Wow! Talk about attendance padding; Time for SJSU todump football

Yeah, according to this site, the SJSU football program's expenses are about $3.7 million and it's revenues about $1.8 million. So they lose almost $2 million a year. Basketball revenues are about $300,000 and they lose about $900,000. So net loss of about $600,000. Much smaller loss than football though the revenue / expense ratio for basketball is actually worse than football. Basketball is just on a much smaller scale than football.

Revenue for all the other men's sports is very very little, and they lose, collectively about $1 million. Women's "other" sports (everything but basketball) lose $2.2 million. This must be Title IX at work. Since there's no women's football team, SJSU has to have a lot of women's teams in other sports to make up for it. (I believe Title IX requires that the male / female student athlete ratio is roughly equal to the male / female general student ratio at the school.) So if SJSU dropped men's football, they could also drop some women's teams if they wanted to because there'd be a heck of lot less male student athletes at the school. So let's say that allows them to shave another $1 million off the women's team expenses. (Not saying this would be a desirable thing to do, but if they're looking at making some hard choices for financial reasons, this area would be pretty exposed.) So the total savings for dropping football might be on the order of $3 million per year. No chump change, that. This doesn't take into account many other factors, though, like the effect of dropping football on alumni donations, etc.

(By the way, does Title IX work the other way? In other words, is it OK for the ratio of female / male athletes to be higher than the ratio of female / male students but not the other way around?)

 

Yes. One reason some at SJSU oppose dropping football is that it would reduce the number of male athletes and cause the university to be non-compliant. The result would be that probably 2 women's sports would also need to be cut.

 

In Frisco, Texas, they are building a stadium for FC Dallas because a school district put up a bunch of money for a place to play football games. There will be football lines on the field in the fall. The upside for ElJefe and Co. is that they know they will have a team for more than one more year.

 

Just to be clear, football isn't the only sport that bleeds money. The women's athletic program burns through $3 million a year. Cost-cutting is needed on both sides of the ledger.

 

Exactly.

Given your situation, I can't think of a thing you guys should be less worried about than football lines.

 

Not that I'm saying they are, but even notwithstanding other's posts about the costs, how much does it change the equation if someone were willing to pay you to cut the program?

https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151334

 

Nobody is. You're reading too much into it. People are just commenting on what's optimum, not saying they won't go if there are lines. Besides, if the grounds crew at Spartan can do such a good job, I don't see why other grounds crews can't do the same.

Getting this back to its NQC subject and away from SSS, ain't it ironic that today's Mercury reports these changes for SJSU football:

* No more Read-2-Lead (aka Literacy) Classic. In '03, an outside promoter put on the SJSU-Grambling St. game at Spartan; the game drew 30K+ and everyone was happy. In '04, SJSU tried to promote the game themselves, and took a bath, because, like I said yesterday, nobody's ever heard of Morgan State.

* SJSU is adding three D1-AA opponents from the Great West Conference: Cal Poly-SLO ('06 and '09), UC-Davis ('06 and '07), and Eastern Washington ('05 and '08). SJSU will pay these D1-AA schools a minimum of $100,000 downside guarantee. This year, they forked out over $400K to Morgan State and their band.

So, while SJSU isn't stepping down to D1-AA, and they're certainly not dropping football (sorry, Revolt)...it does seem like they're taking a realistic inventory of their program.

 

Well, according to the article, the Spartans are averaging 6,468 fans per home game, with one (against fierce rival Fresno St. on 11/27) remaining. Their total attendance for this season so far is 25,874. They would need to draw just under 50,000 for the Fresno State game in order to get season attendance up to 75k for the 15k average. Since they can only draw ~31k max, I'd guess they're hosed as far as drawing 15k average.

 

Not necessarily, on either count. You can use a D1-AA game as an exemption toward bowl eligibility once every few years (I don't know the exact rule). But it won't bring more fans to Spartan...Spartan supporters are largely ticked off at those who signed these agreements that they didn't "think bigger". And as bad as this team has been, it doesn't necessarily help pad the record, either. IIRC, the Spartans have struggled with the last couple of DI-AA teams they've faced (with the exception of Grambling last year -- and they weren't too impressive there either).

That will be for the next athletic administration to figure out, not us. The last five years have been a nightmare and I have my own paranoid assumptions about the hidden agendas therein. The Walsh committee will have a large task in finding a candidate who can raise this Titanic.

Lawsuits will probably prevent the NCAA from ever enforcing those mandates.

 

SJSU are stupid.

With Santa Clara and UoP closing their football programs SJSU cannot survive. The NCAA will enforce their D I-A attendance requirements. They may give a couple of years grace, but the whole idea behind those requirements is to reduce the number of D I-A schools. Basically, a bunch of the current D I-A schools are pretenders or has beens. The NCAA wants their top division to consist of serious programs. Reducing the number of these schools makes it easier to determine a "National Champion." Having a Champion would make it easier for NCAA to sell football.

SJSU are in the NCAA sights. They will take away SJSU's D I-A status. Maybe not for 2005 or 2006, but certainly before 2010.

If SJSU were to voluntarily step down a division they might be able to save their athletics programs, but the idiots (I'm being generous) who run SJSU and Spartan Shops believe that only D I-A football counts. No other sports program is important in their view. The example of Santa Clara U right next door has exactly zero impact on their tiny minds.

Lastly, I should say that I am an SJSU alum. I used to go to football games at Spartan. I've thought that the program was on it's last legs since 1986. Check out the financial numbers. It's bleak. The SJSU master plan makes no mention of MLS or the Quakes. They are not counting on any revenue from MLS. That's because they don't want us.

Sorry, but that's how it is.

LONG LIVE THE QUAKES!!

- Mark

 

Not really. The big schools in the NCAA are re-thinking the requirements, because now they fear losing potential cupcake I-A opponents that they now use to pad their records and help gain bowl eligibility.

There are many reasons that there is no real I-A national championship. The number of teams at I-A status is not close to being one of the reasons.

It's not going to work. Schools that are failing to reach 15,000 will go to court and say that they have made their own institutional decision to participate at the I-A level, and why should they be forced to meet an arbitrary attendance standard?

Stepping down a division probably wouldn't work, because it would mean a big reduction in revenue with little reduction in costs. Pads and helmets and insurance and field maintenance. cost the same at I-AA as at I-A. Attendance would be lower, travel costs would probably be higher due to the low number of I-AA schools on the west coast. There would be no TV or bowl revenue (which currently they get as it is shared equally throughout the WAC), they wouldn't be able to get big paydays as a tomato can for the football powers.

Why should they count on MLS revenue, given that the Quake are going to be leaving the stadium one way or another in the very near future?

 

"Because we're a voluntary organization. If you live under our roof, you'll live by our rules. Otherwise, go somewhere else." That's what they'll say, anyway. And it might work. Or it might not.

SMU tried to fight the NCAA. They lost.

 

If they wanted to, they could have Quakes revenue they could count on.

 

This is the part where I said that the folks who run SJSU and Spartan Shops are idiots. They have always assumed that MLS would fail in the short run. So they have always planned to gouge MLS for every penny possible with no thought for the future. They also believe that they can resusitate their football program.

They used to get big attendance days whenever they played: SCU, UoP, and Fresno. With Santa Clara and UoP gone, they only get one big game every other year from Fresno, and Fresno is now in a different conference, so that might not last. When I spoke to these idiots they actually believed that they could get Stanford and Berkeley to play in Spartan every other year. Clearly, that hasn't happened.

Trying to apply logical models to the thinking (and lack of planning) at SJSU is a completely futile exercise. These idiots also told me that the Football program pays for the rest of the athletic programs, which as we have seen today is completely untrue and it was at the time of my conversation with them too.

LONG LIVE THE QUAKES!!

- Mark

 

Mark, you're lucky the system logged me out on a previous reply. Because you'd be seriously singed by now.

I will point out how far out of the loop you are. We've been in the same conference with Fresno State again for the past 10 years. Where have you been?

Way to support your alma mater. Get your facts straight before you spout off again.

 

Fresno being in our conference or not is a pretty minor nit given the rest of my points. I chatted with the SJSU folks in 2000, or was it 2001? At that time there had been some discussion of Fresno moving to another conference. I thought they had. No big deal one way or another.

And I gave up on SJSU football long ago. You may remember Mike Perez? He was clearly a serious Heisman candidate, but garnered zero votes. I believed then, and still do, that SJSU will not be able to attract "blue chip" players to their program because those players rightly believe that going to SJSU will dramatically reduce their chances of getting drafted by the NFL. If Perez couldn't get any Heisman votes and got drafted in the third round, what chance does a lineman or DB out of SJSU have? (Can you cite someone who has graduated after 1995?) This is just one more thing that hurts SJSU's pointy ball program.

And I'm wearing my flame resistant jacket, so have at it Spartucus!! Besides, you tend to have better information than me. Still, the SJSU idiots are totally focused on pointy ball to the exclusing and detriment of all else. They could promote their winning baseball and soccer programs and work on rescuing their basketball programs. All of those stand a much better chance of showing a profit that pointyball. All of those programs are sports where SJSU can or has recently done well. When was the last time they fielded a competitive pointyball team?

They'd be better off killing pointyball altogether and focusing their promotion on those sports (soccer, baseball, basketball) where they have done well and stand a chance of competing.

But what do I know?

LONG LIVE THE QUAKES!!

- Mark

 

With an advertised slogan of "One Tough Quarterback" I wouldn't have voted for Perez either - and I was at SJSU in '86.

Still he did try and live up to the rep - I think he got two roughing the linebacker penalties that year.

 

Perez led the nation in offense two years running.

He played in a professional style offense and he was great. Whether or not he should have won the Heisman, you'd expect him to get some votes, but he got none. Whether or not he should have won a bunch of awards, he should have been a higher draft choice.

So, if you're a pointyball player and you're looking for colleges to attend, why would you even consider SJSU? You'd have to have a season or two better than Perez to have any chance of being noticed by anyone. So the point here is that prospective pointyball players are going to look at the SJSU program with distain at the very least. Mostly they'll think, "I'd better go somewhere else if I want to play in the NFL."

It's just one more reason that SJSU pointyball is dead. They've had a losing program for years. Even their best players have almost no shot at the NFL. So it's hard to recruit good players. That means it's hard to fill the stands. (They had pretty decent attendance back in the middle 80's when they had a good team.) That makes it hard to have a money making program.

And with their two biggest local rivals out of it, they have almost no games that they can count on getting 20k fans in the stands. We could go on endlessly about this. I don't see any hope of rebuilding the SJSU pointyball program. I just don't.

LONG LIVE THE QUAKES!!

- Mark

 

Get a clue dude...

Jeff Garcia played at SJSU... Maybe you've heard of him?

Wasn't that Josh Parry from SJSU that I saw this past Monday playing for the Philadelphia Eagles? Yes it was!

How about David Loverne from SJSU, isn't he the starting LG for the Detroit Lions? Yes he is!

Didn't my pal David Diaz-Infante from SJSU earn two Super Bowl rings with the Denver Broncos? Yes he did!

As a rookie, didn't Johnnie Johnson from SJSU start in the Pro-Bowl? Yes he did!

I am sure I am missing others, perhaps Spartacus can fill in the blanks? While the program is down, it can be revived. The NFL sniffs out talent no matter how many people are in the stands so stop being ignorant with your clueless remarks Mr. Pointyball dork!