Football doesn't make financial sense to us. Football would be an idiotic monstrosity of a boondoggle at Green Bay.
But let's go ahead and play around with this idea, if only for the fact that my mind could use the distraction.
FCS football costs, roughly, $5 million annually to run - between operating costs, coaches salaries, game day expenses and logistics expenses, it costs a lot of money to field a football team. Youngstown State is the only current Horizon League school that plays football at this level, but plenty of familiar schools are FCS powers - Northern Iowa and North Dakota State being the most familiar to us.
In his interview, Scott Venci specifically mentions
non-scholarship FCS football, which would eliminate plenty of money needed to run the team - 63 scholarships cost a lot of money. The schools we're most familiar with at this level are former rivals Valparaiso and Butler, with both playing in the Pioneer League. This is a conference that was specifically created in the early 1990's for schools who played D-III football but D-I in every other sport, because before then a school could keep one sport below the rest.
Essentially, the Pioneer League exists for a D-III conference to play in the bottom of D-I. The other non-scholarship conferences in FCS are historically black schools and the Ivy League, where most players are on some form of academic scholarship.
Morehead State is the only school in the Pioneer League that is a public school, and the reason should be obvious. Schools use non-scholarship football as a way to drive up enrollment, and at private schools this is a BIG money-maker. Public schools, not so much. When your
Say you have 125 students who attend your school specifically because of the football program. Of them 85 are on the team, 10 want to be on the team, and 30 are in the marching band. For a public school with a round $5,000 in-state tuition, that's $1.25 million of income annually - not anything to sniff at for a public school. But for a private school like Valpo, whose annual tuition is north of 36,000, that's
$4.5 million.
Now you can see why it makes more sense for private schools to drive up enrollment with Pioneer League football than it does for public schools, which still have a ton of expenses beyond the income from tuition - and I'm sure at a school like ours, they wouldn't even consider those dollars as income for the football team.
So say you put 5,000 paid fans in the stands on average for six home games, with $20 the average cost of a ticket - which would be towards the top of the Pioneer League. That football team would rake in about $600,000 in ticket sales for the season. The private school has paid for their team. The public school hasn't come close.
Don't get me wrong - there are absolutely benefits to non-scholarship FCS football, and if Milwaukee were to ever consider the sport, this is the only level I would support adding without a major (8-figure) donation to bankroll the team. But the numbers don't make sense for us, and they'd make even less sense at Green Bay, a school which is in a football-crazy area but would likely struggle to get that area out to their games. Although I'd be willing to bet Green Bay would probably average more in football attendance than Milwaukee, which has a lot more competition for the entertainment dollar on any given Saturday.
Scott Venci's interview took this tact because there's interest from readers in a UWGB football team, but not enough to actually support a team. If the support were there - say the Packers offered $5 million to start up the team as well as Lambeau Field to play in rent-free for their first 5 seasons - this would make sense to me. But the team needs a stadium, it needs a grassroots effort to push for it, and right now all it has is an interview with an AD.
That said, if I had won the Mega Millions, you can bet your ass Milwaukee would be playing football about 3-4 years from now.