FB: Southern Athletic Association

[cush]

That would be a strange move by Hendrix since they have plenty of money

[river2]

Don't mean to imply it is solely over money (although most decisions at this level are to some degree) but they have a clear travel partner in the SCAC with Ozarks College.

[Kuiper]

It would be a meaningful budget increase for any SCAC football school to leave for SAA, not happening.

On this front... Hendrix to SCAC will be announced shortly. Won't go into effect until 2025 to my understanding but haven't seen the official announcement anywhere.

The official announcement is now up

https://www.hendrix.edu/warriors-return-to-SCAC-2025/

[Ron Boerger]

When they left for the SAA, their president at the time said it was primarily due to the academics of the Texas SCAC not meeting their standards.  Guess that isn't a problem given the current environment.  Or maybe they *really* don't like Trinity and/or Southwestern. 

It takes the pressure off of Schreiner ever doing anything with their nascent football program. 

[jknezek]

I'm thinking the cost of travel in the SAA across all sports, given a viable, football playing, alternative, had a lot to do with it. But yeah, they weren't lighting the SAA up and adding Trinity had to be a problem.

If you are trying to recruit kids out of Texas, it's one thing to say we are in a great academic league and a great sports league, something that is not available if you stay in Texas. That hook is gone, so maybe the cost of travel was not worth the ability to use that speech to recruit in Texas anymore.

Got to figure they will have more football success in the SCAC at the least. Don't really know too much about other sports, but Hendrix's was second to last in the 22/23 overall SAA commish cup, 3rd to last in men's sports, and dead last in women's.

[tigerguy]

Forgive my ignorance, but other than a school wanting cheaper/more convenient travel and/or joining a conference with similar academic/school 'prestige', what other factors are at play in a D3 school's decision to shuffle conferences? I know that at the D1 level, it's mostly money from TV contracts. For D3, I assume conference stability is another favor. But are conferences actively recruiting schools (or schools actively begging conferences) at the D3 level by offering anything in the form of financial incentives? Obviously there isn't much, if at all, revenue sharing to do that from the conference side. I'm really posing this question to figure out if there was an amount of money one of the ASC teams could offer the SCAC/SAA (or their member schools) on an annual basis that would open the conference doors. The jump from D3 to D2 is going to hurt financially and so I'm sure those schools could run the numbers and figure what that annual delta would be, and then offer some % of that to the schools in a conference. I doubt it would be enough, but was curious if anything like this happens at the D3 level, from either the conference or school standpoint.

[jknezek]

Forgive my ignorance, but other than a school wanting cheaper/more convenient travel and/or joining a conference with similar academic/school 'prestige', what other factors are at play in a D3 school's decision to shuffle conferences? I know that at the D1 level, it's mostly money from TV contracts. For D3, I assume conference stability is another favor. But are conferences actively recruiting schools (or schools actively begging conferences) at the D3 level by offering anything in the form of financial incentives? Obviously there isn't much, if at all, revenue sharing to do that from the conference side. I'm really posing this question to figure out if there was an amount of money one of the ASC teams could offer the SCAC/SAA (or their member schools) on an annual basis that would open the conference doors. The jump from D3 to D2 is going to hurt financially and so I'm sure those schools could run the numbers and figure what that annual delta would be, and then offer some % of that to the schools in a conference. I doubt it would be enough, but was curious if anything like this happens at the D3 level, from either the conference or school standpoint.

Pretty sure that's not how it works. I guess you could ask them to pick up more of the conference expenses, but there is no payout per se because there is no money that comes in. A few dollars here and there from sponsorships and ads on conference websites, but that's about it.

[Ron Boerger]

According to a report in The Birmingham Times, Miles College has signed a LOI to begin negotiations to purchase the former campus of Birmingham-Southern.

[jknezek]

According to a report in The Birmingham Times, Miles College has signed a LOI to begin negotiations to purchase the former campus of Birmingham-Southern.

Yeah. I don't know if this is the best idea for Miles. Not sure they need it. But I know they were going to be in trouble if Alabama A&M got it. Hopefully Miles has a big donor who is going to pop up with the funds. It would be a massive expansion, and there is a fair bit of deferred maintenance they need to tackle before reopening the campus.

[cush]

Is miles planning to move campuses?

[jknezek]

Is miles planning to move campuses?

I think the goal is to expand. They've looked at other property in the past, but this is more ready made.

[BSCpanthers]

I've been very open with my stance that I'd prefer Miles get it over A&M.  I'm not sure either of them can really afford it, but A&M has state money.  I'd like to see BSC give Miles a "deal" that includes combining the history of the two schools, problem is BSC has no students to offer Miles in some sort of merge.  Had they started a merge process a year ago, that would not be the case.  They could have combined them then and had over 2,000 students.  That may have been the best case for both schools.

[cush]

Unless miles has a major donor this seems like a bad move for them and for BSC if their goal is to keep their campus functioning post closure especially with the Alabama A&M offer for the BSC campus.I just don't see how it would make sense for miles to run two campuses but my guess is this move by miles is just to block the Alabama A&M offer to move into Birmingham. I wonder if Alabama A&M would be interested in the miles campus if miles moved to the BSC campus. Ideally, miles and BSC would have merged a year ago but it would have been hard to merge the two schools. It might make sense for miles to merge into the Alabama A&M system but they would lose their independence. The big takeaway is the state of Alabama should have just made the loan to BSC

[Ron Boerger]

BSC's primary concern is to get enough money to pay off the various debts they owe.

[Etchglow]

BSC's primary concern is to get enough money to pay off the various debts they owe.

It was reported that Alabama A&M's offer was reported to be 52 million. Supposedly that is 30 million over the debt they owe.