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After the NCAA announced the 12 teams that made this year’s College Football Playoff, a friend messaged me: “So how does it feel to be an alumnus of a football powerhouse?”
My alma mater, James Madison University, snuck in as the No. 12 seed — the only Virginia team to make the field.
The way JMU made the cut is somewhat controversial, although that controversy has little to nothing to do with the Harrisonburg school and everything to do with the convoluted nature of college football.
The top 10 teams as ranked by the CFP selection committee made it in, but numbers 11-19 did not. Instead, Tulane (ranked 20th) and James Madison (ranked 24th) did. Why? Rules, complicated rules meant to acknowledge the winners of lesser conferences such as the American Conference (won by Tulane) and the Sun Belt (JMU). That means No. 11 Notre Dame, which might be a better team than many of the ones that did get a bid, stays at home.
If all that matters to you, well, you probably know all that already because it’s been all over sports talk shows. Maybe the CFP rules are dumb. Maybe Notre Dame is greedy, because it insists on remaining an independent, which puts it at a disadvantage under these selection rules. Like I said, tune into sports talk radio and they’re probably still arguing about all this.
All we need to know for our purposes today is that JMU is in — and that this column has very little to do with sports.
JMU stands out from this playoff bracket of 12 in several ways.
It’s not because the school is named after a person — Tulane is, as well.
It’s not the youngest school in the field, either. Texas Tech was established in 1923, a full 15 years after The State Normal and Industrial School for Women opened in Harrisonburg in 1908.
JMU is unusual because it’s the only one of the 12 schools that began as a women’s college.
It’s the only one whose nickname comes from a person’s name — the Dukes are named after former president Samuel Duke. (After all, James Madison didn’t think much of the dukes of British royalty.)
JMU is also the only school in the final 12 that has purple and gold as its colors.
But that’s not why we’re here today.
What really makes JMU stand out is this: It has the highest mandatory student fee for intercollegiate athletics of any of these 12 schools.
Some of the schools don’t have any. When I started researching this, the media relations department at the University of Alabama asked me what in the world I was talking about — Alabama doesn’t have such a thing. I had to explain how Virginia colleges work — and how out-of-line JMU is even within Virginia.
Let’s sketch this out the way a coach might diagram a trick play.
If you attend a public college in Virginia, you have to pay tuition (unless you’re blessed with a full-ride scholarship) as well as certain “mandatory fees.”
These vary from school to school. They generally cover parking, student health services and intramural sports. They always include “student union and recreational fees.” And they always include something else: mandatory fees for intercollegiate athletics. You can see the full list here:
Maybe you never need to use the student health system, but the theory for charging a mandatory fee is that every student might need it at some point. I’m not going to quibble over intramural sports, which some students may never play, and go straight to that line for intercollegiate athletics — which only a relative handful of students are ever going to play. While in theory any student could “walk on” to the team, the reality is that’s almost impossible. When I was at JMU back in the dark ages, I played on an intramural softball team simply by virtue of signing up — nobody asked if I could hit or field (and my subsequent lack of a professional sports career suggests I couldn’t). However, there was no way I was going to be allowed to play on one of the official teams, but we all had to pay for them anyway.
I call your attention to several things on this chart. You can skip the bottom two lines, which are two-year schools, Richard Bland College and the Virginia Community College System. At all but two of the four-year schools — George Mason and the University of Virginia are the exceptions — the mandatory fee for intercollegiate athletics is the highest of any fee.
At all but three — those two plus Virginia Tech — that mandatory fee is more than $1,000 per year. That will drop to two over the next few years; this fall, the Virginia Tech board of visitors voted 12-1 to raise the fee to help generate more money for athletics. (This was a board whose members are all appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, so this is a striking example of Republican appointees voting for what amounts to a tax increase.)
At six schools, the mandatory fee tops $2,000 per year. At three, it tops $3,000. At one (Virginia Military Institute), it tops $4,000.
JMU is in that $3,000 range: $3,036 per year.
Let’s be clear: The figure is that high because JMU has chosen to pursue big-time college sports (particularly football) even though it’s not a big television draw (the way Notre Dame is) or in a conference with a big TV contract (the way Virginia and Virginia Tech are) or a conference with an even bigger TV contract (the way most of these other playoff schools are).
JMU is essentially taxing its students to help fund its big-time college athletic ambitions — and that clearly seems to be paying off, at least in terms of this year’s playoff.
Why, though, must students be forced to pay for that? If deep-pocketed boosters (the adjective knocks me out) or the free market don’t supply the funds for JMU to play at that level, why must my alma mater shake down teenagers (or their parents) to make up the difference?
When the Dukes take the field against the Ducks on Dec. 20 in Eugene, Oregon, JMU will be playing a school where students don’t have to pay any mandatory fees for athletics. The University of Oregon did away with those fees in 2021; it used university licensing fees to make up the difference.
Of the 12 schools in the playoffs, seven appear to have no mandatory athletic fees based on their published fee schedule, recently published news accounts or an email confimation to Cardinal (Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas A&M). So more than half the schools in the field don’t make students pay for intercollegiate athletics.
Four other schools in the football playoffs do have mandatory fees for athletics, but the numbers are much smaller than any school in Virginia charges: $122.40 at Texas Tech, $126 at Georgia, $170 at Miami and $280 at Tulane.
Let’s put this another way: JMU’s mandatory student fees for athletics are more than four times higher than all the other College Football Playoff schools combined.
We’ll find out whether JMU is out of its depth on the football field, but we can say now that JMU’s mandatory fees are way out of line with these other schools. As the chart above shows, this isn’t just a JMU issue; it’s a Virginia issue — JMU stands out only by degree.
So for those schools that don’t charge any mandatory fee for intercollegiate athletics, or don’t charge much, how do they fund their programs? One thing we see is that most of those schools play in “power” conferences that have huge television contracts. Two years ago, Sportico, a news site that focuses on the business of sports, published a report on mandatory fees across the country. The lowest fees were in the two conferences with the biggest TV contracts (and the biggest brand names): the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. That Sportico report said about half the schools in those leagues had no mandatory fee; the highest at the time in the Big Ten was $718 at Rutgers; in the SEC, it was $1,374 at Auburn. By contrast, the conference with the highest mandatory fees was the one in which JMU plays — the Sun Belt. Coastal Carolina, which plays in the Sun Belt, had the highest fees in that report: $3,634.
Here’s another way to measure these fees: as a percentage of the total cost that students must pay.
At JMU, tuition and fees for in-state students for the 2025-26 school year are $14,300. The mandatory athletic fee constitutes 21.2% of that.
For a student who lives on campus, the cost of room and board is another $14,212 for a total of $28,512. The mandatory athletic fee constitutes 10.6% of that.
That’s not the highest percentage in Virginia. At VMI, it’s 14.0% of tuition, room and board. However, JMU’s is one of the highest. The statewide average, based on computations I made from data available from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, is 6.8%. At Virginia Tech, 4.4% of tuition, room and board is for mandatory athletic fees. At the University of Virginia, it’s 3.9%.
Our governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, was elected on a platform of making life more affordable in Virginia. Here’s one place she could start: Ask the legislature to repeal the law that allows these mandatory fees. If they were banned, she could reduce the cost of a Virginia student attending a state-supported four-year school by an average of 6.8%. That would seem to be a big affordability talking point.
Otherwise, Richmond is complicit in a scheme whereby we force college students to subsidize what are increasingly professional sports programs — something not even the Alabamas and Ohio States of the football world do.
If any state legislator or college official would like to defend these mandatory fees, let me know and I’ll ask you to write an opinion piece to counter this. In the meantime, what do you, our readers, think on this subject? You can weigh in here.
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