(06-16-2017 09:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  As I said, IMO, attendance is to me the gold standard for achievement, as it is very highly correlated with the stature of a program. Isn't that what an NCAA "division" is supposed to reflect? To me, it is. The SWAC and MEAC schools have good attendance relative to the rest of FCS, and long and established histories as well. That counts too, as college football is perhaps the most tradition-steeped major sport, along with major league baseball.

Let me ask this. If we pretended for a second that the NCAA allowed every school to have a separate classification for football than the rest of sports, would you be supportive of SWAC and MEAC schools keeping football in FCS while moving the rest to DII?

(06-16-2017 09:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  I'm far more impressed with a MEAC team with a long tradition and 14k attendance than a newbie North Carolina Mountain Slopes with high student fees (and yet 8k attendance) to hire a better coach and field a team that can upset an FBS every few years as part of their 15 year Master Plan to get promoted to the Sun Belt Conference.

I understand this. I may not fully agree, but I get it.

(06-16-2017 09:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  We both know that these fees aren't always decided democratically nor are they necessarily ground-up, grassroots student efforts, often they are top-down agendas pushed by administrators, and also they persist over time. E.g., a vote may have occurred at one time, but now it's 5 years later and the fee is still there even though the current students never voted for it. Many aren't even aware of it, it's just rolled in to all the other things they pay for.

Heard this argument before, and I do have some sympathy for it. Perhaps in a perfect world, there would be some reasonable way to allow a revote every year or every few years on whether to continue the fee for athletics.

Thing is, if the fees were abolished, then I feel like the school would just raise tuition and use the raise in tuition the same as they were using the fee ... so in a sense a bit of a shell game anyway. But ....

(06-16-2017 09:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  That said, I'm not advocating that a school be prevented from doing these things, freedom means the discretion to do foolish things. I'm just saying the NCAA shouldn't incentivize and reward it by making division membership contingent on dollar investments.

OK, fair enough.

Would you be OK with it if the division rules also included specific requirements about needing the "subsidy" to be less than X% of the athletic dept revenues?

(06-16-2017 09:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  Yes they are. But "best in the nation" is a relative term. We're talking FCS here. None of the FCS schools are any good in an objective sense, save for maybe North Dakota State.

What I was trying to get it is the idea that fans would be less interested in a competitive game between two HBCU rivals because of a perception that overall quality on the field was down, from some historical point in time, with some respect to a known high level. Of course, none are even near the FBS, let alone the NFL.

I still think enjoyment can be had watching even DIII level football, with a competitive game when the fans are into it.




Say, it looks there was one point missing from the "money" section, that I was hoping you would address. It might have been in an edit after you replied. Mind addressing that below?

"- lastly, you might feel that because federal tax dollars (via federal tuition assistance programs), as well as state tax dollars for public schools within a state, go to support schools, then as a taxpayer you do have a right to say that your tax money shouldn't be spent on athletics. My response to this is simple: I would be perfectly fine requiring any school that receives any such public money to maintain two separate accounts for incoming dollars, one from public money sources and the other from all other sources (donations, normal tuition payments, etc.), and then forbidding the school from using any of the money in the public money account to be spent directly or indirectly on athletics. If a school wants to use its "own" money (from the other sources account) for athletics, that's its business."