Troubling Times for CAA???

What the hell are the interwebs for if not for rumormongering and rampant, uninformed speculation about doomsday scenarios for collegiate athletic conferences?!  Well call us sheep, but we’re definitely not going to let an awkward, something-seems-fishy-here, strange bit of commentary from CAA commish Tom Yeager slide by without shamelessly contributing to the general internet hysteria that results when the uninformed masses (that’s us) try to make sense of things like this on blogs, Twitter, and message boards.

One thing I do know is that Yeager and co. need to figure out that as the CAA has grown in terms of reputation, exposure, and marketability, so has the peripheral yak (again, that’s us and the general Twitterazzi).  When they botch something like yesterday’s “we’re going to have a vote on raising the conference exit fee to something in the seven-figure range and then hold a presser to tell you about it” by not actually being able to get a quorum of school presidents and then being forced to give a very awkward statement about why that vote was called off, they’re going to set off the rumor mill.

Look, there are a lot of ways to look at yesterday’s vote being called off but the two most likely are a) the presidents were just busy and b) Yeager knew it wasn’t going to pass because some schools are on their way out.  The first one is boring, but the second is a WTF moment for the league.  We know GSU is gone to the Sun Belt after they change planes in the CAA this fall.  We also know VCU and GMU have been linked to the A-10.  And now we know that JMU President Rose and AD Jeff Bourne said yesterday they are not sure how JMU will vote.  Lastly, we also think we know that technically CAA Football is a separate organization with separate bylaws from the rest of the CAA and who knows how that affects things.  Oh yeah, and we have this quote from Yeager on GSU’s announcement about the Sun Belt. “…the CAA could not accomodate that desire [to move to FBS] within Georgia State’s timeframe.”  Whaaaa?!?!  If I’m Mason or VCU, that certainly sounds to me like a conference with designs, albeit slowly developing designs, on raising their profile in football.  And a conference that just got tossed out of ESPN Bracketbusters, which for better or worse has been helpful in those March Madness runs, because they signed what amounts to essentially a football deal with another network.

Needless to say, we’ll probably be talking about this business a lot this summer and maybe the next couple of years, but for now we just hope that Rose, Bourne, and Alger are staying ahead of the game and positioning JMU well for however the dominoes fall.