Here's a
recent article about Robert Morris and their conference options:
Where could Robert Morris go? An analysis of a potential conference moveBy Andrew Chiappazzi | 7/25/17
As the Horizon League sifted through potential candidates to fill the vacancy left by Valparaiso’s move to the Missouri Valley Conference, Robert Morris’ name came up often. The Detroit News reported RMU as one of five schools to have been vetted by the league in the last few years.
The Horizon ultimately chose IUPUI as Valparaiso’s replacement, but the Robert Morris rumblings aren’t new. RMU athletic director Craig Coleman has heard the rumor often enough that he’s resorted to using humor to respond.
“I told our commissioner that we’ve set an NCAA record, as far as I can tell. We’ve moved into the Horizon League four times in the past five years,” Coleman said. “Right now, we have no current plan to make any change at this point.”
Robert Morris will spend the 2017-18 season as a member of the Northeast Conference for the 36th straight year. But questions about the school’s future and the mid-major landscape persist. Realignment still bubbles under the surface of college sports, from the largest FBS leagues down to conferences without football. That includes the Horizon League, where commissioner Jonathan LeCrone sees the league expanding to as many as 16 teams.
Meanwhile, Robert Morris is in the midst of building a new arena and recreation center. The project is the capstone of a decade-long effort to enhance the school’s athletics program.
BUILDING A FOUNDATIONIs the next step a move to another league? Is the NEC, which has seen its basketball profile dip, still the right fit for RMU? To understand what the future might hold, it’s important to understand how RMU and the mid-major landscape got to this point.
When Coleman took over as athletic director in May 2005, Robert Morris’ athletic budget was substantially smaller than it is today. Though the school was in the midst of adding sports and building a campus football stadium, the overall athletics budget was just $6.5 million, according to data from the Office of Postsecondary Education.
Over the next decade, Coleman and then-president Gregory Dell’Omo, who was also hired in 2005, began working to improve the department as part of the university’s larger strategic plan. Coleman credits Dell’Omo and the board of trustees for being willing to back project after project as the university’s athletic budget grew to $17.6 million by 2015-16.
Multiple sports enjoyed success in that timeframe, but few moments enhanced RMU’s profile like the men’s basketball team’s overtime loss to Villanova in the 2010 NCAA Tournament and win over Kentucky in the 2013 NIT.
“For both the Villanova game and the game against Kentucky, for a period of time during and after the game ended, we were the number one Googled and tweeted expression on planet Earth,” Coleman said. “It’s hard to quantify, if you somehow were able to do that with paid advertising to reach that kind of audience and get that exposure, how much that would cost.”
In the midst of that success, RMU made the decision to pare down the number of sports it offered in order to enhance the remaining programs. Less than nine months after the milestone win over Kentucky, the school it announced it was cutting seven sports.
“It was a very difficult decision to make and a very emotional one,” Coleman said. “I think that over time we’ve been able to consolidate funding into all of our other sports to the point where everyone was able to benefit from it.”
RMU reinvested the savings by adding full-time assistant coaches, expanding recruiting budgets, and more for its remaining sports.
The university invested in its coaches, too. According to the school’s latest publicly available tax forms, former women’s basketball coach Sal Buscaglia and current men’s basketball coach Andy Toole were two of the university’s highest salaried employees for the 2014-15 school year. Buscaglia had a salary of $212,949 for the 2014-15 season, while Toole had a salary of $282,176 for that season.
The numbers illustrate Robert Morris’ growth, especially when compared to the rest of the NEC. Robert Morris spent $1.9 million on men’s basketball in 2015-16, more than any other school in the league. As a whole, Robert Morris’ $17.6-million athletic budget was second in the league. Only Sacred Heart spent more, but the Pioneers’ $23.5-million budget was spread across 31 sports compared to RMU’s 16 programs.
Toole’s salary is believed to be the highest in the NEC after an examination of available tax records. It’s particularly notable because it hasn’t reached an internal cap. The school gave him an extension later in 2015 and again in January 2017 when it announced the plans for the new arena.
While Robert Morris was busy building up its athletics program, the collegiate sports landscape was changing. Those changes have had a lasting impact on both the NEC and mid-major basketball.
CURRENT CLIMATESince its founding in 1981 as the ECAC Metro Conference, the Northeast Conference has primarily featured small, private schools in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Six original members, including Robert Morris, remain in the conference. The relationships run deep. So when Monmouth and Quinnipiac left for the Metro Atlantic Conference in 2013, it was a rare seismic change. The last member had left in 2003, and the last founding member to leave was Marist in 1997.
“I think from a realignment standpoint, when changes happen you have to adjust,” NEC commissioner Noreen Morris said. “You have to look forward and figure out how to continue to improve on what you’re doing and move in the same direction as a league, and I think we’ve done that very successfully.”
The changes were driven by a wave of conference realignment that hit college sports from 2010-14. Much of it was driven by football at the FBS level, but the NEC’s changes were not. The ripple effect started with the Patriot League, which expanded to 10 members by adding Boston University from America East and Loyola (Md.) from the MAAC. The loss of Loyola meant the MAAC needed to find a replacement.
”It tends to get done usually when there is a compelling reason,” MAAC commissioner Rich Ensor said of conference expansion. “When you lose a member, you start that process to look at additional members. In the most recent go-round, Quinnipiac and Monmouth both stood out as schools that would help lift the profile of the MAAC, so we took them both instead of just one.”
Basketball drove the MAAC’s desire to add Quinnipiac and Monmouth. Both had new facilities, made a financial commitment to the sport and played in locations that fit geographically within the league.
Monmouth’s departure left the NEC with just seven members for football. The conference has explored expanding its ranks, but potential candidates aren’t plentiful.
”We want to maintain the footprint we currently have so as to not create travel scenarios that would be difficult for our student-athletes,” Morris said. “But at the same time, we also have to look at how many associate members are out there to potentially add just for football. There’s not that many within our footprint.”
Even with seven football members, the league has tried to grow. The league now allows a maximum of 45 scholarships, which schools can combine with other financial aid to reach the FCS threshold of 63 scholarships to make a team an eligible bowl counter for FBS teams.
But the last few years have been difficult for the league in basketball. The NEC’s RPI has plummeted. In 2010-11, the year after RMU’s close call as a No. 15 seed against Villanova, the league enjoyed a robust RPI of 18. By the time Robert Morris returned to the NCAA Tournament in 2014-15, the league’s RPI had dropped to 26th and relegated RMU to the play-in game. The NEC dropped to 30th in RPI in each of the past two seasons.
Transfers of the league’s top players have also rocked the NEC. Of the 24 underclassmen to make the NEC’s all-conference teams in the past three years, half of them have transferred. That includes all three underclassmen on the all-NEC first team from last season and RMU’s top scorer last season, sophomore Isaiah Still.
Transfers are a nationwide issue. More than 700 players transferred this summer, believed to be the highest in NCAA history. A solution isn’t isolated to the NEC.
“In some sense, you can say this is a great reaffirmation of what we’re doing in the NEC, which is hiring great coaches and the coaches are doing a great job recruiting,” Morris said. “Unfortunately, our trending upward has kind of fallen right into the timeline of where this transfer culture has changed.”
If top talent continues to exit, schools like Robert Morris could be enticed to move to another league to try to stabilize their programs.
CHALLENGE OF MAKING A MOVE
Basketball is the driving force behind mid-majors, even those with football. But the options for a small private school like Robert Morris are more limited than it would appear. The America East and Colonial Athletic Association present challenging travel situations. The Big East and Atlantic 10 are unrealistic. That leaves the MAAC and Horizon, conferences that were 16th and 17th in RPI last season.
The two leagues have differing attitudes toward expansion. Ensor told The Times the MAAC is comfortable with 11 members, though a 12th member isn’t out of the question.
“I think when you get to that discussion, location plays a role in that,” Ensor said. “Do we want another school within our geographic footprint? Is there an area where we could augment our admissions effort? A lot of what private schools talk about is driven by admissions. Where are the alumni? Where are the potential students?”
Since moving to the MAAC, both Monmouth and Quinnipiac have seen their athletic budgets increase by almost $5 million each. Such an immediate financial commitment could be challenging, but RMU’s current budget wouldn’t be out of place. Robert Morris would have the fourth-largest budget in the MAAC and eighth-largest basketball budget. RMU, though, would be the westernmost school in the MAAC and would face more travel to league games than it does in the NEC.
While the MAAC is content to wait, the Horizon wants to be aggressive. Expansion is part of the league’s strategic plan after a study conducted by the league concluded it could remain cost-effective while getting larger.
“Although it may spread out our geography, some people may think it increases cost,” LeCrone said. “If you got large enough, we believe in divisional play in all of the sports – with the exception of men’s basketball – really might help us save money.”
LeCrone said the league has vetted about 20 potential candidates over the past few years but would not divulge if Robert Morris was one of them. He added that while the league wants to expand, there isn’t a specific timetable. “I think you move at the pace that works for the institutions politically, economically,” LeCrone said. “There are no independent schools out there. So these schools are good partners in other conferences, so we want to be aware of that as well.”
The Horizon would actually reduce travel for RMU in basketball, thanks to the presence of five schools within 300 miles. Youngstown State would be a natural travel partner and conference rival. And Robert Morris’ current athletic budget would actually be the largest in the league, with its basketball budget sitting in the middle of the pack.
But it’s not a perfect fit. Even with the new arena, Robert Morris would have the smallest facility in the league. It would also have the smallest enrollment because much of the Horizon League consists of public universities with more than 15,000 students.
A move gets more complex outside of basketball. The MAAC and Horizon don’t have football, and the Horizon doesn’t sponsor lacrosse. Hockey and rowing, the two sports RMU plays outside the NEC, would be untouched. But finding a home for football, in particular, could be difficult. When Monmouth left the NEC in 2013, the league rejected the Hawks’ bid to stay as an associate member in football. There’s no guarantee that it’d keep RMU if it also chose to leave.
A solution outside of the NEC is even more challenging. Any move to a full-scholarship conference would require additional financing. Monmouth and Albany have had their football budgets increase by almost $1.5 million apiece since moving out of the NEC in 2013. Even with that increase, Albany has the smallest budget in the Colonial Athletic Association. RMU would have the smallest football budget, smallest stadium and second-smallest enrollment in the league. It would have to nearly double its budget to reach that of Albany.
Similar challenges exist in the Missouri Valley. While Youngstown State is less than an hour away, RMU’s $2.6-million football budget would be the smallest in the league. To move up to, say, ninth in the 12-team conference in terms of football budget, RMU would have to increase it by 33.5 percent. Another challenge would be 3,100-seat Joe Walton Stadium, which would be the smallest capacity in the conference by nearly 7,000.
RMU could follow Monmouth to the Big South for football. The Big South will be at seven teams in 2019 with Liberty’s departure to the FBS and the addition of Campbell and North Alabama. But travel could be cumbersome because every school except Monmouth would be a 1,000-plus mile round trip.
Robert Morris’ unique blend of sports may end up being the most complicated part of the entire process. RMU is one of just a dozen schools in Division I that sponsors basketball, football, men’s and women’s hockey and men’s and women’s lacrosse.
“We really feel like that makes us kind of a special place,” Coleman said.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDSFor Robert Morris, the immediate focus is inward. Construction on the new recreation center is expected to be done by mid-September, with construction on the UPMC Events Center to follow. Toole has his focus on returning the basketball team to the top of the NEC, and Coleman said a similar goal exists for RMU’s other sports, including a football program that is 7-26 over the past three seasons.
“With football, we want to become relevant in the Northeast Conference again,” Coleman said. “We want to challenge for a championship and get back into the FCS playoffs.”
Beyond the Moon Township campus, though, those in college athletics wait for the next domino to fall. Missouri Valley and Horizon officials have spoken openly about their desire to expand. There are no announced timetables or public plans, but, as LeCrone pointed out, college athletics have always featured a shifting landscape. Conferences will continue to expand, contract and realign, like they have for decades.
”I think there are always going to be conferences and schools that want to be better, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” LeCrone said. “We’ve had teams come into our league, grow and prosper and achieve excellence, and (then) decide they want to take a bigger step. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”