SAU v. Augie football not likely anytime soon

Nov. 4, 2004
By Dan Tomlin, Melisa Abbott
Sports Editor, Staff Writer

With Augustana College just across the river many students wonder why our football teams don’t meet up during the season. The answer is that the two schools don’t share the same athletic affiliation.

The National Association of Intercollegiate athletics, or NAIA, has been the parent to St. Ambrose sports for many years while Augustana College is partnered with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA.

SAU is just one of over three hundred NAIA schools in the nation.

St. Ambrose University has sports teams that compete in both the Mid-States Football Association and the Midwest Classic Conference, while residing in NAIA Region VII. Assistant sports information director Bruce Billingsley says that the NAIA is a relatively new organization as it was founded in 1937, in relation to the NCAA, which was established in 1906.

“The NAIA was originally a basketball national tournament,” Billingsley said. “Then from that national tournament it grew into an affiliation of schools who wanted to play in that tournament, and then from that it became other sports.”

In NAIA football, Conference Champions get an automatic bid to the football playoffs, unlike the NCAA. For this reason alone Billingsley doesn’t see a Bee v. Viking matchup coming anytime soon.

“With Augustana, if they lost their first non-conference game, and then went undefeated, and were conference champions, they might not make it to the football playoffs because of that one loss,” Billingsley said.

“And that’s one of the reasons that Augustana doesn’t want to play us. They can’t afford to lose to us in a non-conference game.”

While the Fighting Bees do take on Augustana in almost every other sport, with the schedule spots so important and non-conference games as big as they are, neither team has pursued each other too terribly hard. With the addition of Loras to the Fighting Bees football schedule, at least through the 2005 campaign, the Duhawks will be the only geographic rival for the Fighting Bees.

So for now, Ambrose will have to live without a river football rivalry against the Vikings of Augustana.

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