In the 2019 MAC Championship Game, the RedHawks defeated the Chippewas 2621 in overtime.The Michigan High School Athletic Association, Inc., is a private, voluntary association for public, private and parochial secondary schools which choose to join and participate in the organization. In 2019, the Miami RedHawks won the east division, and the Central Michigan Chippewas won the west, both with a 62 conference record. There are lots of reasons a smart school might consider dropping out of FBS, college football’s top division, and moving to FCS.Main article: 2019 Mid-American Conference football season. Buffalo junior running back Jaret Patterson was tabbed the winner of the 39th Vern Smith Leadership Award as the top player in the MAC and. All of the awards were voted on by the league's 12 head coaches. Cleveland, Ohio Today the Mid-American Conference announced the All-MAC Teams & Specialty Award selections for the 2020 football season.
The NCAA, its conferences, and its schools might have to defend a class-action lawsuit over concussions. Travel costs aren’t getting cheaper either.Other future obligations are unclear. There’s also pressure to invest in expensive facility projects and pay analysts, recruiting staffers, and other full-timers.
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. With the decline of cable TV, the rise of media fees should slow, especially outside the Power 5 conferences. Attendance has declined all over.
The revenues are smaller too, but for some G5 programs without lucrative TV deals, the future savings may outweigh the costs.The median non-power FBS football program was losing about $20 million per year a few years ago, according to the NCAA, while the median FCS team was down about $12 million.That math isn’t perfect for a lot of reasons. 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. There are a few structural differences between the two levels, the biggest being the different scholarship limits.
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. 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. Dropping down could help a team win more and spend less.
If that can’t happen, at least one of these FBS teams should probably drop anyway.San Jose State, UTEP, NMSU, Nevada, Wyoming, and UNLV are in difficult spots. The Western schools here should try to join forces with Big Sky teams and form a couple of smaller FCS conferences. That leaves 24 drop-down candidates to seriously look at from this list. But let’s leave them out of the conversation for now. Southern Miss was highly competitive in the late ‘90s and 2000s.The jury’s still out on teams that recently jumped to FBS.Coastal Carolina, Georgia State, UMass, Charlotte, Texas State, Old Dominion, and UTSA might not be suited for FBS.
Long commutes across the West could eat into FCS savings, after all.It could make sense for some of these FBS teams to join forces with the 13-team Big Sky, split that league into two FCS conferences of eight or 10 teams each, and give a school like Utah’s FCS independent Dixie State a home.But it may make more immediate sense for San Jose State, a school in a high-cost area without much fan support or success and with the smallest revenues in the Mountain West Conference, to drop down regardless. New Mexico State’s athletic director has cited travel costs as a factor in decisions about which league to play in. But winning and financial sustainability will likely remain hard for all these schools.Western schools have to consider geography. If you try, you can talk yourself into UTEP succeeding by being the only program in a big city, despite all the hard things about that job. But the rest of these schools have a combined two AP Top 25 finish in their histories.You can talk yourself into UNLV’s potential in the Raiders’ new stadium.
The Rust Belt is losing population relative to the Sun Belt and West, sapping potential support for smaller schools. The state of Ohio no longer produces the same volume of FBS-caliber recruits like it did in the 1960s. 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. But that isn’t fair, as the MAC’s TV-focused strategy (with games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights) has to depress turnout. The Midwestern schools could reshuffle, too.If we’re just using attendance as a benchmark, the entire MAC could drop to FCS. The Mountain West could replace them with NMSU or UTEP, or leave that slot open and pay a little more to each remaining member.
(ULM’s under $20 million.) Given the precariousness of Louisiana’s fiscal health, there’s an argument for cutting costs. Let’s combine Conference USA and the Sun Belt, and send some other teams to FCS.ULM and UL Lafayette each report under $30 million in athletic revenue, including other university subsidies. Let’s get even weirder for the South. We finally get to see NDSU beat up on Big Ten teams more regularly, or UMass gets more of a path toward football relevance after sitting in independence purgatory. The MAC gets to split its football money among fewer schools.
Conference Football Teams Free To Swap
But if you feel strongly that UTSA, Texas State, or Charlotte should be here, feel free to swap out someone else in this thought exercise. Here, a few do go down to make the numbers work. That’s a better future for the consumer, the fan, and the TV executive.Now, I know I said earlier that I’d leave some of the FBS newbies out of the discussion for now. Heck, I did once.Everyone else can start a new FCS conference or spread out among the OVC, Southland, and Big South. Heck, other writers have suggested variations of this merger too.
Or drop football entirely.I have like, another 1,000 words on that. Oh, and UConn also needs to drop to FCS. The Sun Belt can play a seven-game round robin, with an extra FCS home game per team per season.That way, everybody can schedule a paycheck game and still keep a home game, helping everybody balance their books a teensy bit more.
But there’s a solution.It might make good sense financially. Another important group to consider here is the players, who’d lose scholarship slots if a lot of teams dropped down. UConn could focus on basketball.
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