Poteintail Big Sky APR issues and ramifications.

[bengalcub]

I was in the shower during the halftime show of the basketball game, but I heard bits and pieces of something that I wanted to hear more about. Apparently, the BSC has potential widespread APR issues--and if the issues persist, the BSC runs the risk of losing the automatic bid into the the playoffs. If this happens, Montana has said that it will leave the BSC.

Not sure if I heard everything right, Skippy and VOTB can you catch us up to date on what is going on. Once again, I may not have understood everything correctly--but it sounded pretty juicy.

 

[Skippy]

I'm a little fuzzy on this, Cub, so I can't speak with great clarity. I exchanged emails with the Big Sky office yesterday to try to clarify and they don't seem to think there is an imminent concern. But what I've been told is that if one more Big Sky program receives APR penalties in football (and I believe four have been sanctioned in the past), then the entire conference would be penalized by losing its automatic playoff berth. I don't know any details -- how long the sanction would last, what the actual rule says that would trigger the sanction (in other words, is it triggered by a certain percentage of a conference being sanctioned within a certain period of time?), or any of that stuff. I tried to do some research to find the rule or news stories of similiar action taken against other conferences and I couldn't find anything. So if anybody is good at googling, you may have more luck than I did.

Again, the conference office seems to feel there is no imminent danger of new sanctions. But I have heard that Montana has said they will leave the conference if such a playoff ban were imposed.