What’s in a name? Quite a lot, actually — it’s been drilled into us for almost 30 years.

At the 1978 NCAA Convention, delegates approved a realignment of Division I football and created two subdivisions, called I-A and I-AA. Now, nearly three decades later, we’re finally clarifying the distinction. The Division I Board of Directors at its August 3 meeting approved new subdivision nomenclature that labels the old I-A as the "Football Bowl Subdivision" and the former I-AA group as the "NCAA Football Championship Subdivision."

In some ways, the whole issue smacks of NCAA bureaucracy and is worthy of the comedic commentary some columnists have given it — after all, the NCAA has been a straight man to the pundits before. And there is a certain irony in the fact that I-AA and its championship are probably enjoying the most success since their establishment.

But the naming issue is serious business to those of us in the business.

Just last year, for example, when the Appalachian State University football team was involved in perhaps its most meaningful game in school history at the Division I-AA Football Championship final, one of the network crawls noted that a victory would represent the institution’s first I-AA title in any sport.

I’ll pause to let you think about that ... In one fell editorial swoop, the "any sport" reference diminished — albeit unintentionally — the school’s accomplishment. The publicity the university gained from the team’s success was compromised by the mere and incorrect application of nothing more than an administrative label. To the unsuspecting viewer, Appalachian State was no longer a Division I institution that sponsored football at the I-AA level — it was something less.

What were we thinking 30 years ago? The problem is that we picked labels that weren’t football-specific, and the fallout harmed every sport but football. Institutions began to be painted with a broad I-AA brush, so much so in fact that some I-A schools would use it in their recruiting tactics. "You don’t want to go a I-AA school," they said, even when courting baseball and basketball prospects.

That’s when you have to draw the line.

What we know now is that the line we drew in 1978 wasn’t bright enough — or perhaps it was too bright. We drew ourselves into a shiny corner.

But the monikers we have now can’t be conveniently shortened or misapplied. Even if some people demand to distinguish by acronym, the FBS and the FCS won’t mean anything tangible to people outside the structure. Frankly, that’s just what we want. The new nomenclature is football-specific and simply can’t be crammed into an all-sports context like I-A and I-AA can.

I applaud my Football Bowl Subdivision counterparts for their help in this decision. The re-labeling has nothing to do with Division I governance; nor does it meddle with the weighted voting that protects that subdivision’s majority. This is simply a name change that more clearly defines who we are. We’re all Division I institutions. We’re happy that the point will become clearer this December when two Division I football teams play for the NCAA Division I Football Championship in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

For the most part, the conferences vying for the Bowl Championship Series title three weeks after our event know exactly who they are, and the rest of the world knows who they are, too. They don’t need a branding campaign. The former I-AA subdivision badly needed the editorial makeover. If nothing else, this helps unify the entire division, not tear it apart.

And that’s what’s in a name.