Briggs is right again

[factman]

Money goes to things like the rec center, chemistry labs, etc that all students don’t use too.

[pdt1081]

Bowling Green, through the MAC, also receives revenue sharing from the FBS so-called playoff. It also generates significant revenue playing football games at schools like Tennessee and UCLA.

What is the cost of generating that revenue? I.e. if you spend $5 million to bring in $3 million, is it worth it? I don't know.

I'm not an advocate of cutting any sport. There does come a time though when expenditures need to be evaluated and analyzed. Example above of spending $5 million and bringing in $3 million. What happens if you only spend $4 million? Can you still generate that $3 million return? How far does it fall, $2.5 million? At what point does it not make sense to keep increasing the debt?

[hammb]

The general fee currently sits at $790/semester for a full time student, 55% of which goes to intercollegiate athletics. That means a 4 year BGSU grad has taken on $3476 of debt solely to fund intercollegiate athletics.

Looking at the most recent pre-pandemic year budget the football program took about $3m of the $13m (more precisely, about 23%). So a BG grad is basically taking on $800 of debt ONLY for football. The vast majority of the rest of that intercollegiate expenses is tied to the non-revenue sports, although it is worth bringing into question why a $20m budget athletic department has over $3m of that budget going to non-sport specific support staff. Obviously that includes administration along with training staff, tutors, etc. Probably just the cost of doing business but seems like having 15% of the AD budget going to "overhead" is a bit high. I say that without looking at the budgets of anybody else though, so this could be normal.

Also worth noting that the $3m football expense was in a year we took multiple payday games to the tune of $2.4m in revenue. I think that's the only fiscally sane path forward is to take more of those type of games, but I think there's an argument that taking those games also puts a hard cap on the peak your team can reach. (2019 for instance had us only bringing in $1.8m in guarantees, upping the general fee athletic expenses to football over 30%)

[Flipper]

Money goes to things like the rec center, chemistry labs, etc that all students don’t use too.

Granted it was a long assed time ago...but students voted for the rec center...were they ever given the chance to vote on sports?

[hammb]

The MAC should jettison football entirely today and commit in effort to an athletics conference similar to the MVC.

I can see you really care about men's basketball, and I'm sure it has been difficult to see the basketball team be so inept over the past half century, even after a huge investment from Bill Frack and a brand new basketball arena. But it seems unfair to take your frustration out on the football team, a program that has actually been fairly successful over the years.

I'm 100% transparent in my bias. I love college basketball and it irritates the s**t out of me how little success we've had in that sport. This discussion has very little to do with BG's ineptitude on the hardwood though, and far more to do with how the conference is allocating its resources. BG has been inept because they spend stupidly; certainly since the Bill Frack money our ability to spend has been far down the list of reasons for our lack of success.

On the whole though there are plenty of Universities that have experienced basketball success spending less than BG. My argument/opinions have little to do with what I think it would do for BG specifically as much as the conference as a whole. College basketball is (at least for now) a far better allocation of limited resources than football.

The only argument for our current football spending, IMO, is that football still does more for the ACTUAL value of university athletics (on campus comraderie, spirit, gameday events, etc) than any of the other sports (maybe hockey being the exception). But I believe you can continue to gain those benefits without spending $3-4m a year in student fees. I do not live in a delusion world where I think our athletics should be profit generators, but I do think it's worth asking at what point these ancillary benefits are worth the money they cost.

[BleedOrange]

hammb, you are correct sir.

[Globetrotter]

The general fee currently sits at $790/semester for a full time student, 55% of which goes to intercollegiate athletics. That means a 4 year BGSU grad has taken on $3476 of debt solely to fund intercollegiate athletics.

That's insane. I am curious what it is at like Indiana and Ohio State. Yeah, no doubt we need to stop with football.

[hammb]

The general fee currently sits at $790/semester for a full time student, 55% of which goes to intercollegiate athletics. That means a 4 year BGSU grad has taken on $3476 of debt solely to fund intercollegiate athletics.

That's insane. I am curious what it is at like Indiana and Ohio State. Yeah, no doubt we need to stop with football.

No idea what OSU's tuition looks like these days, but last I heard they don't take any dollars at all from students towards intercollegiate athletics. Their entire dept is funded through their revenue sports, their TV contracts, their conference payouts, etc. They are in a pretty small minority in being able to operate a massive Athletic Department completely self sustaining (probably less than 20 total schools that can do that), but that's their deal.

[Schadenfreude]

The general fee currently sits at $790/semester for a full time student, 55% of which goes to intercollegiate athletics. That means a 4 year BGSU grad has taken on $3476 of debt solely to fund intercollegiate athletics.

That's insane. I am curious what it is at like Indiana and Ohio State.

This is slightly on the low side for the MAC. My understanding is that most schools outside of the Power 5 conferences have similar student fees. Even Cincinnati spends nearly as much per student on athletics from student fees.

Yeah, no doubt we need to stop with football.

It seems to me people on this board need to decide on whether they object to a student fee for athletics on principle or whether their goal is instead to divert more of the student fee away from football and into men's basketball.

If you object to student fees used for intercollegiate athletics on principle, then the solution is probably for Bowling Green to abandon the MAC, Division I, and perhaps all varsity athletics completely. (Even Shawnee State, an NAIA school, charges $150 per term for athletics, as I understand it.)

[Flipper]

I like Adrian's model. No scholarships...but they field something like 30 different athletic teams...all of them funded by tuition by the students on the team.

Men's hockey just won the D3 National Champions

[pdt1081]

I like Adrian's model. No scholarships...but they field something like 30 different athletic teams...all of them funded by tuition by the students on the team.

Men's hockey just won the D3 National Champions

That works at the D3 level because there are no athletic scholarships allowed in D3.

[factman]

………….. BUT their tuition, room and board is $49,529!

[BillyLP]

………….. BUT their tuition, room and board is $49,529!

Athletes typically don’t pay anything near that, though. I was offered a baseball spot at a couple of D-3 schools way, way back and they basically magnify any academic scholarships you may qualify for. None of them covered everything, by any means, but it knocked about 50% off. It was still too much for me and my family and I picked BG over going somewhere that was smaller than my high school.

[factman]

I understand that, but the point is many of theD-3 schools are still more expensive than MAC schools with the “activity fee”.

[Flipper]

I guess the point I'm really trying to make is that here are a lot of ways to finance sports. Just pulling money from the general student fees is kind of lazy and....wrong...when there doesn't appear to be much thought behind the underlying purpose and the necessity for controlling those costs.

The ONLY saving grace to our current football situation is the ESPN contract. It's money. It's also the reason why fan interest within the student population has waned because students don't want to go to a weeknight game ( and neither do I). There's years and years of data to support that.

Besides....College football sucks these days