Kiss your "A's" goodbye

Folks, as of next year the OVC won't have any I-AA football teams. In fact, I-AA football will cease to exist after the 2006 season. In its place, the NCAA is erecting the "NCAA Football Championship Subdivision." I-A also is out the door, being replaced by the "Football Bowl Subdivision." The NCAA Division I board of directors approved the change at its summer session today (Aug. 3) in Indianapolis. The change was announced in this item from The NCAA News, an official NCAA publication.

The change in terms apparently is designed to help avoid the sort of confusion people like Ray Melick (see below) get into when talking about NCAA football, even when they should know better. Will this move help? I don't know.

When a divisional name change first was propsed I was skeptical. Then, the names being tossed around were "Playoff Championship Group" and "Bowl Championship Group." To me, that sounded like a sham. Division I-A football is ruled by the BCS conferences, who, more than anything else, hate the idea of playoffs. As those conferences and teams live and die by their branding and marketing (just as the corporate bowl sponsors do), I figured they wouldn't allow a change that didn't benefit them in the end. My take: that name change would simply replace the term "I-AA" with "playoff," leading Joe Sixpack to more strongly associate the word "playoff" with football he's been led to belive isn't worth his time. That's a lot of negetive baggage attatched to the idea of playoffs, which the BCS folks would have to love. The term "bowl" gets the opposite treatment, with those massive-commercials-masquerading-as-a-postseason becoming the identifying feature of the I-A crowd.

The names approved today by the board of directors are different, and intriguing. I-AA becomes simply, "the NCAA Football Championship." I-A becomes just the bowls. I-A still gets the same positive treatment of the word "bowl," but I-AA seems to get get exclusive use of the word "championship." How the I-AA folks swung it, I don't know, but I think I kind of like it.

We all know the name "I-AA" carries a sort of stigma among the "Joe Sixpack" fans of the world, who think Division I college football is played only in places like Tuscaloosa, Ann Arbor, South Bend or College Station. Now, the term "NCAA Football Championship" in Division I is associated exclusively with the teams hailing from places like Missoula, Statesboro, Newark and of course Richmond.

Will this make any difference to the Ray Melicks of the world, or more importantly, the Joe Sixpacks? I don't know. But I know there will be only Division I teams playing in the OVC in 2007, and they'll all be aiming for the Championship.

The board of directors meeting saw a little more action on the I-AA front, with a re-born proposal for a 12th regular-season game getting postponed because two of the four I-AA members of the board weren't there. (Who was absent, and how could they possibly have missed a vote like this?).

Also, our very own OVC is proposing legislation, according to The NCAA News' story, that would let the I-AA members of the I-AA/I-AAA Presidential Advisory Group vote on issues specific to I-AA (or FCS?), instead of the D-I Board of Directors. That would have to diminsh I-A control over I-AA football, I'd think, and that could only be a good thing.