MAILBAG! FCS realignment, European football, Sports Biz and more:

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

It’s been a minute since we did a good ol’ fashioned mailbag edition, and since a fair number of people have been sending me questions, now is a great time to answer as many as I can.

As always, mailbag questions can be emailed, or DMd on Twitter or Bluesky. When I get enough good questions, I’ll do a mailbag! Or…if enough people decide not to call me back, well, then I’ll force the issue to make deadline.

ANYWAY, Reader Sam asks,

Good question! The University of New Haven announced they had accepted an invitation to join the NEC on May 6, effective July 1 of this year. Sam is right, that is an unusually quick turnaround, albeit one that isn’t unheard of.

The precedent around conference change advance notice has changed over the last several years. Earlier in my career, it was more common to give well over a year of advance notice before changing leagues. This helped departing members avoid huge exit fee penalties, made sure they weren’t excluded from postseason opportunities, and preserve positive relations with their previous conference.

Nowadays, with movement happening so frequently, my understanding is that most of the time, schools, and conferences would prefer to not have awkward lame-duck situations. If membership isn’t needed to ensure the existential survival of a league, it’s become easier to just cut a check and move as quickly as possible.

I can’t speak to the exact specifics of the situation at New Haven. I do know that UNH’s desire to join the NEC isn’t a state secret…it’s a campaign that started years ago, under different athletic directors and university presidents. Shoot, I first wrote back UNH’s D1 ambitions back in 2020!

I don’t mind sharing that a) NEC conference leadership and school based leaders were already very familiar with UNH and didn’t exactly need an extensive deliberative process with multiple campus visits to decide if they wanted to move forward or not and b) I’ve been told the NE-10 is uh, maybe not a great place to be for a school on its way out of the conference. It made sense for both parties to try to get this done quickly.

Hey, speaking of the NEC, reader Doug asks,

Good question!

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