They need to add Cradle of Coaches Plaza to this photo!!
Eh at that point move all of the statues inside. We’ll need all of the room possible for the 500-foot tall Chuck Martin statue if he wins the 2028 national championship.
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I need all the ultra wealthy with net worths of over 30 million to raise their hands please!
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If this projection is true, and all these teams leave the AAC for the ACC, is it still a good move for Miami? And for the record, Miami can’t get the hell out of the MAC fast enough for me. But I had to raise this given this projection:
I’m sure we’d be able to bring Toledo and/or WMU/Ohio with us to the AAC in that scenario, so yes the MAC would be completely garbage and the AAC would be way better
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Yes
The biggest risk to Miami athletics is staying in the MAC while some combination (or all) of Toledo, WMU, UMass (yes football has sucked historically but they spend), and Ohio leave. Those are the only programs actually spending money. If we are left in a MAC made up of only Miami, Akron, Kent State, CMU and the rest, thats a death sentence.
If there’s a mass movement like the one above, you have to think the AAC will be filled with the best teams from the Belt, CUSA, and the MAC and we need to be in there and not left with the dregs.
Its not about getting into the American as much as making sure we don’t get left in the MAC.
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This just out about ACC…
Still all speculative, but I hope we are working on this as well.
Left without comment.
There are some who have suggested or pondered, should Miami drop football to the FCS level to save money and/or funnel money elsewhere. And the answer is no. This is from an article from Extra Points which writes a lot on college sports economics, and their article on the Louisiana regents suggesting 3 Louisiana schools drop to FCS (because LSU has a 44 million dollar deficit!):
Dropping to FCS means athletic revenues decline on multiple levels
Doing some very quick back-of-the-napkin math, according to those NCAA reports, Louisiana Tech football reported FY25 revenues of $9,530,710. ULM reported a football-specific revenue figure of $5,292,436, while ULL reported $5,239,601.
The single biggest driver of football-specific revenue for those three programs? It wasn’t ticket sales. It was guarantee game money. Okay, technically, ULL reported generating $91,742 more in donor contributions than it did in guarantee game money, but for the other two, paycheck games were the largest revenue driver.
A guarantee game — or paycheck game, bodybag game, whatever you want to call it — is when a smaller school plays a one-off away game at a much larger school, in exchange for a hefty payout. FBS schools can command guarantees between $1.3 to $2 million, depending on who they play and how desperate that team is for an opponent.
FCS schools can’t command that kind of money. The going rate for an FCS-to-FBS paycheck game, according to the contracts in our database, is closer to $500,000. A reclassification would probably knock at least $1 million off the top-line athletic revenue each year, just from game scheduling.
Revenues from ticket sales, fan donations (at least in the short term) corporate activations and TV money would also all decline, at least in the short term. While none of the three programs are exactly rolling in big TV money now, dropping to FCS would mean leaving the Sun Belt in everything, and a hypothetical future conference home (Southland? UAC?) isn’t close. I imagine in the short term, total revenue would decline by at least 25 percent, if not more.
Would costs decline? Eventually…but not in the immediate short term
FCS teams don’t have to carry as many scholarships as their FBS peers, which could translate to more tuition money for the schools at large (depending on the kind of students they’re able to recruit as walk-ons). The three schools would also be able to get away with not distributing House rev-share payments to their football players (although right now, they’re not exactly spending that much on those guys anyway).
But as we learned from Idaho’s journey back to FCS from FBS, you don’t save millions of dollars in staff payroll right away. The insurance costs, travel costs, infrastructure and everything else stay the same, since it’s not like you blow up your stadium and build a smaller one if you move to the Southland. Over time, sure, you’ll save money (when you hire a new coach, you can hire a guy at $400,000 instead of $900,000), but not enough to suddenly bring a program into the black. It’s not like the Southland Louisiana schools don’t run deficits. Or hell, even LSU!
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And then you have the cost of doing business!! This is why athletes are fighting so hard to stay another year in college.
Outside of Idaho, I am not aware of any schools who have gone from FBS to FCS.
In fact, Idaho is the only school to voluntarily downgrade from FBS to FCS since those subdivisions were created in 1978 according to Google AI.
On the other hand, at least 10 schools have gone from FCS to FBS including Coastal Carolina, Liberty, James Madison, Delaware, Missouri State, Kennesaw etc.
Why???
The reasons—economics and school stature.
And I would never, and I mean never, advocate for Miami to drop down to FCS in any sport.
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The economic landscape has changed. Prior to NIL , the House settlement and the current congressional legislation it made little sense for programs to drop from FBS to FCS.
The costs of competing in FBS have gone up so much that it is now a fair question.
Very true.
However, with talk of a possible 24 team CFP format which would include a provision that FBS teams could not play FCS the talk is that this might be the death knell for some FCS teams who need the buy games.
https://x.com/jloesche88/status/2106113354469147117?s=20
The ACC might have a bunch of spots opening up
Just wondering. I would be ecstatic if Miami was able to join a different conference even if it meant spending $40M. But if this goes through and every decent team from these conferences upgrade to the super leagues, the investment becomes wasted capital. Would you all prefer just staying in the MAC with $40 M or moving to an AAC where the top 8 teams have been poached?
I almost hope we stay in the MAC and wait until the first moves are made and either try to fill an empty spot without paying for it or trying to create a new league with the best remaining teams from all of the torn down conferences.
I have raised that same issue, if the AAC, ACC are gutted is it worth moving. And I think the answer is yes. If we can’t get in the P4, we want to get into the best G5.
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Agreed. Just because the ACC gets gutted, does not mean the new version of it won’t be leaps and bounds ahead of the MAC.
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