The Chronicle of Higher Education June 30

The Chronicle of Higher Education June 30, 2000

Football's Have-Nots Contemplate Their Place in the NCAA

By WELCH SUGGS

Unless you're a hard-core fan, you would never know that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is a football powerhouse.

You would never know that the Minutemen won a national championship in 1998, or that they had a won-lost record of 9-4 in 1999, including a 62-20 walloping of their neighbor, the University of Connecticut, in their season finale.

You would never know any of this, and if you did, you probably wouldn't care, because the UMass football team plays in Division I-AA of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It's very hard to find anybody who cares about the teams in I-AA, other than their fans.

Unlike other sports, notably basketball, N.C.A.A. football has a fairly rigid caste system, with 114 teams in Division I-A -- the "big time" -- and 122 in I-AA. Within I-A, another split exists between the teams in the six conferences that participate in the Bowl Championship Series -- the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pacific-10, and Southeastern Conferences (plus the University of Notre Dame) -- and everybody else. The teams outside those elite 62 have a hard time making any money or finding any kind of respect.

That hasn't prevented a steady stream of colleges, most recently the State University of New York at Buffalo, from making the jump from I-AA to I-A in search of fame and fortune. UMass is considering the same jump for several reasons, chief among them that Robert K. Marcum, the athletics director, is tired of red ink.

"Normally, we lose about $1.9-million a year" on football, he says, although those costs rise when the team gets to play in the I-AA championship tournament. "The year we won the championship, we lost $2.1-million. But that's I-AA football."

Moving up isn't all that hard to do. Under N.C.A.A. rules, all a college needs is at least 14 intercollegiate teams (including seven for women) and a stadium that holds at least 30,000 people. It also must show that it has sold 17,000 tickets per football game for at least one season. Many teams can meet that goal easily by getting boosters, alumni, and local corporations to buy season tickets, essentially as a donation, even if the ticket buyers don't always make it to the games.

But joining -- or simply staying in -- Division I-A may soon become much harder. Under a new plan, which will be reviewed by the N.C.A.A.'s Division I Board of Directors in October, colleges will be expected to have an average of 17,000 actual, warm bodies in the stands, per game, averaged over four consecutive years, in order to be eligible for Division I-A.

The change would probably end I-A dreams for numerous I-AA institutions, including Massachusetts, and it could threaten the I-A status of some current members. The new policy has been endorsed by I-AA athletics directors and conference commissioners, and by administrators at the big-time I-A programs. They say it would strengthen I-AA by forcing teams to commit to the division, and would help Division I-A by making it more exclusive.

"The people in I-AA came to I-A 18 months ago and said, 'We've got a problem -- help us fix it,'" says Karl Benson, commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference, in Division I-A. "We're still convinced that, even though the criteria being proposed are more stringent, the I-A institutions that might be vulnerable can meet that standard."

However, the new proposal appears to be no more than a short-term solution to big-picture questions about the structure of college football. All I-AA teams have a hard time making ends meet. That has led several Division I-AA conference commissioners to try to find new ways of making their teams more marketable, such as by getting them their own bowl games or television contracts.

"If I-AA football doesn't get some kind of help in the future, we're going to find it very difficult to justify this expense," says UMass's Mr. Marcum. "I think I'm as good a football person as anyone around, but when you have idealism versus realism, it's tough to beat realism."

If the new standard for Division I-A membership is approved, the small fry will have trouble meeting it. According to The Chronicle's analysis of N.C.A.A. members' attendance records, 16 I-A institutions failed to meet the 17,000-fan average at football games over the past four years. And many attendance figures could be inflated because of no-shows. Another nine colleges averaged less than 20,000 fans per game from 1996 to 1999; if actual attendance were counted, many of them might fall below 17,000 per game as well.

"It's going to be a huge challenge," says Michael Rodriguez, interim athletics director at the University of Akron, where the Zips have averaged only 8,418 fans per game between 1996 and 1999. "Ohio State is two hours away, and every game is on cable TV, so we're competing with that."

There is one loophole in the new rules: If more than half of the colleges in a particular conference meet the attendance criterion, then the rest are exempt. Six of the 13 teams in the Mid-American Conference, in which Akron plays, surpassed the 17,000 mark in announced attendance for the 1996-99 period. Even assuming that those numbers are not inflated, the conference would still need one more team to lift its attendance above the threshold. If not, the seven conference members that aren't meeting the attendance requirement -- Akron and Buffalo, plus Bowling Green State University, Eastern Michigan University, Kent State University, Miami University, and Northern Illinois University -- could be downgraded to I-AA.

Think that sounds bad? None of the seven football-playing institutions in the Sun Belt Conference averaged more than 17,000 over the past four years. Only one conference member, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has managed to draw as many as 17,000 fans per game in a season. But it did so for just one year, 1996, when it attracted 21,710 fans per game, before plunging to fewer than 10,000 two years later.

Wright Waters, the conference's commissioner for a little less than a year, insists that community pride and better scheduling will enable its members to stay in I-A. While many Sun Belt teams travel to Bowl Championship Series institutions for $500,000 paydays, some have been able to persuade those big-name teams to come to their own stadiums, pumping up attendance. An institution like Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro, Ark., might be able to draw a big crowd for a game against a well-known opponent, Mr. Waters notes.

"I'd rather try to get 20,000 to a game in Jonesboro than 20,000 in New Orleans," he says. "In Jonesboro, it becomes easier to be more of a rallying cry, and [the team] can become the center of attention for a whole town."

The N.C.A.A. hasn't decided what would happen to colleges that fail to meet the 17,000-fan mark. If the new rule goes into effect in 2001, as expected, athletics departments would have to meet the goal during the 2001-4 football seasons. Those that fall short would be placed on "restricted membership" status for three years and could be subject to demotion by 2008.

I-AA teams that are considering moving up to I-A also could find their hopes dashed by the new rules. Alabama State University, for example, is planning to upgrade its football team by what the Hornets' interim athletics director, William Head, calls "the traditional route." It will sell big blocks of tickets to corporations. As a historically black university, though, it has an advantage when it comes to attendance. Alabama State and its rivals play what they call "classic" games at neutral sites, often drawing much larger crowds than at their home games.

The new rule doesn't include anything about neutral-site games -- under current rules, they're typically considered home games for one team or the other -- but Alabama State would have to draw a lot more fans to home games than it does now. The Hornets have averaged only 12,544 fans in the past four seasons, including home games and neutral-site games where they are considered the home team.

Mr. Head says he isn't worried. "If we've got to have 17,000 folks in the stands, we can do that. We'll have two [classic] games, with one over 50,000 and another over 30,000. We'll be OK."

That refrain is heard often among administrators at colleges in lower end of the Division I-A spectrum: Whatever the standard may be, they will meet it.

However, those colleges have a hard time being competitive, because of college football's caste system. The colleges in the Bowl Championship Series conferences have enormous stadiums, television contracts, and bowl tie-ins. Other teams are left out of the loop, so they have a hard time competing on the field or with their pocketbooks.

Colleges in the six championship-series conferences averaged 53,230 in per-game attendance from 1996 to 1999. On average, their football teams reported budgets of $6.9-million and generated revenues of $13-million in 1998-99, according to data published under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.

On the other end of the spectrum, the 54 I-A colleges that do not belong to the big-time conferences averaged 24,335 in football attendance between 1996 and 1999. They spent an average of $3.2-million on their football teams in 1998-99, with revenues of $3.1-million. That's a net loss of about $100,000 per program.

By comparison, I-AA football teams averaged 9,059 in attendance over the past four years, with $671,000 in revenues and $1.1-million in expenses.

Many of the less successful I-A football programs have more in common with I-AA programs than they do with their big-time I-A counterparts. And that has led several I-AA conference commissioners to talk about new ways of thinking about the structure of college football, such as getting rid of the I-A-I-AA distinction.

"One of the major problems we have in Division I football is that, for whatever reason, it doesn't mirror Division I basketball," says Alfred B. White, commissioner of the Southern Conference. "In basketball, every team is just known as Division I, although you hear them, in an unofficial way, called majors and mid-majors."

"Mid-major" basketball teams, from smaller institutions like Gonzaga University and Valparaiso University, have a chance to achieve national prominence through their performance in the N.C.A.A. men's tournament, Mr. White points out. Meanwhile, two of his conference's members, Appalachian State University and Furman University, have solid I-AA football programs that nobody knows about.

That cuts them out of the marketing opportunities available to colleges whose teams have a national reputation, depriving them of money from corporate sponsors and a higher profile.

Basketball's mid-major colleges have students and alumni and faculty members who would be good markets for sponsors, Mr. White says, adding that their athletics departments always need more money.

By getting rid of the I-A-I-AA nomenclature, smaller colleges could compete in postseason bowls of their own, possibly in conjunction with existing bowls or even in some sort of a playoff format. That would give them a shot at more exposure, the money guaranteed by a bowl committee, and a nice holiday for players and fans in the vacation cities that typically play host to bowls, according to Mr. White.

Institutions in I-AA and the lower levels of I-A also might create their own coalition of conferences -- a "mini-Bowl Championship Series" -- to give themselves more leverage. As it is, the series is controlled by its member conferences, not by the N.C.A.A., as is the case with the Division I-AA tournament. By creating a similar arrangement for I-AA institutions, the best midlevel football programs -- like those in the Southern Conference or the Big Sky Conference -- could attract corporate sponsors just like the I-A teams, says Doug Fullerton, the Big Sky's commissioner. "We need to take a hard look at moving the postseason out of the N.C.A.A.," he says.

Those kinds of changes are years off, but the stiffer attendance requirements could take effect soon. The N.C.A.A.'s Division I Management Council voted to approve the 17,000-fan average as emergency legislation at its April meeting, meaning that the new policy didn't have to go through the normal committee process for rules changes, and could have taken effect with this fall's season. However, the Division I Board of Directors, a panel of college presidents that has the final say, elected to send the measure to the membership as a whole, to get a better feel for the consequences of demoting programs to I-AA. The tougher requirement has ramifications for the N.C.A.A.'s governance structure, because conferences in I-AA have fewer votes on the Management Council and Board of Directors than do those in I-A.

Even if the new rule is approved, no institution will be forced out of I-A for at least seven years. By then, the Bowl Championship Series could dissolve, conferences may swap members, and football issues might be entirely different.

"The Board of Directors is getting this on their radar screen for the first time, and all these forces are beginning to gather," Mr. Fullerton says. "Who knows where it's going to end up?"

Football Losses and Gains

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is considering a rule to restrict membership in Division I-A to colleges that average more than 17,000 fans at their football games over a four-year period. Below is a list of the 16 colleges that sold an average of fewer than 17,000 tickets per game during the past four years, followed by a list of the top 16 colleges in football attendance over the same period:

Notes: Financial data are taken from reports published under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act. Figures in parentheses are losses. * Will join the Sun Belt Conference by 2001.

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