(07-30-2019 05:02 AM)Rob3338 Wrote:  

(07-11-2019 05:39 AM)DavidSt Wrote:  Boise State is a R2 in academics. They are not terrible.

I assure you Boise is listed in national ranking publications as NOT IN THE TOP 600 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITIES IN THE USA. That sir is not just bad it is god awful bad. In at least 2 of the more prominent publications they ARE NOT IN THE TOP 900 UNIVERSITIES.

(08-01-2019 02:24 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  I think if we stuck someone in the freezer and thawed them out in 2026 they wouldn't notice much difference other than we might see different looking helmets in 2026.

Wouldn't be shocked if there were a few changes in the lineups among the G5+ (ie. the five conferences plus non-Notre Dame independents). Maybe Army or BYU finds a conference to their liking. Maybe someone finds the economic stress too much and drops football or less likely drops to FCS (I say less likely because the Idaho isolation situation was truly unique).

For the most part dropping football likely needs a certain set of things to line up.
1. Extended fan frustration that has eroded the base of FBS football or die fans.
2. A university CEO who is at least agnostic about athletics if not against.
3. Budgetary crisis. The collision of a school issue and state issue would be most likely though a private could go down just on an internal crisis. I think the more likely scenario is School X budgets based on expected enrollment figure and misses by a significant margin and the state is unable to bail them out and the school can't find enough cuts and has to cut football.

This is pretty much true.

Of course there is resistance to the inevitable, such as at UAB where donors give 5x as much as can be raised through gate (even students don't go to UAB games they have gotten $1.2M on gate very year for all sports from 2005 to the present --- flat lined, really steady decline when you figure the 40% inflation over that period) indicating an aging and dying out fan base (but clearly wealthy enough).

Then there is the crazy resistance like at Chicago State, where enroll is down to about 1300 FT students, and the program is dead out of money, paying HS salaries to coaches, but they still try to play D-I despite losing 90% or more of their games in every sport, playing before empty seats and besides a $95,000 one time donation in 2017, have collected only $11,000 and about $50,000 in gate over the last decade total (!!!). About $600K in rights and distributions, all at the cost of $43M in support.

So killing athletics, or even dropping down is nearly impossible as every employee in the department, plus their spouses, the players and others attached to the programs (local sports writers included) becomes a 24/7 advocate for the program and screams and yells.

It takes a really hard nosed school leader to pull the plug or lower the classification when faced with such opposition. This is even more true at public schools, where state employees are well trained in lobbying and public pressure techniques.