{"id":44,"date":"2010-10-16T00:50:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T05:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/?p=44"},"modified":"2010-10-21T11:40:29","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T16:40:29","slug":"get-to-know-big-south-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/2010\/10\/16\/get-to-know-big-south-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Get to Know: Big South Conference."},"content":{"rendered":"

And now, we bounce back to the FCS ranks with a look at one of the two new auto-bid conferences, the Big South Conference<\/strong>.
\nMembers<\/strong>: Charleston Southern Buccaneers, Coastal Carolina Chanticleers, Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs, Liberty Flames, Presbyterian Blue Hose, Virginia Military Institute Keydets.\u00a0 The Stony Brook Seawolves play in the league as a football-only associate.\u00a0 High Point, Radford, UNC-Asheville, and Winthrop do not field football teams.\u00a0 Campbell will rejoin the conference in 2011, but their football team will remain in the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League (for now, anyway).<\/p>\n

The Big South was founded in 1983 as a Division II basketball league, and moved up to Division I in 1986.\u00a0 In 2002, the conference began sponsoring football, albeit with only four teams (Charleston Southern, Elon, Gardner-Webb, and Liberty).\u00a0 A year later, Coastal Carolina began its football program, and VMI moved over from the SoCon, swapping leagues with Elon.\u00a0 In 2008, Stony Brook joined as an affiliate, and Presbyterian moved up from D-II; that enabled the league to earn its automatic bid to the FCS playoffs, beginning in 2010.<\/p>\n

A good thing, too, as the conference hasn’t experienced a great deal of luck grabbing at-large bids.\u00a0 Coastal Carolina (0-1) in 2006 is the complete list.\u00a0 Gardner-Webb won the first two conference titles, followed by a three-year run by Coastal Carolina (with Charleston Southern sharing the honors in 2005), and Liberty has won the last three (splitting the title with Stony Brook last year).\u00a0 Coastal Carolina has, by far, been the most successful program out of conference (and began achieving that success in only their second year of football existence).\u00a0 Gardner-Webb and Charleston Southern are the only other conference teams which have winning cumulative non-conference records over the history of the conference.<\/p>\n

The big rivalries are between Charleston Southern and Coastal Carolina, and between Presbyterian and Gardner-Webb.\u00a0 Presbyterian still despises former SAC rival Newberry with a passion, but on the field that rivalry is on hold now.<\/p>\n

TIDBITS:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Charleston Southern<\/strong> began their program in 1991 under David Dowd, who in twelve years only won 27% of his games.\u00a0 Jay Mills replaced him as head coach in 2003, and has built the program well; he has a winning record as CSU head man.<\/p>\n

Coastal Carolina<\/strong> has only had one head coach in its existence; David Bennett has a career record of 50-29, and led the Chanticleers to the league’s only playoff appearance to date.\u00a0 He was helped along by QB Tyler Thigpen, who’s seen some NFL action with the Chiefs.\u00a0 Despite this rousing success in football, the school is far more well known for hitting white balls with big wooden sticks.<\/p>\n

Gardner-Webb<\/strong> was a long-time member of the South Atlantic Conference (NAIA, then D-II).\u00a0 Woody Fish led the Bulldogs to SAC titles in 1987 and 1992 before guiding the school into the Big South and Division I.\u00a0 In 13 years, he had a record of 72-71-1.\u00a0 He was succeeded by Steve Patton in 1997, and he’s been there ever since, compiling a 83-59 record.\u00a0 Former Seahawks RB Derrick Fenner came from G-W.<\/p>\n

Liberty<\/strong> began football in 1973, two years after the school opened.\u00a0 (Liberty is the “youngest” school playing football in Division I, and only Florida Gulf Coast was founded more recently among non-football schools.)\u00a0 They moved to Division II in 1981 and FCS in 1989.\u00a0 From 1989-1999, the team was coached by Sam Rutigliano, more famous as the former coach of the “Kardiak Kids” era Cleveland Browns (where he was Marty Schottenheimer’s immediate predecessor).\u00a0 After six lackluster years under Ken Karcher, former UVA assistant Danny Rocco took over the program, immediately notching a winning season then following that up with three straight conference titles.\u00a0 The Flames are 16-3 in conference under Rocco, and 32-13 overall coming into this season.\u00a0 Former Broncos TE Duane Carswell and Eric Green, former Pro Bowl TE for the Steelers, are Liberty’s most successful football alumni.<\/p>\n

Presbyterian<\/strong> trails only VMI among conference schools in regard to the duration of their football program, having begun play in 1913.\u00a0 Early on, they were members of the original Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the organization which gave birth to the SoCon and by extension the SEC and ACC; they won that conference’s title in 1930 and 1941.\u00a0 After the war, they played in the South Carolina Little Three conference before joining the Carolinas Conference in 1964.\u00a0 That conference morphed into the South Atlantic Conference, of which Presby was a member until 2006.\u00a0 The Blue Hose won or shared six Carolinas\/SAC titles before moving to Division I.\u00a0 Presbyterian has two “legendary” coaches; Walter A. Johnson oversaw the program during their days in the SIAA, while Calhoun “Cally” Gault led the team from 1963-1984.<\/p>\n

Stony Brook<\/strong> would appear to be out of place in this conference, being a New York team.\u00a0 The Seawolves joined the Big South in order to play full-scholarship football, as moving to the Colonial was not going to happen.\u00a0 They began as a D-III school, playing in the now-defunct Liberty and Freedom football conferences prior to 1995.\u00a0 They then moved to D-II, and played in the Eastern Football Conference until 1998 before jumping again to D-I.\u00a0 From 1999-2006, they were members of the Northeast Conference, where they shared the 2005 conference title.\u00a0 Sam Kornhauser spent 22 years at the helm of the program, before being replaced in 2006 by current coach Chuck Priore.<\/p>\n

VMI<\/strong> has the most storied history of the programs in the conference.\u00a0 The Keydets fielded their first squad waaaaaay back in 1871, although they then went on hiatus before restarting the program in 1891.\u00a0 They were, briefly, members of the South Atlantic Intercollegiate Athletic Association (another precusor to the SoCon).\u00a0 They then joined the SoCon in 1924, and remained there until 2002, when they moved to the Big South.\u00a0 They won six SoCon championships over the years, and shared another.\u00a0 When the NCAA restructured, and VMI ended up in I-AA, the program fell on hard times; their last winning season was in 1981, although they did have consecutive 6-6 finishes in 2002-2003.\u00a0 The problem is that they’ve also suffered two 0-11 seasons and eight one-win seasons in that span of time.\u00a0 Current West Virginia coach Bill Stewart led the Keydet program for three years (1994-1996), and won less than a quarter of his games before being forced to resign over allegations of racial comments to a player.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And now, we bounce back to the FCS ranks with a look at one of the two new auto-bid conferences, the Big South Conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[6,14],"tags":[18,41],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fcs","category-get-to-know-a-conference","tag-big-south","tag-fcs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p185sV-I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","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=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/tog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}