Here's why Delaware joined Conference USA, and what comes next

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Earlier this week, the University of Delaware announced they were leaving the CAA and the ranks of the FCS to join Conference USA, effective in 2025. About 30 minutes later, my DMs, email inbox, and mentions started to fill up with questions.

So when I finally had a chance to catch up with Delaware athletic director Chrissi Rawak, I made sure to lead off by asking the question that I knew my readers were most interested in.

Are the Delaware Blue Hens going to be in the next EA Sports College Football video game?

Rawak told me that she wasn’t sure, and that she planned to reach out to CLC and the school’s MMR partners for more details and information. She told me she’d love for the school to participate, but since they won’t be full FBS members in 2024, she wasn’t sure what their options might be yet.

I didn’t call up Rawak to talk about video games, of course. I had plenty of other questions about the school’s ambitious decision to reclassify to FBS.

For one…why Conference USA?

Back in September, I published an update on Extra Points that said that while Delaware wanted to make sure the department was ready to accept a potential FBS opportunity if one presented itself, the department wasn’t 100% sure if it even wanted to join FBS. I also wrote that I had been hearing that Delaware wasn’t particularly interested in joining the Sun Belt or Conference USA.

Back in September, that was 100% true. But now it’s December, and Delaware is joining Conference USA. So what changed?

For one, Rawak told me, it was critical that the entire school “remained open and engaged throughout the entire process”, making sure they were doing their complete due diligence on all opportunities. By sticking through everything, some of the potential objections and concerns the school may have had over the summer were alleviated.

Take travel, for example. Delaware does have access to maps, and they know that Conference USA’s sprawling geography, with schools in far-flung Miami and El Paso, is dramatically more spread out than the CAA.

But after really digging into everything, Rawak told me that the travel is actually much more doable than they initially thought. “We’re pretty close to major airports in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Once we really sat down, looked at which airlines fly to what markets, how much class time our students would miss, how much everything would cost…we realized this was more doable than we thought.”

The biggest difference, she pointed out, is that the school is prepared to spend what they needed to spend to swap bus rides for plane rides. The mileage might be longer, but they’re confident that the actual missed class time won’t be significantly more.

While Delaware did evaluate many other conference realignment opportunities, Rawak also singled out a shared sense of ambition and shared values for why Conference USA.

“I have to really credit {Conference USA Commissioner} Judy MacLeod. I think she’s a great leader, and Conference USA has been able to constantly completely reinvent themselves.” While Rawak understands that Delaware doesn’t share many geographic similarities or institutional profile similarities with their new conference peers, she believes Delaware shares similar “ambitions” and “athletic values.” “Different isn’t bad. Different is just different. During this process, we learned that we, at Delaware, care about the same things as Conference USA does.”

How is the school going to pay for all of this?

Delaware will be the first school to pay the new reclassification fee as they move from FCS to FBS, a fee that was recently bumped up to $5 million. The school tells me that actually, when you consider their exit fee obligations to the CAA, and entrance fees for Conference USA, the total obligation is $6 million, not five.

While Rawak admits the timing and the fee increase aren’t ideal, she told me that she wasn’t going to let that fee prevent Delaware from reclassifying if the school deeply believed the move was best for their long-term interests. The school is fundraising to pay those fees, and they’ve already raised about $3.5 million of that amount.

Rawak also pointed to investments the school has already made, which will make the reclassification process a little easier. “We’ve already invested in our staffing infrastructure. We already have the trainers and support staff to help us prepare for the reclassification.” She also noted that the school will not need to dramatically increase scholarships in other sports to be compliant with FBS requirements.

Beyond finding affiliate league membership for sports that Conference USA does not sponsor, the school has also committed to adding a new women’s sport. Delaware will announce at 10:00 ET today that the institution is adding Women’s Ice Hockey. The team will compete in the CHA, along with regional programs like Penn State, Syracuse, and Robert Morris.

Rawak also told me that the program also hopes to play many out-of-conference games closer to home. “We will probably play teams like Towson, Drexel, and many other CAA schools” as well as others within driving distance.

I did ask if she had reached out to Michigan about a potential football game. Rawak is a former Michigan college athlete, and the Blue Hens sport a verrrrry similar iconic winged helmet look and color scheme. She agreed that would be a wonderful experience, and added that she actually tried to get Michigan on the schedule several years earlier, but nothing is imminent for now. According to FBSchedules, the Wolverines appear to be booked until 2027 at the soonest.

So what’s next?

With the addition of Delaware, Conference USA now has 11 football-playing institutions. Rawak told me that the league does intend to eventually get to 12, but “probably not significantly more than that.” While she agreed that it would be nice to have a travel partner (the closest full-member right now, Liberty, is about 280 miles away), she was mum about confirming any potential candidates or timelines.

No matter what hypothetical additional expansion scenarios happen, Delaware will be making road trips to Florida, Texas, Virginia, and elsewhere. Rawak told me she sees that as a positive, since the school’s student enrollment profile currently skews heavily to the Northeast and area around the DMV. The entire institution, she told me, is excited about spreading the Delaware brand in new markets south of Maryland, and also regularly playing on linear, national TV broadcasts.

But just getting on the bar TV on a random Wednesday night isn’t the long-term goal. Delaware competed for championships at the FCS level and has a deep history of football success. “We want to compete at this level,” she told me. As an athletic department, and as a school, “we want more.”

And hey, we can think of at least one person who is going to be pretty excited. Rawak did confirm that a certain Blue Hen fan in the White House is very aware of the reclassification, and is excited.

What else did we write this week?

Great question!

• A longtime college football coach in Canada wrote a quick explainer for how Canadian College Football actually works, and what sort of major issues administrators are discussing there. Canada’s problems aren’t the same problems we’re facing here with the NCAA…but some of them are still pretty similar!

• I wrote about how I believe the newsletter industry and the NIL industry are facing a similar, but major, problem…they haven’t figured out how to grow the demand-side of the ad business.

• And I wrote about how I’m sick of hearing football coaches who make millions of dollars try to guilt regular fans into contributing to NIL collectives to solve college football’s labor and payroll problem. Paying for talent should not be the obligation of fans who are already paying too much for tickets, parking, and hot dogs.

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I’m going to be taking some time off later in December, but I’m going to do everything I can to finish the season strong. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in your inbox next week.

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