But you haven't addressed the core fact: more money doesn't bring success. We spend, what, some 40% more than Kent on B-ball and have facilities that far outclass theirs, yet they have outperformed us for more than a decade. Our last coach - a fairly big-time East Coast assistant and recruiting specialist - was given a 7-year guaranteed deal. Back in the 1960s, we took a leap of faith and invested in a facility that was and remains the league's best. All of that investment hasn't led to tangible results in terms of consistent championships and NCAA appearances. So now you want to bleed an additional 500k off the football program? And yes, I understand you are talking about the league as a whole, but this would affect us as well. Are we going to cut Frank's staff salaries? That's a sure way to undermine our significant progress on the gridiron. As to our inability to perform in bowl games, I lay part of the blame on a funds shortage that requires us to send our team home during the break and spend only minimally on pre-bowl practice. We have had to half-ass our approach to these bowl games and we've seen that our team has in generally not been well prepared as a result.
Setting aside the internal contradiction in your response (i.e., giving basketball more money won't help the league's competitive standing, but reducing football budgets will harm us on the gridiron), you keep wanting to focus on an individual school, when I am talking the league as a whole. I won't disagree that Ohio has failed to maximize its advantages over the rest of the MAC on the basketball court. But that doesn't mean that adding $500K to the basketball budgets across the entire league wouldn't significantly improve the MAC's competitive standing as a whole.
If you look at the average basketball budgets per conference, you find that those conferences that spend the most tend to have the best results. Outside of the 6 BCS conferences, I don't think many would dispute that the Mountain West, A-10, MVC, and West Coast Conferences have generally been the best mid-major conferences over the last few years, with C-USA, the CAA, Horizon, and possibly the MAC in the next tier. Not surprisingly, that ordering directly corrolates to each conference's average basketball budget:
http://www.midmajority.com/redline
In contrast, given the current competitive and financial landscape in FBS football, the best we can hope for are routine appearances in bottom-tier bowl games. Sure, if the MAC cuts its football funding it might only send 2 or 3 teams bowling every year instead of the more recent 4 or 5 (in which case we'd actually lose less money). And perhaps we'd lose those bowl games by even greater margins than we already do. But once again, who really cares? No one outside a few die-hard MAC or Sun Belt fans remembers who played in the New Orleans Bowl this year, let alone what the outcome was. There is simply little to no possibility of the MAC making a significant national impact in football anymore. The financial disparity between the haves and have-nots in football today is much greater than even just a few short years ago.
Therefore, given our limited resources, I maintain that the most prudent course of action is to spend the bare minimum on football to maintain FBS status and our ESPN contracts (which I agree probably provides sufficient return over FCS football), and devote the rest to basketball. Is there a chance that the increased funding wouldn't improve the MAC's basketball performance? Sure, nothing in life is guaranteed but death and taxes. But given that basketball features a much smaller financial gap than football between the haves and have-nots, hoops therefore gives us a much better chance of making a national impact.