The Ohio Valley and Big South conferences made a significant announcement Tuesday, signing a letter of intent to create an association of their football memberships beginning in 2023. It's unclear at this point how most of the alliance's details will look, but what is clear is that the agreement gives both conferences automatic qualification for the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision Playoffs.
Both the OVC and Big South currently sit below the six-member requirements for an automatic playoff bid. But with the OVC's five members -- plus recent Division II addition Lindenwood -- and the Big South's four members, the 10-member field ensures playoff hopes, in some form, for both conferences moving forward.
In a similar position, the ASUN Conference will soon be back below the six-team automatic-bid threshold it'd reach in September with Austin Peay's addition to the conference. So with the home of the University of Central Arkansas athletics in a similar position as other FCS conferences, is a membership alliance a possibility?
"If someone says, 'Hey, we'd like to talk to you about something,' my answer is almost always 'yes,' " ASUN Commissioner Ted Gumbart told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Friday. "We're in the business of building partnerships. There's never any deliberate attempt to take something off the table."
Gumbart, who helped bring football to the ASUN with the addition of UCA, Jacksonville State and Eastern Kentucky in January 2021, said he sees his conference with an automatic bid in 2022. The Gamecocks will compete in the ASUN this season, but they are set to join Conference USA -- which is in the Football Bowl Subdivision -- at the start of the 2023-24 academic year, a move that was announced less than a year after JSU joined the conference.
It puts Gumbart and the ASUN back at an initial goal to add enough members for an automatic bid, whether autonomously or otherwise. Gumbart was aware and "participating at some level," he said, in conversations with both the Big South and Ohio Valley before the conferences landed on their membership alliance.
"We knew all three of us were, because of the footprint, looking at options," Gumbart said.
The ASUN commissioner stressed Friday that no options are off the table for how his conference reaches automatic bid status in coming seasons, but gaining an auto-bid independently is a priority.
Gumbart expressed a similar confidence in the ASUN adding a sixth member within the next two years, and possibly a seventh or eighth football-playing member in that time frame as well.
UCA Athletic Director Brad Teague also echoed those sentiments and described a membership alliance as a "fall back" plan should that six-member goal not be reached.
"You make an alliance because you have to have it, right?" Teague said. "It's really out of an extreme need for something to continue, to have enough teams to qualify for the playoffs. The problem, though, is in [the OVC/Big South] alliance, or in any alliance, if you have that extreme need, you lose an AQ [automatic qualifier]. So the Big South and the OVC have an alliance. They used to have two AQs. Now they have one. So you want to try to avoid that."
Teague also stressed the importance of adding members beyond the AQ threshold, especially as conference realignments continue to impact not only other FCS conferences, but some in the FBS as well.
"[Conference USA has] nine schools," Teague said. "Are they going to stay at nine? It seems like an odd number to me. My concern is, if they go to 10, are they looking at somebody in our conference? Somebody in the WAC? Where are they going to pull? ... That's why I think we really can't say six is our number, because somebody may leave again."
UCA Athletic Director Brad Teague