(04-07-2020 02:24 AM)Michael in Raleigh Wrote:  Great points all around, but I do think JoeJag made a solid point about Jacksonville State's small enrollment. I don't mean to be offensive, but I think with that small enrollment, a Jacksonville State jumping to FBS may wind up being the next Akron or Eastern Michigan or (sorry) ULM. Schools at the G5 level unfortunately are just very dependent on student fees. With only 8,500 students, the fees don't multiply up to nearly as much as they would for a school of App State's size (just under 20,000) or bigger. Financially the school would likely struggle. Getting and retaining good coaches would be troublesome. Now, maybe they could actually do it, but that enrollment hurts them.

I'll point to TCU then. A G5 program up until 2013 had an enrollment of under 7200 at the time. Its now still only around 8800.

Troy has less than 10K on their main campus. If you want to count all of their campuses and online students then it goes up to 18.2K. ULM has somewhere around 7500 and 8800 if you count grad students.