D-1 Expansion: Realignment Obsession

This is probably a post best-suited for the offseason, but I can’t help myself.

My biggest question about ripple effects – as it always is – relates to conference affiliations. That means it’s time to break out the conferences map:

View D-1 Lacrosse in a larger map

The aforementioned three programs are now included as independents (represented by the purple alien-looking thing, since Google Maps does not have enough colors for their pushpins).

Since I’m realignment-obsessed, let’s go into a bit of that. Here is every school that competes in a lacrosse conference different from their “home conference.”

The big story here is the MAAC. Loyola and Fairfield are normally members of it: they don’t want to be in lacrosse for competitive reasons. It would be a pretty big shakeup if those schools decided that they’d be willing to compete in their home conference. Obviously, it’s something that I’ve been personally been rooting for, but I don’t know that it’s realistic any time soon.

That change would probably come with the loss of a few members of the MAAC, and all three non-full members are risks for that. Fairfield and Loyola would probably not move to the MAAC unless perennial bottom-dweller VMI was no longer part of it. Detroit has a more natural home with the western teams from the remainder of the ECAC.

I initially thought this would mean Jacksonville would be gone from the MAAC, but they’re a program on the relative rise, and they don’t have a natural home in another conference, either. They could bide time in a new and improved MAAC waiting for another Southern program to come into existence and allow the creation of a conference based in the South. There’s also the option of Bellarmine joining to form such a conference, but that leaves our ECAC with only five teams (and therefore no NCAA bid). Could a Texas or Colorado State be the long-term answer there? Even USC?

I’ve gone so far down the wormhole with this, I’d better just stop. Anyone with a longer history following the game want to chime in on how (un)likely some of these ideas are?