announcement of the conference move made no mention of football. According to BU athletic director Mike Lynch, the school had been in exploratory talks with the Patriot League "for four or five years" prior to the announcement. Ultimately, the school's administration saw the move as what Lynch called "an opportunity to go someplace that's extremely stable with brand-name institutions." The Terriers' move was seen as a major blow to their former conference. At the time of BU's announcement, it had won the previous seven America East Commissioner's Cups for all-sports performance, collecting 40 conference championships in that period. The departure of BU left the America East with eight members; one of them, Stony Brook, was reportedly a CAA expansion target, and eventually joined CAA Football, the technically separate football arm of the CAA (see 2010–2013 Colonial Athletic Association realignment), while otherwise remaining in the America East. BU itself had reportedly been a CAA target before announcing its move. Like the CAA, the America East has a bylaw that allows the conference to prohibit a departing school from participating in any conference postseason tournament. The America East chose to enforce this rule against BU in its lame-duck 2012–13 America East season. In turn, this meant that the 2012–13 Terriers could not receive an automatic bid to any NCAA championship that was linked to an America East tournament, most notably the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments. The Patriot League was not finished with expansion. On August 29, 2012, it announced that Loyola University Maryland, then in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), would join in 2013. The Baltimore-based Greyhounds were coming off what The Baltimore Sun called "the most successful athletic year in school history", including the men's basketball team's first trip to the NCAA Tournament since 1994, an NCAA quarterfinal berth by the women's lacrosse team, and a national championship for the men's lacrosse team. While most of Loyola's sports were housed in the MAAC at the time of its announcement, the school's lacrosse teams played elsewhere—the men's team in the ECAC and the women's team in the Big East. Like BU, Loyola does not sponsor football, and as with the BU announcement, the Loyola announcement did not mention that sport. Current Loyola athletic director Jim Paquette indicated that the move was dictated by academics as much as athletics, saying, "The Patriot League has been a very strong academic league,