In 1978, college sports fans added a new term to their lexicon, when Division I was divided into Divisions I-A and I-AA for football.
This year, another phrase has become part of the national vocabulary, albeit a bit more quietly.
It is the "Division I-AA mid-major," and it is used to describe some of the newest teams at this level of the sport.
The term is co-opted from the use of "mid-major" in college basketball. In that context, it describes a school that is not in one of the major conferences but is capable of playing with the nation's bigger teams. Often, this manifests itself in the NCAA Tournament, which has made household names out of schools such as Butler and Gonzaga.
Division I-AA football mid-majors may not have quite that level of recognition, but it does have a somewhat clearer definition.
In 1991, the NCAA mandated that schools had to have all of their teams compete at the same divisional level. There are still some exceptions to this rule, such as the men's and women's lacrosse teams at Johns Hopkins University, which are Division I, while the rest of the school is Division III. But by and large, this rule change forced schools that had previously been at lower levels to raise programs to Division I status .
Some of the schools that did this for their football programs are familiar to Penn sports fans, such as La Salle, San Diego and Dayton.
Penn beat San Diego, 61-18, in its season opener this year, and the Quakers' basketball rivalry with La Salle is part of the annual Big 5 round-robin.
Dayton is a perennial powerhouse in Atlantic-10 basketball, and has been the host institution for that conference's postseason tournament for the last two years, as well as the host for the "play-in game," between the 64th and 65th-seeded teams in the NCAA Tournament.
Penn football coach Al Bagnoli described the I-AA mid-major tag as a "self-made classification."
Mid majors are "teams that were originally Division III at some point -- it didn't have to be recently, it could have been 20 years ago, but I think that's how they did it," Bagnoli said.
The Sports Network, a sports news wire service, runs a weekly top 10 poll of mid-major football programs. In the most recent ranking released on Monday, Dayton was No. 1, followed by Robert Morris, Central Connecticut State and Duquesne, the latter which the Quakers beat, 51-10, last season. San Diego was ranked No. 10.
Four of the top 10 -- Dayton, Drake, San Diego and Valparaiso -- play in the nine-team Pioneer Football League. The PFL was created as a direct result of the 1991 NCAA ruling, and also includes Butler, Davidson, Morehead State, Austin Peay and Jacksonville.
The rest of Penn's non-conference schedule this year involves teams from the Patriot League, which includes teams that are more established in Division I-AA. There was one other Pioneer League-Ivy League matchup this season, as Yale defeated Dayton, 24-17, on Sept. 18.
