UNO's move to Division I and the Summit League isn't official, but the Mavericks' Division II conference is making plans for life without them.
Administrators from the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association and its institutions — including UNO — met via conference call Monday morning in the wake of UNO's Sunday announcement of its intention to leave.
MIAA Commissioner Bob Boerigter said the tenor of the call was “collegial.”
Still, UNO's expected departure has created some difficulties and disappointment for the MIAA.
“Obviously, each institution has the option of making decisions that they feel are in their best interest,” Boerigter said. “But we've just been involved in a very comprehensive plan to move to 16 teams, and we thought we had 16 committed schools. We invested a lot of time and energy, and now we have to go back to the drawing board.”
Northeastern State (Okla.), Central Oklahoma, the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Lindenwood (Mo.) will join the MIAA beginning in the fall of 2012. League football schedules for the next eight years had been set.
Now those schedules have been disrupted. Boerigter said many MIAA schools will simply be forced to have open dates on their football schedules this fall if UNO departs.
“A couple of the new schools had only 10 games on their schedule, so they're anxious to fill that hole, but certainly not all will be able to fill those dates,” Boerigter said. “If you lost a road game to UNO, you may just elect to play 10. But if you were playing UNO at home and can't fill it, that's a big hole in your schedule.”
Boerigter said there is no plan at this time to reconstruct the MIAA football schedule for 2011. MIAA basketball schedules were complete for the next six years.
Boerigter said the MIAA would look to find a replacement for UNO.
“Certainly, we would like to get to 16,” Boerigter said. “The perfect numbers are 12 and 16. If you have byes in schedules, it upsets a lot of things in terms of competitive balance.”
The league has waived its intraconference transfer rule for any UNO athlete in any sport. The rule requires athletes to sit out one year of competition before playing again for another MIAA institution. But now, for instance, a UNO football transfer can play for another MIAA school this fall rather than having to sit until 2012.
“We anticipate several to look at our schools,” Boerigter said.
Should UNO get approval from the NU Board of Regents to move up to Division I and out of the MIAA, the school would have to pay an exit fee to the MIAA.
The fee would be $80,000 — twice the standard exit fee because UNO wouldn't have given two years notice of its departure.
Boerigter, the former Northwest Missouri State athletic director, was the chairman of the committee that in 2007 examined UNO's application to join the MIAA. His group's recommendation was that UNO was a good fit — a recommendation that kept the UNO athletic department viable.
At the time, UNO wasn't interested in dropping from 36 football scholarships to 24 in order to join the Northern Sun Conference.
UNO appears to have spent only three years in the league.
“I've experienced some significant personal frustration, because a lot of my colleagues then were questioning whether Omaha was appropriate for our league since it immediately became the largest school in the largest city with the only Division I program in hockey,” Boerigter said. “I assured them that UNO was committed to Division II, and we took them in under that premise.
“But with time, things change and they had to make some tough decisions. It doesn't do any good to be mad at anybody.”
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