Also worthy of note: Harvard, Iona, Davidson, Belmont, Saint Joseph's, Butler, Gonzaga, Wichita State, SIU, Saint Mary's all have one HUGE thing in common: They. Don't. Play. D1 Football. None of them.
Yep, this is the big key. It's not a coincidence at all that the mid-majors who have managed an upward trajectory in terms of status don't play D1 football. I'd add VCU to your list.
There's also other schools (basically all of the old CAA teams that jumped to the A10 -- Richmond, GW) who didn't even have to have sustained success to make the jump. All they did was commit resources and budget. Richmond's really telling. They went a solid 13 years between NCAA tournament wins. They won as a 14 seed in 1998, and got an at-large bid as a 7 seed twelve years later. No tournament wins in that time, just an investment in the program that resulted in an invitation to a better conference.
They also don't play D1 football.
While I agree with you on VCU, etc. - I was merely quoting all of the teams that bshott had in his comments.
I hate to have to pull this up year after year, but just because this is coming up eleven months after I last posted this, regarding why OHIO is NEVER going the route of Gonzaga/Butler/Etc: Thread link for those who prefer to read the context:
http://www.bobcatattack.com/messageboard/topic.asp?FromPa... "So at BLSoS's request, here is how a conversation with Jim would likely go regarding why OHIO should remain in FBS football, and why it should never leave the MAC.
I’ll try to make the explanation as linear as possible, as much of the logic ties into a decision tree format, however a number of items are interrelated yet not linear. This is a compilation of various conversations I have had over the last couple of years with Jim and other members of the ICA and Development staff, and I have added data and commentary for illustrative purposes. (apologies in advance for the lack of brevity)
First and foremost, OHIO is NEVER going to leave the MAC, and for the following financial reasons:
-The budget mechanism for OHIO Athletics (principally from Student Fees), and the continued pressure to reduce the volume of that subsidy by students does not permit significant increases in investment in intercollegiate athletics. For each of the last several years, the Office of the President has asked ICA to increase their self-sufficiency by seeking other revenue streams in order to allow the subsidy percentage from student fees to go down, and the subsidy has indeed been reduced in recent years.
-The MAC permits OHIO Athletics to sponsor their NCAA Division I minimum number of sports, which is important if you need to be able to operate as few DI sports as possible, and at the most efficient funding level possible.
-You can’t be a full MAC member (and by extension receive the ESPN subsidy) if you do not participate in FBS football.
-The MAC is largely a bus league, and because of that, MAC athletic budgets are able to operate at a built in discount to other mid major conferences. This is incredibly important when you are attempting to compete with the other mid major conferences. This permits the MAC to have much lower annual budgets than other mid-major peers while still competing at mid major levels in MBB and FBS. After coaching staff and admin salaries PLUS scholarships, the highest budget line item for each program is travel expenses. When you are increasing the number of flights and overnights for athletic teams because you are doubling (or more) the number of flights/overnights, you are creating a huge and presently unbudgeted increase into an already lean P&L. Example: If OHIO, who has the largest budget in the MAC for MBB, was accepted into the A10, its current budget would have to be increased from $3MM just to accommodate the spike in T&E, and those funds (that do not presently exist) have to come from somewhere. I don’t know in which hypothetical conference all of you want to participate, so I’ll leave it to you to determine how much more the travel expense line item increase is going to be to send every women’s and men’s team to schools outside of the MAC radius of Kent/Miami/Akron/BG/etc, and/or have easy weekend double headers like the EMU/CMU/WMU’s, which are easy to double dip during a weekend trip and help control the MAC athletics budgets so significantly as to make it such a great value to most of its members.
-Aside from the recent MAC contract with ESPN providing a significant cash infusion to the program, which is largely based on the MAC offering FBS football, and despite lots of significant effort from IMG and the OHIO Athletics Development staff, Athens remote location (with a very limited corporate/business base) makes it incredibly difficult to find major untapped revenue streams that would support significant increases in ICA budget to “go to the next level” or participate in an arms race in any sport. (see recent examples of inability to sell naming rights to Peden’s field and the Convo’s court) OHIO cannot afford to walk away from the annual subsidy of ESPN dollars when still seeking to find new partners in funding, especially when you major competition is the evil empire, CBJ and the Crew, which are actually located Columbus, the city in which most of the targets for corporate sponsorships reside. Unless you can think of a good way to move Athens closer to a major metro, nothing about this tough uphill battle will change.
-Additionally, the OHIO Bobcat Club, which has realized significant increases at the top membership levels (in members and dollars), has continued to fight to generate “average” level donors, and has struggled to do so since its initial bump of new donors when taking over from the Green and White Club. The difficulty is at the Captain level or lower, under $1,000, where OHIO is one of the poorest performers in the MAC in generating funds via alumni donations, this despite having increased the number of staff significantly to try to change this flat trend. While the program could use a T. Boone Pickens (a la Bob Walter/Perry Sook/Peterson brothers), it doesn’t have a T. Boone Pickens-esque problem, it has a Joe Lunch Pail issue. The most successful mechanism to incent fans to provide an increased charitable donation in recent years has been the required donation added to seats/parking in premium locations, but general membership in OBC that isn’t tied to a guaranteed seating positing continues to be flat year after year. The strategic initiative to attack that continuing problem is the new Building Champions program, which is seeking to double the number of donors from the presently stagnant level of members.
-Evidence of the fact that you don’t have a higher value donor problem is the repeated reliance on high level donors to increase in investment in our major sports WITHOUT relying on student fees to pay for nearly every major investment: what many of you call “the arms race”. Wren, Walter Fieldhouse, Convo upgrades, Sook Center, Strength and Conditioning Center Upgrades, all the “heavy lifting” for these was done by major gifts from major donors. Then consider that it was going to take a similar, donor based program to be the source of the Groce retention fund (that increase in salary was ALL coming from donor gifts), and long story short, you are NEVER going to pay Greg Marshall level salaries without major donors stepping up. And while OHIO donors were willing to get John to $750k, I don’t know that we have any major donors that are willing to pony up $1MM or more a year to stipend a head coach to even half of the Marshall level. Interesting comparison to Wichita, as I did a really quick search on their ICA budget and funding, is that Greg Marshall’s $3MM is not on their annual institutional budget, as it is funded off the books by independent funds. You can see detailed on their 2017 annual ICA staff budget that they have another coach that has $127k in funding coming from independent funds as well, and doesn’t hit the University/ICA budget. You can also prove this out in the USA Today 2015-2016 budget numbers, where Wichita’s total revenues are $28MM while their budget is $25MM that still requires a student subsidy, the $3MM salary fund being the private donations fill the gap between the two. (might not hurt that your basketball arena is named KOCH Arena…yes, that Koch…and to be located in a metro area with a combined total population of 650k, to work a trick like that)
So…despite these inconvenient truths, you still want to cut Football to reallocate those funds so you can increase your budget to a level even higher than your MAC peers and participate in a conference other than the MAC…
…But your problem is now Title IX! You can’t just drop from FBS’ 85 men’s scholarships to FCS’ 65…or for that matter no football at all…without REPLACING all those scholarships by adding men’s sports to retain the title nine balance. Again, you have to recall from above that in the MAC, OHIO is already participating at the minimum number of DI sports, and you cannot eliminate women’s sports/scholarships to even out the men’s scholarship reduction and remain DI. You already provide a full complement of MBB scholarships, so what are you going to do, bring back men’s track or tennis? Add lacrosse? If you do that, then you have to hire coaches and admin staff, and fund equipment and facilities to support the sport/s that don’t presently exist. And you could add scholarships to men’s sports that are not currently providing full scholly’s to all participants (Golf/Baseball/Wrestling/Cross Country), but would having most or all members of the other men’s sports we presently sponsor provide you the same return on investment and the promotional/television visibility that FBS football in the MAC does? Uh…no.
A great example for comparison’s sake is, again, Wichita, who has an estimated annual budget of $25MM without football (3/15/17 article from Kansas.com, when at the time they were in the MVC, and only 25% of that funding comes from student fees) They sponsor two fewer D1 sports than OHIO while moving up to the American for ’17-18, have the only one off agreement for hoops of being permitted to be a full member without FBS football, and their $3MM MBB head coach salary is 100% off of their annual budget books. That is the dream scenario, correct?
NOW, in exchange for American membership, you get to DRIVE all of your teams to just Cincinnati, but FLY them for every conference game for every sport to: Memphis, Houston, SMU, Tulane, Tulsa, UCF, USF, UCONN, Temple and East Carolina. What do you suppose that has done to their 2017-8 budget for the American versus the MVC? Follow that with needing to find the necessary $2.5MM entrance fee to the conference. (which for Wichita can likely offset in American tourney credits, and while they forfeited all 16 of the tourney credits they still have outstanding in the MVC, they will likely be able to replace all those in short order)
In what alternate reality can someone foresee the OHIO Board of Trustees permitting spending $3MM on a MBB head coaches salary, let alone increasing the annual operating budget of MBB to $7MM/year from the current level (a 300% increase), on the backs of donors and students, to be able to compete on a Wichita level in just MBB?
So ultimately, why would you deconstruct football and walk away from $700k/yr from ESPN to find a conference that will pay you far less for broadcast fees (because the American would be your only trade up for fees, and that invite is NEVER coming), voluntarily choose to reconstruct your entire ICA department in order to remain Title IX compliant, having to add new sports/coaches/staff when you already are in a conference that permits you to sponsor a bare minimum number of sports, allows you to spend a bare bones minimum in budget and permits you to be at the top level in all major sports? There is no logical reason to voluntarily do this.
This should illustrate why the topic of dropping or downsizing football is far more complex than just dropping sport X and throwing a bunch of money at MBB. And while many of here HATE the MAC because it is “keeping hoops down” as it is only a “one bid league”, and HATE football, because they perceive it as stealing funds from hoops, when you look at the present state holistically, MAC basketball and football and the ESPN contract is THE BEST thing for OHIO ICA, and is precisely what is permitting OHIO to increase the investment in MBB to the level it has in recent years.
Additionally, the OTHER best thing that ever happened to the MBB program in recent history was Groce’s success. With that came an aspiration (from OHIO and the remainder of the MAC members) to remain at that level, and brought the many increases to the hoops budget for things like: increased salaries and staff, travel via charter for some trips instead of always flying commercial, upgrades to facilities, etc. These are similar benefits that our mid major peers enjoyed before we started competing in the mid major hoops arms race. Like it or not, if you believe there is such a thing as an arms race in ICA, then you need to embrace the fact that it exists BOTH in MBB and FB, and we are participating in both. So suck it up, buttercups, MBB is in far better shape than it would have been without the present set of circumstances and Groce’s 2010-12 success, not worse.
Understanding in greater detail the difficulties in dealing with budget limitations while trying to remain competitive in D1 sports has actually led me to appreciating the MAC more, not less, and I hope we never leave it, as it allows us to retain the proper balance between the academic mission while still using ICA as the front porch to the university.
And…if you aren’t a member of the OBC on some level and you find yourself complaining about our level of spending to support MBB or questioning our commitment to success in MBB, you are actually part of the problem, and can easily participate in being part of the solution with your donation to the OBC."