McFeely’s Tip Sheet: D2 conference commish has big ideas about college football (including NFL running it)

McFeely’s Tip Sheet is a compilation of notes, quotes, rumors, gossip and commentary by Forum columnist Mike McFeely. If you have a tip, a note or a hot rumor feel free to send it along to mmcfeely@forumcomm.com. Not all will be printed because of, you know, legal reasons. But they might lead to something. All tip sources will remain anonymous.

Should the NFL oversee college football?

Mike Racy thinks it’s worth a thought.

That’s one of several ideas he has about the future of the college game.

And he wants to talk about them.

Racy is commissioner of the powerful NCAA Division II Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, which is based in Kansas City and has member schools in Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma. He worked at the NCAA for years, has been commish of the MIAA since 2017 and is an outspoken influencer in the D2 world.

His latest enterprise: Get people thinking and talking about a major reorganization of college football, whether it’s under the NCAA umbrella or some other entity.

Among the potential “football governing bodies” outside the NCAA that could oversee the sport, Racy mentions the National Football League.

“I say the NFL because we know in the MIAA that we have officials, administrators, coaches and players who’ve been here and have become part of the NFL,” Racy said in a phone interview with the Tip Sheet. “Maybe we need to look at somebody who cares about the future success of the sport.”

That’s just one thing about which Racy wants to talk when it comes to college football. He and others believe it’s time for a major restructuring of the game.

“I’m talking about all of college football from the standpoint of being able to do something with your football program and that would have no impact on membership and where you play in all of your other sports,” Racy said. “Football would be independent from all other sports, either within the NCAA umbrella or outside managed by a separate football governing body. There could be as many as seven or eight football national championships or playoff structures, but perhaps only four or five divisional structures for all other sports.”

Yes this includes the Power Four leagues. For now. They might still do their own thing. Who knows?

This would be a major change.

Racy is part of an advisory board gathered by former Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone that is looking at the future of college sports committed to an educational model, as opposed to a revenue model.

Specifically football.

“I don’t want to say football is more important, but it is certainly different,” Racy said. “It’s different in terms of how it’s used for branding by schools, connection to communities, alumni, fundraising. So maybe we need to look at football differently than we look at other sports.”

There are Division I football programs in the Southland Conference or Ohio Valley Conference of FCS, for example, that are more closely aligned with the top schools in the MIAA than the top schools in FBS or even the FCS like North Dakota State and South Dakota State.

“If you look at our league, schools like Pitt State, Northwest Missouri State or Central Oklahoma look a lot more like the Southland or OVC schools than, say, Central Arkansas (Division I FCS) looks like Arkansas (Division I FBS),” Racy said. “Is there an opportunity for those lower-level FCS schools to align with Division II schools in football, but still play Division I in their other sports? They still want to have a Division I membership and have the opportunity to be part of March Madness, but football is different and maybe there’s a better place for them to be aligned in football with a different model or different system.”

The idea of being Division I in most sports and a different division in football is not far-fetched. Up until the NCAA made a rule change in 1991 requiring schools to be Division I in all sports (hockey being an exception), current FCS programs like Dayton and Georgetown played Division III football while being D-I in everything else. Butler, an FCS program familiar to NDSU because the teams played at Target Field in Minneapolis in 2019, was a Division II football program for many years before joining the FCS Pioneer Football League in 1993.

Racy believes it’s time to start thinking along those lines again. There is so much disparity in all levels of NCAA football that it’s time to rethink the Division I, II and III model, which has been in place for 50 years. Racy admits some of the same issues pervasive in Division I are common in Division II and III, too. There are haves and have-nots at every level, even within conferences.

And maybe NAIA needs to be brought into the fold. Get all the four-year institutions together.

“We’re trying to arbitrarily fit football into a model that’s made for other sports,” Racy said. “Football is different. Maybe the governance for football needs to be different.”

What say you, Bison fans? Would you like to allow lower-level FCS football programs like, say, Indiana State and Murray State drop down to Division II for football while remaining Division I in the sport(s) that matter most to them (basketball)? Or NDSU and other top Missouri Valley Football Conference programs opt-up to play against schools from the Mountain West or Sun Belt?

Something that probably won’t happen, but if it does I’ll look like a genius:

— The Pac-12 Conference will snipe UNLV and Nevada from the Mountain West within the next year, setting off a chain of events that will lead to North Dakota State and South Dakota State receiving invitations to join the Mountain West.

NDSU offensive coordinator and current running backs coach Jake Landry will drop the running backs job and replace the retired Randy Hedberg as the Bison’s quarterbacks coach. … Former Bison running back Sam Ojuri, currently running backs coach at Illinois State, is a possibility to become the new running backs coach at NDSU. … The biggest concern at South Dakota State after losing a pile of players to the transfer portal and graduation is the defensive line. … Hedberg thought strongly about retiring after 2023, but stuck around for one more year to coach Cam Miller’s last season.

Former Moorhead Spuds defenseman Will Borgen signed a five-year, $20.5 million contract with the New York Rangers last weekend. It has an annual average value of $4.1 million. Borgen, 28, is a 2015 graduate of Moorhead High School and played in the USHL before playng for St. Cloud State. … Former NDSU women’s basketball player Elle Evans, who transferred to Kansas after last season, ranks 40th in the nation in minutes per game. She’s averaging more than 35.24 minutes per game for the Jayhawks, who are 4-6 in the Big 12 and 14-7 overall. Evans is averaging 14 points and four rebounds per game. … True freshman Jocelyn Schiller is one spot ahead of Evans on the minutes per game list, averaging 35.25 minutes. … Grace Larkins of South Dakota is seventh in the nation at 37.08 minutes per game. … Former Bison men’s basketball player Andrew Morgan is averaging 8 points off the bench for Nebraska, playing about 18 minutes a game. … NDSU’s men rank sixth of nine teams in the Summit League in attendance, averaging 1,647 a game. SDSU is first at 2,734, followed by Oral Roberts (2,701), Omaha (2,156), North Dakota (1,871), South Dakota (1,691), NDSU, St. Thomas (1,250), Kansas City (841) and Denver (740). … NDSU’s football regular-season average attendance was 16,789 (89.7% capacity at the 18,700-seat Fargodome) was higher than the average attendance in FBS leagues Conference USA and the Mid-American Conference. The Mountain West averaged 24,609 while the Sun Belt averaged 23,644.

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