Lehigh Football Nation

I actually feel bad for the schools and athletes of the MEAC. Last year, the players and coaches of the schools of the MEAC knew that they all had an equal chance to compete for a national championship, just like all the other schools in Division I Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS. But with the announcement of the Celebration Bowl , a postseason bowl game which rips the MEAC's champion away from the playoffs to face off against the winner of the SWAC, none of the talk anymore is about the athletes. The talk on the internet around the bowl, financed and created, essentially, by ESPN, is how much money each host school could or could not bring home if they qualify for the game. Rather than haggle over money, though, I think HBCU conferences are probably better served by doing something that probably has been needed to be done for decades - reorganizing. The reason, oddly enough, is the bowl game.

You may remember the genius of Groucho Marx , the bespectacled Marx Brother with the grease-painted eyebrows and mustache.  One of my all-time favorite films, Horse Feathers , featured Groucho, Harpo, and Chico on the football field (actually the Rose Bowl), representing their "school" in a particularly important game. But it's a particular quote of his that seems to summarize Division I football perfectly, at both the FCS and FBS levels. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." Division I has never truly been a large tent of equal schools.  It was a division that counted as members Texas (whose athletic budget is as large as some small nations), Mississippi Valley State (whose entire athletics budget is about the size of what the University of Texas pays for socks for its athletes) and Marist (who doesn't even spend any money on athletics scholarships for its football athletes). But 2014 was a year of true soul-sea...

(Photo Credit: Shreveport Times via USA Today ) If you're reading this blog, chances are you've enjoyed some college football at some point during this 2013 season, either in person, at an FCS school like Lehigh, or maybe on TV, watching someone like QB Johnny Manziel play in front of 100,000 stadium fans. If you're like most casual fans, though, you don't think about the number of days it takes for these players to get to gameday and to compete: hot practices in the summer heat, countless hours in the weight room, the training regimen it requires. This last week, student-athletes at a very small Division I university in Louisiana had looked around at the environment surrounding themselves in regards to their program and facilities and said: enough. Grambling's situation this season, which led to the strike that caused them to forfeit Jackson State's homecoming game last weekend, is a complicated one.  It's hard to summarize neatly in 500 words o...

Few analogies are as overwrought as the consistent characterization of football being a "war".  I do it; Pat Forde does it; everybody does it. But it seems strangely appropriate to use this as my "Sunday Word" this weekend. With Democrats and Republicans making every single tiny appointment and legislative action as an epic struggle between good and evil, anything on the political front these days feels dangerous - whether it means driving the American economy into a ditch, or not. So it goes, too, with all the big issues on the docket in the NCAA this past week. If you thought Congress was the only body that had walkouts, no-shows, financial straitjackets and throwing the least well off under the bus, you should see the "war" happening in the halls of the NCAA. (more)