The modern history of HBCU conference realignment – the Allure of Division I is too much to ignore

The 1980s will mostly be remembered for Reaganomics, the Berlin Wall falling and TV becoming a serious part of everyone’s lives, but for HBCU conferences such as the MEAC and the SWAC, it’s remembered as the decade in which both conferences took a leap into the big-time.

The Southwestern Athletic Conference attained Division I status in 1977 as the NCAA was in the middle of reforming its classifications. The former college division would now be known as Division II and an intermediate level between D-I and D-II would be formed for football, I-AA.

The SWAC had been in business since 1920 and could claim major stars from many sports – Walter Payton in football, Lou Brock in baseball, Willis Reed in basketball, and so on. The signature program, of course, was Grambling football, led by the greatest coach the sport has ever seen, Eddie Robinson. It was also around this time that HBCU sports started suffering the ills of desegregation.

The legendary story of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant being so overwhelmed by the talent and dominance of Southern Cal running back Sam Cunningham that he began recruiting Black players is looked at by the larger world as a heartwarming story of merit overcoming race. The reality is it was a devastating siphoning of top talent from Black colleges that most schools and teams have yet to recover from.

“Supposedly, we were given the same scholarship, the same opportunity. But there was something we couldn’t give [recruits] that the big white schools could,” Jackson State AD Dr. Walter Reed said in a December 1978 piece in the Boston Globe in a story fittingly titled, “Fame Finally Catching Up to Long-Ignored Schools.”

That fame, in the short term, would work out for the greater good. During the 1979-80 NCAA men’s basketball season, the Alcorn State Braves buzzsawed their way through the SWAC, led by head coach Davey Whitney and future Golden State Warriors power forward Larry Smith.

Alcorn lost one regular season game – to Mississippi State of the SEC – and won its SWAC tournament games by an average margin of 23 points per game before heading to Dallas to play in the team’s first NCAA tournament game against South Alabama. The Braves overcame stall tactics by SAU (there was no shot clock at the time) to win 70-62, becoming the first HBCU to win a Division I tournament game.

Not long after Alcorn State’s initial NCAA tournament run, the MEAC would join the SWAC as a Division I conference, but not without some changes to the lineup.

Football had become a losing proposition for the newly-minted University of Maryland-Eastern Shore by the end of the 1979 season – on and off the field. The Fighting Hawks program, which boasted names such as Art Shell, Emerson Boozer, and Johnny Sample, had fallen to a 3-7-1 mark that year and was draining money from the athletic department.

Chancellor William P. Hytche had his administration look at the bottom line and they all came to an agreement – football in the interim wasn’t worth it.

“I cannot continue to have our athletes do some of the things we have done — like, when a substitution occurs, they’d actually have to exchange shoes,” Hytche told the Washington Post on December 20, 1979. According to the chancellor, the UMES athletic budget was $75,000 that year, with football taking up 85% of that budget. To put a team on the field in 1980 would’ve cost $99,000 alone. Along with Title IX concerns, that made it easy for UMES to suspend football, with an eye for returning to play around 1984 or 1985.

UMES has not had a football program since.

North Carolina Central also saw the writing on the wall and returned to the CIAA in 1980. Two original MEAC members were gone (UMES also left for two years), but two new members from Florida would provide a much-needed boost for the youngest sibling of the HBCU conference family.

Florida A&M’s name was already golden by the time the school joined the MEAC the same year UMES football played its final season. The Rattlers played the 1978 season as an independent and, under coach Rudy Hubbard became the first I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) national champions, defeating Jackson State 15-10 in the semifinals, then UMass-Amherst 35-28 in the championship game.

Not wanting to be left out, FAM’s longtime rival and former SIAC competitor Bethune-Cookman also joined the MEAC in 1979, extending the league from Dover, Delaware to Daytona Beach, Florida. That increased not only the profile of the MEAC, but the travel expenses as well, a bone of contention that would last the lifetime of the Florida duo’s association with the conference.

Still, it looked like the MEAC was ready to join the SWAC as an HBCU D-I success story, and on the football field, South Carolina State would lead the way.

The Bulldogs were led by Bill Davis, who took over once Willie Jeffries became the first Black D-I head coach at a PWI when he took the Wichita State job. S.C. State was in the middle of a decade of dominance – they won or shared the MEAC football crown nine times between 1974 and 1983 – when they made their I-AA playoff debut against Tennessee State, led by the late Big Joh Merritt, in 1981.

The Bulldogs led 19-6 in the first half, but the Tigers rallied behind two touchdown passes from quarterback Brian Ransom to tie the game at 19, sending it to overtime.  It was there that Bulldogs reserve QB Ben Mungin tossed a scoring pass to tight end Andre Charlton and placekicker Al Gardner booted the winning points through the uprights for a 26-25 victory and the MEAC’s first NCAA playoff win.

SC State would repeat the feat next season, dominating host Furman 17-0 in the opening round, but the expansion of the I-AA playoffs would strangely mean fewer opportunities for MEAC schools to play for a championship. Between the 1983 and 1991 seasons, the MEAC champion was invited to the postseason party just once – North Carolina A&T in 1986 – an early reminder that the playing field would never be completely level for HBCUs.

In the interest of full disclosure, the SWAC not only had more playoff appearances than the MEAC in the 1980s (9 to 3), but had four different schools (Grambling, Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State) make the postseason as compared to the MEAC’s two. Tennessee State, as an independent school, would have the most I-AA success in the decade, making it to the national semifinals in 1982, losing a tough 13-7 decision to eventual champion Eastern Kentucky.

Football once again had a strong start to a decade but a rough finish in the 1980s, and basketball in the MEAC would be boosted by a dynasty that would raise the conference’s visibility every March for much of the decade.

Don Corbett came to North Carolina A&T as a known winner in Division II men’s college basketball. A native of Thomasville, Georgia, Corbett starred at Lincoln University of Missouri in basketball and became head coach of his alma mater in 1971. In his eight seasons guiding the Blue Tigers, he never won less than 17 games in a season and LUMO made five NCAA tournament appearances under his watch, going as far as the Elite Eight in 1978.

Corbett’s first Aggies team went 8-19, but in 1981, they made it to the MEAC title game, where they lost 66-63 to player of the year James Ratliff, future Los Angeles Lakers forward Larry Spriggs and the Howard Bison. After that, A&T went on a run of seven straight conference tournament titles, complete with four different MEAC players of the year – three-time winner Joe Binion, Eric Boyd and George Cale.

As A&T’s dominance wound down at the end of the 1980s, another MEAC basketball dynasty would emerge. And it would come from the unlikeliest of places.