M4Fam did a great job of making the case that the RMU administration is not considering dropping football. My question is why? Why not consider dropping football or hockey or dropping the entire athletic program to D-II or D-III? RMU is an extremely small school to be competing at the D-I level. The costs of operating a D-I program are extremely high, and revenues generated by lower tier D-I programs are very low. Obviously, considering attendance, ticket sales revenue for RMU sporting events is insignificant. TV and other such revenues that higher level programs greatly benefit from cannot be significant at lower tier programs. There may be a few hundred students that faithfully attend the football and basketball games regularly, but when the athletic department wants a big turnout, the students need to be offered food and special events to get a good showing. Alumni and people in the community regularly attending games is limited. For football we are talking about five or six home events per year. At least one or two of those will be on days when the weather is less than desirable. If the team is having a losing season, people are less interested in attending the last game or two. When the weather is nice and the team is winning it can be absolutely wonderful to attend an RMU football game with a "big" turnout of a few thousand people. Is it worth it for those rare perfect game settings? A lot of private colleges are struggling financially. The competition for students and maintaining enrollment is brutal. Private colleges cannot just keep increasing tuition to cover expenses. The costs are becoming unaffordable for students. Hey, I am a RMU sports fan, I say keep all of the sports, increase their budgets to make them more competitive with larger programs. If it bankrupts the school, it's no loss to me, it will be fun while it lasts. However, if i were a tuition paying student, and i see tuition being increased once again this year, while some staff positions are being eliminated, I would be wondering why the University spends millions on a D-I athletic program. As M4Fam pointed out, there does not seem to be any likelihood of football being dropped. Plans are underway for a new basketball arena, so there apparently is no consideration for dropping basketball from D-I. The people in the RMU administration are a whole lot smarter than me. So what am I missing? What is the benefit of RMU spending millions and millions of dollars on a D-I athletic department that only a few of us really care about?
