So how does the math work behind this Sacramento State/MAC business?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Friends, I’m wrapping up my visit at St. Bonaventure later this afternoon, after speaking to a few more journalism classes and doing a little #reporting. I’ll fly back to Chicago tonight, and then I promise I’ll get back to all of your emails, I promise.

The question I’ve gotten the most over the last few days? It probably isn’t a surprise. It’s some variation of “how the hell does the math behind the MAC/Sac State” move actually work?

Real Stats Solutions for Growing Flag Football Programs

Flag football is growing across the country, from D1 colleges to JUCOs to high schools and beyond.

But the supporting tools haven't always grown with it. And you can't just use any generic team software and hope for the best.

Blitz Board Stats gives coaches, players and admin live, filterable game data they can use to make in-game decisions and organized stats the moment the games ends, built specifically for flag football.

Give your team the tools to promote your athletes across social media, and make informed decisions with real-time leaderboards, team-level breakdowns and game-by-game visibility across every stat category

So coaches can coach.
Athletes get seen.
Programs build credibility.

Learn more here!

On the off chance you haven’t heard about this yet, the MAC, an athletic conference primarily based around the Great Lakes, just added Sacramento State, an institution in California, as a football member. While reported by Yahoo, ESPN and a few other places, the league made the news official on Monday afternoon.

This isn’t like most conference realignment decisions, and not just because Sacramento is a good 2,000 or so miles away from their closest conference neighbors.

It isn’t uncommon for conferences to have entrance fees that new schools need to pay. Sometimes these fees might be waived during the recruitment process, but not always. But normally, in D1, these new fees aren’t more than a few million dollars.

But Sacramento State isn’t paying just a few million bucks. In addition to paying a $5 million fee to the NCAA to reclassify to FBS, the Hornets will reportedly also pay a whopping $18 million to the MAC for the privilege of joining the league on a five-year term.

Sacramento State won’t get any conference distribution during that window, and will need to pay $6 million of that fee up front. The NCAA reclassification fee is also due in one lump sum. The rest of the MAC fee will be paid out in installments over the next several years.

To me, that means if the rationale for the MAC adding Sac State is just about securing a membership bag, individual schools might find that wanting. Six million bucks split roughly evenly among the rest of the MAC membership would be a one-time check of around $500,000, with additional disbursements being smaller and spread out over a five year period.

That’s real money, especially since a typical MAC conference distribution check is usually around the neighborhood of $2 million. But MAC schools are spending ~$35 million a year, in total, for their athletic departments. A few extra thousand dollars is important and meaningful, but not program-altering.

To put that number into context, $300K is less than many low-majors earn from just playing paycheck games…in Men’s Basketball.

But if the league believes Sacramento State can be additive for other reasons, and that if not, they can kick the Hornets out in five years, then maybe that's a defensible risk. After all, each individual school is going to make no more than three trips out West over a five year period, and Sacramento State is going to subsidize the travel.

I don’t think the financial risk for the MAC is zero here, (more on that in a second), but I can understand the argument that the risk is very manageable.

The school’s leadership has been very clear about a desire to move to FBS for over a year. They want to move the institution into a larger, less-commuter-focused campus that can grow enrollment from all over the country, not just greater Sacramento. Playing FBS games on national TV, to the school, is part of a broader marketing play. It isn’t just about dollars and cents that live purely in the athletic department budget.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise I don’t think this move could be defended.

In FY25, Sacramento State reported total athletics revenues of over $47.3 million, according to their MFRS report obtained by Extra Points Library. That’s a solid number, larger than what many MAC schools reported. But over $40 million of that figure comes from either direct university support, student fees, or “indirect institutional support.” The athletic department generated less than $600,000 in ticket sales, and interestingly, also less than $600,000 in athletic department donations.

University president Dr. Luke Wood stated that the school will not use student fees or institutional fees to pay for the FBS reclassification expenses, and that revenue from guaranteed games will pay for those costs.

If Sacramento State is willing to play three of those football games a season, I do think that figure is possible.

Based on FY24 MFRS data obtained by Extra Points, MAC schools like Kent State and Ball State reported generating north of $3 million a year from football guaranteed game revenues. FBS teams can command sometimes more than double the rate that FCS teams can earn. Playing that kind of schedule will make it harder for Sacramento State to make bowl games, but if they’re okay losing to USC and Alabama by 49 in September, yes, I believe they could find that money.

But those won’t be the only new expenses. Sacramento State will also need to fund 20+ new football scholarships, hire additional staff, figure out athlete compensation money and continue to fundraise aggressively for their new planned stadium. The department will absolutely need to come up with millions more in annual operational spending beyond what they’ll need to pay the MAC and NCAA.

It’s going to be a lot of cash, no way around it. Dr. Wood points to the significantly larger viewership their athletic department will enjoy as an FBS institution as the benefit, especially as the school seeks to market itself outside of California.

Industry folks have been telling me over the last several months that Sacramento State believes it will be able to count on substantial support from businesses and industries that have traditionally not given the athletic department a ton of money in order to make this transition work. Specifically, I’ve been told to keep an eye on contributions from the real estate and tribal gaming industries, two worlds that could potentially profit from Sacramento State football growing in stature.

Could that snowball into activating new donors from the fanbase, or new generated revenue across the department? Sure, that’s possible. I think it would be difficult to do, but maybe not impossible.

But in the short term, it’s very hard for me to see a world where the university doesn’t have to contribute more money into the athletic department budget. One could credibly state that no student fee or general fund money would be used for MAC entrance fees. But that doesn’t mean it can’t go towards football scholarships, airplanes, recruiting travel, software, or any of the other things that go with FBS football.

I’d personally be surprised if somehow, Sacramento State welched on their financial commitment. I expect they’ll find a way to come up with the money to pay off their fees and make good on their commitments to the other MAC institutions. I honestly do not believe that’s a major risk.

To me, the risk is in how adding a Northern California school could impact other parts of a MAC school’s budget.

For good or for ill, the vast majority of MAC schools are located within a bus drive from each other. That doesn’t just save money on the ol’ Anthony Travel bill, it means that MAC grads are more likely to come into contact with each other. They can travel to each other’s games. Razz each other at church and at the office. They can be invested in the other programs.

If you’re an Eastern Michigan grad living in like, Ft. Wayne or suburban Chicago or Flint or something…are you going to know anybody that went to Sacramento State? Almost certainly not. Are you going to be as personally invested in these games after the novelty wears off? Will you stay up to 11 PM ET to watch a weekday kickoff in California?

The risk is that the answer might be no. And every game against Sacramento State is a game that you aren’t playing against Western Michigan, Toledo, Ohio or another local program. The risk is that the addition dilutes the core brand identity of the league, sapping revenue from ticket sales, concessions, parking, and eventually, even MMR.

This opportunity cost of schedules is part of the reason I think the Big Ten is taking it on the chin, TV-ratings wise, compared to the SEC. Turns out most Midwest faithful really don’t want to watch UCLA-Purdue or Oregon-Rutgers.

The fact that the official release points out that Sacramento State is invited “for a five-year term” makes me think everybody involved believes this is going to be a temporary arrangement. And if Sacramento State is out of the league in five years (either to the Pac-12, MWC, back to the Big Sky, the NFC West or somewhere else), then probably even the worst case scenario won’t be too damaging to the MAC.

But you never know!

Extra Points recently announced a new addition to its free game library: NIL Agency Tycoon 95.

The objective of the game: to build a college athlete representation empire. You try to pitch various athletes to become your clients, track down marketing gigs for them, negotiate contracts and finagle revenue sharing deals with collectives.

It’s a lot of resource management, and you have to juggle internal investments (new offices, marketing staff, NCAA certifications), athlete recruitment and the work it takes to pull off enough successful marketing campaigns with Division III baseball players to actually pay your rent.

Give it a try now!

I think that it can be a very good idea to separate football conference membership from Olympic sports membership. That’s what NIU did with the MAC/MWC, and it’s what Sacramento State is doing here. A few long flights to Ohio isn’t that bad for an athletic department, especially when the rest of their programs will compete in the Big West. Honestly, I think the travel expense portion of this story has probably been overblown.

Do I think it’s a good idea for Sacramento State to join the MAC? Probably not, although if the goal is FBS-Come-Hell-Or-High-Water, I understand taking the first port in a storm. It’s not going to be easy to convince students in Chicagoland, Detroit, Indy or Cleveland to attend school in Sacramento (mostly because this region just doesn’t make as many college students, period, than it used to), and cultivating a rabid fanbase around beating Central Michigan sounds difficult…but I get it.

I also understand Dr. Wood’s vision here to try and grow Sacramento State’s profile. Moving from a commuter campus model to something more resembling a public flagship is hard, and sometimes that means doing some “disruptive marketing”, as I believe he referred to it in Yahoo. That might mean doing some stuff that might otherwise seem distasteful for a university president, like trying to cut a pro wrestling promo against Montana. I may not love all of that, but I get it. If it works, that’s all that's important.

Do I think spending tens of millions of dollars to play FBS football in the MAC is the best use of university money in their effort to change the profile of the university? No. I don’t.

I’ve been wrong before. Maybe the Hornets come in and kick ass right from the jump, unlocking a deluge of new fan donations and positive national media coverage.

But that’s a huge bet to place on a MAC football game. And I’ve been covering college football long enough to know that betting on #MACTION is a fool’s errand. The path to Flutie Effecting your way to higher education glory is narrow and fraught, especially in a post-COVID, post-NIL era. There are far more failures who have tried this strategy than successes.

But I’m not the intended audience here, and neither the MAC, or Sacramento State, has the resources to only rely on conventional moves.