{"id":1578,"date":"2012-08-23T06:50:32","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T11:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/?p=1578"},"modified":"2012-08-23T06:50:32","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T11:50:32","slug":"this-is-the-craziest-thing-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/2012\/08\/23\/this-is-the-craziest-thing-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"This is the Craziest Thing Ever."},"content":{"rendered":"

So, even though I stopped the previews, I’m still throwing together all my spreadsheets that I’ll need for the season once it starts.\u00a0 That involves dumping each conference’s composite schedules, among other things.<\/p>\n

And that’s when I noticed the insanity.\u00a0 I didn’t catch it at first when I did the Great American Conference preview, because Arkansas-Monticello and Southern Nazarene had the school listed under its old name of Shepherd Tech.\u00a0 But when I noticed that West Alabama was playing something called “College of Faith”, I had to look them up to see who the hell they were because I’d never heard of them before.<\/p>\n

And that’s when I discovered “College of Faith” had games scheduled against Arkansas-Monticello and Southern Nazarene.\u00a0 So this must be Shepherd Tech (which two years ago had been Shepherd Film Academy).\u00a0 Teams have been scheduling this school the last couple of years to make up for holes in their schedule left by the closing of Lambuth University (which is now the Jackson campus of the University of Memphis).\u00a0 Last year, Harding clobbered them 70-0.<\/p>\n

But wait!\u00a0 Digging deeper to see what the deal was here, I discovered that this is an unaccredited bible college.\u00a0 That’s nothing surprising; bible colleges often aren’t accredited, because all they offer is bible-related degrees.\u00a0 Indeed, most states give bible colleges a waiver to operate without accreditation so long as the only degrees they offer are theological.\u00a0 Not a problem.<\/p>\n

But wait! Then I figured out that this is an online<\/em> college.\u00a0 An online college with a $99 annual tuition.<\/p>\n

Now, that led me to wonder how in hell an online college, which is not accredited, can possibly field a football team.\u00a0 And then I found this post<\/a> on the VSN message boards (an NAIA forum), and oh lord.\u00a0 Seems MidAmerica Nazarene also had a game scheduled against College of Faith, but pulled out, partially in response to uproar about even playing this school.<\/p>\n

And then, out of the blue, here comes the college’s president, posting a rather butthurt response to the thread defending his school… and, hey, look, I get it.\u00a0 You’re trying to get a school off the ground, and you’re proud of it, and… hey, maybe you shouldn’t be worrying about fielding a freakin’ football team when you don’t even have a campus!<\/p>\n

No, I can safely say that in all my years of following college sports, I have never seen a situation as crazy as this.\u00a0 It’s absolutely insane.\u00a0 I mean, how do you even pull that off?\u00a0 How do you get your players to practice and games when they’re not tied to a location?\u00a0 I don’t even understand.\u00a0 What are we going to get next, the University of Phoenix deciding to start an athletic program?\u00a0 Hey, maybe they can get together with National American University and a few other online programs and save the WAC!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, even though I stopped the previews, I’m still throwing together all my spreadsheets that I’ll need for the season once it starts.\u00a0 That involves dumping each conference’s composite schedules, among other things. And that’s when I noticed the insanity.\u00a0 I didn’t catch it at first when I did the Great American Conference preview, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[9,13],"class_list":["post-1578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-division-ii","category-naia","tag-d2","tag-naia-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p185sV-ps","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}