Was speaking only In regards to a team that has more money but little success. In that case the money is just a totem. Of course money is useful. But we won 5 natty outside of the P5 so the argument falls flat right there. You don't need football
First, that’s not actually correct we won three of those national championships in the affective equivalent of a “power conference”.
Whether we bury our heads in the sand or not, college athletics is in the middle of a facilities and coaching salary shooting war. The “ammo” for that war is sports, revenue, predominantly conference media rights. The ACC is currently considered underfunded at a distribution in excess of $35 million per school. Right now, the big east conference schools get a media rights distribution of about 4 million per school. The Big Ten gets a media rights distribution of $72 million per school. Every single year we remain in the Big East we fall tens of million dollars behind our peers. Every. Single. Year.
Now, just to be fair, the big east conference is about to renegotiate their media rights deal. The best case scenario is that the conference distribution may double from $4 million per school to $8 million per school. And that would be an amazingly good deal, but it falls for short of what’s needed to stay relevant in college athletics.
Why does the big east, which literally is the most successful basketball conference over the last five years or so get paid pennies on the dollar compared to other conferences? Well, because the value of basketball broadcast rights is worth no more than $.20 on the dollar what the value of football broadcast rights are. So, if we want to ever receive competitive income to our peer institutions, we absolutely “need football.”
(Oh, and before you talk about how expensive it is to run a football program, about 17 million of our $72 million athletic department deficit was from football. And that is after having historic bad seasons, that depressed attendance. I fully expect a dramatic improvement in footballs financials this year. Just so you don’t have to do the math, that means that $55 million of our $72 million deficit was from sports other than football.)
