(07-15-2017 12:16 PM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(07-14-2017 03:48 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(07-14-2017 03:11 PM)MplsBison Wrote:  

(07-14-2017 10:10 AM)Stugray2 Wrote:  It's also a commuter school. A residential school (where most of the students live >50 miles away from home) typically gets double, treble or quadruple the support.

Students pay tuition/fees regardless if they "cash in" on their free tickets to games. Major schools make students pay for tickets on top of their tuition/fees (like Minnesota), but we're not talking about that with UALR or USA.

So if the students are all paying, and less are showing up, that's just more general admission tickets to sell to the public.

(07-14-2017 10:36 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  Yes, when you're using a lot of student fees to finance your football program, and UALR will be doing exactly that, having a THIRD fewer students to spread that cost around is really important.

That's why schools like Georgia State and Texas State have a lot more flexibility. They have tons of students.

This argument would work if something like 15k students was a floor for making it work. But nothing says it can't also work just fine with 10k students, so long as students will continue to enroll at the school paying a bit higher of tuition/fees.

Would UALR be the lowest enrollment public school in FBS? The answer to the is no. I'll let you take one big, giant guess as to a school from their own conference that is smaller ...

And has the lowest budget in FBS and has an all-time losing record in conference play in all their team sports.

But that school also had been playing football at the FCS level, with some success, for decades prior to moving up. They at least had some history.

By the way, no way they'd start a football program as a greenfield program now.

Starting a greenfield program is much, much, much harder than moving up from FCS. No alumni have any experience going to games. They're are no community links. It takes decades to build that.

BTW, if UTA were making this move, I'd be far less concerned. While there's a lot of competition, having 40,000 students can make up for a lot.

UALR did field a football team. They won the 1949 Little Rose Bowl in Pasadena. There could be some alumni still alive remembering those days.