Why Southern Should Leave the SWAC

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Last week, sources confirmed that Hampton University plans to leave the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) to join the Big South Conference. The MEAC serves alongside the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) as one of two Division I-Football Championship Subdivision (DI-FCS) conferences within the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) that have only HBCU member institutions.

This comes on the heels of Savannah State University, another MEAC school, reclassifying to a Division II athletic program in April. The athletic director of the school recognized the loss in publicity that comes with being a Division II school, but admitted the costs that came with being a Division I program were too expensive.

What if Southern University began to have a similar epiphany?

The SWAC has consistently remained among the bottom feeders in terms of revenue, despite college athletics being a multibillion dollar industry. It has caused the conference to scratch the SWAC Football Championship in hopes that participating in the Celebration Bowl will pay off.

The Celebration Bowl could be considered ‘the Black College Football National Championship’, consisting of the champions from the SWAC and MEAC conferences squaring off to begin the college football postseason.

This type of bowl game is monumental for HBCUs, but although each conference is guaranteed a $1 million payout, more than half of that money goes to the two teams competing on the field. Technically speaking, if Southern’s football team headed to the Celebration Bowl six straight years, we could forget having this conversation.



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