(02-21-2014 04:54 PM)Wedge Wrote:  1) A minimum budget requirement for FBS football would be equally controversial (and also fudge-able). Still, budget is more relevant than attendance to making sure teams are competitive. If some rich guy wants to go all T. Boone Pickens at Central Michigan and give 'em more money for football than Purdue spends, what does it matter if they have 4,000 or 64,000 people in the stadium?

The problem is most FBS programs blow their budgets on luxurious nonsense. FCS teams use the same number of players, same equipment, same balls and goalposts, and 75% as many football scholarships, yet their expenses aren't anywhere near 75% of the average FBS budget. That even most BCS programs aren't making a profit despite tens of millions of dollars from new TV contracts ought to be sufficient proof of the gross excesses going on. Maryland just cut 7 sports. Maybe they're the ones with the problem, not Eastern Michigan. There's no reason it should cost $15 million per year to play 12 football games with unpaid, amateur athletes.

(02-21-2014 02:06 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(02-21-2014 01:54 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  If you are going to be in a position where people may challenge your power as an Oligopoly do you want to be a group of 65-67 market actors combined into five market groups or do you want to be part of 10 market groups or 32 market groups? Especially when your five market groups conspire/collude to control a major economic activity like the BCS/CFP.

In other businesses, powerful players don't encourage more "market actors" to flourish. Apple and Google aren't encouraging mobile phone manufacturers to sell more phones with operating systems other than iOS or Android. They're probably pressing companies to marginalize competitors in that space and will continue to do so unless the government forces them to do otherwise.

Not quite true, businesses often want competitors to have some degree of success in order to be able to point to that competition to avoid regulation.

And of course when it comes to mergers and acquisitions companies often spin off a book of business to strengthen a competitor in order to get DOJ approval.

(02-21-2014 11:25 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(02-21-2014 11:18 AM)MinerInWisconsin Wrote:  

(02-21-2014 11:12 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  The comments to that story say part of the problem is they want 240 for a season ticket (34 a game). That might be too high for that market.

Ohio prices some of its games at 35 but for others they keep in the 15 to 20 range. The regular season ticket price is somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-15 dollars a game.

That said the entire attendance rule is just plain stupid. Its not a measure of institutional support, its a measure of community support. I wish they would go back to a minimum capacity rule of say 25,000 seats and drop the whole attendance counting business.

Since they've set the minimum average at 15,000 now schools with 15,000 seats think they can play at the top level without expanding their stadium.

But why is one arbitrary number better than another? I understand the need to show support because I really think it's ridiculous to have a "major" college football team competing because they have a handful of major donors with almost zero fans in the stands in major market in a football hotbed like Texas. But I don't know how you draw a line that's reasonable when you've already allowed a number of schools below that line to sign up for fbs.

How many schools fall below the 25,000 capacity line and how many above it?

I can only think of Charlotte, Old Dominion and Idaho of having less than 25,000 capacity. ODU of course is building a 30k seater.

A few schools in the MAC are in the 23-24k range but are 26,000 Standing Room Only. To me that is close enough. Maybe you could allow them to count the SRO seats into the capacity.

I don't think it would matter. We already know from history that if a stadium requirement is used the MAC schools will do it even if it seems ludicrous. Even if they did not allow the standing room only to work I don't think there is a traditional MAC school that would allow that to send them down.

I'd be happy to make a tradeoff. Do away with the attendance requirement for membership in the top football division (let's call that division D-T). In exchange, raise eligibility standards. To play in D-T, a player must not only meet the 2016 Core course and GPA standards, but he must have a minimum of 1000 on his SAT. If you don't achieve this score by December 31, you may not sign with a D-T school.

So, even if Rice, SMU and Tulane can't qualify based on attendance, they can still play at the top level if they want to. And as long as they are still allowed to play against D-T schools for the financial benefits that brings, there are probably any number of schools that would accept kids with an 800 SAT who can jump over buildings. They might even prefer to have a few of these kids instead of the 22 extra two star kids they currently carry on their roster to meet the FBS standard.

(02-21-2014 04:08 PM)CommuterBob Wrote:  This article is over two years old. If CMU were in any sort of trouble, we'd have heard about it by now.

That said, the NCAA actually did put two schools on notice for 2013 for subpar attendance - South Alabama and UMass, and only did so because both programs were still transitioning to FBS.

yes - if cmu were in trouble we'd have heard about it.

fwiw: their official average attendance for 7 home games in 2012 was 16,305 (buoyed by a home game against michigan state that drew 35,127)

(02-21-2014 04:54 PM)Wedge Wrote:  2) FCS football is also expensive and, for the most part, lightly attended. Without checking, I think it's a good guess that there are many FCS football programs that sell fewer than 1,000 tickets/home game. FCS football isn't nearly as expensive as a fully-funded FBS program (there are probably many G5 programs that give well under 85 FB scholarships, but that's a different topic). Still, FCS football is orders of magnitude more expensive than D-I basketball.

You would be wrong - not a single FCS program has attendance under 1,000, and only one or two of the non-schollie are below 3,000