Last week, the ASUN announced a plan to expand to 20 teams and create a new conference. This announcement caused a lot of confusion as many asked a number of questions related to this announcement. Today, the ASUN and Commissioner Ted Gumbart released a video further explaining the conference’s plan.
In this video, Gumbart clearly explained the ASUN is just in the exploratory phase of this new concept where the goal would be for the ASUN to expand from its current membership of 10 to at least 18 members and then split into two different conferences, thus creating the new United Athletic Conference (UAC) to go alongside the ASUN.
The UAC would be an FCS football playing conference that would include current ASUN members Kennesaw State and North Alabama as well as an additional six FCS football institutions.
“In the ideal world,” Gumbart explained in the video, “(these six additional members) would be state institutions that play football.”
If this happened, the current ASUN would be reduced to 8 members – Liberty, Florida Gulf Coast, Jacksonville, Lipscomb, NJIT, North Florida, Stetson, and new member Bellarmine which joins next season. The league would want to add at least two more, to replace Kennesaw State and North Alabama, to remain at 10 members or add a total of 4 new institutions to get to 12.
The ASUN and UAC would work together as sister conferences, assisting each other with scheduling. Additionally, if there was a sport, such as swimming & diving, which the two conferences didn’t have enough participating members to sponsor the sport twice, one conference could offer swimming & diving and members of both the ASUN and UAC would make up the league.
The full video can be seen below:
