stretch of the subdivision’s history that’s exactly what it would become.

A critical part of that evolution was Chuck Boone, Richmond’s athletic director.

Along with Delaware, Richmond would join the Yankee Conference in 1986, a I-AA football-only conference in a move to give the Spiders a home in that sport.

Richmond’s big Rival, William & Mary, was competing as a I-AA independent, the same as the Spiders. It was widely assumed that they would follow Richmond, their Rivals, into the Yankee Conference, and soon thereafter they did so.

It almost didn’t happen.

Just a few years prior. it was announced in the papers that they were going to become a part of an upstart I-AA league that was to be revolutionary.

Richmond’s Rival, William & Mary, was going to be a founding member of the Colonial League, which is now known as the Patriot League.

It was almost a done deal.

The CFA and I-AA

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the largest schools were at war with the NCAA.

Fed up with fending off proposals to abolish scholarships and sharing half the TV money with the vast majority of the NCAA’s membership, the cartel inside the NCAA known as the College Football Association, or CFA, was throwing their weight around, trying to effect change.

A decade of legislation, first to formalize the split into divisions (Division I) and then to split into subdivisions (I-A and I-AA) had as its heart the desire of the largest Division I schools, the members of the CFA, to shrink the pool of schools it wanted to be its peers.

In 1981, after a stealth campaign, and then later a public campaign, the members of the CFA got their way – sort of.

The so-called “Ivy Amendment”, which temporarily kept the Ivy League, Colgate, Holy Cross, Richmond and William & Mary I-A, was voted to be abolished by the membership of I-A. No longer would having a broad-based sports program with multiple sports be enough.

Thus, new variations on the arbitrary stadium and attendance rules devised by the CFA originally became the only way a school could qualify to be I-A, or face demotion.

A 30,000 seat home venue requirement, and an average of more than 17,000 fans at home during a four year period – thus became two of the three ways to qualify for I-A. (Another loophole given to friends of the CFA schools – if a team averaged more than 20,000 paid home and away over the last four years, they would also qualify, meaning borderline members like Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Wake Forest would be able to qualify easily through conference games despite only barely meeting the 17,000 requirement.)

Effectively, while members of the CFA handed out passes to their conference members and friends, in 1981 the Ivy League, along with Richmond and William & Mary, were forced out of I-A.

“I told you this was going to happen,” Chuck Boone, Richmond’s athletic director, told The Richmond Times-Dispatch at the time. “After canvassing as many delegates as I could the past two days here, especially when the Pac 10 and Big 10 decided they were in favor of it, I knew it was hopeless. They had the vote.”

Coaches like Joe Paterno over the years tried to paint the CFA’s motives as wholly pure, claiming that schools like Wagner, Brown and Colgate simply “don’t have any idea of what we are trying to do with our program. Let us run our programs, and we will have less recruiting evil,” he claimed.

By 1981, though, the jig was up. By then, the CFA wasn’t moaning about the Ivy League telling them what to do anymore – they were trying to negotiate their own TV contract, one where all the money would go to just their schools and none would go to the rest of the NCAA’s membership.

The CFA revealed that all of their moves and pressure over the last decade wasn’t about divisions, subdivisions, or football recruiting. It was all about money.

Simply put, the CFA wanted to negotiate their own TV contract and keep all the money for themselves.

By pushing schools like Richmond and William & Mary out of I-A, there would be less sharing of the potentially huge pot of money that might come from cable TV in the future.

Many of the smaller schools resisted forced reclassification.

“Six demoted schools,” The New York Times reported, “will appeal Monday, when the NCAA opens its annual convention here: Arkansas State, Louisiana Tech, Northeast Louisiana [later renamed Louisiana-Monroe, or ULM], Richmond, VMI, and William & Mary.”

All six had their appeals denied, though it was expected.

The schools of the MAC, which counted as their members Bowling Green, Eastern Michigan and Toledo, had some of their members force-classified to I-AA, but they schools waged a fierce campaign at the conference level to meet the arbitrary attendance numbers, including stories of boosters buying blocks of tickets to make the grade while in reality the seats on gameday were empty. They eventually succeeded, making it into I-A by the barest of margins after 1981, and only after appealing to the NCAA as a conference.

The Ivy League, too, didn’t take the news sitting down.

“The measuring stick is what sticks in the craw,” columnist John Fox wrote in The Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. “the hypocrisy of the NCAA, with its pledge of dual allegiance to athletics and academics, agreeing to a paid-spectator rating system for its member institutions of learning.”

“Every Ivy was playing intercollegiate football in the 1800s” Fox continued, “long before the NCAA was weaned. They don’t qualify [for I-A]. Yet if Atlantic City casino-owners throw together a few classrooms and a football team to lure weekend business with range of the crap tables, if the stadium’s big enough, Slot-Machine Tech would get the seal of Div. I-A approval.”

Shortly after their demotion, in early 1982 the Ivy League allegedly considered an ambitious plan to remain I-A – by potentially adding two schools, trying to work within the NCAA’s arbitrary paid spectator guidelines.

By doing this, as a conference they would have enough venues and attendance to meet the arbitrary numbers. Army, Navy and Northwestern were allegedly their interested targets.

“Army and Navy wanted to join the Ivy League in basketball two years ago,” The New York Times reported, “but were turned down by the other league members. Army, Navy and the eight Ivy members make up the 10-team Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League. Army and Navy, which regularly played Ivy teams in football years ago, returned to playing Ivy football opponents in recent seasons.”

Fox was dubious.

“The Pentagon wouldn’t hear of it,” he wrote. “A league round-robin would account for nine games out of the maximum 11 (Ivy presidents don’t allow more than 10). Neither academy can stand that much denationalization of its image, even though Army’s only three football victories this year came in its three games against Ivies. Despite frequent embarrassments, trips against a Far West and Deep South team one season, and against Big Eight and a Southwest Conference opponents [sic] are important public relations.”

That wasn’t all.

“An Ivy official who did not wish to be identified also raised the possibility that three other colleges – Holy Cross, Colgate and William & Mary – might be considered in Ivy expansion.” The New York Times article continued.

Fox scratched his head at this, too.

Colgate, William & Mary and Holy Cross had no chance at meeting the attendance requirements for I-A, and in fact William & Mary’s stadium size was a very large reason they lost their appeal for I-A status in front of the NCAA.

“If the Ivy goes that route,” he wrote, “it’s obviously for other reasons than regaining I-A status. And unless the Ivy heads revise their ban on postseason play or on spring practice, don’t expect Colgate to be interested.”

The Supreme Court Wrecks I-AA on TV

At the start, being a part of I-AA was a great boon to the schools that chose to be there – financially as well as competitively.

Containing costs and scholarships in practice made for more equitable competition. In I-A, it was mostly the same schools that qualified for the huge bowls and lucrative TV contracts, but in I-AA, there were six different champions in their first seven years.

The closest thing to a dynasty was Eastern Kentucky, who won two national championships and lost two other times in the national championship game.

Not only there was a true national champion determined (unlike the world of I-A, where bowls and polls helped determine a mythical winner), the way the NCAA TV contract was at the beginning, it was actually quite lucrative for a team to be in the championship game, as they shared in a large share of TV revenue.

“It means $70,000 to $75,000 for the school on TV and $35,000 for the other conference members,” Morehead State AD Sonny Moran said in 1981. “For about five seconds I held a check for $422,000 in my hands.” In 1981, that was an enormous sum for any athletic department.

With the CFA battling the NCAA and negotiating their own TV contract, the regional slots for ABC and ESPN telecasts largely fell to I-AA schools.

Morehead State in 1981 only appeared on regional TV once, but thanks to Eastern Kentucky’s dominance in the OVC and their playoff runs, they and the rest of the OVC benefited handsomely, and this was true from the beginning of I-AA in 1978.

But those days were numbered, thanks to the CFA, the Supreme Court, and statehouses across the country.

“The TV money has helped us tremendously,” Moran continued, “and therein lies a little of the problem. Once you dangle that carrot out there, it’s hard to go back to Division II when that money is hanging out there. We have reaped tremendous benefits out of it. But that’s what you call soft money. You can’t count on it.”

They couldn’t rely on Kentucky’s Council on Higher Education, either.

In 1981 the Board floated a recommendation to end athletic subsidies in four years. For I-A schools like Louisville and Kentucky, it was not so big a deal, they with big stadiums and potential bowl games to replace the funding. For Western Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, Murray State and Morehead State, however, losing that funding would be mean they would “face a crisis situation,” The Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

That put the OVC in a very awkward position – as the cradle of champions of I-AA, yet facing a political financial crisis not of their own making, causing them to be a bus league and relying on guarantees against I-A teams to balance the books.

Then the hammer fell from the Supreme Court.

In a 7-2 decision in the case NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s exclusive right of TV broadcast rights of college football games violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The CFA, architects of NCAA Divisions and NCAA subdivisions, were not satisfied with all the of change they forced on the rest of the NCAA membership. They wanted the power to have autonomy over their own TV contracts, too, and Oklahoma and Georgia, representing the CFA, went to the Supreme Court to try to prove why they should.

It was the first time the NCAA’s concept of “amateurism” was attempted to be defined in court.

Before 1959, sporting events weren’t considered interstate commerce, and before 1984, college football TV deals were managed by the NCAA for the overall membership for distribution to the TV networks, not any individual school or conference.

In their decision, the Court decided that by limiting the number of games available to TV broadcasters, the NCAA was acting anti-competitively through “horizontal price-fixing” – in other words, artificially limiting the supply of televised games.

It was not totally unexpected.

In each of the circuit courts, the NCAA had lost, and it was widely expected that the Supreme Court would simply confirm the lower court rulings, and they did, albeit with a larger majority than some anticipated.

But the ruling had an immediate, chaotic effect on college football, as schools and conferences had to now figure out a brave new world where every school was free to negotiate their own TV deals with the major networks and cable TV.

There were no more rules – the NCAA could not, as they did before, withhold TV broadcast rights (and by extension TV revenue) from schools who violate NCAA policies. Games no longer had to be confined to Saturdays, nestled in between high school Friday Night Lights and NFL Sundays as the NCAA had basically forced through their TV contract – they could be fit into any day there was a football break in the TV schedule. Thursday college football games soon became the norm, classes and academics be damned, and eventually every day of the week would have college football games of varying degrees of spectacle and interest.

It was true that breaking the NCAA’s grip on TV did cause more college football games to be broadcast on TV overall, which theoretically was good for consumers of college football.

But whereas the NCAA previously restricted the supply of games to promote a large number of schools, the lawless aftermath led to a supply glut of games that made no sense academically or physically for students in institutions of higher learning.

The aftermath also exposed the brutal hand of Adam Smith to I-AA.

With the NCAA no longer with tight control of exposure, the Eastern Kentucky’s now had to compete for TV program rights against the Alabama’s. This was an unwinnable battle.

About the only thing that seemed very clear was that overnight, the big money guarantees of regional TV appearances were gone for I-AA schools.

“Oh, man,” Grambling State head coach Eddie Robinson said at the time. “This puts us in a tough position. I go with the Constitution and what the Supreme Court thinks, but I think it’s going to have a negative effect on the future of Division I-AA, Divisions II and III. We aren’t going to be able to get a piece of the television pie.”

That wasn’t all.

“It’s going to affect our enrollment,” he continued. “It’s going to give them more advantage in recruiting, more financial advantage. Those of us who do not have the opportunity to appear [on TV] are going to be at a tremendous disadvantage.”

Furthermore, thanks to the CFA, the I-AA playoffs went from being a net money positive endeavor to one that cost the schools money.

“In 1983, TV rights fees [for the I-AA Playoffs] were worth $1,227,500 to I-AA teams,” Big Sky Commissioner Ron Stevenson said. “Last year [1984], those fees amounted to $8,000.”

Montana State, who won the I-AA National Title in 1984, netted a check for $582.71 in TV broadcast money that year. The other Big Sky schools collected a $395.41 check.

It’s hard to really say that the CFA and the most powerful college football schools set out to cripple the vast majority of its Division I membership financially, reduce their ability to have their games be seen widely on TV, and also simultaneously help fuel a financial crisis that took a money-making college playoff endeavor into one that cost the schools money to participate. However, by operating in their own greedy, self-serving interests, that’s exactly what ended up happening.

“As you can imagine,” Stephenson was quoted as saying, “we don’t root for Oklahoma or Georgia around here.”

Ivy Colonialism

The battles over the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally changed Eastern college football, and by the time 1985 rolled around, it finally felt like the shakeout was complete.

What was left was a shambles of what it had been just a decade before.

By 1983, the Ivy League finally lost their battle to remain I-A, meaning that the large stadiums and large tradition of the Ivies were basically forced to exist in I-AA.

What they found in I-AA East were a hodge-podge of different college football programs. (Their effort to convince Army and Navy to join forces to keep the Ivy League I-A, apparently, didn’t get very far.)

In I-AA, they found the remnants of the Yankee Conference, now a football-only construct and all that was left of the former all-sports state school conference. They were the de facto power in the East in I-AA, however, the only Eastern conference with an autobid to the playoffs. Teams like Maine, UNH, UMass and Boston University were members.

They found a few football independents – Delaware, Bucknell, Lehigh, and Lafayette, among others – who took the chance during the formation of I-AA to reclassify to Division I to ensure their basketball (and in Bucknell’s and Lehigh’s case, wrestling) programs remained Division I instead of Division II. They all were in the ECC, the East Coast Conference, in basketball and in the ECAC in all other sports.

And they found a decent number of football independents that were in the same boat as them – forced into I-AA by the CFA’s arbitrary attendance and stadium size requirements. Colgate, Holy Cross, William & Mary and Richmond were four of those teams.

All of them had different aspirations and concerns, but it was the Ivy League Presidents that made the first destabilizing move.

“In 1983 Howard Swearer, president of Brown and the Ivy League presidents’ group,” The New York Times reported, “sent Anthony [Maruca], vice president of public affairs at Princeton, on a mission. The Ivy presidents, having little confidence in the NCAA’s efforts at reforming college football, were looking about in the East for colleges that shared their belief that good football can be played with good football players within a high academic framework.”

There was another, less public relations-friendly reason the Ivy League went on their search – they needed to find someone, anyone, at the I-AA level that they would able to schedule somewhat regionally.

Army and Navy were set to disappear from their out-of-conference schedules, as would the hodgepodge of I-A Eastern schools they could schedule.

A few years prior, in 1980, Penn State scheduled Brown, just as the Ivy League had expanded from a 9 game schedule to a 10 game schedule. “I would be willing to bet,” one anonymous Columbia official said, “that that one game, Brown-Penn State, more than anything, prompted the [Ivy] presidents to act. What Penn State stands for caused a lot of reaction among Ivy presidents. And some of the coaches were concerned that you go play a team like that and get the daylights beat out of you – it doesn’t make your league look good.”

“Schools like Lehigh and Lafayette, small private colleges [sic], were preferable to the Yankee Conference’s state universities like Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which are beefing up their [I-AA] full-scholarship football programs,” The New York Times corroborated.

Maruca went looking and found six college Presidents who eagerly sought out an affiliation with the Ivy League. Three of them – Colgate’s George Langdon, William & Mary’s Thomas Graves, and Bucknell’s Dennis O’Brien, were Ivy League alums, and William & Mary and Colgate had provided critical support for the Ivy Amendment that allowed them all to remain in I-A when the I-AA split happened.

On November 6th, 1983, a splashy two-page article appeared in The Suffolk (NY) Newsday which detailed the Ivy League’s thinking at the time.

“What came out at first was a scout, and explorer in the form of Maruca, who set said from the Ivy island… stuck a flag in the sand at Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh, and William & Mary,” the article stated almost in prose. “And called it the Colonial League. Perfect. The Ivy establishing its own colony. The world is round.”

It detailed the philosophy that was being shopped – a philosophy eagerly embraced by two true believer Colonial presidents, Lehigh’s Peter Likins and Holy Cross’ Rev. Father John E. Brooks, of the Colonial League adopting the Ivy League way of “doing” college football at that time. That meant no spring practices, no I-AA Playoffs, no freshman eligibility, and most importantly and controversially, no football scholarships (other than those based on general need).

“The six Colonial schools intend to form a so-called ‘presidents’ league, in the Ivy mold,” the article continued, “whereby all football policy will be determined by the head administrators, with athletic directors making ‘recommendations only’.”

While the flowery article tried to go out of its way to say that the Ivy League wouldn’t impose Ivy League rules on the Colonial, it was pretty clear that that was the direction the league would go.

In the book The Dunlap Rules, Colgate head coach Fred Dunlap‘s son details a story from his father concerning their 1984 I-AA playoff run. (Colgate at the time was an I-AA Independent, and had no autobid to the I-AA playoffs.)

Colgate was getting ready to play against Holy Cross, a huge game in I-AA at the time between nationally ranked Eastern teams with a possible shot at the playoffs on the line.

But Dunlap recalled president George Langdon being mad at a series of articles extolling the success of the Red Raiders’ football team that season, and that the playoffs could be at hand.

“All of this emphasis on football is hurting our reputation,” Langdon allegedly told him, “And what’s this about going to the playoffs? I never said we could go. No Ivy League team is going to any playoffs. Participating in them would compromise our exam schedule and it would hurt the players’ academic performance.”

Happily, Dunlap didn’t cave to Langdon’s pressures, as they would end up participating in the playoffs that season behind the rushing of one of the all-time great I-AA backs, RB Kenny Gamble, a true freshman at the time. But it showed Langdon’s philosophy on football and the postseason was closely aligned to the Ivy League’s thoughts on the matter.

And with presidential control, if the Presidents wanted to impose a no-scholarship policy over the wishes of the players, fans, coaches and administrators, they could.

Ironically, this imperial attitude almost caused the league to not form at all.

William & Mary Leaves Colonial Experiment

Allegedly the name “Colonial League” was offered to the new upstart league by William & Mary’s President, Thomas Graves.

By the spring of 1985, that was all that would remain of William & Mary’s presence in the new upstart league they had spend more than a year to help form.

“William & Mary’s potential affiliation with the league was placed in jeopardy Saturday when it was learned three league members – Lafayette, Lehigh, and Bucknell – would oppose grants-in-aid when the league begins in 1986,” The Daily Press reported in the winter of 1984.

(Grants-in-aid is a form of scholarship where the student goes through the financial aid office to determine need, and the amount that the student was deemed eligible to pay could instead be converted into a grant, effectively making it a scholarship. Apparently this was how William & Mary was planning on continuing to offer football scholarships to its players.)

“I’m not in a position to confirm that the league is in trouble,”, William & Mary athletic director Jim Copeland said. “But I can tell you this: Our school intends to keep our football scholarships.”

The Indians, led by head coach Jimmye Laycock, had just gotten some good success at the I-AA level and were a whisker away from qualifying for the I-AA playoffs that season. Only a thrilling 33-31 win by Richmond, a battle of nationally ranked teams in front of over 21,000 fans, kept Laycock’s team from the postseason.

But it wasn’t so much the success of William & Mary’s football team that had the Colonial league in trouble. It was the way they were coming up with their policies.

“The presidents of the Ivy League were dealing only with presidents of the six Colonial League teams. It was their charter with little, or no, input from athletic directors,” The Daily Press reported in 1985.

Athetic director Jim Copeland and William & Mary’s Board of Visitors claimed they were “misled” and said they thought they would be “permitted to retain maximum football scholarships under NCAA I-AA provisions (now 70) unless, down the road, the Indians dominated,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. “That, as it develops, was erroneous information.”

For better or worse, it seemed like William & Mary’s athletics administration felt like they could work around a scholarship policy with grants-in-aid, but that nuance or policy was either not considered or rejected by a group of Presidents who were unwilling or unable to compromise on the principle.

More broadly, it seems more than anything the rules of the league were being made by twelve college presidents who had closed themselves off from input from their athletics directors and coaches.

Colgate’s involvement in the league seemed to summarize the divide between athletic directors and presidents well.

From The Dunlap Rules and articles at the time, it seems pretty clear that at Colgate, Dunlap’s and Langdon’s philosophy and vision for their athletics programs were different. (“I was opposed to this league from the start,” Dunlap was quoted as saying. “But my school president wanted it, so we joined. It was that simple.”)

Another aspect that didn’t seem to be grasped by the Presidents was the I-AA Playoffs. They mattered.

Lehigh, Colgate, and Holy Cross all had a taste of the I-AA Playoffs, and liked it (with William & Mary very close to making it themselves). Being a part of a national championship conversation was something that brought excitement to their schools, national rankings, and fans to their games. While their presidents didn’t seem to be paying attention, a lot of people in those communities sure did, and more national exposure came as a result.

But the Colonial schools were supposed to give that up – a wildly unpopular move – to be in alignment with the Ivy League’s decision not to play in the postseason.

One by one unpopular moves were piling up, and the athletic directors felt like they were not being listened to, and more and more they were going to the press to gripe.

It almost caused the Patriot League to fall apart before it even began. But somehow, they pulled it together. In 1986, the Colonial League started play.

Addendum

William & Mary’s decision to exit the league they helped form was huge on a lot of levels.

Indirectly and more immediately it would land them in the Yankee Conference, along with Richmond a few years later, two Top 25 teams that would provide them in the future many I-AA and FCS playoff victories and an FCS National Championship.

It would make the Yankee Conference a powerhouse in I-AA football, who just a few years before was worried about its survival. With the formation of the Colonial (eventually to be called the Patriot League), the Yankee Conference was under enormous pressure to expand and become more secure and viable. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

It came at a time when a bunch of Eastern independents were unceremoniously dumped in I-AA, who quickly figured out if they wanted to have stable schedules, joining a proper conference was a must.

But William & Mary was critical to the Ivy League’s strategy of expansion of the Colonial League, too.

In a league with no postseason, a season-ending Rivalry becomes that much more important, and while I don’t have any documentary evidence, I think that the Ivy League hoped dearly that Richmond would follow William & Mary into the new Colonial League – which might also drive other schools into the new league, perhaps VMI, Davidson, The Citadel, or all three.

William & Mary’s rejection of the Ivy League presidents’ pure non-scholarship argument put that whole part of the experiment, in my opinion, into a tailspin.

It also helped that they were a Top 25 team in I-AA that had decided that the Colonial League evolved in a way in which they weren’t comfortable.

“Things have kind of pulled apart since William & Mary dropped out,” Fred Dunlap said. “It made us kind of look at things again. William & Mary was important to the strength of our conference and their leaving has caused second thoughts. I talked to my president two weeks ago before all the presidents met, and he said he doubted that the league would actually come off. He listed the chances at less than 50-50.”