Could Bellarmine's immediate success in Division I lead to a change in the reclassification system?
The Knights are the latest team to make the transition to D-I that wins right from the jump.
One of the hottest teams in college basketball resides in Louisville, and it’s not the city’s namesake university tearing through the ACC.
The Bellarmine Knights completed a road sweep of North Alabama over the weekend to increase their win streak to 10 games, which trails only Gonzaga (24), Belmont (19), Baylor (17), and Loyola Chicago (12) for longest active streaks in the sport. They’re 10-2 in the ASUN and 13-5 overall with a pair of home games looming at the end of the season against Liberty that could decide the ASUN title.
For any ASUN team, a stretch like that would be a resounding success, especially if it continued into the postseason. For Bellarmine, it’s even more impressive given the fact that the Knights are doing it in the midst of their first season as a Division I program.
It’s a fantastic story that, unfortunately, won’t have a happy ending in the NCAA Tournament. Not because they aren’t good enough to earn the ASUN’s automatic bid, though.
Since Bellarmine is in the first year of the university’s transition to D-I athletics, they’re ineligible to participate in NCAA Championships. They’ll have to complete the four-year transition process before being considered an active member of D-I, which won’t be until the 2024-25 season.
It’s not uncommon for a D-I team in the middle of a transition to find success right from the jump. Just last season, Merrimack was the regular-season champion in the NEC but was not eligible for the NEC Tournament before it was ultimately canceled. Cal Baptist also took a step forward, finishing second in the WAC, while North Alabama finished with a .500 record in ASUN play in just their second season as well.
Some schools like Dixie State and Tarleton State make the leap from Division II to D-I due to the prominence of their football programs. The University of St. Thomas is making an even bigger jump from Division III to D-I, becoming the first university to do so since the three divisions were established.
Making the transition is a massive undertaking for a university, and success is obviously not guaranteed. But for a school with a basketball program like Bellarmine, it makes sense. The Knights have a coach in Scott Davenport who’s a legend in the area after playing at Louisville and spending time there as an assistant under Rick Pitino. They also have the results to back it up, having won a D-II national championship and making three other trips to the Final Four during his tenure. If you have an elite revenue-producing sport, why wouldn’t you want them competing at the highest level if you were a university administrator?
Programs that make the transition and pick up right where they left off are the exception, not the norm. In most cases, conferences and programs alike don’t have to worry about what they would if a team was in fact good enough to earn the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. And if they were, wouldn’t it make sense to want your best teams on the biggest stage?
For conferences like the ASUN or the WAC, realignment has become like a warm blanket. Top programs like Belmont, East Tennesse State, and UCF have all spent a stint in the conference before dipping for greener pastures. The WAC seemingly adds and loses members every year as the conference’s geographic footprint makes the usage of “Western” stretch thinner and thinner.
The ASUN has already proven to be a fertile breeding ground for college basketball programs with high aspirations. Northern Kentucky spent its first three years as a D-I member in the ASUN before joining the Horizon League and making the NCAA Tournament in its first year of eligibility, while Florida Gulf Coast stayed home and made their historic run in their second year of eligibility.
There’s reason to believe that Bellarmine is next in line to join the crop of immediate successes, and it’s no surprise that the ASUN is trying to do everything in its power to make that happen. In fact, the conference is going to try to make that a reality even sooner.
Ted Gumber, the ASUN Commissioner, tweeted over the weekend that the conference would be sponsoring legislation that would make Bellarmine (and presumably each subsequent school that makes the D-I transition) eligible for the league’s automatic bid in their third year of reclassification, which would be in the 2023-24 season.
While that might not seem like a significant change to the average college basketball fan, it would be a big step forward for programs from the lower levels of the D-I. From a conference’s point of view, the sooner you can put your best teams in the NCAA Tournament, the better. Especially if it’s the difference between your conference representative being a 14-seed instead of a 16-seed, for example.
One might scoff and say “oh they’re going to get killed no matter what”, and that’s completely fair. But even a slightly better chance of pulling an upset and picking up additional credits for the league is a huge boost financially.
So why stop at allowing them to be eligible in the third year? If a new team happens to be your best team, wouldn’t you want them in the NCAA Tournament?
There are undoubtedly other factors that go into determining an athletic department’s viability as a D-I school beyond just wins and losses. The transition period is in place to ensure that the department is compliant with NCAA rules and regulations and to ensure that they’re still strategically and financially feasible. It would be foolish to allow a school to make the transition simply because one of their teams could hang with the big boys.
But if a school checks all of those boxes, immediate postseason eligibility should be on the table. On a podcast I did with then-Northern Kentucky head coach John Brannen a few years back, we discussed the difficulties of leading a transitioning program and just how hard it was to get players to buy into sticking around while knowing they wouldn’t be able to play in the NCAA Tournament even if their team was of that caliber.
For some players, the pride of saying they played at a D-I school is enough. But giving them the chance to play in the NCAA Tournament regardless of how long the program has been around would be in the best interest of the student-athletes, as the NCAA loves to claim that is always front of mind. If a team is good enough on the court, field, track, pool, etc., the biggest stage for each respective sport would feature its best talent.
It remains to be seen how the rest of this season will play out for Bellarmine. They could lose their last four games to close out the regular season. They could run the table, head down to the ASUN Tournament (the ASUN allows its teams to compete in the conference tournament despite not being eligible for the NCAA Tournament), and run through the competition there as well en route to cutting down the nets. They can take solace in the fact that even though they’re good enough to be in the Big Dance, they can settle for an NIT that might not even happen instead.
The Knights aren’t the first team to announce their presence as a contender upon their arrival, and they won’t be the last. But hopefully, with a stretch of continued success and a conference that’s willing to push for change, the next Bellarmine to come down the pipeline won’t have to wait to climb up to the mountaintop.