Why did uconn wait so long to join Div1 football?

[mike012]

What was the reasoning back in the 90s as to why uconn didn't join the newly formed big east football conference. I am more then positive we were asked to upgrade, what was the sad reasoning not to at that time? Easy to point fingers now obviously but what was the excuse?

 

[Jimmy Serrano]

$$$$$$

It's a huge financial committment to go from the Yankee Conference to the Big East.

 

[mike012]

Well I certainly hope someone learned a lesson... penny pinching in sports gets you stuck in the AAC while your rivals make 10 times more then you.

 

[specialisthusky]

I'm not so sure Uconn was asked to join when the big east formed...any link for that?

 

[HuskyHawk]

Well I certainly hope someone learned a lesson... penny pinching in sports gets you stuck in the AAC while your rivals make 10 times more then you.

But the landscape was very different then. Most D1 teams lost money on football. The TV money for football didn't take off until the DVR changed the value for TV programming, with a huge shift towards live programming.

 

[FDNY99]

the guys I tailgate with played at UCONN under Tom Jackson in the late 80's early 90's. All of them say that when they were recruited, they were told UCONN would be a 1A program by the time they graduated.

 

[ktuck911]

the guys I tailgate with played at UCONN under Tom Jackson in the late 80's early 90's. All of them say that when they were recruited, they were told UCONN would be a 1A program by the time they graduated.

I was at UCONN during that time and heard a lot of talk about that. Those were some good days though... Thought we had some pretty good talent back then ( Kevin Wesley, Rusty Neal - who btw used to cut my hair, Alex Davis, Carl Bond, Wilbur Gilliard, etc.... )

 

[Jimmy Serrano]

Well I certainly hope someone learned a lesson... penny pinching in sports gets you stuck in the AAC while your rivals make 10 times more then you.

Why do you think upgrading 10 years earlier than we did would've mattered?

 

[jackl]

Why do you think upgrading 10 years earlier than we did would've mattered?

Hathaway would have never been a part of Uconn Lore.

 

[huskyrob1]

What was the reasoning back in the 90s as to why uconn didn't join the newly formed big east football conference. I am more then positive we were asked to upgrade, what was the sad reasoning not to at that time? Easy to point fingers now obviously but what was the excuse?

Lots of reasons but the big one was they didn't have a stadium yet that was up to 1A standards. It was planned but was several years away, if Lou Perkins had seen a way to get around that he would have done so. Also might be one of the reasons why he left, when the Kraft deal fell through? If the Patriots had moved to Hartford (almost happened) in the mid 90's sharing a new downtown football stadium (built on the site of the Connecticut Convention Center) with UCONN's football team it would have happened much sooner than it did.

 

[Jimmy Serrano]

Hathaway would have never been a part of Uconn Lore.

How in the world do you figure that?

 

[metsfan2323]

The lack of a stadium was the big roadblock that had to be overcome. If there were an existing Yale Bowl type structure that could have been accessed in Hartford the upgrade would have happened sooner.

 

[huskypantz]

Because UConn in the 80's was treated by CT like UMass is treated by MA now. There was a lack of investment in a campus with a library that was falling apart, old dorms, dated recreational facilities etc. You couldn't justify a stadium when the stairways of the chem building looked like they were straight out of a prison. Once CT became more vested in UConn, funding became viable.

 

[freescooter]

It's a huge financial committment to go from the Yankee Conference to the Big East.

That's pretty much the reason. I think UConn was offered the opportunity to upgrade in 1991ish when the Big East football league was formed. They also looked at it in the late 70s/80s and tried to upgrade their schedule a bit a few times. That's when you see Army, Navy, Rutgers showing up regularly on the schedule. William & Mary who was 1A until the 1981 re-classification (Yale was 1A until then, too), VMI who was 1A again until 1981. Patriot League teams who were also 1A at the time. There were a couple of years in the late 1970s, early 1980s where UConn's non-conference schedule consisted entirely of 1A (at the time) teams. The concept at the time was to play in the Yankee Conference for a few years and gradually upgrade the non-league portion of the schedule with lower level 1A teams and a few better ones (eg Army, Navy, Rutgers) then over time start to replace the YankCon schools with other 1As along the line of the Patriot League (which didn't exist at the time). There was even a plan to upgrade and expand Memorial stadium (I think to about 25000). I think the re-classification of a bunch of eastern schools, the Ivies, what became the Patriot League, was the biggest thing that derailed that plan. At that point the Yankee conference went all in and UConn went along.

 

[mike012]

Why do you think upgrading 10 years earlier than we did would've mattered?

Playing in the big east from 91 till 2003 would have been very helpful. To compare that league to any league we have played in now is no comparison...even remotely. Uconn might have been run over by those Miami and Michael Vick Va Tech teams but i can assure you the rent if it was around then would have been packed. Plus rival games with BC could have helped us with them relationship wise... who knows.

 

[John]

I love your avatar.

 

[coachcap]

John Toner serving as both UConn AD & NCAA President was a double edged sword. Toner oversaw the creation of Division 1-AA during his tenure with the NCAA. He was ecstatic to move UConn out of Division 2. There was NO thought of a Division 1 upgrade until after the Big East Football Conference was formed, & has been stated before a new stadium was the major road block.

 

[huskyrob1]

Playing in the big east from 91 till 2003 would have been very helpful. To compare that league to any league we have played in now is no comparison...even remotely. Uconn might have been run over by those Miami and Michael Vick Va Tech teams but i can assure you the rent if it was around then would have been packed. Plus rival games with BC could have helped us with them relationship wise... who knows.

I don't think the Rent ever would have been built if UCONN had gone 1A in the mid or early 90's. There was a big push to build a huge stadium right in downtown Hartford which would have been home to both the Patriots and the Huskies and if that had happened UCONN would have been one of the first teams taken in the first conference raid, maybe even before BC. What killed that deal was the CT legislature not giving Kraft everything he wanted, despite Gov Rowland doing everything he could to urge them to do so. I liked John Rowland, yeah he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but I liked him as a Governor.

 

[mike012]

I was young when that whole Kraft Patriots thing started to happen. What was the major set back for that move? Or did Kraft have no intentions of ever coming to CT?

 

[John]

I don't think Kraft ever had any intention of coming to CT. He played Rowland to get Massachusetts to pony up.

 

[John]

I don't think the Rent ever would have been built if UCONN had gone 1A in the mid or early 90's. There was a big push to build a huge stadium right in downtown Hartford which would have been home to both the Patriots and the Huskies and if that had happened UCONN would have been one of the first teams taken in the first conference raid, maybe even before BC. What killed that deal was the CT legislature not giving Kraft everything he wanted, despite Gov Rowland doing everything he could to urge them to do so. I liked John Rowland, yeah he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but I liked him as a Governor.

he was surely better than the doofus we have in there now, but let's be honest, Rowland was a criminal.

 

[Jimmy Serrano]

I was young when that whole Kraft Patriots thing started to happen. What was the major set back for that move? Or did Kraft have no intentions of ever coming to CT?

Kraft used CT as leverage to get the Razor built for just about nothing.

As far as UConn being one of the first teams snatched up during the first raid if we played in a downtown stadium shared by the Patriots........that is Boneyard Fantasy at its finest.

 

[Carl Spackler]

John Toner serving as both UConn AD & NCAA President was a double edged sword. Toner oversaw the creation of Division 1-AA during his tenure with the NCAA. He was ecstatic to move UConn out of Division 2. There was NO thought of a Division 1 upgrade until after the Big East Football Conference was formed, & has been stated before a new stadium was the major road block.

Toner was a huge proponent of the theory of "cost-containment" football, which is what the creation of the 1-AA division was entirely based on, and has been proven many times over to be a faulty system.

It wasn't until the late stages of the reorganization process into division 1, 2 and 3 in the late 1970s, that the clause about the stadium seating capacity being a criteria for classification got thrown in to be division 1A in football, (and that was the work of Joe Paterno to eliminate the Ivy League from division 1A classification - and eliminate the recruiting competition that the Ivy league was for him). I'm not sure what you mean by division 2. I could be wrong, but I don't think UCONN was ever classified division 2 when it was created in the early 1970's. I think the Yankee conference was still division 1 until they created 1-AA. The problem they ran into, was that Paterno had pushed through that stadium seating capacity clause in the late 70s when it came to being classified as division 1A, and I agree, that Toner was quite happy to place UCONN into the 1-AA classification.

 

[huskyrob1]

he was surely better than the doofus we have in there now, but let's be honest, Rowland was a criminal.

John Rowland did or tried to do more good things for this state than any Gov I can remember. He was basically a great gov who let power make him feel he could do nothing wrong. Did he deserve prison time? Yes, but he learned his lesson, read his bio.

 

[Carl Spackler]

The interesting thing about the theory around "cost containment" intercollegiate football, and the divide of division 1 into 1A and 1-AA, is that had the Supreme Court ruled differently in the Oklahoma Board of Regents and University of Georgia case v. the NCAA around television broadcasting of college football, 1-AA football probably becomes quite successful.

As it was, the supreme court opened up the floodgates in the mid 80s, and aside from the Ivy League, there is no college football conference in the country that has not been changed dramatically since as conferences and university presidents and commissioners jockeyed for TV money.

As for the OP question, In the early 90s, AFTER Toner left the AD job, there was a lot of prep work and talk put into the upgrade of UCONN football, but it got shelved for a number of years because of the roadblocks that went up about building and adequate stadium and infrastructure. The constant turmoil in the Big East along the football and basketball divide, with programs wanting in and threatening to leave started in 1991. It wasn't until 1996 or so, that UCONN (along with Villanova) was seriously considered to upgrade and join the football conference because the conference needed some kind of stability along basketball and football lines. UCONN BOT voted on it, and it was officially approved in October 1997. The stadium, which it all hinged on, was shot down numerous times, and ways, and didn't become reality until the summer of 2000, based on some creative politicking by Rowland.

Basically, the upgrade happened, as fast as it possibly could based on all of the dynamics around it.