about the cost of football. Look, First step to getting major football is getting a team on campus. As a D-1 school, you have to play either 1-AA or 1-A by NCAA rules and you have to play 1-AA for 5 years before going 1-A. So, the the program would have to play at 1-AA. 1-AA non-scholarship will cost between $300,000-$700,000 per year. Donāt be fooled by this multi-million dollar number people throw out. I refer you to the athletic budgets of Drake, Valpo, Dayton, and Butler where you can get real infromation.
Further, Title IX is not that big of an issue. Womens crew teams routinely have close to 100 members at a total cost of around $100,000 for the program. Futher, Title ix relates to participation, not scholarships. If you had 85 men, you could easily add 85 women without breaking the bank. Crew only allows 20 scholarships, I believe.
Okay, how do you come up with the funds? A $1-$2 per credit hour fee could be used to fund the entire football and crew teams, as well as, provide extra funds to fully fund the other sports, without selling one football ticket. At $1.50 per credit hour x 20,000 students x 15 hours per semester x 2 semsters = $900,000.
Now, most would want to start at the 1-AA scholarship level. This would entail a greater financial commitment, but it is doable. It costs between $1.0 and $1.5 million per year plus scholarship costs to field a 1-AA football team. Check out the costs at Villanova, a top flight 1-AA program. At 65 scholarships, the team would cost roughly $1.3-$1.8 million per year. Let use a student fee of $7 per credit hour. UNCC has roughly 20,000 full time students who take, on average, around 15 hours per sememster. Again, we do the math. We are talking about $4.2 million per school year without considering summer school or ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, parking fees, concessions, etc.
Now, you probably donāt have an adequate facility to play 1-AA scholarship football, but such a facility could be built for around $10 million. I refer you to Coastal Carolinaās stadium for an example. Further, you donāt want to start the program without alumni contributions. So, you start a fundraising drive. Tell the alums that you will start football once you hit $10 million. For $20 million and 5000 season tickets sold, you will play 1-AA scholarship ball. For $50 million, a place to play and 15,000 season tickets, you will move up to 1-A. Maybe you will never get there. Maybe you will get there quickly. However, you put the monkey on the back of the people that want it.
Donāt be fooled by this crap that the school doesnāt have the money. The simple reason a school like Charlotte doesnāt start football is because academics fear that contributions to the school will be redirected to the football program. Another hogwash argument. Studies have shown that those who donate to the athetic department will also donate to the school, but those who do not donate to athletics donāt donate at all. They use the imaginary scholarship cost argument to discourage the talk of football. BTW, do you really think it costs Ohio State $8000 per student per sememster to have an athlete on campus? The school has 75,000 students. I am sure they do not hire one extra teacher or one dean to accomodate 85 extra football players on campus. And yet, the scholarship costs are part of the budget.
I challenge you to look at real numbers from real schools and do the math. A study conducted by UT-Arlington about the costs associated with starting a 1-AA scholarship program is online. It talks about everything from scholarship costs to the cost of upkeep on the stadium. Very interesting stuff.
