2010–13 Colonial Athletic Association realignment

The 2010–13 Colonial Athletic Association realignment refers to the Colonial Athletic Association dealing with several proposed and actual conference expansion and reduction plans among various NCAA conferences and institutions from 2010 to 2013. Moves that involved the Colonial Athletic Association were part of a much larger NCAA conference realignment.

Among the fallout from the moves in the CAA was that the conference dropped wrestling as a sponsored sport after the 2012–13 school year. The 2013 departures of all-sports members Old Dominion and George Mason left the CAA with too few schools to sponsor the sport, and all of its remaining wrestling schools would join other conferences for that sport.

The first move in the 2010–13 time frame affecting the CAA involved the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) football team. At the start of the realignment cycle, UMass was a CAA associate member in football and men's lacrosse, and a full member of the non-football Atlantic 10 Conference (A10).

For nearly 20 years, UMass had intermittently considered moving its football program from the second-tier Division I FCS to the top-level Division I FBS (the subdivisions were respectively known as Divisions I-AA and I-A before 2006). The issue of an FBS move became more pressing to the UMass administration in the late 2000s due to significant changes in the CAA. Two full CAA members and natural football rivals for UMass, Northeastern (located in Boston) and Hofstra (on Long Island), dropped football after the 2009 season. Another New England school with football-only membership in the CAA, Rhode Island, was soon to announce that it would leave the CAA for the Northeast Conference in the near future. In addition, Villlanova, a longtime member of the Big East Conference but a CAA football member, had long been rumored to be contemplating a move to Big East football. According to UMass athletic director James McCutcheon, these changes would have greatly impacted UMass football had it stayed in the CAA—most significantly in increased travel costs due to the CAA apparently becoming a more Southern-based league.

...
Wikipedia