The landscape for Independents is different than 10 years ago. There were a lot of schools in the Great West or Independent. Today there are none.
As people have been saying, they need help from local conferences, especially Illinois schools. But their NET has been in the 320-350 range for several years running. No coach wants to schedule a school that hurts their NET and no conference will be happy with members scheduling them and hurting their conference ranking. But that is the competitive angle.
The financial is far worse. If you look at USAToday, you see the complete lack of ticket sale and donation revenue; looks like one large one time donation of $90K to sports a couple years ago (2017) and literally bake sale level donations for all the other years; also gate is dwarfed by several local high schools in my area that charge $3 for entry and fill 1,000 adults on their side of the gym every conference game. Lack of support for the program is the real killer.
Chicago State has something lover 98% of their students on state grants, meaning the revenue for the school is pretty much fixed by enrollment and state per student funding. The endowment was exhausted a few years back and it's hand to mouth existence. Enrollment dropped from 3,000 full time undergrads when they joined the WAC to 1278 (numbers a year old from DoE ... no idea what CoVid-19 impact, but probably the number is down a bit more). Since the money per student is fixed, that means there is no revenue to grow the budget. As noted above their budget is maybe 50% of the minimum for the MEAC (which is significantly lower than that of the WAC). We are here talking about operating expenses. But facilities need a lot of work too, and that is where the lack of donations and gate come in.
Another revenue issue as an Independent will be the loss of conference distributions. The WAC is not a big payout conference, but certainly they will lose a good chunk of their NCAA distributions, since they will only be eligible for individual school distributions, not those through conferences. This means they will have even less money to work with. They just cannot afford to buy home games.
It's just not sensible nor practical to be a D-I Independent. At D-II they can Jettison 4 sports and play in a regional conference if one will take them. More sensible would be the NAIA Chicagoland, where schools have similar budgets, pay coaches similar low scales, and travel is all local. Again they can drop some sports.