I’m going to try and knock out two of these every day through December 10. I’ll be going through each division alphabetically, but I’ve arranged my output schedule to balance the divisions out somewhat (in other words, I’m not doing all the FCS conferences first then moving on to Division II). The conferences which play football are going first, and should be wrapped up by mid-November; then I’ll hit the hoops-only leagues.
There will be a lot of basic info in these abstracts which you can get anywhere (Wikipedia represent!, I guess). But I’ll be trying to limit that information to what’s needed to convey the flavor of each conference. I’ll touch on the intriguing parts of their histories, give you an idea how successful they’ve been in the post-season, discuss unique challenges facing them, and attempt to pinpoint key rivalries and whatnot. For leagues which sponsor both football and basketball, I’ll discuss both — with the exception of the FCS leagues, because when it comes to basketball they’re no different than the FBS leagues and thus they’re beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here.
And so, we begin our 57-day-long (fingers crossed) journey in the Rockies and beyond with the Big Sky Conference.