Future of college football’s lower tier uncertain as teams bolt

[Harry]

Hypothetical sit- uation. Imagine a rich (and eccentric) billionaire sidles up to you in a sports bar one night, lays down a stack of $100 bills and asks, “Are you a Youngstown State football fan?”

“Sure,” you say.

“That’s very good news,” he says, “because I’m going to change your life. There is $100,000 in that stack and it’s all yours if you can answer one question: Who lost to North Dakota State in this year’s FCS

championship game?”

Could you answer it?

This has been a bad offseason for the Football Championship Subdivision, a clunkily-named collection of 127 teams struggling to remain relevant in a shifting college landscape.

The bad news started in mid-February, when Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez said members of the Big Ten would no longer schedule FCS teams, a troubling (but so far unsubstantiated) development that could cost teams like YSU at least $500,000 a year, hurt recruiting and diminish the FCS’s national profile.

“That is extremely troubling,” said Patty Viverito, commissioner of the Missouri Valley Football Conference, of which YSU is a member. “If what Barry says comes to fruition, and it leads other leagues to come to the same conclusion, then I’m beyond a little concerned. I’m really nervous.

“That is a very significant source of revenue and pride for our subdivision.”

The bad headlines continued last month when Appalachian State and Georgia Southern announced they would join the Sun Belt, becoming the latest FCS schools to move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision.

The move robs FCS football of its most decorated program (Georgia Southern has won six national titles, two more than second-place YSU) and its most famous (thanks to Appalachian State’s 2007 upset of Michigan).

The decision follows the recent departures of high-profile FCS teams such as UMass and Western Kentucky and could lead schools such as Liberty, James Madison, Villanova and Jacksonville State to make the jump, even though for every success story like Boise State, there are far more cautionary tales (like, well, UMass and Western Kentucky).

“I think Appalachian State moving up sends a message,” said Northern Iowa athletic director Troy Dannen, whose school also has explored making the jump. “If the best among you are dissatisfied, is anyone asking why? Is it a matter of what they’re reaching for, or is it a matter of what they’re running away from?

“I tend to think it’s what they’re running away from.”

A day after the Appalachian State/Georgia Southern announcement, Craig Haley, who covers the FCS for The Sports Network, wrote an article headlined “End of the FCS as we know it is looming.”

His most damning line: “It seems the FCS level can only take so many more hits while it grasps for national relevance in college football.”

At this rate, FCS may soon stand for Frankly, Can’t Survive.

But is it that bad? And what can the FCS to do to change things?

Read more: http://www.vindy.com/news/2013/apr/14/fcs-mess/

[untjim1995]

All that these FCS schools that are moving upward are going to accomplish is to pull down the bottom rung of FBS back to a level with them. MAC, SBC, and CUSA are going to be easy targets for the future culling of FBS. At that point, you'll probably have about 125 schools that will be in the new 1-aa. It will be interesting to see if that new level of football would follow a bowl system or go to a playoff system. If it were up to me, and assuming that we drop back down, I'd love to see a playoff system again. The bowl system is very antiquated, in my opinion, and I have always liked the FCS playoff system that the smaller schools use. If you were in a level of football that included the current members of at least the leagues mentioned above, I'd be more interested than I was when we were playing small schools in Texas and Louisiana, like SFA, SHSU, or Nicholls State. Keep in mind that I MUCH prefer us staying at the FBS level of play, but college football is such a mess right now that I just can't see us making that cut, nor do I see us ever having the resources to compete against the AQs of the world. I've posted this before, but I wonder how a dropdown in realignment will be felt here in Denton or in El Paso or at Rice. What would it do to places that realignment could eventually catch up to, like SMU, Tulsa, Tulane, or other AAC schools that aren't very big? Time will tell, but I suspect that a new i-aa is coming around the corner, sooner than most of us think.

Edited April 18, 2013 by untjim1995