What conference does your favorite college football team play in? Odds are either it or its conference has been affected by the shifting college sports landscape and now Cal Poly is no exception.
One conference expansion that went mostly under the radar was the Big Sky, a part of the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). Next season, the Big Sky will have 13 teams instead of nine and one of them will be the Mustangs. Cal Poly will be joined by fellow former Great Conference members Southern Utah, UC Davis and South Dakota.
“This is the premiere conference in FCS,” Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong said. “There are only about two dozen athletic programs in the country that do not lose money, and we feel that this move will take us one step closer to joining that group.”
Cal Poly joins the most competitive conference in the FCS and offers the possibility for Cal Poly to move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision (home to teams such as USC, Oregon and Ohio State).
Scheduling
Each Big Sky team will play eight conference games next season. That is four more than Cal Poly played this year. Two of those conference games will be against rival universities, and they will play each other every year regardless of the conference schedule. Cal Poly’s two rivals will be UC Davis and Sacramento State. The universities are guaranteed to play a home game against one of the rival schools each year.
“I think that we can create great interstate rivalry games between the three of us,” head coach Tim Walsh said. “For the marketing of our program and the marketing of our conference, this makes sense, and we want that.”
The other positive development is that, instead of having to find six non-conference games each year, the athletics department will only have to schedule three. Cross-country jaunts to places such as South Alabama and Northern Illinois will be replaced with conference trips to Montana State and Northern Arizona.
“This move gives us a full schedule and gives us the opportunity to have at least five and sometimes six home games every year,” athletics director Don Oberhelman said. “You see some craziness with us taking games against South Alabama. It will steady our ship, and we won’t have to scramble for games.”
Competition
In essence, the Big Sky is the FCS equivalent of the SEC. Eastern Washington, a Big Sky member, is the defending national champion, and the University of Montana made it to the FCS championship game five times since 2000 and won it all in 2001. Additionally, the conference produced current NFL players Taiwan Jones, Marc Mariani and All-Pro defensive end Jared Allen.
“It’s awesome in that it gives us and automatic bid to the playoffs,” Walsh said. “It’s great that we won our conference, but we aren’t in the playoffs. It will be great to tell our recruits that we can compete for a national championship each year.”
Facilities
The University of Montana has the best facilities in the FCS and both UC Davis and Sacramento State have renovated or opened up new stadiums in the past five years. In order for Cal Poly to be competitive in the Big Sky, it will have improve its athletic facilities.
“We are in the process of evaluating our athletic facilities and assessing what we need to improve on,” Oberhelman said. “We want to service our student athletes the best we can and that means a new athletic weight room and completing the football stadium. The move to the Big Sky will help speed up this process.”
With California’s budget situation, it is not reasonable to assume that public funds will be available to complete these projects. As a result, the majority of the funds will be raised by the private sector.
The new fund raising opportunities make Armstrong extremely optimistic about the future of the athletic program.
“We hope to start facility improvements within the next year,” Armstrong said. “We have had great feed from supporters and would like to continue to elevate the private support that we receive. It’s an extremely exciting time for the university, and we are grateful for the support that we are receiving from our alumni, donors and local community.”