(02-10-2018 05:57 PM)Duke Dawg Wrote:  

(01-26-2018 11:14 AM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  I just don't get the "thinking" by the BOT and Athletic Department at JMU.

They have good FCS football. They have 'nothing to write home about' other sports.

And they spend stoopid amounts of money on it. JMU's athletic budget is 47 million dollars a year, of which at least 34 million is directly subsidized by the students (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2...43179d607e)

JMU pays more for athletics than most AAC teams, more than every MWC team but one, more than every SBC school, more than any team in FCS (by a very wide margin), more than any MAC team, etc. What the hell is JMU paying all that money for? JMU pays more than DOUBLE what Louisiana Tech does for athletics and almost TWICE what Southern Mississippi does. Does anyone want to compare JMU's athletics with Louisiana Tech and USM?

And JMU doesn't have a far flung, expensive conference to play in either. They have exactly 1 team that is more than 380 miles away from them in their conference for Olympic sports. The league has no obvious outliers and has reasonable travel partners. Football does have a few schools that are more than 500 miles, but JMU isn't really playing them all that often.

Then the AD (in the linked article above) makes the ridiculous case that JMU can't move up because its too expensive. I think that it might be the case that the expensive part about JMU is the fact that the AD is wasting bucketloads of money and the BOT either won't or can't rein in the spending.

Might I suggest that JMU do the following

1) Fire the Athletic Director
2) Hire the AD from BGSU, Louisiana Tech, ULM, etc. Someone who can operate an athletic department with some cost effectiveness
3) Put the program on a serious diet
4) Join FBS (if anyone will still have them)
5) Reduce spending to 30 million a year and the student subsidy by 40%
6) Provide a 500 dollar reduction in fees back to the students

And that's before JMU gets a guaranteed million bucks a year in additional NCAA revenue from the CFP, gets another 500,000 a year from incremental payday revenue, gets marginally more TV money, and gets more money from an alumni base that appears to be really, really, really in favor of moving up.

All that so they can play Elon, New Hampshire, and Kennesaw State? And no, even winning a National championship in FCS doesn't provide you more exposure than USF gets for their equivalent investment in college athletics.

And if you take the amount of subsidy required to support athletics and then compare it to other schools.....JMU's numbers even look worse...Much worse. JMU loses more money on college sports than any other public institution in the country (defined as .. the amount students are compelled to pay to prop it up). The next biggest loser? UConn. Does anyone think that JMU gets more exposure for its mandatory investment than UConn?

With all the money JMU has spent on consultants, you'd think they'd do some peer analysis to figure out what the *&^% is going on in their athletic department budget.

At this rate, JMU appears to be expecting its students to pay 340 MILLION dollars this decade for a couple of FCS playoff runs, and perhaps a 16th seed play in game in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

JMU's situation really isn't FBS vs FCS. It appears to me to be a case of a BOT and Athletic Director that just wastes money like there's no tomorrow, and then covers it up by being the equivalent of the 12 year old playing football with the 10 year olds.

#16 ranked Nothing To Write Home About U (N2WHAU) beat #3 Blue Blood UNC in Women's Lacrosse today.