You'll need to back that up, my friend.

99% of athletic departments will cover the deficit one of two ways:

1. Student fees
2. General fund (tuition)

That's subsidy! You can't just operate at a loss the $$$ has to come from somewhere.

WOW. This is what the death of football looks like... Crazy!

UAB president leaving the meeting after telling the football team you're done.

http://instagram.com/p/wHjf_-zLiF/?utm_source=partner&utm...

[QUOTE=Recovering Journalist]Some interesting quotes from Ridpath in this piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/sports/ncaafootball/uab...]

Great link. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if all of the smaller conferences could band together to set standard pricing for playing games at the big conference schools to help make up those deficits and "force" some revenue sharing.

Want to schedule a C-USA team to play at Alabama? $1.5M for any team

A MAC school to play at Michigan? $1.25M

Collusion? No more so than what is already happening on the other side of college football. What other defense do programs have? UAB won't be the only one to shut down its football program.

Who else will big teams schedule? They need the "easy" wins and small schools should make them pay for them.

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/11430182/c...

Actually, C-USA is currently at 13 with UAB, so I imagine they will just stay pat at 12.

Did I hear a, "I'm gonna $@%@ you up!"?

It's impossible for me to view this as a singular event. UAB seems more like a canary in the coal mine for football and maybe beyond. The escalating expenses and the fees used to cover them are untenable. UAB faced a certain amount of anger for this decision, but you can bet there are other 1A schools that will see what happens over the next few years.

My bet is that nothing significant will change UAB from an enrollment or academic rankings standpoint. If so, I expect other schools to start doing a cost/benefit analysis on athletics, and football is the most obvious place to start cutting for many reasons. To name a few: It's the biggest expense for most departments, it has increasingly well-established negative health consequences, it isn't played by women (who make up the majority of the population and most student bodies), the greed of the Power 5 has pulled back the curtain on the illusion of competition for the rest of 1A, and pretty soon the pool of players and fans will shrink as parents stop letting their kids play.

UAB may well just be (trail)Blazers in the inevitable death of most money-losing college football programs.

Remember that when a school has football, Title IX requires them to add an offsetting 85 women scholarship athletes, and ~120 women sports participants. Once they drop football, they also must drop probably 5-6 women's sports. If they don't drop the women's sports, Title IX will require them to add back some other men's sports to keep the number of scholarship athletes equal, and the expected savings will evaporate.

Great point. That's something that a lot of people don't realize. Not all athletes at schools who aren't football or basketball or volleyball players get full scholarships. Half-tuition and quarter-tuition scholarships are very common in small athletic departments. When I was at X, I think the baseball team only had 7-10 full scholarships to give out, so they split them up.

The question is football is a net money gainer or loser.

Not if you plan to keep offering the same number of scholarships. Then the question is how much does the substitute sports cost vs. football's net (of revenue) cost. I think it would be very close. Probably not worth losing the value of football.

If you plan to reduce scholarships for men and women (which may be UAB's plan), then yes you save money.

Except the Alabama system has plenty of money to pay for the UAB program. But Paul Bryant wanted it gone, so it's gone. This decision has very little to do with money.

That's the thing I don't quite get. UAB has been bad yes, but they haven't been EMU bad. Only twice in their history have they won only 2 games in a year (2007 and 2013). Looking at their history, it doesn't look awful for a program that started 23 years ago. And it's not like they are in a bad area. They are located in the largest city in Alabama in a talent rich South. Granted, there are probably slim pickings amongst all of the other teams, but there are worse places you can play football (Idaho, EMU). If you get the right coach in there, which Clark definitely seems to be, then what's the issue?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UAB_Blazers_football...

After reading more and more about the personal side of this story with Bear Bryant's son and the Alabama Board, one has to think it wasn't just because of the numbers or the fan base wasn't there. Something deeper is going on here.

^Yes, I'm dying for some investigative journalism here.