FB: Ohio Athletic Conference

[Raiderplaybyplay]

Enrollment wise, Whitewater is much closer to D1 than D2.

Here are Division I FBS programs with fewer undergraduate students than Whitewater:

Tulsa
Rice
Air Force
Navy
Army
Wake Forest
Duke
Stanford
Vanderbilt
SMU
Louisiana-Monroe
Tulane
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Boston College
Louisiana Tech
Idaho
TCU

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Given that they have a massive student body and an insanely low cost of attendance, University of Wisconsin schools should compete and win national titles in every sport every season.

Great point I feel never gets brought up much. uww is a very atypical d3 school.
Id have to check the numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if they had better attendance than YSU thia year.

Another intereating facts is the all the colleges in the state are d3 except Wisconsin -Madison. I always wonder if that gives the WIAC a recruiting advantages since guys who want to go to school in state and play ball don't have the options like Ohio players do

REALLY!?!?! This probably the most reacurring topic on these boards over the past 5 years. You look like you're new, so your ignorance gets a pass.

Sorry I must have thought I was on the YSU athletics board for a second. They were having a discussion that dipped into D3, boy that was ugly.

Someone was making a point about potential D3 coaches being ruled out of the YSU coaching search because they weren't qualified, this was before LL got picked up by UB. Anyway someone was trying to explain how UWW's conference, the Wisconsin Athletic Association ??  was the second most dominate football conference behind the OAC. I just had to stop reading.

I tried to oversimplify by comparing the WIAC to the SEC (not perfect, I know) But the retort was Hilarious "Well the OAC usually has 2 or 3 top ten teams by the end of the season..."

[mtfan]

Enrollment wise, Whitewater is much closer to D1 than D2.

Here are Division I FBS programs with fewer undergraduate students than Whitewater:

Tulsa
Rice
Air Force
Navy
Army
Wake Forest
Duke
Stanford
Vanderbilt
SMU
Louisiana-Monroe
Tulane
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Boston College
Louisiana Tech
Idaho
TCU

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Given that they have a massive student body and an insanely low cost of attendance, University of Wisconsin schools should compete and win national titles in every sport every season.

And yet, the NESCAC earns more national titles than the WIAC, proving enrollment does not correlate to athletic success in Division III.

While that might be true, I'm not sure Toph is considering Backgammon, Chess and Curling in national title counts! oh and don't forget hockey ice or field.  IMO the NESCAC needs to step on the football field with the rest of Division III instead of avoiding it, but guess that's there choice. Pat, are the titles in the NESCAC more individual national titles than team sports? I'm only a little familiar with Williams and Amherst, and know Williams has a stockpile. I somewhat agree with Toph that enrollment size does factor into athletic success in Division III, and though it may not necessarily show in titles won it does in turn come out in other ways, facilities, ticket revenues, $$$ generated for athletic depts. etc..

[reality check]

Not exactly what's being discussed in this NESCAC/WIAC debate but I just want to point out while we are talking about enrollment and championships that, on my Facebook page, I posted the video yesterday of the young man (war veteran) from UAB emotionally responding to the UAB president's news of the folding of the UAB football program and the comment was made by a former coaching colleague that "it isn't like they (UAB) are a DIII school..." as some perceived knock on the high cost of football and its relative cost/worth to a small school.  Ignorant statement of course but it's par for the course.

We (knowledgeable DIII fans and alums) deal with ignorant opinions from outsiders all the time.  Okay we deal with plenty of ignorant statements by insiders here as well (about 3 per page in this forum). Whether it's the "DIII is glorified high school ball" attitude or whatever, the broad brush DIII is painted with by outsiders is usually completely backwards.  I want to slap folks when they badmouth or spread completely baseless opinions about DIII athletics.

Football programs are money makers for DIII schools.  We know that a program costs money to start up but can bring in student-athletes that otherwise wouldn't attend and that means tuition dollars.

[TooForRaider]

I have a file I track all this stuff in. I use only the actual sports there is a Division III championship in:

Baseball; Basketball, men's; Basketball, women's; Cross country, men's; Cross country, women's; Field hockey; Football; Golf, men's; Golf, women's; Ice hockey, men's; Ice hockey, women's; Indoor track, men's; Indoor track, women's; Lacrosse, men's; Lacrosse, women's; Rowing; Soccer, men's; Soccer, women's; Softball; Swimming, men's; Swimming, women's; Tennis, men's; Tennis, women's; Track and field, men's; Track and field, women's; Volleyball, men's; Volleyball, women's; Wrestling.

Among these Division III championships, here's year-by-year since Whitewater's first football title: NESCAC national titles vs. WIAC national titles.

2013-14: NESCAC 5, WIAC 5
2012-13: NESCAC 6, WIAC 4
2011-12: NESCAC 3, WIAC 2
2010-11: NESCAC 6, WIAC 3
2009-10: NESCAC 5, WIAC 3
2008-09: NESCAC 5, WIAC 2
2007-08: NESCAC 6, WIAC 3.5 (shared men's track title)
2006-07: NESCAC 4, WIAC 2

There's no squash or alpine skiing in these totals. NESCAC has many more Division III titles (40-24.5) in the past decade.

Interesting new twist to this (wrong) side of the argument.  While it doesn't include squash or alpine skiing, it does include rowing (have to imagine this is uber competitive), women's ice hockey, field hockey, gymnastics, tennis and lacrosse-some of which aren't even sports at all schools. Both numbers for both schools are misleading when cherry picking like this  The wild 2010-2011 championships for the NESCAC included Field Hockey, Squash, Women's Basketball, Women's Cross Country, Women's Rowing, Men's and Women's Tennis. 

[Pat Coleman]

Again, TooForRaider, Squash is not counted in this.

You may want to look down on lacrosse but more schools sponsor women's lacrosse than football (and men's lacrosse will surpass football in a few years' time). Which should we count? This is exactly the opposite of cherry-picking. This is the entire orchard of sports. Many more schools sponsor tennis than football. More schools play Division III women's basketball than ANY other sport at any level of four-year college athletics. So we look down our nose on the conference because it's not football?

Mtfan -- the titles are pretty evenly spread. Tufts, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Trinity, along with Williams and Amherst.

The WIAC actually has a lot of titles in "individual" sports as well, as they regularly have national contenders in track and field, indoor track and cross country.

[Toph]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

[SaintsFAN]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

Maybe I'm obtuse -- but I'm just trying to figure out what in the hell the argument is about on this page?

Kinda feels like Pat is taking unnecessary shots from a couple lone-wolf, cabin-in-the-woods guys.

[Toph]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

Maybe I'm obtuse -- but I'm just trying to figure out what in the hell the argument is about on this page?

Kinda feels like Pat is taking unnecessary shots from a couple lone-wolf, cabin-in-the-woods guys.

Yes. It's devolved. My original point was only that Wisconsin state schools, in my opinion, have two big advantages to most division III programs. 1.  The sheer amount of students attending, we can extrapolate that you're naturally going to have more gifted athletes due to sheer sample size. But more importantly than size (I really bring that up to tweak the WW guys' noses every now and then) is cost of attendance. I assume it's gone up a little, but in state tuition was something like $7,000 per year at Whitewater, for example. So a student's total cost of attendance before any aid is probably going to be in the $16,000 range with room, board, books, etc. That total cost of attendance for a year will get you less than a semester's tuition at John Carroll.

Before the other purples go ballistic, I am not taking shots at the university, the academic rigor of the curriculum, or anything else. I am merely pointing out that for in state athletes, UW schools are a very affordable option.

[Desertraider]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

I knew it! You are a closet Mount fan!! True colors, my friend, come shining through.

[Pat Coleman]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

Maybe I'm obtuse -- but I'm just trying to figure out what in the hell the argument is about on this page?

Kinda feels like Pat is taking unnecessary shots from a couple lone-wolf, cabin-in-the-woods guys.

Yes. It's devolved. My original point was only that Wisconsin state schools, in my opinion, have two big advantages to most division III programs. 1.  The sheer amount of students attending, we can extrapolate that you're naturally going to have more gifted athletes due to sheer sample size.

This one is valid ONLY if you're not recruiting your student-athletes to come there. How many D-III kids at legit programs (which includes the entire WIAC) are being recruited as true walk-ons out of the general population? WIAC teams are limited to 100 roster spots, so how many of them are really going to go to a kid who walks on, which means he misses the first week-plus of training camp at that?

This just doesn't happen. This isn't high school -- we don't just draw kids from a specific district and hang up signs in the hallways announcing open tryouts.

[02 Warhawk]

Pat-

You can count football. That's the list. Preferably only Mount Union football if possible.

Maybe I'm obtuse -- but I'm just trying to figure out what in the hell the argument is about on this page?

Kinda feels like Pat is taking unnecessary shots from a couple lone-wolf, cabin-in-the-woods guys.

Yes. It's devolved. My original point was only that Wisconsin state schools, in my opinion, have two big advantages to most division III programs. 1.  The sheer amount of students attending, we can extrapolate that you're naturally going to have more gifted athletes due to sheer sample size.

This one is valid ONLY if you're not recruiting your student-athletes to come there. How many D-III kids at legit programs (which includes the entire WIAC) are being recruited as true walk-ons out of the general population? WIAC teams are limited to 100 roster spots, so how many of them are really going to go to a kid who walks on, which means he misses the first week-plus of training camp at that?

This just doesn't happen. This isn't high school -- we don't just draw kids from a specific district and hang up signs in the hallways announcing open tryouts.

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to grasp this. 

This stupid argument comes up every few months when posters think they have some ground-breaking revelation about why the WIAC is thriving. 

You want to know the biggest reason why the WIAC succeeds? Answer: Lack of DI and DII schools in the state of Wisconsin. It makes recruiting a helluva lot easier in WI than say Ohio. Especially football since there's only one scholarship-offering program in the entire state (Madison).

[reality check]

I think it would just be best to move on and focus on Mount Union.  That's why we have this forum afterall.  Let's get back to basics.

[SaintsFAN]

I think it would just be best to move on and focus on Mount Union.  That's why we have this forum afterall.  Let's get back to basics.

Agreed.  what the hell is wrong with everybody? 

[02 Warhawk]

I think it would just be best to move on and focus on Mount Union.  That's why we have this forum afterall.  Let's get back to basics.

Agreed.  what the hell is wrong with everybody?

Agreed x2. The biggest OAC game in some years is two days away, and we're worried about why the WIAC/NESCAC is winning championships? I don't get it 

Best of luck to both teams....it should be a great game.

[ExTartanPlayer]

Yes. It's devolved. My original point was only that Wisconsin state schools, in my opinion, have two big advantages to most division III programs. 1.  The sheer amount of students attending, we can extrapolate that you're naturally going to have more gifted athletes due to sheer sample size.

This one is valid ONLY if you're not recruiting your student-athletes to come there. How many D-III kids at legit programs (which includes the entire WIAC) are being recruited as true walk-ons out of the general population? WIAC teams are limited to 100 roster spots, so how many of them are really going to go to a kid who walks on, which means he misses the first week-plus of training camp at that?

This just doesn't happen. This isn't high school -- we don't just draw kids from a specific district and hang up signs in the hallways announcing open tryouts.

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to grasp this. 

This stupid argument comes up every few months when posters think they have some ground-breaking revelation about why the WIAC is thriving. 

You want to know the biggest reason why the WIAC succeeds? Answer: Lack of DI and DII schools in the state of Wisconsin. It makes recruiting a helluva lot easier in WI than say Ohio. Especially football since there's only one scholarship-offering program in the entire state (Madison).

I agree.  I've always (at least, as long as I've bothered paying attention to this sort of thing) thought the lack of D1 and D2 presence had more to do with it than enrollment.  Even acknowledging that some kids choose a D3 school over a D2 school for any number of personal reasons so it's not like D3 just gets the "leftovers" - the 20+ Division III programs in Pennsylvania (I think it's 23) still have to share the pool of "good HS football players that don't get an FBS or FCS scholarship" with the 14 D2 schools in the PSAC and a handful of non-scholarship FCS schools.  Concentrate all of those "Not Quite D1" players on 10-12 teams and things would no doubt be somewhat more competitive.

(I only use Pennsylvania because that's where I live & what I am most familiar with, this is no doubt true elsewhere as well)

(since someone will no doubt interpret this the wrong way, I am not crying foul or demeaning the UW schools' success)