Division II (NCAA)



Division II is an intermediate-level division of competition in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It offers an alternative to both the highly competitive (and highly expensive) level of intercollegiate sports offered in NCAA Division I and to the no athletic scholarship environment offered in Division III. Divisions II and III were formerly known collectively as the NCAA College Division.

Nationally, ESPN televises the championship game in football, CBS televises the men's basketball championship, and ESPN2 televises the women's basketball championship. CBS College Sports broadcasts six football games on Thursdays during the regular season, and one men's basketball game per week on Saturdays during that sport's regular season.

Membership
Division II schools tend to be smaller public universities and many private institutions. Athletic scholarships are offered in most sponsored sports at most institutions, but with more stringent limits as to the numbers offered in any one sport than at the Division I level. For example, Division II schools may give financial aid in football equivalent to 36 full scholarships (whereas each school in Division I FBS, the highest level, is allowed 85 individuals receiving financial aid for football), although some Division II conferences limit the number of scholarships to a lower level. Division II scholarship programs are frequently the recipients of student-athletes transferring from Division I schools; a transfer student does not have to sit out a year before resuming sports participation as would be the case in the event of transferring from one Division I institution to another (with the exception of football players transferring from a Division I FBS school to a Division I FCS school, who also do not have to sit out a year). Currently there are 282 either full or provisional members of Division II.

All Division II schools must field athletes in at least ten sports, with male and female competition in a given sport counting as two different sports. In addition, all coeducational schools must field athletes in at least four sports in each gender. Simon Fraser University became the first institution outside the USA to enter the NCAA membership process. This occurred after the Division II Membership Committee accepted the institution’s application during a July 7–9 meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. Simon Fraser, located in Burnaby, British Columbia, began a two-year candidacy period September 1, 2009. Prospective members also must complete at least one year of provisional status before being accepted as full-time Division II members. In the fall of 2012 The NCAA President’s Council made it official, approving Simon Fraser University as the organization’s first international member.

Conferences competing in Division II

 * California Collegiate Athletic Association
 * Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference
 * Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association^
 * Conference Carolinas
 * East Coast Conference
 * Great American Conference^
 * Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference^
 * Great Lakes Valley Conference^
 * Great Midwest Athletic Conference
 * Great Northwest Athletic Conference^
 * Gulf South Conference^
 * Heartland Conference


 * Lone Star Conference^
 * Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletic Association^
 * Northeast Ten Conference^
 * Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference^
 * Pacific West Conference
 * Peach Belt Conference
 * Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference^
 * Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference^
 * South Atlantic Conference^
 * Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference^
 * Sunshine State Conference
 * West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference^

^ Conferences that sponsor football

The newest D-II conference is the Great Midwest Athletic Conference, which was approved by the NCAA Division II Membership Committee in February 2012, and was an official conference as of September 1, 2012.

The WVIAC is now set to fold after the 2012–13 school year. Nine of its 15 members broke away to become charter members of the Mountain East Conference, which (pending NCAA approval) will begin competition in the 2013–14 school year. Three other members have since announced their departure for the G-MAC and two others for the PSAC. The other school is tentatively scheduled to go independent.

Independents

 * Division II Independent schools

Interaction with other divisions
The NCAA does not strictly prevent its member institutions from playing outside of their own division, or indeed playing against schools that are not members of the NCAA, but it is discouraged in many sports.

NAIA
Many Division II schools frequently schedule matches against members of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which consists of colleges and universities across the USA and Canada that promote competitive and character-based athletics that is controlled by its membership, as opposed to the NCAA that serves as a regulating body.

Division I
Division II schools also frequently schedule "money games", usually in football and men's basketball, against Division I schools.

In football, D-II teams once occasionally played games against schools that are now in Division I FBS, but this practice has ended because under current NCAA rules, FBS schools cannot use victories over schools below FCS level for establishing bowl eligibility. Today, D-II "money games" are exclusively against FCS schools, whose postseason eligibility is less seriously impacted by scheduling a D-II opponent. In basketball, where conference tournaments play a large role in determining postseason participants, D-I schools have less of a penalty for scheduling an occasional D-II opponent, resulting in more "money games".

In any event, the D-II school is almost invariably the visiting team, and is invited to play with knowledge that it will likely be defeated but will receive a substantial (at least by Division II standards) monetary reward which will help to finance much of the rest of the season and perhaps other sports as well. Such games are funded by Division I schools which can afford such games.

In recent years, "money games" in men's basketball have also included preseason exhibitions against D-I programs, typically in the same region, that do not count in official statistics for either team. Under NCAA rules, Division I teams are allowed to play two exhibition games in a season, and must host these games. However, prior to the 2011–12 season, two D-I men's programs in Missouri, namely Missouri and Missouri State, received NCAA waivers to travel to D-II Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, a city devastated by a May 2011 tornado, for third exhibition games. Both games were played as fundraisers for tornado relief efforts. Under normal circumstances, these exhibitions can still provide the D-II program with a financial boost similar to that of an in-season game.

The University of Kansas helps the state's four Division II members by rotating them onto the Jayhawks' exhibition schedule annually. Milwaukee, which has been a Division I member since 1990, has continued its series with their former Division II rival Wisconsin-Parkside as part of their exhibition schedule.

When these exhibition games do happen, there are times when the Division II team does win, and to a quality Division I program. In 2009, a Division II team beat the eventual Big East champion. In 2010 two other Division II teams beat teams that reached the NCAA Division I tournament. In 2011, another Division II team defeated a Division I team that finished in the top half of the Pac-12 Conference. In 2012, another Division II team beat a team in the Atlantic Coast Conferenceref>sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/miami-exhibition-loss-division-ii-st-leo-aberration-182644298--ncaab.html which later defeated several ranked Division I teams.

Also in basketball, two of the best-known early-season tournaments for D-I schools, the Great Alaska Shootout and Maui Invitational, are hosted by D-II schools that also compete in the events, respectively Alaska–Anchorage and Chaminade. The Great Alaska Shootout has men's and women's tournaments, while the Maui Invitational only involves men's teams. In the men's tournaments, the hosts usually lose all of their games. However, Alaska–Anchorage has been highly competitive in the women's Shootout, winning the tournament five times since 2003.

Non-revenue sports competition
Matches between the different collegiate divisions in non-revenue sports are often quite competitive. Indeed, in some sports, among them ice hockey and men's volleyball, there is no Division II national championship. In hockey, many schools whose athletic programs are otherwise Division II compete in Division I, and men's volleyball has a truncated divisional structure with a Division III championship but no Division II championship (as opposed to the NAIA, which fully includes men's volleyball in its divisional structure). In any sport that does not have a Division II national championship, Division II members are allowed to award the same number of scholarships as Division I members.