(04-08-2018 05:42 PM)billybobby777 Wrote:  ECU will be fine. The school has never had to tax the heck out of its students or the locals to have a football program. The attendance/support is great and not artificial. The locals come to the games in CUSA, AAC etc. whatever circumstances. The schools that will struggle are the ones where there’s never been a sustained local interest in college football:
What athletics cost each student in 2017:
1. UConn $1,784 per student
2. Cincinnati $1,238
3. Wichita St $561
4. Houston $508
Temple’s numbers aren’t listed; I’m assuming they’d be top 3.
ECU: $160
USF: $132- attendance issues and $ for a stadium are issues that loom large though
UCF: $109- in pretty good shape

(04-08-2018 05:29 PM)billybobby777 Wrote:  “Avoiding 130 schools”....to avoid athletic fees.
It’s a lot less than that. Most of those 130 don’t charge athletic fees. Most aren’t UMASS, UCONN etc. Many have 0 athletic fees and some have 0 subsidies.

I'm just gonna repost this because UMass' financial situation likes to get thrown around a lot. TLDR at $270 per student we're probably somewhere in the middle of the AAC.

(01-22-2018 05:00 PM)McKinney Wrote:  

(01-22-2018 03:21 PM)Steve1981 Wrote:  

(01-22-2018 08:41 AM)TrueBlueDrew Wrote:  Almost everyone who plays in the Sun Belt and CUSA moved up from the FCS and I don’t think a single school except for Idaho obviously would entertain going back.

From a Georgia Southern perspective, we only entered the FBS a few years ago, but our athletic budget has doubled, we’ve added almost 10k seats to our stadium and fill it regularly, and we get more national recognition now than we did even when playing FCS National Championship games.

However, we didn’t move up for that. We moved up to be in the same subdivision as our peer schools. ECU, App State, MTSU, Troy, Texas State, Southern Miss, etc are all listed as our peer institutions and almost all of them are schools we used to play at the D1-AA level before they moved up. That left us as a large public school with 21k (soon to be 28k) students playing in a subdivision dominated by small private colleges with 4-5k students. It was a no brainer to make the decision to move up with our peer schools and I’m glad we did.

That is it on a nail head. We consider ourselves a national research institution and aspire to be AAU. We've been a top 30 public research university for the past 4 years. Almost everybody in that club is FBS. You can argue all you want about who our peers are, but we moved up to be like our peers.

To add on to that... finances don't seem to be a problem. A study by the Pioneer Institute's states that student fees at the University of Massachusetts have increased from $6.662M in FY2004 to $8.151M in FY2015. And although PI (a right-wing think tank that's been in the center of several scandals in Massachusetts) attempts to criticize the athletic department's "out of control finances", that's an increase less than ******* inflation (which would be $8.51M). Additionally, those fees when spread out among our 30,037 students at Amherst (Fall 2016 most recent available data) come to ~$270 or about 0.8% of the cost of attendance for in-state students and 0.5% for out-of-state students. While the cost of D1 athletics is currently not financed by the system, with 74,496 students in the system we could potentially drop that number to ~$100.

And as I said, the student fees have nothing to do with FBS vs FCS as we were paying MORE in student fees during FCS if you adjust for inflation. Similarly, our entire athletics budget accounts for only 3% of our entire budget (Amherst) and (if financed by system in the future) 1% of the system budget. Football (only $8M budget) accounts for only 0.6% of the Amherst budget and (if financed by system in the future) 0.2% of the University of Massachusetts system budget.

Further, the argument cannot be made that taxpayers are holding the, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent burden. The state only supports 22% of the University of Massachusetts system's revenue, meaning that dropping football would save the median family (income of $75,297) only $0.05 on their taxes, yes, 5 ******* cents.