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This article is a few days old so I suspect most have already seen it, but Briggs is again a wise voice at the Blade. Not without flaws, but the premise is correct. Curtail football spending. Spend PROPERLY and COMMIT to basketball conference wide. No excuses for us ruining MAC basketball so we can spend our asses off to still be a bottom tier conference in football.

https://www.toledoblade.com/sports/coll ... 0220326091

This column doesn't make much sense to me. Briggs claims he isn't proposing that "MAC football should drop to a lower level of Division I, or even that schools should rob Peter and dial back their autumn budgets." But then he seemly goes and argues that.

I think.

It's actually hard to figure out what he's actually proposing in that column.

Basketball and hockey should be the "revenue" sports that get the most attention here. In hoops obviously you have a chance if you get into the tournament, and we've already experienced success in hockey.

I love college football but the direction the major programs are going, and with the transfer portal being what it is, the mid-majors are going to get swallowed up and basically become farm systems for the P5. Basketball may end up that way too, but the one and done rule might allow the mid-majors to remain competitive even with that landscape.

These departments bend over backwards trying to prevent you from seeing how much they lose in football.
What is your best case scenario?
WMU with Fleck a few years back. What did that get WMU? That springboard them to a big time run of MAC championships and national attention. Nope it didn’t. They are mediocre as ever.

Schadenfreude wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 4:03 pm This column doesn't make much sense to me. Briggs claims he isn't proposing that "MAC football should drop to a lower level of Division I, or even that schools should rob Peter and dial back their autumn budgets." But then he seemly goes and argues that.

I think.

It's actually hard to figure out what he's actually proposing in that column.

Yeah I think the tone of his article was what I've been saying for awhile but he was afraid to come out and say it.

My opinion has long been the MAC should put a hard salary cap conference wide on football spending. D1 fbs requires the scholarship commitment but doesn't say we have to keep spending more and more on coaching with zero returns on that investment.

Cap spending on football. Somehow...tied to revenues, tied to overall AD spending, I don't know but something. Yeah we'll be a bottom 2 conference in football every year, but so what. We're basically bottom 4 anyhow. FBS football is fine, and makes more sense than FCS, but everybody spending millions on coaching makes zero sense.

hammb wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 6:35 pm
Cap spending on football. Somehow...tied to revenues, tied to overall AD spending, I don't know but something. Yeah we'll be a bottom 2 conference in football every year, but so what. We're basically bottom 4 anyhow. FBS football is fine, and makes more sense than FCS, but everybody spending millions on coaching makes zero sense.

There isn't much that juice on that orange. Do you think we spend more than a couple of million on our entire football staff? If so, it probably isn't that much more.

It seems to me MAC schools earn significantly more prestige in their current situation -- playing at the highest level of college football in front of national television audiences, occasionally beating Power 5 schools and occasionally cracking the Top 25 or Top 15 -- than they would defunding football to try to chase the Missouri Valley or whatever.

The Peacocks last week got more prestige than any MAC school has gotten in football, probably in our lifetime. Oh, but what about WMU in the cotton bowl some might say? Well you want to know how to tank the ratings of a major bowl game? Put a MAC school in there. Sure the game was played on a Monday afternoon...that negatively impacts the ratings, but the whole reason for THAT is that WMU was there. In terms of garnering interest and prestige nobody wants to watch the MAC play. The absolute pinnacle of MAC football (not sniffed since, fwiw) garnered a whopping 5.4m viewers. Source: https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2017/0 ... igan-espn/

Conversely the Peacocks game on Sunday pulled 13.6m viewers. After just pulling in 10.2m viewers on Friday night. Even the early round games of an NCAA tournament typically garner 2-3m eyeballs. 1 win in March and you're instantly catapulted past any amount of viewership a MAC football team will ever see.

That means, in the past 4 years OU & Buffalo (twice) have definitely reached more eyeballs than any MAC football program since who knows when. Hell they've probably reached more eyeballs than all MAC football programs combined in the past 4 years. Like it or not, if the goal of sports is to achieve prestige and national attention(which I'm uncertain of, but when we're talking about the expenses to students that's really the only justification) March Madness is BY FAR the better bet for the MAC than football. The football powers that be have done everything to minimize the eyes and chances on MAC programs. The football playoff has rendered even the "major bowls" completely irrelevant and unwatched...that compounds itself when a MAC team (or similar level) is in those major bowls. Unless you're actually holding out hope of being Cincy and making it to the actual playoff (which is not even a real possibility for MAC teams, Cincy spends like a low tier P5 school, many times more than any MAC school), there is zero chance of touching March Madness level audiences. Memphis was the last G5 team in a "major bowl"...6.2m views.

The MAC has shown in recent years that the top of the conference can compete and win in March. The numbers show, inarguably, that winning games in March has more prestige value than anything MAC football has accomplished in forever. Moreover it costs less to compete at a higher level of basketball than it does to flounder where we currently are in football. If the goal of our millions in athletic expenses is to get our name out there and increase our national brands getting multiple teams in to March Madness and continuing to see them win games would be a FAR better ROI than football.

You want to argue FCS football makes no sense, I'm fine with that. In reality jettisoning football entirely is absolutely the smart thing for the entire MAC to do, but that would mean dropping D1 in almost every other sport. I think the smart course of action for the MAC would be to challenge the NCAA that they can afford to maintain D1 in everything else (and actually COMPETE!) if they got rid of football. Get the rules changed. Football on the FBS level has become a monstrosity of expense that is just absurd. Even moreso when you realize that we (and many other MAC schools) are eventually going to have to re-invest in stadiums that nobody actually visits.

hammb wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 9:08 am The Peacocks last week got more prestige than any MAC school has gotten in football, probably in our lifetime.

I don't know about that. Without question, a podunk Catholic school in New Jersey making a deep run in the men's basketball tournament captured the nation's imagination and got good ratings in a tournament with many built in eyeballs. But at the end of the day, everyone knows St. Peters is still a podunk school.

By playing FBS football, MAC schools send the message that we are more than podunk schools like St. Peters. We are national universities that compete with the very best.

In reality jettisoning football entirely is absolutely the smart thing for the entire MAC to do,

FBS football is the MAC's brand. It's what elevates us above most other Division I conferences. It is our differentiator.

I find it unfortunate for people on this board to speak so often of cutting athletic programs. It isn't right. We should cheer on all the programs and not pit one against the other.

But if people here are going to insist that we need to cut another sport to sink more money into a basketball program that has floundered for 55 years, even after an enormous investment from Bill Frack, I have some ideas. But I certainly wouldn't start with football, where we actually have had some success over the years.

but that would mean dropping D1 in almost every other sport.

There is no rule requiring Division I schools to play football.

If your goal is to model BGSU's athletic department after Wright State or Cleveland State, that's an approach, I guess. But it sure wouldn't be mine.

Bashing St Peter's...a fine institution...to make the MAC seem like a bigger deal is distasteful. It also plays into the hands of the P5 conferences who would no doubt refer to the MAC as "podunk".

We spend a ton of money on football. It's an arms race we cannot win...nor should we try to. I would like to see conferences like the MAC take a unified approach to controlling costs . I genuinely think it's the only way to sustain anything close to D1 football here

Schadenfreude wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 10:20 am
There is no rule requiring Division I schools to play football.

If your goal is to model BGSU's athletic department after Wright State or Cleveland State, that's an approach, I guess. But it sure wouldn't be mine.

Hmmm...did the rule change?

I thought that you had to either be D1 in everything or you could be D1 in a single sport but not the rest. I guess maybe my misunderstanding is the differentiation between even having a sport or not. By not offering football at all we could maintain D1 status in every other sport? For instance I thought the MVC teams were D1 in basketball only. Looks like I'm mistaken.

In that case you can erase my entire posts. The MAC should jettison football entirely today and commit in effort to an athletics conference similar to the MVC. Even the Horizon league makes far more sense.

I'll be honest my entire understanding of this has been completely wrong forever. It's now a complete no brainer. What "differentiates us" as you like to say is that we're effing stupid. The realization that we can compete D1 in basketball, hockey, etc and just make our football expenses $0? Easiest decision that there ever was.

(Oh and if anybody wants to wonder about ESPN contracts, the Horizon league pays its members about $250k/yr, to our $1m). SO we'd probably lose about $750k/yr in ESPN revenue.

FWIW, also, football amounts to just over $7m of our ~$20m in athletic expenses. Just over $2m of that is coaching salaries.

As for the unfortunate reality of discussing cutting sports on this board, I'm sorry, but when your athletic department is 90% funded on the back of student fees, budget cuts are completely worthy of discussion. If our athletics were self-sustainable I would never want to cut any sports. Hell, go look back 10-20 years ago at posts on this site, I was as big a fan of MAC football as anybody. I went to road games, I argued incessantly with big school fans about our worthiness, etc. But reality is stark...D1 FBS football has passed us by in a BIG way. We play the game in name only and continue throwing insane cash at it. Cash that is only available because we just keep raising tuition prices.

You want to keep spending $7+ million a year on football? Fine, take a poll of all students and incoming freshmen. If a majority of them are fine ponying up a couple grand a year additional debt to finance that program, by all means keep going. I suspect you'd find a vast majority of them would probably prefer we cut athletics entirely. I find the notion of cutting football to focus on sports we actually CAN compete in a far preferable path than cutting all sports, but I can certainly see the argument for the latter as well.

Denny Stolz beat Kentucky and went unbeaten until he abandoned the team before the Raisin Bowl with a coaching staff that could ride together in a mini van...it's not just the coaching salaries that have grown, it's the volume of coaches we employ...that's just one example of the profligate increase in expenses from football

hammb wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 10:56 am FWIW, also, football amounts to just over $7m of our ~$20m in athletic expenses. Just over $2m of that is coaching salaries.

As for the unfortunate reality of discussing cutting sports on this board, I'm sorry, but when your athletic department is 90% funded on the back of student fees, budget cuts are completely worthy of discussion. If our athletics were self-sustainable I would never want to cut any sports. Hell, go look back 10-20 years ago at posts on this site, I was as big a fan of MAC football as anybody. I went to road games, I argued incessantly with big school fans about our worthiness, etc. But reality is stark...D1 FBS football has passed us by in a BIG way. We play the game in name only and continue throwing insane cash at it. Cash that is only available because we just keep raising tuition prices.

You want to keep spending $7+ million a year on football? Fine, take a poll of all students and incoming freshmen. If a majority of them are fine ponying up a couple grand a year additional debt to finance that program, by all means keep going. I suspect you'd find a vast majority of them would probably prefer we cut athletics entirely. I find the notion of cutting football to focus on sports we actually CAN compete in a far preferable path than cutting all sports, but I can certainly see the argument for the latter as well.

I am curious about how much students actually pay in fees a year for athletics. For many anything over zero is too much.

hammb wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 10:46 am 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.

(Oh and if anybody wants to wonder about ESPN contracts, the Horizon league pays its members about $250k/yr, to our $1m). SO we'd probably lose about $750k/yr in ESPN revenue.

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.

"I am curious about how much students actually pay in fees a year for athletics. For many anything over zero is too much."

Roughly 13 million dollars per year is collected from student fees for athletics. BGSU raised student fees by 4% during a pandemic in which students couldn't attend games, and many of the services those fees pay for, the students did not have access to. The second largest percentage of fees go toward Recreation & Wellness which Bob Moosbrugger now oversees.

This same Bob Moosbrugger https://www.toledoblade.com/sports/bgsu ... 0220303107