Realignment Series Part II: Don’t Forget to Drink Your Ovaltine

Listen, we intermittently get all fired up on this topic.  Actually mostly I get fired up for this topic.  Rob and I both want the best for JMU, but as we’ve been trying to clarify without much success on our shared @jmusportsblog account, we’re not exactly of the same mind what would constitute the best outcome for JMU’s future in athletics (and what that means to the university as a whole).  Just to clear it up, Rob’s more patient and a little more risk averse.  He also has more faith that those in positions of power at JMU are their for a reason and given all the turmoil in college sports right now, maybe just “monitoring the situation” really is alright for the time being.  I usually am more aggressive in my thinking.  Maybe I just love football more and no what fall Saturdays have done to bring me and quite a few of my friends old and new back into the JMU community after years of apathy, but I also have a little less rationality on the financial side of the house and a little less faith in an administration that has blown a playoff bid, allowed Matt Brady to become a eunuch in the recruiting world due to his lame-duck contract status, and is teetering on the edge of having spent $68 million on a stadium we can’t fill by playing heated conference rivalries with “peer” institutions like Albany.  But just know that for all our back-and-forth we’re really both just a degree or two on different sides of center and it seems more and more a fools errand to let the larger realignment news of the day or the week sway you one way or the other.

And sometimes I’m like, I just, I mean…this is exhausting, you know?  Like today for example.  Seems like we’ve been saying for years that eventually all the realignment would trickle down to the CAA level.  We just didn’t know it would happen in a torrent instead of a trickle.  One thing I have to give Rob’s more cautious approach on a day like today is that I certainly wouldn’t want JMU to become one of the growing list of schools experiencing serious buyer’s remorse after jumping too early from the perceived frying pan into the now raging fire.

What a ripoff! What the hell kind of conference is this?!

Take ECU for example.  All these years they’ve been pining for a nibble at the Big East or ACC.  But when their super-secret decoder ring finally arrived last week, it only took a hot minute to realize the result is nothing more than an ad jingle for a fowl-tasting bit of nothingness that is the Big East with nary an actual Big East member.  Or UMass, whose faculty, while actually powerless in this area, is raising a stink and asking to move back to FCS.

But not to worry, I’ll be fired up again next week when College of Charleston inevitably announces they’ll be skipping out on the CAA without the ball ever being tipped on their way to join the remnants of the A-10 or Big East hoops-only schools and picking up Mason on the way.

All I know is we’ll be rethinking just how in-depth we really want this realignment series to be when it usually just makes both of us want to vomit like we’ve stayed too long on Cantrell again.

But hey, in better news, the CAA hoops tourney is still limited to seven teams this year so the Dukes won’t have to play on play-in day, the tournament is mercifully leaving the dump that is the Richmond Mausoleum for the much more celebratory confines of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (we were going to write more about this, but really, is the CAA going to exist in 2014 and is JMU going to be in it? – not worth the worry just yet), and one of our favorite Dukes’ football players of the recent era, DJ Bryant, signed with the Ravens practice squad this week.

Also, senior OG Earl Watford made first team All-American and LB (and junior!!!!)  Stephon Robertson made the 2nd team.

Lastly, look out next week for some non-athletics related JMU material here for a change.