(04-25-2016 01:04 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  

(04-25-2016 12:43 PM)lance99 Wrote:  Update: http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/mi.../83493156/

Reads like a reporter who covers college education and not sports; you can tell by the stilted cadence when the story gets into sports terminology*—it's absolutely written by somebody who doesn't deal with sports as a part of their job.

Plus the reporter either doesn't understand what Division I athletics are or presumes too much by saying that the report recommends Eastern Michigan drop out of D1 entirely, when the part of the report he immediately quotes talks about joining the (solidly D1) Horizon League and spends more time on that topic than the possibility of going D2 or D3.

That said, it's telling that some students are behind dropping football. Faculty being anti-football is no surprise; given their druthers, a large portion of faculty would drop sports outright, whether they're at a D3 liberal arts college or an SEC powerhouse. But students usually support athletics unless it's a real drain, which it appears to be here.

* — you can also click on his byline and see that he's the paper's higher ed reporter, but that way's not as fun.

Its not really surprising that the students are for dropping sports. They don't show up because they are not interested. Its just an extra cost to the vast majority of the students there.

That said, the HBO Real Sports segment is ridiculous when it says sports should pay for itself. Does any other student amenity pay for itself? Does intramural department pay for itself? How about the band? Sports is the marketing arm of the university. Marketing is an expense. What companies make money with their marketing department? Universities have found a very effective marketing method that allows the schools to recoup a large portion of the expenses involved in promoting their schools---that's really pretty ingenious. A word of warning to E Michigan, that form of marketing loses virtually all of its effectiveness when a schools drops from the world of division 1 athletics and FBS.