SFA is Out

Stephen F. Austin State University announced a couple of weeks ago that they intended to depart the Western Athletic Conference and rejoin the Southland Conference, effective in one month. That ended weeks of speculation regarding their intentions to move.

SFA officials trumped up the move, of course. Citing benefits that were generally esoteric in nature, save for the student athletes (an increasingly archaic term) decreasing their time out of the classroom with reduced travel time, a cost savings and ability for fans to see the team on the road. 

For the WAC, it does several things and I'll give my take on both entities.

Diamond Addendum

The transition between the outline of the last post and the written word left off a very important point that applies to both the baseball and soft squads at UT Arlington. I initially thought I'd add the info into its own comment below the post, but there's a lot to it and its deserving of its own blog entry.

With the struggles the two teams have experienced the last few years, especially since they downgraded conferences from an RPI perspective, there has been a very notable metric that suffered this year, reversing a decade climb.

In 2024, the baseball team averaged 378 fans, the third straight decline in attendance, discounting the COVID year where every game drew 314 in the box score. It was the lowest since 2014's 352. Their time in the Sun Belt was generally positive for fans in the seats, nearly doubling the totals the team saw while in the Southland Conference. The highest year was 618 spectators per game in 2017. 2019 saw 591 and 2020 drew 606 fans before COVID cancelled the remainder of the schedule.