***This is the second of a four part series looking at the biggest factors surrounding a move to the FBS.

Part 1: Competition

Money

Now, the biggest issue facing the university itself is the money needed to move up. It is no small thing. As was pointed out in an attempt at taking a swipe at SDSU and USD by a certain writer, SDSU gets 45% of its athletics budget from institutional support. Keep in mind, that is one of the lowest percentages in the entirety of the FCS. And we all remember how the BOR reacted to the last jump SDSU made without the yotes, imposing bans on increasing student fees (something you can notice they didn’t do to the yotes with their 66% of funds coming from the school). I think it would be smart to assume they will need to get the money mostly through private dollars, and SDSU will need a lot of them. Something to keep in mind when you move up to FBS is you are adding scholarships, and a lot of them. The athletic department pays the school for those scholarships, and you aren’t just adding them to the football team. You have to match those on the womens side as well. Just in scholarships alone, if you got in-state tuition for half of the athletes you brought in, you are adding $486,376 for the 44 scholarships (22 for football, 22 for women) you need to add. That’s not taking into consideration the possibility of needing to add extra women’s sports to accommodate those scholarships (cough, cough, women’s wrestling, do it) and those costs. Then you can pretty well count on almost doubling most of your coaches’ salaries in your major sports. Which brings us to the athletic budget and the possibilities for a conference. 

Lets go through the average budgets for what are the 4 possible FBS conference options. You have CUSA, the MAC, the Mountain West, and the AAC. Now not all of these are likely, some are more of pie in the sky, but these are the four I think there is at least a small chance of happening. I do think the AAC would be pie in the sky stuff, but I throw it in there just because. The average athletic budget for a CUSA school is $31.784 million, the MAC is $25.387 million, the Mountain West is $46.187 million, and the AAC is $41.5 million. Now CUSA and the AAC both have private schools that don’t report their budgets, so those schools could tilt the budget one way or the other. Plus there are tons of factors when it comes to budgets, like tuition cost which will change the amount you’re putting into scholarships, the cost of building in certain areas compared to others, etc. But in the end these numbers give you a rough idea of what it would cost to compete in these different conferences. And don’t kid yourself, the money matters. How much it gets maximized can be debated, but the SDSU program made the leap to national contender when there was a much more serious investment into the program by donors and by the athletic department. And, with the geographic location of the xDSU’s, you can likely expect to need to have a budget that is towards the top of the conference to compete across the athletic department just based off of the extra dollars that will have to go to travel compared to the hypothetical conference mates. The harsh reality is the xDSU’s are in a brutal spot when it comes to any G5 conference and the geography of it. And some will say “geography doesn’t matter, look at team x or team y”, which isn’t applicable as much to this situation. That’s because those teams that are in far flung locations, the majority of the time are in P5 conferences where money is so plentiful it doesn’t matter. The G5 doesn’t have media contracts generally that allow a team moving up to simply absorb those costs. As seen prior to this, just to meet the average budget SDSU would have to add $6 million per year on the low end and up to $26 million on the high end to meet the average budget of these conferences, plus adding extra to take travel into account. There will be a serious challenge when it comes to FBS when it comes to travel, there won’t be many bus trips. 

When you compare the conferences we selected, nothing is close. But there aren’t any conferences that would add a FCS team close anyways. And no, the Big XII or even more certainly the B1G are not ever adding the xDSU’s straight out of the FCS or possibly ever, so just let that go now. However, there are two that sound like they should be good geographical fits at first blush. The immediate thought I used to have was that the MAC was a pretty decent footprint for SDSU. But then you go to the map. The closest school in the MAC is 576 miles away, which isn’t terrible. However the conference stretches all the way to Buffalo, NY. That’s a whopping 1,157 miles from Brookings. Yes they are an outlier, but the majority of the conference would be a similar trip to going to Youngstown, which is the furthest road trip in the MVFC. Also, you’re changing time zones, which can wear on an athlete. Prepare those airline miles cards, cause the athletics teams will be flying, often. Now, look at the Mountain West. The immediate thought is schools like Colorado St and Wyoming are close, but the reality is the closest school (WY) is 673 miles away. And every other school is quite a bit further, never mind the flights to Hawaii (those would be sweet though). You’re also jumping not just one time zone in that conference, but multiple. That does make this more difficult. Looking at CUSA, the closest school is Western Kentucky, in Bowling Green, KY, 943 miles away. The furthest trip is to the tip of Florida to go to Florida International in Miami 1878 miles away. The AAC isn’t much better with Tulsa at 617 miles all the way to FAU 1840 miles away.

Moral of the story is, the travel budget to go FBS is not small, its quite massive. Especially when you consider sending soccer, track, volleyball, baseball, swimming and diving, etc to all those locations on top of football. It is no small feat that can make it difficult for athletic departments to be successful. There is a reason a fair chunk of NDSU fans are hoping for a football only invite, and this cost is most of the reason for that hope.

Go Jacks!

Brendan

Brendan is a cohost of the wildly successful “B-Team Podcast” and the author of this four part series.