(05-12-2022 07:18 AM)schmolik Wrote: (05-09-2022 02:54 PM)TDenverFan Wrote: (05-09-2022 02:32 PM)andybible1995 Wrote: (05-09-2022 08:50 AM)MattBrownEP Wrote: (05-08-2022 09:38 PM)andybible1995 Wrote: It's not just the geography of the league. It's the fact that none of these teams have anything in common with each other, other than they just play non-scholarship football.
They're almost all private schools, almost all small enrollment, and most are committed to having a competitive D-I experience in multiple other sports.
I understand that, but the day is going to come when the P5 smackdown money dries up, and all the FCS schools are going to have make financial adjustments and play a more regional based schedule in a regional based conference.
63 scholarships x $60k a piece x 2 (for the equivalent add in women's scholarships) = $7.5 million
That's more expensive than a few plane flights.
Since it's a non scholarship conference, PFL teams actually don't play FBS teams, they would not count towards bowl eligibility.
Dayton's endowment is $609.7 million according to Wikipedia. Butler's is $212.0 million. Athletically, Butler's in the Big East. This post says each Big East school is getting $4.6 million a year from FOX alone. I don't know if every PFL school can "afford" to offer scholarships but at least a few of them certainly can and are just being cheap. Why can Georgetown and Villanova afford scholarships and Butler can't? Why can Fordham and Duquesne afford scholarships and Dayton and Davidson (whose endowment is $1.3 BILLION) can't? I can't speak for every PFL school but at least these schools don't give out scholarships because they don't have to, not because they can't afford to. HBCU's "can afford" to give out scholarships (Delaware State's endowment is $43 million), certainly Davidson can.
Using endowment as a measure of if a school can afford scholarships doesn't really make sense. The endowment isn't a Scrooge McDuck vault of cash just sitting around, most of it is tied up in capital projects, specific funds, etc.
Most of these schools could afford to give out scholarships if they wanted to. But if you told Butler they had to spend ~7.5 million dollars (and it would likely be more, since you would be adding a whole new women's sport, which would require more coaches, trainers, etc, on top of the additional football investments needed to compete in a non PFL league), I would bet football scholarships wouldn't even be on their top 20 list.
They could afford to give out scholarships, you can call them cheap if you want, but how much benefit would Butler University get from adding football scholarships and playing in the OVC?
Endowment isn't really a big factor in these type of things, maybe it's indicative of how well the school is at fundraising to some degree, but there's schools at all levels with huge endowments:
UChigago - 11.6 billion endowment, D3, no scholarships
Louisiana Monroe - 23 million, FBS school
UCF - 165 million, about to become a P5 school
William and Mary - 1.2 billion, FCS/CAA
JMU - 116 million, moved from the FCS/CAA to the FBS