It's cold as "heck" and not much going on in sports so time to read some SBNATION news. Guy makes a lot of good points:
There are lots of reasons a smart school might consider dropping out of FBS, college football’s top division, and moving to FCS.
The financials of the sport are changing. Coaching salaries are skyrocketing at an ahistorical rate. In a few years, the average head coach salary in the AAC, a non-power conference, could be north of $2 million. Programs are feeling pressure to increase assistant salary pools, with top coordinators easily clearing $1 million a year.
That’s just coaching salaries. There’s also pressure to invest in expensive facility projects and pay analysts, recruiting staffers, and other full-timers. Travel costs aren’t getting cheaper either.
Other future obligations are unclear. The NCAA, its conferences, and its schools might have to defend a class-action lawsuit over concussions. A court case could force schools to spend more on athletes — or even eventually pay players.
That might not be so bad if revenues were rising as quickly as expenses. Attendance has declined all over. With the decline of cable TV, the rise of media fees should slow, especially outside the Power 5 conferences. Many state governments have slowed their support for higher education, leading schools to charge students heavy fees to subsidize athletics.
Many teams aren’t going to win anything significant. They’re often the same ones in financial peril.
To free themselves from that wasteful cycle, an FBS team could consider dropping to FCS. There are a few structural differences between the two levels, the biggest being the different scholarship limits. FBS lets you have 85 full-ride scholarships, while FCS is limited to 63 (and in some leagues, even less than that).
The cost savings over scholarships is suspect (the schools are cutting checks to themselves, after all), but the costs for virtually everything else, from facilities to coaching salaries to support staff, are substantially less. The revenues are smaller too, but for some G5 programs without lucrative TV deals, the future savings may outweigh the costs.
Dropping down could help a team win more and spend less. Attendance could reveal some candidates.
The NCAA technically requires that FBS teams average 15,000 in paid attendance per game over a rolling two-year period. Schools typically pad their official attendance numbers, but in real life, many schools actually have fewer than 15,000 butts in their seats every game.
In 2017, 34 FBS schools had fewer than 15,000 people actually scan tickets into their average home game. Some schools don’t have to comply with records requests for data like that, so the number could be even higher.
But we know these teams didn’t scan 15,000 fans into their games: ULM, Coastal Carolina, Buffalo, Eastern Michigan, Ball State, UMass, Kent State, San Jose State, Miami (Ohio), Central Michigan, Charlotte, UL Lafayette, Akron, Northern Illinois, UTEP, Arkansas State, New Mexico State, Ohio, Western Michigan, Middle Tennessee, Texas State, Nevada, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, UNLV, Old Dominion, Toledo, UTSA, Southern Miss, Marshall, Louisiana Tech, Wyoming, Connecticut, and Western Kentucky.
If we’re just using attendance as a benchmark, the entire MAC could drop to FCS. But that isn’t fair, as the MAC’s TV-focused strategy (with games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights) has to depress turnout. If MAC teams played all their games on Saturdays, then Toledo, NIU, and WMU would sell more tickets.
But the MAC’s situation has gotten worse. The state of Ohio no longer produces FBS-caliber recruits like it did in the 1960s. The Rust Belt is losing population relative to the Sun Belt and West, sapping potential support for smaller schools. Building fanbases in the shadows of Big Ten programs might only get harder.
One idea: three of the 12-team MAC’s lowest-revenue programs — Kent State, Ball State, and Eastern Michigan — keep their MAC membership in other sports, but play football in the Missouri Valley. To get back to 10 football schools, the MAC could try to woo FCS power North Dakota State.
