(01-24-2018 08:38 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(01-24-2018 07:53 PM)Tom in Lazybrook Wrote:  

(01-24-2018 07:14 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-24-2018 05:16 PM)TrueBlueDrew Wrote:  

(01-24-2018 05:06 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  There's zero evidence that, e.g., Appalachian State's degrees are more valuable because they are FBS now than when they were FCS.

But it's a hard truth that student fees and transfers have gone from $6m to $20m. That's $14m in cold cash lost every year.

You consider it lost and I consider it invested. That's the disconnect.

Investments have to show a return, a positive ROI.

Except for FBS football - for some reason admins rarely seem to hold it to that standard. I wonder why?

To be fair, the other athletic programs lose plenty of money too. Its just that football is a LOT more expensive and requires additional investments in other money losing sports.

Most G5 FBS athletic departments are on track to individually lose 150,000,000 to 200,000,000 over this decade. Two. Hundred. Million. Dollars. At almost every G5 institution. And the FCS schools are losing plenty of money too.

They aren't losing 15-20 million dollars a year, not even one of them.

Actually, they are. Here's a list of school deficits from a few years back. http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

I've actually looked up a couple of school's financial reports that break out revenue and expenses by sport and they appear to match up reasonably well with this study. Many public institutions don't break out athletic revenue and expenses so its hard to validate the numbers for each institution, but for the ones I was able to find the data for, it does appear to match up.

Here's some fun numbers (I think you're from the MAC, right, so I'll use them - The Belt and CUSA are similar...the AAC's public schools actually have higher deficits)

Eastern Michigan - USA Today says 24 million deficit. Mlive says 27 million institutional subsidy. The school doesn't appear to report athletic costs and revenue as a separate line item in their official reports.

Western Michigan - 24 million deficit

Central Michigan - 21 million deficit

Akron - 24 million deficit

Miami (OH) - 23 million deficit

Northern Illinois - 17 million deficit

Toledo - 14 million deficit

Kent - 19 million deficit. I was able to find a NCAA report for them. Looks like the number for 2015 was around 20.8 million of a deficit. http://kentstatesports.com/documents/201...Report.pdf

Ball State - 17 million deficit

Bowling Green - 12 million deficit

Buffalo - 25 million deficit

Ohio - 21 million deficit

So, per USA Today, the average in the MAC is just north or 20 million per school....For a total per year of 241 million dollars in subsidies required to participate in MAC athletics. Or 2.4 Billion over 10 years. Looking at a few other sources, it doesn't appear that the USA Today numbers from a few years back are out of order here. There might be something that USA Today missed. These numbers do appear to include scholarship costs, which might inflate the deficit slightly (as there's some incremental cost that is probably less than the per unit cost, but it looks like its based off of University reporting).

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And the MAC is by no means unique in the G5.