By Seth Herrold
The latest victim in the serial killings of college football tradition by greed and money is one that hits kind of close to home. The MIAA Conference, a hot-bed for Division II football, has added four new schools to their 12-team conference, making it a 16-team super-conference (if there can be such a thing at the Division II level).
With the added teams comes a need for a new schedule format and the MIAA came up with one dubbed the ‘rivalry format.’ Basically each team will play their one designated rival every year and then play the remaining 14 teams on an eight-year rotating basis. For Northwest, where I went to school, this means they will be losing two rivalry games.
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Northwest has built three great rivalries in the MIAA over the years, playing Truman State every year for the Ol’ Hickory Stick, Pitt State every year at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City and Missouri Western, a school just 45 minutes down the road. When the MIAA decided to go to the rivalry format, Missouri Western was designated the Bearcats’ rival. That doesn’t bother me. The schools are very close together and I have always viewed that as a big rivalry game. What does bother me is that there will be no annual Ol’ Hickory Stick game, there will be no annual trip to Arrowhead. Northwest is losing two great rivalry games that were looked forward to by the fans each and every year.
The Hickory Stick game had earned national recognition. It’s one of the oldest rivalries in all of Division II football. Northwest and Truman have played each other 90 times dating back to 1908. My friend Brent Foster, a Truman graduate who is now the sports editor at the Waynesville Guide, had a lot of fun with this rivalry. He is a St. Louis guy and I am a Kansas City guy, but the Northwest-Truman game always went right up there with our Royals-Cardinals debates. It was fun, it was tradition rich and now it is gone.
Gone, but not completely gone. Unlike Missouri and Nebraska following the Cornhuskers flight to the Big Ten, Northwest and Truman are still in the same conference. They will still play every couple of years, just not every year. It’s similar to the Nebraska-Oklahoma rivalry, which was ripped apart when the Big 12 was formed and the two schools were placed in opposite divisions. Sure they still came together with some big games, but the rivalry lost a lot with the game not being played every year. Talk to younger generation Sooner fans and all you hear about is beating Texas, but talk to a life-long Sooner fan and they will tell you the Nebraska rivalry is where it’s at. I feel as though when I am an old man, Northwest students will be talking about only the Missouri Western game and Truman Students will be talking about beating… Lindenwood University. Yeah, that’s right, Lindenwood was the school designated to be Truman’s rival. Oh and by the way, the two schools have never played each other, ever.
The MIAA could have preserved a lot of rivalries with divisions like major conferences on the Division I Bowl Subdivision level do. They wouldn’t even have to have a conference title game if they didn’t want to. There are eight Missouri schools in the new MIAA and eight schools west of Missouri. An East-West format would have preserved the Northwest-Truman game. Then again, they could have done what the new Big Ten is doing and just hand picked which schools they wanted in which divisions and gave them non-region based names like the Big Ten’s Legends and Leaders divisions.
I don’t really see how 16 teams can benefit a conference when it’s at the Division II level. Money is not as big of a factor as it is at the Division I FBS level. Now Lindenwood, the conference’s eastern-most school, is in for an 11-hour bus ride to Fort Hays, the conference’s western-most school. This isn’t Division I FBS, the teams don’t just go hop on a plane; they take buses.
Whatever the reason for the expansion, at the end of the day, the biggest losses are the annual rivalry games. That is what I am really going to miss.
