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| Lycoming, Wilkes athletics photos |
By Pat Coleman, Dave McHugh
D3sports.com
At the NCAA convention in January, NCAA Division III membership voted to extend automatic bids in all sports to conferences with as few as six members in a sport. And the first move to take advantage of this new standard is coming.
D3sports.com has learned that the Landmark Conference is working on expansion, adding two schools, using those two new schools and the relaxed standards to qualify for an automatic bid in football, perhaps as soon as the fall of 2023.
Sources tell Hoopsville that Lycoming and Wilkes, current members of the Middle Atlantic Conference in football, have been extended invitations to join the league. If they accept those invitations and Landmark Conference presidents vote accordingly, then the existing Landmark schools with football would leave their affiliated conferences and bring football in-house. Those schools are Catholic, currently a NEWMAC member in football, and Juniata, Moravian and Susquehanna (Centennial Conference).
These sources are unnamed because they are not authorized to speak about the situation publicly.
The Landmark followed this report with its official announcement on Feb. 10.
The Landmark Conference is a collection of eight schools in a corridor from Washington, D.C., to northeast Pennsylvania. Its founding, announced in 2005, helped set off a cascade of conference affiliation changes informally termed “The Mid-Atlantic Shuffle” and eventually led to several rounds of affiliation changes, the formation of another new conference, and forced the Capital Athletic Conference to rebrand and accept members from Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern California.
Adding Lycoming and Wilkes would give the Landmark six football programs and an automatic bid under the new rules put in place. The Centennial would have seven remaining programs and would retain its automatic bid and the MAC would have 10 programs, with Eastern having previously announced it would add football. The NEWMAC would retain seven programs, with SUNY-Maritime joining the league in 2023.
That would leave Division III football with 28 automatic bids to its championship, and just four at-large bids.
Drew, Elizabethtown, Goucher and Scranton are also full members of the Landmark Conference which do not sponsor football. Conference bylaws indicate that "If a member institution sponsors a sport that is considered a Conference sport, the member must participate in all Conference scheduling, competition, and championships in the sport," so adding football would require Catholic, Juniata, Moravian and Susquehanna to leave their current football affiliations.
There would be a total of 10 full members of the Landmark Conference.
Remaining issues for football would include finding a scheduling partner to help Landmark Conference football schools fill out a 10-game schedule with five non-conference games.