Would you be willing to drop Football or Basketball if....

[BleedsGreen33]

It guaranteed the other sport would become a consistent national title contender and guaranteed we would win one or two?

I know stupid question right. The reason I ask this is in watching the tournament there are teams like Gonzaga who have risen to the top of college basketball, especially the last couple years, and teams like Xavier that have no football and are constant fixtures in the tournament and one of the top programs in the country.

Maybe not even drop football, but drop it down a level like Villanova. Be a national title winner and have the #11 football team in the FCS.

Conversely if dropping basketball would help propel football into a P5 conference and to the level of national title contention year in and year out.

Me personally I couldn't have attended a school that didn't have football. I enjoy it too much and going to football games is an awesome college experience. Plus from April until November there would be nothing really going on. I would be in favor of dropping football to the FCS if football resembled 1992-96 and basketball was cutting down nets.

Could you sacrifice one for the other?

 

[Herd Fever]

No

 

[jocktalker]

It's an interesting question that you posed but I think, realistically, the only real question that you could ask would be "Could you accept dropping football from FBS to FCS if it meant that basketball would become a consistent national power.

 

[Raoul Duke MU]

Football will be dropped down a level eventually anyway.

 

[old buzzard]

.......... if dropping basketball would help propel football into a P5 conference .......

That wouldn't happen. Name one P-5 conference whose members don't have both football and basketball teams.

 

[i am herdman]

Yes, as each year passes I believe Marshall football is headed to a lower division anyway. The upper P5 schools are going to split off and we are in a arms race in which we can't compete. Play for the Boca Bowl Trophy for what it cost is not feasible in the long run.

In addition, there is a day of reckoning coming in this country and higher education. All this money spent of this fluff is not sustainable. It will knock a lot of folks a dose of reality and will help the shift in us being moved down.

Raoul Duke is right. We are going to go down a level whether we like it or not.

 

[BleedsGreen33]

Some of you guys are taking this way too seriously. This is a hypothetical devoid of real world factors. I am simply aiming to see if you could live without one sport in favor of the other.

See I personally could not attend a school that didn't have football. Home football games are an experience that every college kid should have and I would never give back. That and what the heck would you do from April until November every year.

Not really something that needed to be over analyzed with TV contracts and that we would in reality never be asked to move into a P5. I am simply asking would you give up basketball IF it meant getting into a P5 and winning national titles or would you rather give up football IF it meant the basketball team would be cutting down nets?

Which is more important to you. Cutting down nets or tearing down goal posts?

 

[sportsphantom1]

Maybe not even drop football, but drop it down a level like Villanova. Be a national title winner and have the #11 football team in the FCS.

We already tried something like this and it didnt work then. It still wouldnt work now. In the 80's Marshall had a brand new basketball arena with some of the best attendance in the country and a 1-AA football team the school spent very little money on playing in Fairfield Stadium. Marshall still wasnt a national power even with more resources devoted to basketball.

The one thing I do think would help Marshall is that if Marshall was located in another state that would devote more resources to the school. The state of West Virginia strangles Marshall's ability to thrive both in sports and education

 

[dangerousdaneerfan]

The current state of finances with the State of WV should cause heartburn in the Marshall AD office.

 

[herdalicious]

Marshall would not be able to compete for a national championship in either sport, in any condition.

 

[andy4theherd]

if you took Dan's $400k salary and added it to Doc's ($600k) we are still paying our head football coach what assistants make in P5 conferences. You would also take the top spot for highest paid CUSA coach from Rice.... by a whopping $90k. In comparison, Jim Harbaugh makes over $9 million with his base salary.

We could give up every sport AND stop paying University faculty/staff and it wouldn't be a drop in the bucket compared to the P5 schools.

 

[Herd Fever]

Our Budget is only about $28M. If we dropped Basketball, how much do you think would go to the football budget? $3M max. Would that help getting better coaches......sure maybe but we still don't have the homegrown recruiting talent to win. And when we do, they aren't coming here anyway. Over the past 3 years alone, we have signed 1 football player that is within a 2 hour radius of the school that was a FBS recruit. We have watched players sign with WVU, Louisville, UNC, Tennessee, UK, WKU, Stanford, LSU, and Ohio State. Plus there is something called Title IX where football won't even get all that money.

How about dropping Baseball? The baseball budget which I believe is the third largest at Marshall. That money would be best served by supporting both Football and Basketball.

 

[marshallisqbu]

I have been calling to drop baseball for years. Waste of money and resources. If you aren't going to commit to it then just drop it

 

[Herd Fever]

Baseball is the more Cost effective move. At least Basketball has facilities.

 

[marshallisqbu]

Meant baseball sorry autocorrect

 

[TheGreenhouseEffect]

College athletics is about to become non existent due to greed. Within 3 year P5s wether they are deserving or not due to conference affiliation will get ALL monies , while G5s will get virtually no monies. We have already begun to see this with our conference.

Likewise due to this, P5 watching and monies will diminish because viewers will lose interest in watching Alabama vs another to be named opponent each year, and in 5 more years an unstainable model will implode, much like the well meaning OBama care model. In fact a National Championship game will not on NOT sell out, its viewership will steadily decline, and in 3 years will have half the audience it does now.

For Marshall, our goal should be to simply stay afloat during the next decade and stay on the Top end of G5 status schools and oddly enough remain a college institution that has college sports. In the long run simple is best will be the "sustainable model" which will become the norm again in 10 years and we will have survived and even thrived in the harshest of economic times.

Give to the Big Green today, our school depends on you, not a conference payout that means we have tons of money but are a also ran that doesn't really matter to ESPN or Fox Sports1.

 

[tabennett5438]

"It guaranteed the other sport would become a consistent national title contender and guaranteed we would win one or two?"

Why are you guys talking about raising money, if the outcome is a guaranteed championship? I would pick basketball, just because I enjoy the sport more.

 

[Herdmeister]

It guaranteed the other sport would become a consistent national title contender and guaranteed we would win one or two?

I know stupid question right. The reason I ask this is in watching the tournament there are teams like Gonzaga who have risen to the top of college basketball, especially the last couple years, and teams like Xavier that have no football and are constant fixtures in the tournament and one of the top programs in the country.

Maybe not even drop football, but drop it down a level like Villanova. Be a national title winner and have the #11 football team in the FCS.

Conversely if dropping basketball would help propel football into a P5 conference and to the level of national title contention year in and year out.

Me personally I couldn't have attended a school that didn't have football. I enjoy it too much and going to football games is an awesome college experience. Plus from April until November there would be nothing really going on. I would be in favor of dropping football to the FCS if football resembled 1992-96 and basketball was cutting down nets.

Could you sacrifice one for the other?

I would drop football to a lower level like Dayton or Morehead to a non-scholarship level if our basketball team could be a college basketball juggernaut

 

[herdalicious]

In a way, this thread touches on something that almost ruins Marshall fandom for me - this idea that its a reasonable expectation that Marshall would be competing on a national stage, and that failure to do so implies overall failure.

It's like with the Coal Bowl - when that thing was going on, you couldn't tell me we weren't going to win at least once. Now that its over and I'm looking back, I realize it was a school with a $25 million playing a school with an $80 million budget. If you believe these dollars people are spending actually matter, if we ever won, it would have been as much about their failure as it would have been about our success.

Schools on this end of the pool can dump $25-$30 million into athletics, year-in and year-out, for 20 years, and maybe make a New Year's Day bowl once. Maybe go dancing once. Maybe - a big maybe. Bump up that spending by $10 million, you've knocked it down to just a large maybe.

The fence this whole thing rests on is whether you admit you aren't a national brand and can't become one, and dial things back to match your reality, or you believe that just the belief in being a national brand is reward enough itself (even if no one outside your fanbase shares that belief), and that makes the expense worth it.

 

[caliherd]

It's interesting you say that Herdalicious, there are a number of small basketball schools that disagree with your take. Heck one of them is a one seed in the tournament that's going on right now that's playing WVU in the next round.

You will never convince me that if we dropped football down to DII or NAIA level and poured our money into men's basketball that we couldn't be a Dayton or Wichita State. Dayton football doesn't even have a season ticket program in football. Tix are 5 bucks sit where you like. But their hoops team consistently makes the tournament even if they don't win their conference tournament and if not for the untimely death of their 7 foot center over the summer they would have been a national championship contender this year.

In case you haven't ever been to downtown Dayton it's nothing to write home about. It's not like trying to compare Huntington to Los Angeles. Dayton has as many or more problems as Huntington and they are also a dieing Rust Belt town.

The coach at Dayton makes about 650k per year but he signed for in the 400s so you don't think if we went all in and made the Henderson Center a great venue and paid a head coach 7 figures along with paying his assistants top dollars as well that we couldn't be a player nationally.

Now do I think we could ever win a National championship I don't know but I definitely think we could be a consistently sweet 16 team and perennial tournament participant.

Oh and just an FYI if you start regularly playing on a national level donations will increase and the Big Green could go out to corporations who maybe only have a small footprint in Huntington but would be willing to fork over some money for the free advertising they get with a high level team that plays several games on national TV.

But I know this is all hypothetical, which was the point of Bleeds post. I know football will always be king here and we will continue to dump tons of money into it so we can go to the Beef OBrady bowl and contend for the worst FBS football conference in America.

 

[The Real SamC]

IMHO,

- This is a false dichotomy. MU w/o football or playing I-AA football in a football only league with basketbal in a basketball only league is not a path for basketball superiority, and there are no I-A football schools that do not play basketball (last was Miami, the real one, which dropped basketball for a time in the 70s and 80s).

- In some alternate universe, the city of Huntington was not run by morons in the 1970s and the $$ used for the (failed) Huntington Civic Center and the (less than it could be) Henderson Center and the maintance on the (surplussed) VMFH were combined and MU's basketball history is far different.

- The HC is OK. Rockefailure cut a lot out of it, both because he had broken the state's budget and because he was 100% anti-Marshall and anti-public education generally, and it has not been maintained, but it is OK. Fill it up, regularly, no matter who we play, and then complain about it.

- The stadium is fine. It needs a good cleaning, the beer situtaion needs a dedicated set of concession stands, and the restrooms need gutted and redone. Minor things in the broad scope of life.

- I do not buy the idea that the "group of 5" is going to be forced back to I-AA. The fact is that the so-called power 5 do not want to play just one another. They want easy victories. And, the $$ in college sports is getting less, not more, due to the (covered in other threads) end of ESPN's business model. Fact is, if there is a "relegation" of I-A, it is not just the group of 5 that is going down. You really think Ohio State gives a ratsass about Purdue? 20 to 25 is the limit if they do go to one superdivision (of which exactly zero will be in WV).

- The fact is that CUSA does hurt us, in basketball. If you are good enough to play here, you can play at, say James Madison or East Tennessee or such. And not put up with three time zones worth of conference road trips. A CUSA that was football only, with everybody finding a basketball home, would work better.

 

[herdalicious]

In case you haven't ever been to downtown Dayton it's nothing to write home about. It's not like trying to compare Huntington to Los Angeles. Dayton has as many or more problems as Huntington and they are also a dieing Rust Belt town.

UD is a private Catholic university that catches the academic run-off from Notre Dame. Their endowment is five times Marshall's, with a student enrollment that's a third less. Tuition is about $40,000 a year.

I will say though, their basketball facility is physically identical to the Cam, so long as you swap out the peeling paint and "we-can't-reach-that" dirt for fresh paint and graphical wraps, with a concourse that looks like you're in an NBA arena.

First time I was ever in it, my first thought was "This is what the Cam could look like if someone gave a sh--."

 

[puma304]

Would dropping down to FCS really be that much of a downgrade from C-USA?

 

[ARandomHerdFan]

Would dropping down to FCS really be that much of a downgrade from C-USA?