James Madison athletic director Jeff Bourne said he values well-established regional rivalries. He also thinks as college athletic departments across the nation face COVID-19 related financial losses, steps could be taken to make geography more of a focus in scheduling and alliances.

And it’s become clear administrators at other schools agree with him.

“The COVID crisis has certainly sparked a lot of hard thinking about cost reduction,” UNC Charlotte Chancellor Philip Dubois said. “One possible cost reduction is to figure out a divisional alignment.”

Towson athletic director Tim Leonard said: “Jeff and I have talked a lot about it, and I mean the business model for college athletics has been broken for a long time and it just keeps getting more and more extreme.”

After an independent study commissioned by Old Dominion University suggested the Monarchs needed to explore leaving Conference-USA due to losses of $2 million annually, Bourne told the Daily New-Record that talks of conference realignment were “ramped up” among schools.

JMU is currently a member of the Colonial Athletic Association and competes in the Football Championship Subdivision. Last week, Bourne said his department regularly forecasts the ‘what if’ scenarios involving a potential move to the Football Bowl Subdivision or if conferences at that level realigned. Others, including CAA commissioner Joe D’Antonio, acknowledged the lingering possibility that JMU could be looking at a potential jump.

ODU was previously a member of the CAA until 2013 when the Monarchs moved to FBS and joined C-USA, with membership extending from Norfolk to Miami to El Paso, Texas. JMU opted to remain in the CAA while its only FBS options were C-USA or the Sun Belt, which is home to schools such as Appalachian State and Coastal Carolina but also covers territory from the East Coast to Texas.

“Television rights aren’t what they used to be for everybody outside of the Power Five,” said Leonard, who worked previously as SMU’s senior associate athletic director prior to taking the Towson job in 2013. “So that old model of trying to assemble the best group you can get based on a television market and what you can get from networks, that’s not there anymore. Not to the level that it once was, so I think that we are headed down that path regardless. I do think the coronavirus and with the economic impact that it’s going to make, I do think you’re going to see some changes in the college athletics landscape.

“What it looks like? It’s like everything else. There are large scales or it could be minimal. You could have one or two universities switch their lineup in terms of what conference they’re in. Or it could be dramatic, they blow everything up and hit the reset button, and start all over again.”

If a loss of revenue were to force schools such as ODU or Charlotte, also a member of C-USA, to look for a more geographically-aligned league, the Dukes might be interested.

“I think if we would go through and do a polling of most Group of Five institutions and maybe even some of the Power Five institutions,” Bourne told the Daily News-Record in an in-depth interview earlier this month, “they would find themselves in a similar spot and they would say, ‘Are there things we should attempt to look at doing a different way?’”

Dubois, who retires this summer, said Charlotte wasn’t currently looking for a new conference. But he acknowledged that COVID-19 related losses, including missing revenue from the canceled NCAA men’s basketball tournament, could lead to changes.

“I won’t be around when any of this happens, if anything happens,” Dubois said. “I will say, it’s a logical sort of question about if there are cost savings. I’m sure every conference is doing this because the scenarios for conferences like ours are pretty dire if we don’t have a fall football season.”

Leonard said it’s way too early to tell if Towson would explore making a move.

“It all depends on what’s the scenario,” Leonard said. “Is this business model going to change at the Group of Five level? Because it’s not a good model. Not that FCS is terrific either. We’ve got our own sets of problems … It’s just the level of above us can’t sustain the expense side of it because the revenue isn’t there.”

In a statement via email to the Daily News-Record, Delaware athletic director Chrissi Rawak wrote: “As all of our colleagues around the country are doing, we’re working together as an athletic department to evaluate and consider all options for the upcoming academic year. It’s crucial for us to consider every possibility and to be as prepared as possible for any situation that unfolds. Having the bigger picture in sight is also important during these times and we talk about that daily. We want to come out of this smarter, more efficient and effective and even more prepared.”

Delaware, like JMU and Towson, is an all-sports CAA member and CAA Football member.

Jimmy Bass, athletic director at UNC-Wilmington, said his school likes the current makeup of the CAA and hasn’t explored any other options. His school does not have football.

“All members have similar academic and competitive philosophies, goals and ambitions,” Bass said. “Student-athletes are the CAA’s priority and UNC-W firmly supports that commitment.”

Another thing Bourne and Dubois agreed on was that regional rivalries were important not just because of travel costs, but also to maximize interest from fans and media partners.

Dubois was previously president at the University of Wyoming and was a part of the group in 1998 that broke away from the Western Athletic Conference to form the Mountain West after a divisional structure was proposed that would have limited some long-standing rivalries.

“The WAC was 16 teams and pretty far-flung geographically,” Dubois said. “There was always sort of a question on whether or not we could build intra-conference rivalries that would matter in terms of the television contract or gates for football and men’s basketball. What they came up with in the case of Colorado State and Wyoming was that we weren’t going to be playing each other and that just was not acceptable. The feeling was it made sense to go to a smaller conference built around regional rivalries.”

Regionally, a total of about 400,000 alumni of JMU, ODU, Charlotte and Appalachian State reside in the states of Virginia and North Carolina, according to those schools’ alumni associations. About 45,000 graduates of those schools live and work in the Washington, D.C., area.

“Charlotte is not looking to go anywhere,” Dubois said. “We’re in Conference USA and maybe there are changes that can be made within the conference. Going all the way to San Antonio is a long way to go as opposed to playing within our own region. It’s much less serious getting to Richmond or Birmingham or up to Marshall.”