I still think a significant reckoning is coming at some point based on all the factors I mentioned earlier. Academic reconsiderations years ago spurred the Ivy League - once the dominant force in big time football - to completely restructure itself as non-scholarship, non-championship football. The University of Chicago, once a significant player in the Big 10 - completely de-emphasized decades ago and dropped to D3. A number of schools in the Southern Conference - like Furman, Davidson and VMI - used to play against fellow conference members VPI and WVU. George Washington dropped football completely. The SOCON split and went their separate ways years ago. Up East, Hofstra, UVM, Boston University and Northeastern threw in the towel and Fordham deemphasized. And that’s all before the extreme financial imbalance we’re seeing today. Nothing is permanent.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some schools like Rice, Vanderbilt, or possibly even Northwestern be some of the earliest re-evaluaters.
With the MAC, I think the re-evaluation will be triggered by costs, continued waining student and fan interest, and a loss of TV revenue due to a media shift to covering only programs in the Autonomous 5 programs…
If you give me a 50-100 year time horizon that you mentioned above then yes I think there will be significant changes.
Just remember that the MACs tv contract signed 5 years ago or so was a substantial upgrade over the past history- I am not sure I am ready to say ESPN is only interested in the P5. It could happen
What is true is that our attendance (students and non- students) is substantially lower than 20 years ago for football. I get the impression there in a nationwide drop over the last couple of pandemic years but we have been way lower for awhile
The media pundits would like nothing more than to just have to cover 40-50 very high profile programs. If the A5 fully separates from the G5 like guys like Sankey and Radakovich want to do, our media coverage may quickly drop to where FCS is now.
The casual college football fans without a firm commitment to any alma mater - the Walmart Buckeyes, Volunteers, Gators and Nittany Lions - only care about the local P5 team they’ve adopted. My brother’s stepson in Iowa is a huge Hawkeyes - Black and Gold everything fan - who cares nothing about his alma mater’s UNI Panthers. From my understanding there are a lot of Walmart Buckeyes on campus in Oxford. Many people are just classic “front runners.”
Those folks actually would prefer a mini NFL where it’s always the Michigan’s vs the Alabamas. And that doesn’t help us.
My daughter is at Rice, so I have some familiarity with their situation. Despite lack of success, there seems to be support for keeping Rice football in the highest division. Their coach came from Stanford and has been trying to instill Stanford’s “intellectual brutality” brand with the Owls. Their endowment is huge and, although no longer the top college program in Houston, they still have some strong financial supporters. They also have the benefit of moving from CUSA to the American in a couple years.
I have mixed feelings about this because on the one hand, I would be 100% fine with Miami winning national championships at any level, but it seems that unless our endowment was much bigger, we need to stay D1 to have a chance of getting the big money that comes with it. Look no further than Cincinnati to see the effect it can have. The other issue is we have 3 horses with football, basketball and hockey and when I look at schools our size who are making moves in the athletics world, they seem to focus on just one: usually basketball as maybe the operating costs are lower? It’s a fascinating topic.
Interesting insight. I guess I’m simply anticipating the killing of the goose that lays the Golden egg at some point - when costs rise and interest wains to the point where that academic community at many institutions decides to assert authority that many seem to have abdicated. Time will tell.
Indeed it is, Yellow. And the evolutionary timetable seems to me to be accelerating. We have never had so much change in big time college athletics as we have seen in the past 10 years. Your reference to Cincinnati is on point. I think now more than ever a program must spend large sums of money to try to buy success. Another example is Liberty, a come from nowhere program that is now paying its coach $4 million a year, buying its way into bowl games and used its financial clout to leverage itself into a conference during that conference’s existential crisis.
Even when Miami reeled off 33 consecutive seasons of winning football (defined as no season finish below .500) there was minimal financial support thrown Miami’s way. Sadly, that metric, save for a few wonderful FB alums who stepped up to fund the APC and the Indoor practice facility, hasn’t changed in any meaningful way.
All I see is an inevitable and continuing loss of relevance / stature for Miami and the MAC as the powers-that-be running big-time college FB move inexorably to something resembling an NFL model. Many years ago, I suggested an eventual landscape of four P5 college divisions, each consisting of 16 teams…and I see nothing to alter that view, though there’s still an outside chance that it may morph into a five division grouping totaling 80 teams…but many current P5 teams are destined for a lower tier
I also believe it’s likely, though less certain that the likes of the MAC, Mountain West, etc. (the G5 and several P5 outcasts) perhaps also including the Big Sky and Missouri Valley top dogs will somehow aggregate into their own regional groupings/ leagues and have some sort of season-ending Championship Tournament perhaps including a total of between 16-32 teams depending upon how many schools join at the revised next level.
Even a further substantial infusion of yet un-found money into FB at Miami and other similarly-situated schools will not likely save the inevitable avalanche that is still on the P5 drawing board under wraps.
Sadly, renmanez, I think you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. About 50-60 programs are going to declare themselves elite, grab all the money and then turn over the table and chairs of traditional D1 football. Cincinnati, Houston snd UCF have bought themselves a membership to the country club. Liberty, the Rodney Dangerfield program, has purchased a new tux, had a manicure and is desperately trying to buy itself in. A few others - like Memphis, Boise State and San Diego State are probably going yo apply for membership.
Unless you can buy your way into the exclusive group you’re going to be working kn the kitchen or chasing the gopher around the course. Nobody in the MAC wlll be trying to buy their way in.
Yep, MUHawk. As a 50 year Seattle Mariners fan who was highly involved with them for 16 seasons, I have seen what greed can do to the lack of parity and the inducement of fan ennui. Not one World Series in the franchise’s history - even though they nurtured Junior and ARod, acquired the Big Unit in a trade and brought Ichiro over from Japan. I couldn’t name more than one or two of their players right now even though they had a fairly decent non playoff year last year. I think old guys see college football essentially as a religion and many of the younger guys see it more as a transactional money train - either playing the game or betting on it.
I just don’t have any interest in an organization that purposely acts in opposition to the welfare of it’s members. I have a passing interest in the Pennsylvania teams as it’s my home state, but my overall interest in college athletics has significantly dropped in the last two years.
This is what I proposed when I suggested all schools with cardinal directions in their names had to all join one conference as it would simplify the landscape and add meaning. (Ok, it would do nothing of the sort, but I still want it!)
Miami has mismanaged the athletic programs somewhat over the past however many years
UC is almost twice the size of Miami and located directly in a major metro area, two attributes which allowed it to move up to the P5 and prevent Miami from doing so.
That’s not to say that Miami can’t do better but our cap is realistically being like App State, not UC.
Also, I agree with people that a “super league” would be bad for college football as a whole (and I already hate things like OU and UT going to the SEC) but I’m not really sure it would be that bad for Miami football.
There are already plenty of casual fans or people who don’t follow football that closely who think that G5 teams are in a different division than the P5. A total split wouldn’t be that different for Miami in my opinion. The real losers would be the bottom third of the existing P5 teams who could see themselves left behind.
I mostly agree with you MooreHawk, other than the fact that UC isn’t even the big dog in it’s own metro area. OSU, UK, IU and XU all take big bites out of that market. I think if UC was going to a regionally relevant conference, it would be a little different.
Whatever rule(s) that would be instituted would have to come from the NCAA or conferences. When was the last time any D1 school intentionally penalized itself in recruiting, competitively, etc? If any had balls we wouldn’t see these ridiculous coaching contracts, gaudy facilities, etc.