Re: Moratoriums
But it needs to be nipped in the bud - what if one of those schools were to actually win a DI championship - why that would be awful. Those titles are the birthright of the megaschools - Minnesota, Wisconsin, BU, BC, etc. For a DIII school to win would totally destroy the credibility of the invincibility of the megaprograms.
I have a couple points of contention with this. And since I can't sleep right now anyways, I might as well share them.
The first is: This isn't news. Those in power in anything (politics, sports, radio station clusters in triple-digit market numbers...) want to keep that power. The Yankees aren't lining up to institute a salary cap in baseball and the Cowboys don't want to increase revenue sharing in football. Acting surprised by this prevents any of the real issues from being discussed.
Second: I think your point about the reaction to a smaller school winning a championship is flat out wrong. If TCU had snuck into the BCS championship this year (they were arguably one loss away) and won the thing, you would have seen exactly the same level of complaints as you see any other year. If George Mason had won the men's basketball tournament in 2006 you think there would have been a contingent of people shouting "They're not real champions!" from the rooftops?
Third: It could be argued allowing a single sport at a D3 institution could actually be unfair - to the Division I teams. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 12 teams playing up to DI are all private schools. Which means that while they may not have the enrollment of more prominent schools (though this could also be questioned - RIT enrollment in 2008: 16,450. Duke enrollment 2009: 13,662), these schools still have a large amount of the pie they can devote to athletics and are not strongly beholden to state/federal government aid fluctuations.
However, these teams only have to fund one athletic team at the DI level. So whereas Duke is funding baseball, men's and women's basketball, cross country, fencing, field hockey, football, men's and women's lacrosse and golf, rowing, men's and women's soccer and tennis, swimming and diving, track and field, volleyball and wrestling at a Division I level, RIT is only funding hockey at a Division I level and gets to fund all their other sports at a Division III level. With the cost of D3 teams being far, far less than D1 teams, RIT could easily be competitive with other teams in just one sport and perhaps even outspend some of the so-called "big boys" because they only have to devote "big boy" money to one program in their athletic budget. Let's say you're Boston College and sending your women's swimming team to North Carolina for the ACC championships because the best way to stay one of the "big boys" was for you to join a conference where everybody else is 1,500 miles away and you look at RIT making the hockey Frozen Four and wonder "why the heck do they get to do that and only have to send their women's swimming team to freaking Syracuse for their conference championship?" Suddenly you can actually make an argument
for the "little guys" having an advantage.
I strongly recommend
this book for anybody interested in the hypocrisy of collegiate athletics. It's about football, I know, which is about one step above "bouncey ball" around here, but it is a delightfully sarcastic look at the dysfunctional world of college football and will actually quite possibly make you look around the our little corner of the world and go "maybe we don't have it that bad."
But probably not.
) or Navy LT (middle manager 
