HOUSTON -- When it came to finding a fresh concept to open the college baseball season, Rice and Central Missouri State Universities came up with a gem of an idea.

The 2003 national champions from Divisions I and II met February 5 in Rice's Reckling Park in a matchup billed as the "Battle of the Diamond."

The game was made possible through the vision of Central Missouri State alumnus Jim Crane, the founder, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Eagle Global Logistics in Houston.

"The idea was that both teams won their national championships in 2003," Crane said. "Some of my buddies were sitting around at dinner, and I said it would be neat if we could play. They said, 'That won't happen,' but we got it done."

Indeed they did. Crane and his cohorts set out to raise $100,000 for the game -- $50,000 for each team, with each program keeping whatever remained after expenses were paid. By game time, he said that $95,000 had been raised, and that the prospect for raising the other $5,000 was good.

It was an excellent, albeit rare, opportunity for Central Missouri State, which also won the Division II championship in 1994 and finished second in 2001.

Top Division II programs such as Central Missouri State's have had increasing difficulty in recent years scheduling games against Division I opponents. Other than the Central Missouri State game against Rice, the only other games this year involving a Division II champion from the last five years [California State University, Chico; Central Missouri State; Columbus State University; Delta State University; and St. Mary's University (Texas)] and a Division I team will be a home-and-home series between Delta State and Mississippi Valley State University.

While a number of reasons may exist for the absence of such matchups, one appears to be that marquee Division I programs are reluctant to schedule top Division II teams because of how heavily the Division I Rating Percentage Index penalizes a home loss to a non-Division I opponent. Because credit for the win is minimal and the penalty for the loss is huge, Division I programs with postseason aspirations tend to avoid elite Division II teams.

That trend is different from men's basketball, which recently has encouraged limited regionally based interdivision competition (see the December 6 issue of The NCAA News).

Whether it represented a trend or an anomaly, the February event in Houston seemed to work well.

The Mules actually began their season February 4 at Rice's Reckling Park with a pair of games against fellow Division II member Texas A&M University-Kingsville. As for the game the next day against Rice, the Division I Owls defeated the Mules, 5-2. The 19th-ranked Owls showed their prowess as one of the nation's top programs by striking out a school-record 21 Central Missouri State batters, but the Mules acquitted themselves by jumping to a 2-0 lead, holding the Owls hitless through 32/ 3 innings and outhitting Rice, 7-6.

Perhaps more importantly, the contest also served as a rare opportunity to assemble Central Missouri State alumni from southeast Texas. There are 397 exes in the Houston area alone, and a number of them -- along with parents and other friends of the program -- were on hand for a Friday night barbecue and a Saturday morning brunch, as well as the Saturday afternoon game.

No one can know now whether the Rice-Central Missouri State "Battle of the Diamond" signaled the beginning of a new kind of interdivision interaction. But it did mark the beginning of at least a mini-tradition: Rematches are scheduled for 2006 and 2007.