Unfortunately, not the start of a tradition with outgoing CAA head coaches.
The last two times Hofstra knowingly played a school for the last time as conference mates in men’s basketball, the finality of the meetings were overshadowed by other elements.
When the Flying Dutchmen fell to Georgia State 61-43 on Feb. 13, 2013, it ended a series that consisted of just 13 games and stretched all the way back to…the 2005-06 season, when the CAA, in an all-too-brief attempt to turn the conference into a true east coast conference (not East Coast Conference, Litos) welcomed Georgia State and Northeastern. In other words: If there's ever a Sporcle game asking procrastinators to identify every all-time member of the CAA, Georgia State is the answer whose spot is most likely to remain blank as time expires.
Eleven days later, the Dutchmen faced a far more entrenched CAA school for the final time when they beat Old Dominion, 70-59 to cap an all-time series that consisted of 23 clashes as conference foes and included two memorable games in 2006, when Aurimas Kieza hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to give the Dutchmen a 65-63 win and set off a court storm at the Arena before Old Dominion got its revenge with a 61-51 win in the NIT quarterfinals (grrr).
But in February 2013, there was no time for nostalgia, historical perspective and acknowledging the end of an era when Hofstra and Old Dominion were consumed with just trying to make it to the finish line of the most trying seasons in program history. The win over Old Dominion was the last of the season for the Dutchmen, who finished with one more victory (seven) than players arrested. The Monarchs went 5-25 and fired CAA legend Blaine Taylor with eight games remaining.
Times are tumultuous now, too, for reasons that go well beyond any basketball game. But even though the shared history between Hofstra and James Madison is surprisingly light for schools that have competed against each other for 21 straight seasons, there’s no way to forget tomorrow, pandemic-permitting, marks the last time the two play one another in men’s basketball.
Because say this for divorce: It’s memorable. And if the James Madison-CAA breakup isn't the most bitter one in the history of college athletics, well, as Bum Phillips might have said, it doesn't take long to call the roll.
The short version, not because anyone reading this doesn’t know what’s going on but because it’ll begin to underscore the complicated nature of the irreparably damaged relationship: James Madison withdrew from the CAA on Nov. 6 so that it could head to the Sun Belt in all sports starting with the 2022-23 academic year. The departure made the Dukes immediately ineligible for any CAA tournaments (with the exception of field hockey, which had already begun). James Madison asked for a waiver, which was denied Nov. 10.
The CAA has subsequently absorbed wave after wave of criticism, from those rightfully invested in this — the James Madison administration, its coaches, student-athletes and fans — to the Hank and Helen Lovejoys of the national media who’d fail a Sporcle quiz asking the identity of all 10 CAA schools right now.
The one thing everyone can agree upon is that, like real divorce, the people most impacted by this are the youngsters lacking any fault in the breakup. All of the bad publicity the CAA has received and at least some of the bad blood generated with James Madison could have been avoided if there was no rule banning exiting teams from the conference tournament. Student-athletes have a finite amount of opportunities to compete for championships and shouldn't have their fates determined by the whims and decisions made by those way above their (or any of our) pay grades.
But no one’s had more chances to try and get rid of that rule than James Madison’s administration — namely athletic director Jeff Bourne and president Jonathan Alger. Bourne has been James Madison's AD since July 1999, which makes him, by far, the longest-tenured AD in the CAA. Alger has been his school’s president since July 2012, which ranks him third in seniority among his CAA peers.
And it’s hard to envision a school doing a more obvious job of telegraphing its intentions to exit a league than James Madison, which flirted with a departure during the round of realignment in which Old Dominion and Georgia State left but chose to stay put. In April 2020, Bourne acknowledged the pandemic could bring about the next wave of realignment and spoke regularly about the possibility with local media over the next year-plus.
There’s something to be said for the transparency Bourne provided during the process that led to James Madison’s exit, but the school’s actions also came off as passive-aggressive (in an interview with the Daily News-Record last June, Bourne talked about realignment without ever mentioning the CAA) and petty, especially when it came to its complaints about the league’s streaming deal with FloSports. (full disclosure: I have written for FloSports). Nobody is making the multi-million dollar decision to leave a conference and upgrade its football program because it doesn’t like its league’s media rights deal.
There’s also something to be said for using the last eight or so years to do some backroom wheeling and dealing that could have gotten rid of the arcane rule and made for a more productive and less embittered final year in the CAA for James Madison and any schools who will exit in the future. That Bourne and Alger didn’t dot those particular i’s and cross those particular t’s before executing James Madison’s departure lent a certain air of “rules for thee, not for me” to the joint statement they issued after after James Madison’s appeal was denied — especially since Alger is part of the committee that stripped the University of Massachusetts’ men's basketball team of 59 victories and its women’s tennis team of a conference championship due to a financial aid error in which the school gave a total of an extra $9,100 to a dozen student-athletes.
Understandably, none of this matters to the student-athletes who are losing out on a year of championship contention. Nor does it much matter to a passionate James Madison fanbase. I get the latter, even as it has been disappointing to see the hastening of the divide between the Madison fanbase and the rest of the CAA’s denizens.
James Madison fans will rightfully point to the completeness of their athletic program — the women's lacrosse team won the national championship in 2018 while the softball team came within a victory of making the College World Series Finals last year — and the dominance of its football team, which won the I-AA/FCS national title in 2004 and 2016, lost the championship game in 2017 and 2019 and fell in the semifinals the last two seasons, as examples the school had outgrown the CAA and the I-AA/FCS world.
But is their school making the right move? This is an imperfect analogy — I’m barely qualified to parent my own daughter, never mind speak on behalf of the fans of several other schools in the CAA — but for a lot of us, watching James Madison depart feels like parents watching their children head off to the big city with bigger dreams and a tiny checkbook. We hope it works out, and wish them well, but we’ve seen how the power has continued to consolidate within the I-A/FBS world and how it’s become increasingly difficult for those in the Group of Five to break through into the College Football Playoff.
Old Dominion and Georgia State have combined to play in seven bowl games, all of which were played on New Year's Eve or earlier. They’re neat, and if you can afford a trip to a warm-weather climate the week of Christmas, all the better. But are those exhibitions worth the multi-million dollar investments and upgrades? Is it better to serve as inventory for ESPN over the final two weeks of the calendar year and be an afterthought in the championship race, or to annually compete for national titles at a slightly lower level?
The path to the NCAA Tournament in men’s basketball isn’t much clearer in what will be a 14-team Sun Belt, which has received an at-large bid just twice since 2001 (once fewer than the CAA, which, of course, has a three-bid year in there you may recall) and has had one Sweet 16 representative (Western Kentucky in 2008) this century.
And where are the rivalries and competitive camaraderie going to come from in a league which has as many schools in Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana (two apiece) as Virginia? The idea of James Madison vs. Texas State matchup makes Hofstra vs. Georgia State sound like a bus league matchup.
There’s plenty of time to learn the answers to those questions, but fortunately just a few months left of the long embittered goodbye in a breakup in which everyone’s got some culpability. Let’s hope the first thing the new-look CAA does in the early morning hours of July 1 — when Hampton, Monmouth and Stony Brook officially join a now 12-team league — is vote to rewrite its bylaws and allow teams to compete for conference championships in their lame-duck year(s).
It certainly won’t stop the never-ending wheel of realignment — I believe it was Patty Smyth and Don Henley who mused that sometimes decades-long conference affiliation just ain’t enough — but perhaps it’ll infuse the next farewell tour with some sense of collegiality and maybe a bit of light-hearted fun. In the meantime, I will not be presenting Mark Byington with a plaque tomorrow honoring his achievements against Hofstra.
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