MEAC Expansion Should Focus on Division II HBCUs

Stats Perform is bringing a greater spotlight to athletes, students and stories at Historically Black Colleges and Universities through a partnership with Urban Edge Network. Included in the 2024 college football season are both HBCU FCS Player and Team of the Week awards and a season-ending HBCU FCS National Player of the Year Award, each presented by HBCU+.

Over recent years, FCS college football has been in flux as teams have moved up to the FBS amid conference realignment. HBCUs have experienced change during this time as well, but no conference has been affected more than the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.

Since 2018, the MEAC has dropped from 11 football programs to six, making it the smallest of 13 FCS conferences.

Hampton first left the MEAC to join the Big South Conference, and a year later, Savannah State dropped back down to Division II. Neither of the losses sent shockwaves through the landscape.

However, the mass exodus from the MEAC continued in 2021 with North Carolina A&T, one of the conference’s founding members, and a winner of four of the first five Celebration Bowl titles, following Hampton to the Big South. Eventually, those two schools moved once again to CAA Football.

The MEAC changes also included Florida rivals Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M joining the Southwestern Athletic Conference, the other HBCU conference in the FCS.

All of the moves created a question about whether the MEAC would survive with only six football programs. But, three years later, the eastern seaboard conference has won two of the past three Celebration Bowl titles and proven it’s still strong and highly competitive against the larger, more substantial SWAC, which has 12 programs.

Still, having only five conference games every season leaves a lot of holes in schedules that need to be filled and leaves little margin for error within the conference to decide who will advance as champion to the Celebration Bowl. The conference should look to expand by identifying talented Division II programs that could enhance the profile of the conference and provide other HBCUs with a larger platform.

MEAC expansion like this would be familiar in the FCS. The move up by D-II programs is not unprecedented in other conferences in recent years as Merrimack, Lindenwood, LIU, Mercyhurst, North Alabama, Stonehill, Tarleton State and West Georgia have made that ascent. All provide realistic road maps for D-II HBCU programs to follow.

In fact, D-II HBCUs have more than held their own in games against the FCS HBCUs. Last year, the D-IIs won five times against FCS programs, including Virginia State defeating Norfolk State. And it nearly happened again this season as VSU troubled Norfolk State before falling 28-23.

The Trojans, as well as two other dominant Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association teams and a Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference member on the D-II level, would be great additions for MEAC expansion, helping to strengthen the conference’s infrastructure and footprint across that landscape.

Virginia Union and Fayetteville State have been the class of CIAA football, and both would make excellent additions to the MEAC because of their location and proximity to other schools within the conference. VUU, like Virginia State, would fit perfectly in the Mid-States with Norfolk State, Howard, Delaware and Morgan State, while Fayetteville State would work perfectly in the south with North Carolina Central and South Carolina State.

Over in the SIAC, no D-II HBCU was more impressive in 2022 and ‘23 than Benedict College, amassing a 22-2 record in that time. South Carolina State’s first-year head coach Chennis Berry was the architect of that turnaround at Benedict and now he’s hoping to do the same for the Bulldogs. They were just named the HBCU+ FCS National Team of the Week.

Expansion and realignment have been the way of the college football world over the past few years, and the opportunity exists for the MEAC to strengthen itself with these four quality programs.

Such MEAC expansion would increase the number of member schools and allow the conference to offer a football championship game at the end of the season to determine its Celebration Bowl participant – just like the SWAC.

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