Lehigh’s Gabe Knutson blocked Bucknell’s Cameron Ayers’ baseline layup attempt with seven seconds to play which gave the Mountain Hawks the 82-77 victory in the Patriot League championship game.
The small university outside Philadelphia has had a pretty good 2011-2012 athletic year. They finished 11-2 in football and won the league by two games. Now the school has taken the championship trophy in basketball, too.
But next year could be even better.
About a month ago, the Patriot League decided to allow its schools to begin awarding athletics scholarships in football. This is the final step in the Patriot League starting to look like the rest of the NCAA. The league began offering aid in all its other sponsored sports in 2000-01, after beginning with basketball in 1998-99.
Now football has been added in 2012. The thought was, it might offer a competitive balance to the rest of the conference while showing some kids a Patriot League education isn’t out of their reach.
“I feel like more middle class kids will be able to come to our institutions,” Dave Roach, Athletics Director at Colgate, told NCAA.com. “(In the past), the kids who had a lot of need could get a lot of aid. And the kid who was wealthy, we had a chance of getting. The kid in the middle, if we can offer him 100 percent now and they have a chance to get a Colgate education, we have a chance of getting that kid now, too.”
Roach also said the shift doesn’t mean a change in the treatment of student-athletes once they are on campus but will mean the schools can assist those students better once they do arrive.
But there is always the stigma. If players are on an athletic-based scholarship, perhaps they aren’t there to learn. But, Carolyn Schlie Femovich, the Executive Director of the Patriot League, believes the change won’t impact the league’s reputation for academics.
“One of our unwavering commitments is that our student-athletes must be academically representative of all the other students on that campus,” Femovich told NCAA.com. “Whatever the admissions are for students generally, those same standards apply to our institutions. Those standards are generally quite high.”
The move also means the league can start to take part in the trend of expansion.
“As you assess the landscape around you, your conversations turn to ‘Would there be an advantage to being a little bit larger?’” Femovich said. “Part of the strategy is to position us to expand when the right opportunity arises.”
For now, schools are allowed to offer 15 athletic-based scholarships in football in 2013. That number can increase by 15, each year, until for the following three years, until the max number set by the Football Championship Subdivision, is reached.
For Lehigh, the ability to offer athletic-based scholarships for football players might mean a deeper pool from which to recruit from and, ultimately, a better team on the field.
And for a school that just won the conference by two games last fall, that could mark the start of a long run of championships.
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