Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
I’m in Columbus today and tomorrow to visit a few business and journalism classes at the ol’ alma mater and to hang out at the SPJ convention to talk open records nerdery. If you’re around, drop me a line! I’ll return to Chicago Saturday evening.
Earlier this week, the most headline-grabbing statement out of Louisiana higher education, for once, wasn’t centered on LSU.
According to the Shreveport Times, Louisiana Board of Regents member Wilbert Pryor suggested that Louisiana Tech, Louisiana-Lafayette and the Louisiana-Monroe should get out of the FBS business and reclassify to FCS. From the story:
"Schools that are trying to play Division I ... that just a sinking hole trying to play Division I ball," Pryor said during the hearing. "I don't think much of the public would know the difference if they all play the same level, and it seems like they have to have a self-realization and put a humble cap on. They have to have a humble pie."
Pryor pointed to deficits totaling 10s of millions of dollars at Tech, ULL and ULM — "$20 million at Lafayette, $17 million at Tech, $10 million at ULM," he said.
…
Other regents also said the current deficit spending on athletics at the schools can't continue.
"The numbers speak for themselves," said regent David Aubrey, president of AT&T Louisiana. "It's just not sustainable."
"With no changes made it's only going to hurt worse going forward," said regent Dallas L. Hixson, a partner for Hixson Automotive Group in Alexandria.
Pryor is certainly correct that all three institutions are not close to financial self-sustainability, or at least, not on paper. In fiscal year 2025, according to NCAA MFRS data from the Extra Points Library, both Tech and ULL reported athletic deficits of more than $12 million. ULM’s was much smaller (less than $2 million), but the differences in all three of those numbers may be a reflection of the math for MFRS reports being different than what the Louisiana regents use.
But would those budget numbers meaningfully improve if all three schools jumped to FCS to play Northwestern State instead of Arkansas State?
Earlier in my career, I would have said absolutely. Now? I’m far less certain.
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Dropping to FCS means athletic revenues decline on multiple levels
Doing some very quick back-of-the-napkin math, according to those NCAA reports, Louisiana Tech football reported FY25 revenues of $9,530,710. ULM reported a football-specific revenue figure of $5,292,436, while ULL reported $5,239,601.
The single biggest driver of football-specific revenue for those three programs? It wasn’t ticket sales. It was guarantee game money. Okay, technically, ULL reported generating $91,742 more in donor contributions than it did in guarantee game money, but for the other two, paycheck games were the largest revenue driver.
A guarantee game — or paycheck game, bodybag game, whatever you want to call it — is when a smaller school plays a one-off away game at a much larger school, in exchange for a hefty payout. FBS schools can command guarantees between $1.3 to $2 million, depending on who they play and how desperate that team is for an opponent.
FCS schools can’t command that kind of money. The going rate for an FCS-to-FBS paycheck game, according to the contracts in our database, is closer to $500,000. A reclassification would probably knock at least $1 million off the top-line athletic revenue each year, just from game scheduling.
Revenues from ticket sales, fan donations (at least in the short term) corporate activations and TV money would also all decline, at least in the short term. While none of the three programs are exactly rolling in big TV money now, dropping to FCS would mean leaving the Sun Belt in everything, and a hypothetical future conference home (Southland? UAC?) isn’t close. I imagine in the short term, total revenue would decline by at least 25 percent, if not more.
Would costs decline? Eventually…but not in the immediate short term
FCS teams don’t have to carry as many scholarships as their FBS peers, which could translate to more tuition money for the schools at large (depending on the kind of students they’re able to recruit as walk-ons). The three schools would also be able to get away with not distributing House rev-share payments to their football players (although right now, they’re not exactly spending that much on those guys anyway).
But as we learned from Idaho’s journey back to FCS from FBS, you don’t save millions of dollars in staff payroll right away. The insurance costs, travel costs, infrastructure and everything else stay the same, since it’s not like you blow up your stadium and build a smaller one if you move to the Southland. Over time, sure, you’ll save money (when you hire a new coach, you can hire a guy at $400,000 instead of $900,000), but not enough to suddenly bring a program into the black. It’s not like the Southland Louisiana schools don’t run deficits. Or hell, even LSU!
I don’t expect any of these three schools, and especially not Tech, to be forced to leave FBS in the immediate future. My hunch — and this is is just a hunch, because I haven’t lived in Louisiana for a long time — is that these comments are more about wanting to impose some sense of humility rather than an actual data-supported proposal.
But we’ll see!
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Here’s what else we worked on this week:
We crunched operating expense figures for every single public school Division I softball program and compiled everything into a detailed report. Here’s what we learned about the relationship between budget and wins, where spending is increasing the most, how budgets are distributed across the country and more. Next week? College baseball!
I hit the phones to try to better understand the new insurance obligations for the NCAA and member institutions, should the PCSA become law. The new benefits are significant! But so are the costs.
I wrote about what I’m hearing on the low-major conference realignment front, as well as what to make about Miami’s public flirtation with the American.
We have another fun week planned, with plenty of original reporting, FOIA fun and industry analysis in the works. You can support independent journalism and get access to everything we write by upgrading your subscription today.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to run to Buckeye Donuts. If I don’t grab a few while I’m in town…did I really go back to Columbus?
