Depending how closely you follow college sports, you might be aware that there are two Division I conferences fully comprised of HBCU’s: The Southwestern Athletic Conference (the SWAC) and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (the MEAC).
That number may soon be one.
Bethune-Cookman announced on Thursday that they’ll be leaving the MEAC for the SWAC following the 2020-21 academic year, making them the fifth MEAC school to leave the conference over the last few years: Hampton left the MEAC for the Big South in 2018. Savannah State dropped out of the MEAC and down to Division II before this past academic year. North Carolina A&T announced in February that they’ll be joining Hampton in the Big South in 2021. Florida A&M—Bethune-Cookman’s rival—announced earlier this month that they’ll be moving to the SWAC alongside Bethune-Cookman.
The conventional wisdom, following Bethune-Cookman’s move, is that the SWAC is in a stable position as far as collegiate athletic conferences go. With twelve schools, it’s now able to maintain multiple divisions in all sports, and with a footprint extending from Houston to Daytona Beach and the highest football attendance numbers in the FCS, it’s the premier HBCU conference.
The MEAC, on the other hand, might be on life support.
Following Bethune-Cookman’s departure, the MEAC sits at just six football-playing members for the 2021-22 year, and eight total members. If another school leaves (Delaware State is reportedly exploring various options), the conference says it will fall below the Division I minimum, which has provoked it to explore expansion—a move that would likely require convincing a Division II HBCU to make the jump to D-I athletics, something not necessarily enticing for schools comfortable in D-II, especially in the midst of a revenue-threatening pandemic. The conference has indicated it might look outside the world of HBCU’s, but no obvious non-HBCU candidates stand out, and admitting a non-HBCU would alter a core pillar of the league’s identity.
Should Delaware State jump to, say, the NEC, the seven schools remaining in the MEAC would likely move in opposing directions: Some down to Division II; some to the Big South; some to a future that doesn’t include football, or perhaps doesn’t include scholarship football (the Pioneer League exists within the FCS as a Division I, non-scholarship conference). The SWAC looks likely to remain an HBCU-only league (though concerns do exist about the financial viability of Division I sports at a number of SWAC schools), but the MEAC’s partial disintegration could be the first step in something of an HBCU diaspora (prior to Hampton’s departure from the MEAC, Tennessee State—an OVC member—was the only HBCU outside of the two HBCU-only leagues).
We’ll see where it all goes, but with HBCU’s more present on the collective consciousness of college sports, and with legitimate ramifications throughout low-major and even high-major sports (one more spot on the college basketball bubble doesn’t seem like something the Power Five leagues would find meaningless), it’s a story worth following.
