Now that the Legacy Bowl has been put on ice until next spring at least, the time has come for the NCAA Division One HBCU athletic programs to do what they probably should have when they collectively made the leap up from Division Two in the late 1970s – come up with an operational battle plan for survival and growth.

The fact that the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) and the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) were on the verge of approving a bowl game deal which would have been at best underwhelming financially and have completely taken HBCUs out of the NCAA postseason mix shows what the real state of the union is for these schools in the athletic realm.

Even without the nation’s current economic downturn, which has trickled down to the states, this collection of schools – 10 in the SWAC and 13 in the MEAC – are already cash-starved athletically and some of them had hopes that the Legacy Bowl would have been a financial bonanza at a time one was desperately needed.

However, as the tangled web surrounding the proposed game began to unravel under scrutiny from the media and fans of the MEAC schools in the past few weeks, it became clear that the monetary potential of the game was far less than rumored, which led to the Council of Presidents in the MEAC to put an impending fall vote on the game on hold.

That likely gives the league’s two commissioners time to secure additional sponsorship dollars to add to the game’s kitty by the spring, helping underwrite the costs that the competing teams would have had to shoulder, but it also gives the member institutions an opportunity to finally begin thinking strategically about their athletic future.

Part of the assessment each school must make regarding its’ athletic program is first defining a vision and goals for the department; how athletics fits into each school’s overall operational scheme; identifying and increasing revenue streams to better fund the program to ease the burden on the host schools; then clearly defining what the short and long-term expectations are for their respective conferences.

Solving the financial riddle is undoubtedly the key plank in fashioning any strategic plan, and in addition to more effective fundraising, determining of the real market value of these programs/conferences in regards to television, radio and Internet broadcast rights, sponsorships and advertising is critical to increasing the bottom line.

The times also call for a radically different approach to the marketing and promotion of these programs/conferences to be employed moving forward to effectively raise their profiles not only locally and/or regionally, but nationally which would serve to help boost revenue and the recruiting of students and athletes.

And while in the process of developing their individual and collective strategic blueprints, the schools need to consider once and for all whether their competitive goals in athletics include full participation in the national collegiate mainstream, i.e., NCAA playoffs, or if an HBCU-only philosophy exemplified by the Legacy Bowl is a better fit.

This collection of schools has compiled a breathtaking legacy in athletics over the past 100-plus years, many of those accomplishments coming during the era of segregation in the first half of the 20^th Century – accomplishments which often went unnoticed by the larger society and uncovered by the mainstream media.

However, 30-plus years of “wandering in the wilderness” so to speak as members of Division One has left these same HBCU athletic programs looking for a financial and competitive “promised land.”

Therefore the task at hand for these schools is to decide how best to move forward competitively into the 21^st Century, and build on their rich and incomparable athletic “legacy.”