(05-19-2020 02:07 AM)BruceMcF Wrote: Sorry, I am not used to the "sentence X in post #N" comparison as opposed to just copy and paste and wrap in {quote}{/quote}, I was looking at the wrong sentence.
For that sentence, Dayton and X are not in the same boat because they have BUILT their profile in the Southwest Ohio media markets ... where college basketball rules the roost because there is no local NBA team. Literally 50% of an "In-Ohio FCS average" comparison and 33% of an "In-Ohio NFS average" are schools that are quite obviously NOT in the same boat. Akron would be in the Cleveland State, Wright State, Youngstown boat, not in the Dayton Flyers, Xavier boat, but the "Ohio FCS" and "Ohio NFS" averages don't allow segregating things that way.
The national averages are much better for smoothing out the impacts of the outliers.
Again, I've never said anything about Dayton and Xavier, as I didn't find subsidy data on them. I looked at Youngstown, Cleveland, and Wright, and all happened to have subsidies that are less than the national $13m average for FCS and D1Sub.
As for intangibles, here's a good recent study on the value of winning in college athletics among P5 schools. FYI, at the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2, they discuss capital outlays of the kind mentioned here, such as Akron's football stadium, and say that generally, these outlays for FBS athletics are *underreported* to the NCAA, not over-reported. They also discuss the argument about the marginal costs of scholarship athletes.
As for the results, they look at athletic success impact on stuff like quantity and quality of applications, alumni donations, and state appropriations. The upshot is that for P5 there is a Flutie effect, but only for really strong performance, like making the Final 4 in football or men's hoops:
"We find that certain measures of football success have a modest positive and short-lived impact on student applications, but no clear impact on admission yield or on the quality of the student body. Although hampered by incomplete data, we also found that athletic success did not have a statistically significant effect on donations. Final Four appearances in both basketball and football showed some
statistical significance associated with state funding, but the direction and robustness of these findings is unclear."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...nt_Quality