I can only tell you this because of personal experience during that time but the links below can lead you to this conclusion by its inference to Delaware and UMass regading their particpation in the Boardwalk Bowl and our relationship with them. Delaware because we scheduled them as a regional peer and UMass as a fellow conference member. You can also look up Delaware's history on Wiki and find they won three national championships inthe 70's in differently called divisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_II_National_Football_Championship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Fightin'_Blue_Hens_football
Wikipedia, any body can write anythign there.
Here's the low down. Prior to 1968, "major" and/or "university" labels vs. "college" labels.....were essentially meaningless to anything intercollegiate athletics other than football, and when it came to football, it was loosely tied to the actual size of a university and it's student body. But mostly, the labels originated with football media and at that time, it was all sports writers and news papers. No way was a agricultural school in rural Massachusetts or Vermont goign to be considered a "major" college like Tennessee, etc...
In 1937, the NCAA began keeping official records in football, team statistics, and more importantly, individual statistics. Thirty years later it was such a mess that they had to do something. How can some kid at a Arkansas St Baptist U, be better in the record books, than somebody from Michigan? In 1968, schools got either 'Major University" or "College" label officially, to start to clean up football statistics record keeping. Believe it or not.
UConn, got the "college" label officially in 1968.
In 1972, title IX women's rights laws were put into place. Major effect on universities. The NCAA had a special convention in summer 1973 and came up with the division 1, 2, 3 categories of competition. The categories were established based on the characteristics of entire athletic departments. The numbers of mens and womens programs mostly, a few years later, by 1978, the regulations on numbers of football scholarships were also in place.
Establishing those divisions, espeically with women's programs, put many major college athletic conferences in turmoil. People in the northeast, actually wanted to do the right things (look up LSU and women's soccer, and you'll find that in SEC country, they still don't quite get the whole principle behind title IX as recently as a year ago) but I digress.....how does that all affect UConn. The Yankee Conference is made up of the land grant colleges in New England. Totally diverse group of athletic departments, that are tied together aroundn athletics since the end of world war 2.
Yankee conference b/w 1973-1977 for four years of it's history, is now classified, retroactively, by the NCAA as division II. Mostly because of the University of Vermont athletic department, which didn't meet division 1 standards set in 1973, and bowed out of the conference after the 1974 season. UConn, URI, UMass, UNH, UMaine, and the addition of Boston University, were all classified division II on technicality as conference members. Things were still sorting out in the mid 70s, with the Yankee Conference working like hell to make sure everybody was going to qualify for division 1 status as entire athletic departments, when in 1978 the NCAA further divides division 1 into 1-A, and 1-AA and ties the label to football stadium seating capacity.
The yankee conference football programs did not need to "upgrade" in 1978 to achieve 1-AA status....what the football programs had to do to get that NCAA label, was shed the rest of the conference athletic department programs.
At that time, it was called "Cost containment". People all over the northeast were all for it, including Toner at UConn. Time has proven it to be a bad concept. The Yankee Conference continues existence as a 1-AA conference in football only from 1978-1997 and conference expansion is nothing new to the conference. The Yankee conference in 1978, dispands all other sports programs besides football, as the membership athletic departments, at that time had different structure, and vision on where to go for the future.
UConn enters the Big East in basketball in 1979, and for all sports except football by 1980.
The UConn athletic department, was indeed classified "college" vs. "university", but the UConn athletic department, has never been anything but a what currently labeled as a division 1 athletic department.
