Quote Originally Posted by dunbar View Post
The Yankee Conference was an all-sports league in the first 30 years of it's existence. America East (back around the name change from the NAC) had seven football playing schools in 1997 when the Atlantic Ten took over the Yankee Conference. Even though Towson and Hofstra weren't in the YC/A10 yet, the missed opportunity to take over the league is a major blunder twenty years later. If that had happened, then the CAA/AE merger probably would've gone through around 2001.
The Yankee Conference was a legit conference until UMass, URI and UConn wanted to make sure they were in Division I in hoops. With the D-I/D-II split coming in 1977, they wanted to be on the correct side of that divide. On the other side of that coin was Vermont (who abandoned football during the D-I split) and BU (whose president at that time, John Silber, was in the early stages of trying to kill his football team). Ultimately the differences between all the schools became to great, and it morphed into a football-only conference that played at the D-II and eventually the I-AA level.

Pretty much for its entire existence the Yankee Conference was united by institutional similarity (Northeast land-grand schools + BU) and not a heck of a lot else. Many folks think that CAA/AE merger would have happened had the CAA taken it over, and there were talks about it at the time, but I'm not convinced it was imminent or anything. The reason is that the Yankee Conference never really was stable, and even if it had happened serious tensions would have remained.