kreed5120

I hate to admit it, but dre is right here ☝️. Akron has as nice of facilities, if not better, than pretty much every MAC team. The university has kept trying to throw money at football to solve its problems. The problem is we've had a poor string of ADs who have in turn have hired some pretty poor coaches. The blame should be on whoever hires the AD, which I'm guessing would be the BOT.

Outside of Akron, the newest MAC football stadium was built in 1993. I'm pretty sure the only stadium that has seen a meaningful renovation this century is the Glass Bowl. We pour more money into football than our peers, but get worse results. I hate to admit, but maybe Kent was onto something by just punting on the sport to focus on its other sports.

Between buy games, CFP money, and tv money football generates the bulk of the athletic departments revenue. I'm not a big fan of the football program myself, but there is no denying that it's the biggest revenue generator for the athletics program. More than soccer and men's basketball combined.

I'd figure most would transfer anyways. How many scholarship baseball players stuck around? And that's even when we offered to let them keep their scholarship

Not to mention reduced payouts from P5 schools, no FBS playoff pool money, and no tv money. The TV deal alone pays 833k per year. At 35k per scholarship that alone is enough to fund 23.8 scholarships, which makes up the difference between FCS and FBS.

From how I understood the wording is that 4.4 million figure doesn't represent 23% of athletics overall costs. It represents a 23% reduction in direct institutional support. Pretty much they subtracted revenue generated from overall costs then reduced costs by 23% of that.

The thing about tennis though is those courts can still be used by the students and community.

Yep, especially since I don't recall seeing one article ever posted about cross country, tennis, or men's golf in my however many years frequenting this site. Then again I'm sure I'd be more relaxed in my finances if I was spending someone else's money instead of mine.

If those 3 sports cost 4.4 million combined to run, they should have been cut 10 years ago.

I'd be surprised if baseball has more than 3 scholarships currently. When they announced they were starting the program back up they said scholarships would be funded through donations. If they have 8 that means that either A) This program has a ton of donor support or B ) The university lied. I suppose B is a possibility, but I still doubt they have 8 scholarships. Edit: I still think we should have required a $5-$10 million endowment to be funded before bringing back baseball. That's great we have a handful of guys cutting checks now, but eventually those checks will quit coming and we'll be stuck flipping the bill.

Didn't someone post an article a few days back saying WMU managed to cut 6-7 million from their budget without cutting a sport? They were already at 16 teams so they couldn't cut another team. If they were able to do that without cutting a team, we should have some flexibility since we're in a position to cut 2-3 teams.

It's 14 sports to be D1, but FBS requires 16.

You're overlooking the fact that each student pays x-number of dollars in student fees that are to help cover the cost of athletics. If we have fewer students, we're collecting less in student fees. I'm not saying we should have cut athletics spending 23.7% just because enrollment fell 23.7%. I'm saying I don't feel we should have increased it 9.4%.

I'm obviously a fan of athletics. That being said I can't disagree with everything those academia faculty are saying. Had we kept athletics spending in check the last 15-20 years, we wouldn't be in a position to make such drastic changes now. There is no way we should be supporting 20 D1 sports when we're only required to support 16.

The private schools will never let NIU in. They would just be an extra mouth to feed and would be an anchor to a basketball conference that is wanting to return to being a multi-bid league.

What FBS conference is a better regional fit for NIU?

We'd come out way worse. Right now athletics generates ~10 million in revenue. If there are no games then we get none of that. We'd save some costs on travel and game day staff, but not $10 million worth. We'd still have to pay coaches, fund scholarships, and pay for facilities financing and upkeep costs.

For Akron who's kind of in the middle probably not. If Buffalo has to travel to NIU that probably requires chartering a plane, which can be costly.

We'll continue to play everyone at least once, like we do now. We will play 9 teams 2x and 2 teams 1x. Edit: I'd kind of expect them to still preserve division style schedules where we'd play Buffalo, Ohio, & Kent 2x. If the MAC is looking to do whatever it can to reduce costs it makes more sense for them to have Buffalo play Akron 2x instead of having them play NIU 2x.

The AD has already started to begin to schedule 2 payday games per year. Look at the 2018, 2021, & 2022 schedules. The people saying that we should be playing 2 payday games per year aren't the same ones saying that we should disband the program.

Was there anyone who seriously thought we'd be dropping out of D1? There are schools that spend under $5 million/yr and 'compete' in D1. Even with a 20% reduction to athletics spending our budget would be $27.9 million. That would still put us ahead of what NIU and BGSU are currently spending. All these other schools are going to be making cuts as well so we'll still end up being somewhere in the middle of the MAC spending wise.

With baseball the program was terminated immediately a few years back. The university did agree to honor any and all scholarships if players decided to stick around. I imagine they would do the same now. Most players transferred anyways as they wanted to continue playing baseball.

Akron's financial crisis agenda.

The scholarship cost is greatly inflated IMO. Akron has the extra capacity in its dorms and classrooms to absorb the students. Particularly now as we over expanded thinking enrollment would balloon to 30k+, but now it's down to 20k. Sure, it costs money to feed them and they use electricity so I'm not saying there is no cost associated with them. I just feel it's much less than the stated cost. Being able to eliminate and/or reduce travel costs and other coaches/admins would IMO be what actually substantially saves the university money. Edit: Perhaps the university should look into selling off Polsky or lease out a few floors for office space.

I'd imagine the overhead is quite low once you get past the initial start up costs. Not sure we'd be saving much by cutting it, but I could be wrong.