And if you drop football, who is to say that hoops will be allocated a significantly higher budget than it is presently? If its and buts were candies and nuts...
First of all, one can acknowledge that football is impacting our lack of success on the basketball court without arguing that football should be dropped. Indeed, we could maintain FBS football status while nevertheless diverting $500K from our collective football budgets to our basketball budgets.
Second, if we did actually drop football, we would only need to spend less than 1/10th of the current football budget to become one of the best funded mid-major basketball conferences. The average MAC school could save $5.1 million per year on athletics by dropping football (and more if you factor in the related Title IX savings), while still increasing the basketball spending to a level over 10% more than the Horizon or CAA.
Again, though, I'm not arguing that football should necessarily be dropped. At the end of the day I'd probably agree that bottom-tier FBS is better than FCS. But that doesn't mean that we need to be throwing as much money at football, with next to nothing to show for it, when we could have a much bigger impact by just diverting even a fraction of that same money to basketball.