Quote from: Ron Boerger on March 09, 2012, 07:54:56 AMnot terribly competitive scholarship (D1) athletic programs
FYI, before all this mess started, the baseball team made the DI NCAA regionals in 2007 and 2008 (winning the Sun Belt Tournament in 2007).
Quote from: Just Bill on March 09, 2012, 02:03:29 PMWhat on earth could they have been thinking through this whole process. Is no one in charge?
Basically, different people have been in charge. Tim Ryan was chancellor of the school. Athletics had largely been run on student fees and, when the size of the school dropped from 17,000 to 10,000 post-Katrina, the athletic department was producing more red ink than usual. In the face of multiple state budget cuts, Ryan decided to go DIII. The LSU system, which UNO was a part of, endorsed this move. That plan involved starting DIII football in 2011.
Ryan was then fired. The interim leadership indicated that we were unable to find any DIII conference home and made the case that we could, at least, afford DII. They also secured a DII conference home in the Gulf South Conference. The LSU system signed off on this proposal, too. That plan included raising funds to start DII football by 2015.
A bill was introduced that would have merged UNO and Southern University of New Orleans (NAIA in athletics) and placed the merged university in the University of Louisiana system. That bill was defeated and an alternative proposal emerged to just move UNO into the UL system and that passed.
All 8 other schools in the UL system are in DI. The UL system is headed by the former president of Southeastern Louisiana University who was in charge of SLU when it restarted its football program.
The UL system indicated that a final decision would be left to the new UNO president. Dr. Peter Fos was appointed as the new president of UNO, determined how much he would have to find in his budget to support UNO in DI and determined that a) he could do so and b) it was worth it to do so.
Dr. Fos said he can and will fund a competitive DI program (without football). About football, he indicated he still wants to start it, but it will take $3-4M/year that he does not currently have. Indications are that this money would come, in part, from an increased student fee and, in part, from outside sources. In his press conference regarding DI, he indicated that football at UNO may end up pushed back a year to 2016. In any event, it seemed clear that football at UNO in DI was part of his plan.
Rumor has it that the Southland will welcome us. They did just add another non-football school (Oral Roberts) and are losing two schools that did not play Southland football (UTA, who has no football, and UTSA, who did not play in their league), so they may be okay with two non-football additions, particularly if they feel reasonably confident that football is coming to UNO.
Anyway, that's probably more info than y'all wanted on a school that isn't going DIII, but that's a quick recap at what's been happening at UNO since our original DIII announcement.
Quote from: Ralph Turner on March 09, 2012, 02:44:05 PMWhy does the Southland want a non-football school?
As noted, they're losing two schools (UTA, UTSA) that didn't play Soutland football and are adding one (ORU) that doesn't play football. I hope the Privateers are playing football by 2016, but we probably make sense as we'd add one large market to a league that's losing two.
Quote from: smedindy on March 09, 2012, 03:58:08 PMI think Birmingham Southern should have been a great example for them - though with UNO now part of the Louisiana State school behemoth there may be politics involved.
While I'd rather be DI than DIII, I would have supported my alma mater either way. That said, the word we were getting was that no DIII conference wanted any part of UNO, a 10,000-student (hoping to return to 15,000+) public university that intended to play football (we'd already started signing games for a DIII football startup in 2011). That's supposedly why they started looking at DII -- the GSC was invited us.
