Quote from: Jonny Utah on February 20, 2026, 08:59:29 AMIf Ithaca asked for $100 donations to keep free broadcasting going I might even through in $100. 

This has always been the strange thing to me.

The existence of FloSports' model shows that people are willing to pay for access to D3 sports. So why not ask for that money directly, and as you say, cut out the middleman?

Every school has a Giving Day with various funds set up. Why not set up a "Athletics broadcasting fund" and ask for alumni to contribute?

Quote from: unionpalooza on February 13, 2026, 11:54:10 AMI confess I have a hard time getting too fussed about PPV for D3... I don't see how it's any different than charging for a stadium ticket, which everyone has been doing for years without (much) complaining.

My main issue with it is from the perspective of a college.

We're in an age where we're all fighting for every high school student's attention, every alumnus/alumna still feeling connected enough to the college to make a donation, every parent living hundreds of miles away from their child and already writing a whole bunch of checks.

Putting athletics' content behind a paywall reduces points of contact between all those constituent groups and the college. Your goal should be the exact opposite. You want more points of contact, more exposure.

And that exposure isn't limited to the athletic teams. You're highlighting your campus facilities, your staff, the social life component of your college, heck even the quality of the student broadcasting opportunities.

All that stuff has value. The problem of course, is the difficulty in quantifying that value.

For budget strapped colleges, $30,000 a year, as insignificant as it is to any institution's bottom line, is in fact quantifiable. So they take the money and run.

From a completely anecdotal standpoint, they day Ithaca College goes to Flo is the day I stop contributing to their Giving Day campaign. Not out of some principled stand or anything. But I have a limited amount I can spend "on" IC, and the $108 Flo subscription comes from that pile, regardless of the fact that IC doesn't actually get that money.

Quote from: UMHB03 on February 14, 2026, 05:01:31 PM

Quote from: The Third Division on February 14, 2026, 01:15:30 PMUMHB's two year scheduling agreement with Keystone screams desperation. It is not a good look for the program.

Go ahead and list the teams who are interested in scheduling a series with us. Then we can discuss which ones would be better options.

One would think the Division 3 philosophy is grounded in conference and regional competition rather than national and most schools are interested in scheduling as such.

Oh wait: It is

I know you all filter everything through the lens of "What's best for the football team?" which means you think everyone's just too scared to play you, but the sooner you realize that most D3 institutions have bigger concerns than the football team picking up an elite OOC game, the easier it'll be for you.

Quote from: Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan) on February 13, 2026, 07:42:53 AMI'm not sure why we're re-litigating 40 year old decisions, but it's pretty clear the NCAA is going to give the Power 5 whatever it wants.  If they want to have one set of rules for revenue sports and another set of rules for non-revenue, they'll just do it where they are.  No reason to come to d3.

The schools who should drop down are largely schools that don't factor in football or basketball anyway.

No one's "re-litigating" anything. I was offering historical context to possibly help someon more fully understand an issue

Quote from: maripp2002 on February 12, 2026, 10:07:27 PM

Quote from: IC798891 on February 12, 2026, 03:06:09 PMWhich essentially amounted to giving someone a track scholarship but then strongly encouraging them to also join the football team.

That would work out MUCH better if your D1 sports were football or oddly essentially cheerleading. The old scholarship limits were barely enough to give partial scholarships to fill out a roster.

But even a few thousand dollars for a partial scholarship to track might be enough to sway him to come to your school. Once he's there, even if he's lower on the track totem pole for you, he might still be the fastest dude on a football field. So you convince him to concentrate on football, and even if it doesn't impact the track team that much, and you have a D1 caliber athlete (raw perhaps, but still there) on a D3 roster.

Quote from: Patrick Coleman on February 12, 2026, 03:30:19 PMWhat you describe is absolutely the rationale for closing that loophole in the early 1990s, yes.

Sometimes gossip is right!

Quote from: maripp2002 on February 11, 2026, 04:29:55 PMyou can pick your 1 per sex sponsored d1 sport (ala JHU lacrosse), or you gotta sponsor them all at that level (the power 4s of the world) - no in between.

I could be wrong, but I think a part of Ithaca's complaint about Dayton way back in 1980 was that there are ways around it. Which essentially amounted to giving someone a track scholarship but then strongly encouraging them to also join the football team.

The issue wasn't so much sport sponsorship, but getting scholarship level athletes to participate in non-scholarship sports.

Again, this is all vague memories from things I heard 2nd or 3rd hand through non-neutral sources about things that happened before I was born. Maybe there are safeguards against that now

Ithaca's director's Cup Standings under Ken Kutler

2003-04: 11th
2004-05: 14th
2005-06: 26th
2006-07: 21st
2007-08: 14th
2008-09: 20th
2009-10: 22nd
2010-11: 19th
2011-12: 19th
2012-13: 19th

Nationally, that puts your athletic department in the Top 5% of the division. To me, athletic success isn't binary, where it's either national championships or it's not. (If that's how you view it, enjoy being disappointed in life).

This is what I constantly come back to with regard to coach hirings:

Curt Fitzpatrick went 35-38 while at Morrisville. He then went to Cortland, lost exactly one regular season game in four years (in front of 40,000 people, let's GOOOOO Toerper) and took home the first championship from an East team since 1991.

Quote from: Caz Bombers on January 22, 2026, 09:26:19 AM

Quote from: ICAlum16 on January 22, 2026, 08:54:02 AMI am hearing word that the IC head coaching search is not going as smoothly as people would like. The word I've heard used is "disorganized". I don't have much more than that but I don't think the new AD is winning any favor with how things are going...

I'll never understand why they thought replacing Susan with a JUCO guy was a good idea. Reminds me of when they hired Hartwick's AD 20+ years ago and then all the teams basically turned into Hartwick.

Ithaca won the Empire 8 commissioner's Cup every single year it was a member of the conference, from 2006-07 to 2016-17. So that doesn't track, at all

Which, given that it's Twitter, is saying something

As much as it sucks, this is a great thing for D3 as a whole. It shows that the division is respected; that "bigger" schools recognize the skills and abilities of its coaches.

You're still going to have D3 lifers, but I suspect it's increasingly going to be by choice, not a belief that these guys aren't capable of coaching elsewhere.

Yeah, but the thing is, Cortland's got a great reputation for its PE teacher degree program. It was never being put at the bottom of a pile.

That's the problem Ithaca had. Cortland was delivering the type of quality they were, at a fraction of the cost, and everyone wound up in the same place.

Music, film, TV/Radio production, and PT/ATC is where Ithaca really stands out relative to peers, but those just...aren't appealing majors to football players

Echoing what was said above, every gym teacher at Ithaca High School when I was a student 1998-2001 was either an IC or a Cortland grad.

There's nothing wrong with being a high school gym teacher and sports coach. But why on earth would you spend 3x-4x as much on the education that's going to eventually land you -- literally -- the exact same job? It doesn't put you on a different track or open different doors for higher level things.

My IC gym teachers were great. So were my Cortland ones. They were also good coaches. But some of them graduated with a lot less debt than others. As the disparity between the schools' costs grew, it just became impossible.

And you don't know where success is going to come from.

I joke with our PR guy all the time that he delivered the 2023 Stagg Bowl to Cortland back in 1994 when he was part of the hiring committee that didn't hire Boyes.

But imagine going back to 2016 and telling people the guy who just led SUNY Morrisville to a 1-9 season was going to deliver the East a Stagg Bowl by knocking off North Central. It's easy to go around pulling resumes from guys who look good, but life has a way of working out