Trinity College football is undoubtedly more famous for its 15 minutes of SportsCenter fame than it is for the fame that accompanied its 14 Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference titles. The Division-III team from San Antonio, Texas, defeated rival Millsaps (Miss.) College after 15 laterals on the game’s final play in 2007, making a splash on ESPN soon after.

Now, Trinity’s athletic conference, the SCAC, is trying to stage a last-second comeback of its own. The continuous shifting landscape of college athletics has seeped its way into Division III, and in June 2011, five of the seven football-playing members of the conference announced they would join three other schools to form the Southern Athletic Association — a new breakaway league.

The difference between the SCAC and other academically driven Division-III leagues — like the New England Small College Athletic Conference and the University Athletic Association — is geography.  

SCAC football in its current format features seven schools from five different states. The league’s commissioner, Dwayne Hanberry, said his conference is the only one in Division III in which air travel is the rule, not the exception. And Centre (Ky.) College head coach Andy Frye said budgetary cutbacks in 2008 made travel expenses infeasible for small schools in the SCAC that struggle to make budget for their education.

‘It didn’t make sense to pay for airfare, meals and lodging for entire football teams and coaches,’ Frye said. ‘Then you factor in all the other sports we play and their travel costs. We couldn’t justify it.’

But strangely, the 49th and last year of the current version of the SCAC is its most competitive in football. Millsaps, Birmingham-Southern (Ala.) College, Centre College, Rhodes (Tenn.) College and Sewanee (Tenn.) University may be leaving the SCAC at the end of this academic year, but this year’s race is as close it gets.

Two of the seven teams are undefeated in conference play, while two others have just one loss.

Jason Guthrie, an assistant at Trinity, one of the two football-playing schools left in the rubble, doesn’t want his team to go home ’empty-handed’ after the conference walls come crashing down.

‘If this is the last year of the SCAC — and it looks like it — we’ve just got to worry about what’s coming up next week,’ Guthrie said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything if we don’t win a title.’

Other SCAC teams are playing with that sense of urgency, too. Because only Trinity and Austin (Texas) College will remain as football-playing schools in the league, the SCAC lost its automatic qualifier for the Division-III playoffs for 2012-13.

That means this is the last season the winner of the conference is guaranteed a playoff spot. Centre (6-0, 3-0 SCAC) is tied with Trinity (7-0, 3-0) atop the conference. Millsaps (4-3) has a 3-1 conference record as well.

But in the race for the last automatic playoff spot for the SCAC, no team has a stranger story than Birmingham-Southern (5-1,2-1).

The small liberal arts school of 1,500 dropped out of the Big South, a Division-I conference, to join the SCAC in 2007 because of pricey scholarship costs.

The only caveat: The Panthers had to wait a three-year grace period before they were eligible for postseason appearances. This means the Panthers’ first year of playoff eligibility will be its last as an SCAC member.

But Birmingham-Southern Athletic Director Joe Dean Jr. said the impending conference reshuffling should be the least of the football team’s concerns. The Panthers have a Saturday showdown with Trinity that could decide who grabs that automatic qualifier.

‘If we don’t win this weekend, we don’t have a good shot of catching Trinity or Centre,’ Dean said. ‘So we’re not worried about the SAA right now.’

Hanberry, the commissioner of the splintered SCAC, doesn’t share Dean’s lack of concern about the future. The last-minute success of the conference is ‘bittersweet’ to Hanberry, who said he ‘has the SCAC in his blood.’

Should Hansberry fail in his attempt to find football-playing replacements, the competition of the SCAC could never be seen again. The problem of losing an automatic qualifier isn’t even as big an issue as scheduling opponents for a two-team football conference. The SAA-bound teams will schedule Trinity next fall, but only as a courtesy so the school doesn’t have to scramble to fill its schedule.

That gives the SCAC a little more than a year to form a new college football conference before the two teams encounter problems making a full schedule.

Hanberry said he knows exactly what he wants from potential suitors. He just doesn’t know if those universities exist, play football and would be interested in joining a conference without a guaranteed ticket to the playoffs.

‘We’ll look for schools that fit what we’ve come to expect,’ Hanberry said. ‘We won’t let you in for any sports if you’re not a philosophical and academic fit first.’

Trinity and Centre, the two undefeated schools in the conference, meet Nov. 5. The outcome of that game will more than likely send the winner to the Division-III playoffs.

Trinity is looking for its 15th SCAC championship. But Frye, the Centre head coach, would like to take the title in his team’s last opportunity to win.

‘Trinity’s run brought our league play to a new level,’ Frye said. ‘But only one team is going to get that last AQ.’

nctoney@syr.edu

Published on October 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm

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