Nebraska-Omaha: Div. II wrestling champs tonight, program gone tomorrow

The Mavericks are planning to move up to Division I (and are already there for hockey), but cannot afford to take its football and wrestling programs with it.

The wrestling program? It won the Division II national championship on Saturday and will be eliminated tomorrow. Wow.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20110313/NEWS01/703139891/-1

Hockey is UNO's biggest sport, so that's part of this, and the Summit League doesn't have wrestling, but still, that's some cold-blooded shit.

 

Trev Alberts?

 

Unbelievable. I'm just sick about this. I spent a lot of time in UNO's athletic offices and you couldn't ask for two better guys to work with than Mike Denney and Pat Behrns.

Going Division I has been talked about at UNO since Northern Colorado and North Dakota State left the NCC in the mid-2000s, but I don't recall anyone mentioning dropping football. What do guarantee games in basketball run these days? UNO football would've had its pick of regional teams (Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa State, etc.) within a bus ride willing to shell out good money for a I-AA team that didn't need much in travel costs. Instead, UNO will just be Creighton with icing on top. Gah!

 

Not only dropping wrestling the day after winning the title, but calling the football coach at 10 p.m. Saturday the day before the newser? Textbook "how not to handle things."

 

Yes, that Trev Alberts.
http://www.omavs.com/staff.aspx?staff=172

Ham-handed as this all seems, Alberts, Christensen and co. are a marked improvement on their predecessors.

 

If this isn't about gay porn, anal assault or herpes, it really isn't wrestling.

 

What is interesting is that for as big of a football guy Alberts is, he's willing to drop football.

Besides that, this is a punch in the gut. It would have been a better solution by letting football go to I-AA, but that means little now.

Come to think of it, can anyone explain to me how hockey schools can pull off playing in Division I-A (WCHA, ECHL, etc) and yet retain their statuses in Division II and III respectively? Is there a clause that can allow that?

 

Typical geniuses commenting on the story at the Omaha World-Herald. I assume second-grade arithmetic was too hard to comprehend for some of them, especially when the story points out FCS teams still lose a ton of dough with "money" games figured in.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20110313/NEWS01/703139891#uno-takes-aim-at-division-i

 

I'm guessing UNO got a waiver somewhere along the line. Some older schools (most notably Johns Hopkins in lax) were grandfathered in.

 

What this decision also confirms is that it's always about money. It's not about providing your students the most competitive, non-lopsided outlet to pursue athletics. Wait, what was I thinking ...

 

Proposal 65-1 only covered Division III schools that have one men's and women's sport in Division I.

 

UMass-Lowell and Merrimack are Division I in hockey and II in everything else.
Is there a Division 1A in hockey, as well? I always thought it was just Division I.