When it comes to I-A, "what if" is probably more fun than the answer

The CAA shouldn't be tricked by the romanticism of Boise State's emergence as a I-A power.

Admittedly, wondering just how the CAA would fare in Division I-A in the midst of and immediately following the Flying Dutchmen’s impressively competitive 24-10 loss to Western Michigan is kneejerk armchair quarterbacking at its worst. The law of transitive property—i.e. Richmond destroyed the Dutchmen 47-0 a week prior, so imagine what the Spiders would do to Western Michigan—does not work in sports, no matter how often I like to think the Dutchmen would have made the Final Four in 2006 because, duh, they beat George Mason twice that season.

The transitive property is particularly useless when it comes to projecting how a I-AA team would fare in a I-A conference, because imagine the kind of advantage the I-A teams would enjoy with 22 extra scholarships over the course of an entire season, not just one game.

Still, though: To examine the CAA’s success against I-A schools this year is to once again ponder if the end game for the conference is in fact a leap to I-A.

The CAA is 4-7 against I-A foes so far. The rest of the I-AA conferences are a combined 0-59 against I-A. Oh-and-fifty-nine.

The average margin of defeat for the CAA in these games has been 11.5 points, almost three touchdowns lower than the overall average margin of defeat for the I-AA conferences (32.3 points). The Missouri Valley has the next lowest average margin of defeat at 22 points.

CAA teams have lost two games to I-A foes by eight points or less. The rest of the I-AA conferences have combined for eight such losses. The CAA has absorbed one shutout loss, and Northeastern’s 54-0 loss to Boston College marked the only time a CAA school was held under 10 points. The rest of the I-AA conferences have endured nine shutouts and 23 other games in which the loser scored less than 10 points.

The stats don’t tell the entire story. One big reason the CAA has fared so much better than the rest of I-AA is its athletic programs are well-off enough, financially as well as football-wise, so that they don’t have to take the really big payday and go to a true I-A monster and endure soul-crushing defeats. The same cannot be said for Idaho State (a 64-0 loser to Oklahoma), Charleston Southern (a 62-3 loser to Florida), Southeast Missouri State (a 70-3 loser to Cincinnati) or Grambling (a 56-6 loser to Oklahoma State), just to name a few.

None of the CAA’s I-A foes—who enter play this weekend with a combined record of 18-24—are going to be in the national championship discussion, and the most successful of these squads will likely be relegated to nothing more than a token appearance in a bowl nobody watches the week before or after Christmas.

But the ubiquitous nature of the CAA in the weekly polls, as well as its record-setting success in the I-AA tournament, indicates just how far ahead it is of the field. Mike Litos wrote earlier this month how he foresees this dominance continuing—in football as well as the basketball version of I-AA—once Division I realigns sometime next decade.

And that would appear to be the best way to go. Sure, Western Michigan and the rest of the MAC are technically playing for the biggest of the big prizes in football, but the BCS isn’t exactly known for inviting the little guy to the dance. Better for the CAA to establish itself as the best league at a pretty darn good level and enjoy the opportunity to regularly compete for the national title in football and basketball.

But Division I-AA doesn’t send hearts aflutter among the general population, and it would be regrettable—if completely understandable, from the human perspective—if the same feelings trickled up to the administrative level within the CAA and the league’s eyes grew bigger than its stomach as it envisioned Boise State-like success for its top programs.

I imagine the concept of Boise State leaping to I-A was fairly unimaginable 15 years ago, when the Broncos were coming off a season in which they did not even receive a vote in the final Sports Network poll. Yet here it is, 2009, and Boise State is one of the most successful I-A programs in the land, one that is currently ranked in the top five of the AP poll and positioned to once again crash the BCS party, if not the actual national championship game.

If Boise State has made the jump to I-A superstardom, why can’t Richmond or James Madison or Delaware or Massachusetts, all of whom have won the I-AA national title since 1998?

But Boise State is the exceedingly rare outlier. A perfect CAA team at I-A would be far more likely to experience what MAC champion and former I-AA power Marshall did in 1999, when the Thundering Herd went 13-0 but still only ranked 10^th in the final AP poll and played its bowl game Dec. 27.

Sure, a CAA team might follow the path blazed by Boise State. But no matter how well the CAA has fared against I-A opposition recently, my guess is it’ll be more fun to wonder how Richmond would fare at I-A than to actually find out.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

What if Saturday is just the start for the CAA in I-A?

Rodney Dangerfield would appreciate the plight this week of the Flying Dutchmen football team.

The first tip of the basketball season is more than two months away, but the Virginia-based CAA schools are already screwing Hofstra. Clearly, it was part of the Grand Conspiracy for Richmond and William & Mary to thrash Duke and Virginia in their season openers, thereby minimizing in the eyes of voters nationwide the Dutchmen’s routine win over Stony Brook in the annual (for now) Unwinnable Game.

And it worked! The Dutchmen fell out of the top 25 in the coaches poll—at the expense, I kid you not, of a pair of teams that LOST their season openers. Granted, Eastern Kentucky and Liberty gave I-A Indiana and West Virginia quite a scare before falling by six and 13 points, respectively. But still, they got style points for losing while the Dutchmen got the boot for winning. Why doesn’t Tom Yeager just go ahead and award CAA membership to Eastern Kentucky and Liberty!

Of course, all blog bias aside, it was pretty awesome to hear about Richmond and William & Mary beating Duke and Virginia. (I guess Villanova’s win over Temple counts as a win over a I-A opponent, even if Temple hasn’t been any good since Hofstra was pounding the Owls so badly it scarred Bill Cosby for life)

All good Americans loathe Duke, even if getting Schadenfreude-like joy out of the Blue Devils losing a football game—which Duke does better than just about anyone else in I-A—is a lot like laughing at Pittsburgh because of the Pirates. It’s kind of mean-spirited and the source of your contempt doesn’t even acknowledge its inept brethren, but in a pinch it’ll do. So hooray Richmond!

And it’s always nice to see arrogance—in this case Al Groh, who is one of those fools of minimal accomplishment who nonetheless thinks he’s superior enough to protect the identity of his starting quarterback as if it’s a bigger secret than the code to The Bomb—brought down a peg. Yeah Al, that really worked for you last week. Presumably, Eric Mangini—who followed in Groh’s footsteps by first inexplicably landing the head coaching job with the Jets and then approaching said job in hilariously secretive fashion—will learn that this week. So whoohoo, William & Mary!

The urge following a day like Saturday is to declare several CAA teams could compete in a I-A conference, or at least the ACC. Such declarations are usually foolish, because as invigorating as it is to bound off the porch and knock off the big dogs, such performances are rare outliers. The three wins by the CAA were the only wins for I-AA teams in 37 games against I-A foes last week and account for one-fifth of the 15 wins I-AA teams have recorded against I-A teams since 2000. Far more often than not, those 22 extra scholarships at I-A come in pretty handy.

But I’m not so sure it’s foolish to wonder if Saturday won’t further inspire and fuel CAA football to make an eventual move to I-A. It won’t happen any year soon, and this is pure conjecture on my part, but maybe CAA football—which placed eight teams in the preseason top 25 coaches poll and five teams in each of the last two tournaments and whose schools have accounted for four of the last 11 national champions—is outgrowing I-AA.

It’s always easy to spend somebody else’s money, and making the leap to I-A would be a staggeringly expensive proposition. The NCAA requires I-A programs to play in a facility that holds at least 30,000 butts, and only Delaware (22,000) and Richmond (21,329) play in stadiums with capacities of at least 20,000. Then of course there’s the matter of adding those 22 scholarships and upgrading the program in myriad other ways.

Popular convention is that leaping to I-A is a quick way for a school to make money and become relevant. The truth is it’s a get rich quick scheme that rarely works out. More than 90 percent of all bowl money went to the six BCS schools in 2002 and most of the non-BCS bowls are played in front of plenty of empty seats.

But to look at the CAA is to see six schools that would seem, from the outside looking in, to have the fan base and the tradition to at least consider the I-A move: Richmond, Delaware, Massachusetts, James Madison, Villanova and William & Mary. Assume, too, that the infant programs at Old Dominion (which played its first football game in 68 years Saturday to great hype and anticipation), Georgia State and Charlotte will, having already spent millions to begin playing football, be more open to making a further investment and skipping the usual lengthy apprenticeship at I-AA. That’s nine schools (eight if you figure Villanova leaves for the Big East), more than enough for a conference.

And with the approaching apocalypse in Division I sports, maybe the CAA views upgrading to I-A in football as its last chance to be known as more than just a really good mid-major conference. Perhaps, as we alluded to a few months ago, it also pares down a potentially unwieldy conference and allows schools that aren’t driven by football to deemphasize their programs as painlessly and smoothly as possible.

Of course, this is a lot more complex than anything we can write in 1,000 or so words, and New Hampshire and Maine, in particular, would not be thrilled to be left behind if CAA moved to I-A. And what to do with VCU and George Mason (must resist urge to say what the CAA can do with George Mason), neither of whom play football but both of whom are indelibly associated with the CAA?

But what if the CAA decides it wants to do a lot more than just occasionally spoil a September Saturday for Division I opponents? What if the CAA is headed for the day when it is a peer with the ACC in football instead of the cuddly underdog?

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.