Honestly, I'm not sure if this is remotely accurate. But if it is...I don't ever want to hear the "we spend too much on athletics" or "we've put too much $$ in football" argument again. We're at or below the MAC average in both. And the MAC is so far removed from the national average it's not even funny.

Sure it does. Logically, you should be compared to your peers. We are spending less than the vast majority of schools in a similar position to us. And, I might add, getting a superior output. It's hard not to label our football program as a success given the relative ratio of these inputs/outputs.

I suppose you could argue that we should spend as much as Heidelberg or Marietta, but that seems to be a pretty radical notion. For the foreseeable future, we're in the MAC.

Source please

But I don't care how much our peers are spending. I care how much we are spending.

You can't simply look at things in a vacuum. If we hope to be remotely competitive academically, athletically or in any other aspect of this school, you have to benchmark yourself against peer institutions. There is no way to measure or success (or failure) unless there is some basis for comparison.

Funny you say that: We probably should cut programs. We have far too many. But primarily, I'm talking about football. I don't want Ohio University to have it.

Don't try to reason with JSF on this. He says he doesn't want Ohio to have football. You are not going to change his mind.

Football comes at a physical cost to players that is too high. I don't think there is any way to responsibly sponsor the sport and I would rather not my alma mater exact that price from its students. I also don't believe the culture around football is healthy and is partly responsible for the problem of injuries and concussions the sport is facing.

Selfishly, I would rather the money go into other sports. As to whether similar schools don't have football, that's a really good question. But if a student is considering us or Miami or, I dunno, Bowling Green, is it the football program that sways people? I have to think there are a bunch of other things that are going to be more important in that kid's mind. I wholly disagree we'd be a "joke." And if we were, that speaks to a bigger problem. Perhaps that's not a community of universities we would not want to associate with.

I apologize if I made you think the idea was to save the university money. It's not. The university would find ways to spend it in other places.

69: I welcome a discussion on this. I have an open mind; it's how I got to this position in the first place. I've had it with other people around here before and it was a respectful dialogue.

My point being, spending more money on football isn't hurting our academics

to your point and partially tying in mine. If OU didn't have football many people would not want to come here. I would not have gone to OU if they didn't have a football team and I promise you they're many others like me. Don't think of football as a program that OU is spending money on. Think of it as OU putting money into advertising

I was a Michigan fan growing up. And you know what got me first interested in OU, watching the 2005 Mac tourney and watching OU beat Pitt on ESPN. Without ever watching those games I would've never been even remotely interested in OU.