Future of Division III

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Just a thought about the UC Santa Cruz vote... if the focus is on 28% of the actual student body voted for the proposal and that is disappointing, consider this: with that thinking, only 25% of Americans voted for Trump (slightly higher for Clinton) to be president.

Yeah... when you factor in ALL individuals who are eligible to vote, you get a different number than when you only consider those who voted.

Here is how I look at it... yes, the article says the student-body voted to approve it even though a lot of the student-body didn't vote at all. In my opinion, that means those who didn't vote were okay with going along with those who did vote and the decision made as a result. If they didn't feel like voting, they then have to be fine with the result (i.e. it drives me nuts those who protest any Presidential vote and then it's revealed they didn't even vote). So while only 28% of students actually voted for the topic, it was the student-body on a larger scale that approved it because those who didn't vote chose to allow the decision to be made without them. They chose to have others represent them. They chose for a smaller portion to represent the entire student-body.

[Gregory Sager]

There is some truth to what you've said, hickory. But the bigger explanation is that White Sox fans just have never worked up the same fervor for hating the Twins, Indians, Royals, and Tigers that they have for the Cubs. There's a lot of sociology involved with it -- the perceived class differences to which Mark Grace alluded between the supposedly white-collar Cubs fanbase and the supposedly blue-collar White Sox fanbase (a broad-brush distinction that is certainly overblown), and the inferiority complex of South Siders as a result of being from the grittier, oft-neglected side of town rather than the more attractive and higher-profile North Side. The ballparks and game-day atmosphere (old-timey baseball palace in a hip neighborhood with a million places to go before or after the game, versus a rather generic modern stadium surrounded by vast parking lots, with little or nothing in the way of a fan-friendly neighborhood beyond them) play into it as well.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

There is some truth to what you've said, hickory. But the bigger explanation is that White Sox fans just have never worked up the same fervor for hating the Twins, Indians, Royals, and Tigers that they have for the Cubs. There's a lot of sociology involved with it -- the perceived class differences to which Mark Grace alluded between the supposedly white-collar Cubs fanbase and the supposedly blue-collar White Sox fanbase (a broad-brush distinction that is certainly overblown), and the inferiority complex of South Siders as a result of being from the grittier, oft-neglected side of town rather than the more attractive and higher-profile North Side. The ballparks and game-day atmosphere (old-timey baseball palace in a hip neighborhood with a million places to go before or after the game, versus a rather generic modern stadium surrounded by vast parking lots, with little or nothing in the way of a fan-friendly neighborhood beyond them) play into it as well.

Not sure why this conversation continues... the White Sucks Sox aren't worth discussing. ROFL

[Mr. Ypsi]

Dave, the White Sox are serving a vital function - they are keeping my Tigers out of last place!

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

Dave, the White Sox are serving a vital function - they are keeping my Tigers out of last place!

https://media.giphy.com/media/6xWQt3NF9VqBW/giphy.gif

[AndOne]

There is some truth to what you've said, hickory. But the bigger explanation is that White Sox fans just have never worked up the same fervor for hating the Twins, Indians, Royals, and Tigers that they have for the Cubs. There's a lot of sociology involved with it -- the perceived class differences to which Mark Grace alluded between the supposedly white-collar Cubs fanbase and the supposedly blue-collar White Sox fanbase (a broad-brush distinction that is certainly overblown), and the inferiority complex of South Siders as a result of being from the grittier, oft-neglected side of town rather than the more attractive and higher-profile North Side. The ballparks and game-day atmosphere (old-timey baseball palace in a hip neighborhood with a million places to go before or after the game, versus a rather generic modern stadium surrounded by vast parking lots, with little or nothing in the way of a fan-friendly neighborhood beyond them) play into it as well.

As a suburban guy my observation over the years is that if you live in the burbs, you USUALLY like one team or the other, and don't really pay much attention or give much thought to the team that isn't your favorite of the two. My Sox fan son is a perfect example.
On the other hand, many city residents I know like one team, and consider the other one of the lowest life forms on the planet. When the other team wins even a single regular season game they feel like they've been stabbed. A college buddy grew up 3 blocks east of Wrigley. He viewed every Sox win just short of someone insulting his mother.
The other thing I've observed long term is that a higher percentage of Sox fans actually know the game better than Cubs "fans" do, and go to Sox games because they both enjoy the game itself more and are true, loyal Sox fans. They would have to be to inflict such misery upon themselves especially with the current hapless state of the South Siders.
While true Cubs fans are as fervent as they come in any sport, a very large percentage of Cubbie fans attend games purely because Wrigley Field is the place to be. It's a happening. The top party spot on the North Side. The fact that a baseball game is going on is a sidelight or bonus to the fact that they are attendees at a love fest. To be at Wrigley is to be cool. Sox fans get drunk at the game. Many Cub fans arrive, already in that state from pre-game mass consumption at one of the many establishments within a few blocks of The Friendly Confines. Then, they add to their level of intoxication throughout. If you watch a game, every medium deep fly ball off a Cub bat elicits a loud chorus of Oohs and Ahs from the crowd as if there is no chance the ball will land anywhere short of Lake Michigan. They're too drunk and/or know too little about the game to realize that the ball has as much chance to reach the seats as the Sox do of winning the World Series.
The Cubs, of course, play a much more entertaining brand of baseball. But a higher percentage of Cub fans either don't understand what is going into that day's W, or are to far into the wind to notice or, aside from the final score, to care.
And yes. The Sox have no rivalry with any other team that comes anywhere close to that which exists between the Cubs and Cardinals.
Apologies to all for the long winded rant.   

[Gregory Sager]

White Sox fans love to point to that whole "a higher percentage of Sox fans know the game of baseball better than Cubs fans do" and "Cubs fans are casual fans that don't understand the game of baseball" thing, but I don't think that they've really thought out the reason why. The cause is really a matter of simple mathematics.

The Cubs fan base dwarfs that of the White Sox. In major-league baseball parlance there are "big-market teams" and "small-market teams", terms which bear a lot of importance because market size typically (although not always) determines team revenue, and, thus, the ability to compete on the field by doling out big contracts to the best players. The White Sox are always described as a small-market team; the Cubs are always described as a big-market team. That would appear to make no sense, because the two teams share the same geographic area. But the truth is that the entirety of the White Sox fan base can be enclosed within about a fifty-mile radius to the southeast, south, southwest, and west of Guaranteed Rate Field. The Cubs? Their fan base extends deep into downstate Illinois (where it eventually mixes with the Cardinals fan base), over into Iowa, and up to the Wisconsin border and even beyond (southern Wisconsin has a Cubs/Brewers mix, just like central Illinois has a Cubs/Cardinals mix).

Beyond that, the Cubs have a national following, thanks to WGN and the heyday of cable television. You can find Cubs fans in every nook and cranny of this country, and even beyond -- it's no shock to hear people speaking in Dutch, Swedish, Tagalog, Japanese, Hindi, and Greek when you're sitting in the stands at the Friendly Confines. The Cubs are in the same boat as the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers in that they have fans all around the world, and visiting Wrigley is for them the baseball equivalent of a Muslim making the hajj to Mecca. I mean, for crying out loud, when the Cubs celebrated their World Series victory last fall, 5,000,000 people came out to see the parade and the Grant Park rally. Five freakin' million people. Wrap your mind around that, if you can. That was the seventh-largest assembly of human beings in the history of the planet, and the largest gathering ever in the Western Hemisphere. So we're not talking big market versus small market. We're talking brontosaurus market versus flea market.

Now, given that massive following, you're going to get many, many more casual fans of the Cubs than you'll find casual types in White Sox fandom. You'll also find many, many more knowledgeable baseball fans among Cubs fandom in terms of sheer numbers than you will among the White Sox faithful, no matter how vociferously White Sox fans deny it -- but their percentage of the overall fan base is lower. It's simple demographics. If you have ten times as many fans, that means that you'll have ten times as many casual fans and many times as many diehard fans. Don't believe me? Do an online search of baseball blogs. That's usually a good barometer of devoted, well-informed fans of the game. And there are a lot more Cubs-oriented blogs (and Cubs-oriented blog readers) than blogs devoted to the team on 35th Street, and their page-view stats are higher.

So, yeah, when a routine flyball is hit at Wrigley Field, you get a lot of oohs and aahs. But that's not because Wrigley Field is the city's largest outdoor beer garden. I mean, it is the city's largest outdoor beer garden, but the myth that most of the people who are there are drunk or are seeking to get drunk is just that -- a myth. The stands are actually filled with families, aside from the bleachers (which is definitely a heavy-drinking area, and has been since at least the 1960s). The reason why people don't judge flyballs well at Wrigley is because a very large chunk of the crowd on any given day consists of pilgrims from out of town, people who rarely or otherwise never have access to a ticket (especially in the current situation in which the franchise is putting one of the best teams in all of baseball on the field).

The flip side to all that is that the White Sox tend to draw fans who are more committed because, in large part, they have more access to their team. The White Sox draw dismally, even for a small-market team, and they draw dismally even in years when they don't stink as badly as they do this season. There's therefore a higher percentage of true believers at Guaranteed Rate Field on any given night, simply because it's not the kind of environment that brings out casual fans in droves (and there's far fewer casual White Sox fans to draw, anyway). Heck, White Sox fans even take a perverse pride in staying away from the ballpark when the team is bad, as sort of their way of punishing management for not fielding a better team (little heeding the fact that this actually guarantees further poor performance by keeping team revenue low).

And, honestly, Mark, the percentage of Cubs fans in the city who consider the White Sox "one of the lowest life forms on the planet" is not very large at all. In fact, it's the knowledge that their hatred of the other team is not returned tit-for-tat that enrages White Sox fans even further where the Cubs are concerned.

[Mr. Ypsi]

Greg, I couldn't help noticing that your last sentence sounds almost exactly the same as the scenario you have sometimes given for NPU and Wheaton!   (Which would make you a Cubs fan who acts like a Sox fan for D3! )

While I have no clear-cut evidence to back it up, my impression of Peoria fandom when I was growing up there (50s and early 60s -- still the same?) of those who cared about baseball at all was roughly 40-40 Cubs/Cardinals, 10% White Sox, and 10% everyone else combined.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I never attended a game at Wrigley, as a kid or as an adult (one), where I wasn't there to take in the game, learn from it, etc. While many are there for the atmosphere ("Hey look, it must be Pope Day here at Wrigley" or "Hey, it must be bikini day here at Wrigley" - in my best Harry Carey voice) there wasn't a visit to a game I didn't see people following the game by scoring their own game as well. Love, love, love Wrigley so very much.

[Gregory Sager]

I never attended a game at Wrigley, as a kid or as an adult (one), where I wasn't there to take in the game, learn from it, etc. While many are there for the atmosphere ("Hey look, it must be Pop Day here at Wrigley" or "Hey, it must be bikini day here at Wrigley" - in my best Harry Carey voice) there wasn't a visit to a game I didn't see people following the game by scoring their own game as well. Love, love, love Wrigley so very much.

This.

Greg, I couldn't help noticing that your last sentence sounds almost exactly the same as the scenario you have sometimes given for NPU and Wheaton!   (Which would make you a Cubs fan who acts like a Sox fan for D3! )

Very true, Chuck, and in fact I've pointed out that parallel before on d3boards.com.

While I have no clear-cut evidence to back it up, my impression of Peoria fandom when I was growing up there (50s and early 60s -- still the same?) of those who cared about baseball at all was roughly 40-40 Cubs/Cardinals, 10% White Sox, and 10% everyone else combined.

it probably varies according to which major-league team includes the Peoria Chiefs in its farm system. From 1985 through 1994 the Chiefs were a farm club of the Cubs; from 1995 through 2004 the Chiefs were affiliated with the Cardinals; from 2005 through 2012 the Chiefs were back with the Cubs system; and, since the Cubs then transferred their affiliation to Midwest League rival Kane County that year, the Chiefs have been back with the Cardinals since 2013.

[Gray Fox]

You guys need to move this discussion to the Baseball boards.  Maybe more people would chime in.

[iwumichigander]

Santa Cruz - I do not recall anyone pointing out a key fact from the article - this is a 25 year decision !  This binds not only the current student body but future students.
What an abdication for responsibility by the trustees, administration and alumni.  IMHO, it is bad precedent for Santa Cruz and possibly DIII.

Will other schools adult leadership abdicate their fiscal responsibility for student votes for athletics

I am waiting for the potential/possible (and hypothetical for this discussion) lawsuit(s).  My room is sub-standard compared other other rooms in different facilities. I did not get to vote when fees were increased like the athletic and recreational fees.  I filing a class action lawsuit because I want a vote on room and board fees and/or fee increases.  I also want to vote on tuition increases, majors with less than 100 people and professors/administration performance reviews.

Of course, the students can vote with their feet.

[iwumichigander]

I will be brief Gray Fox - as a kid who grew up downstate, 75 miles NE of St. Loins and with various family connections to the Cardinals - I had no idea there were so may Cubs fans down state until I went to IWU in Bloomington, Il.

[Gray Fox]

I will be brief Gray Fox - as a kid who grew up downstate, 75 miles NE of St. Loins and with various family connections to the Cardinals - I had no idea there were so may Cubs fans down state until I went to IWU in Bloomington, Il.

They are everywhere.  Just try going to a Dodger game when the Cubs are in town.

[Ralph Turner]

http://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Sep2017DIIIChamps_September_Report_20171002.pdf

I have a question about Item 12 on  page 5.

"...The Championships Committee's primary goal is for the
division to consider criteria that remove any incentive for conferences to form solely for the
purposes of obtaining automatic qualification. The Championships Committee agreed it would
be helpful to study the percent of competition committed to conference opponents among
schools in conferences with automatic qualification to better understand current scheduling
practices."

I need help with this.  Which conference can one recall formed solely for the AQ, that did not already have some commonality in Mission and Vision to begin with?

Open ended question presented for discussion ... (I have my own thoughts.)