The college sports landscape has been shaking recently, and not just because a lot of Top 10 football teams were upset.
There’s movement toward expanding the post-season College Football Playoffs from 12 to 24 teams, which supporters say would bring in a lot more television revenue and critics say would devalue the regular season.
A mammoth bill to regulate college sports has passed the U.S. Senate and now sits with the U.S. House of Representatives, awaiting possible action after the November elections.
Against this backdrop, a school that has its ambitions set on playing at the highest levels has abruptly jumped conferences, trying to better position itself to get into those playoffs on a regular basis. That school is James Madison University.
JMU’s sudden decision to leave the Sun Belt Conference and join the American Conference makes good business sense. It takes JMU out of a conference where other schools were generally in small media markets (Boone, North Carolina; Huntington, West Virginia; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and such) and puts it in one with schools in Charlotte, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Antonio and Tampa (among some others in smaller places). It also puts JMU into a conference that last year had three schools finish in the Associated Press Top 25 for football.
If your goal is to move up (and that is JMU’s goal), it’s a logical move — one hastened by the Sun Belt’s impending decision to increase the exit fees. (David Teel tells that back story quite well in The Virginian-Pilot.) JMU’s conference switch also brought the Harrisonburg school a new round of national media coverage, along the lines of this piece by Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports: “How did this former all-women’s college, tucked amid the rolling hills and blue crest mountains of the Shenandoah Valley, become one of the nation’s fastest-ascending athletic programs in NCAA Division I?”
Those stories tended to focus on how JMU has been able to hire a series of high-profile coaches: Curt Cignetti (now at Indiana), Bob Chesney (now at UCLA) and currently Billy Napier (formerly at Florida). For this column today, I will look forward at how JMU will measure up in its new conference, not on the playing field, but the balance sheet.
JMU was the financial heavyweight in the Sun Belt Conference
JMU’s athletic budget was fatter than any other school in the Sun Belt Conference, often twice or more as much. With JMU’s impending departure, Old Dominion University will become the most heavily resourced school in the conference, although by not by the same margin. At what point will Old Dominion want to follow JMU’s example and try to get into a higher-level conference? With the Sun Belt raising exit fees, if ODU feels a need to jump, it should jump soon.
Of course, there’s a reason why JMU and ODU have bigger athletic budgets than the other schools in the Sun Belt: Both rely on mandatory student fees for most of their revenue. Here’s where JMU gets its athletic money:
Here’s where ODU gets its athletic revenue:
It’s fair to compare JMU and ODU because both operate under Virginia’s laws, which separate out these fees. Out-of-state schools may charge the same student fees but might hide them under the vague heading of “institutional support,” so here are the combined totals for each Sun Belt school so you can see how JMU and ODU compare:
If we look at the data this way, JMU still towers over the rest, although ODU doesn’t. To the extent that JMU’s athletic rise depends on revenue, the school’s ascent has come through the pocketbooks of JMU students (and their parents). JMU is unusually dependent on student funding, although I often hear from JMU boosters who are quite fine with that; some have told me they think JMU should charge more so it could have an even higher-profile sports program. Whether state-supported schools should be charging students to operate a professionalized sports program is a philosophical question I’ve explored before, so we don’t need to go into more detail today about the wisdom of that policy. Instead, having established the financial baseline that JMU is operating from in the Sun Belt, we’ll move on to look toward its future in the American Conference.
JMU won’t dominate the American Conference financially, but it will be one of the best-funded
Some American Conference schools are private schools (Rice University, Temple University, Tulane University, University of Tulsa) that don’t disclose data. However, JMU measures up well against those that do. Only South Florida has more resources. JMU matches up almost evenly with Army and Navy and somewhat ahead of East Carolina and Memphis. JMU’s athletic revenues are actually higher than the median in the American Conference. We have no idea how JMU will face on the field or the court but it will have the resources it needs to compete with its new rivals.
However, because JMU relies so heavily on student fees, there are some revenue streams where it will be distinctly behind other schools.
JMU will be joining the only school that generates more money from student fees and institutional support
Some of you have seen this chart before. This is how much each Division I school generates from student fees and institutional support combined. From left, the biggest spikes are Arizona State ($59.73 million), JMU ($60.33 million), Air Force ($57.44), Massachusetts ($60.19 million) and the true kingpin, South Florida ($69.27 million.) JMU will now be joining South Florida in the American Conference, so here’s a look at just those schools:
JMU and South Florida rely on student fees/institutional support far more than the other schools. Now let’s look at things the other way. Here are the revenue streams for everything other than these two categories:
There is no movement, from what I can tell, for JMU to reduce its reliance on mandatory student fees (and a much smaller amount of institutional support), but let’s just suppose it wanted to. If Virginia were to require state schools to operate intercollegiate athletics without such funds, this shows how much more JMU would need to raise to be competitive with other schools in the American Conference. Instead of being one of the best-funded schools, it would be almost at the bottom. Now let’s look at some of those categories.
JMU ranks below the American Conference median for revenue from donors
JMU has built its athletic program without a large donor base (although donors are covering the cost of exiting the Sun Belt and joining the American, so that’s $28 million in all, no small sum). JMU will outrank at least three schools in the American but will generally be bringing in less from donors than its rivals. East Carolina is the gold standard for donors in that conference.
JMU will also rank well below other American Conference schools for corporate sponsorships
It’s probably unfair to get compared to Army and Navy, which have unique opportunities for corporate sponsorships. West Point and Annapolis certainly skew the conference median. Still, JMU’s corporate revenue is about half that of Alabama-Birmingham, East Carolina, North Texas and Texas-San Antonio, and even further behind Memphis and South Florida. Curiously, JMU in Harrisonburg currently brings in more than UNC-Charlotte, a city that wouldn’t seem to lack for corporate sponsorships (although UNC-Charlotte does have to compete with NFL and NBA teams for such things).
JMU raises more from ticket sales than the American Conference median
This chart may surprise some people (or not): JMU’s ticket revenue is already higher than the conference median. This is one area where JMU is already planning an increase.
JMU will have the second-smallest stadium in the American Conference (for now)
Bridgeforth Stadium currently seats 24,877 fans. Only UNC-Charlotte has a smaller stadium. Other stadiums in the conference are cavernous. Temple plays at Lincoln Financial Field (home of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles), which seats 69,596. South Florida plays at Raymond James Stadium (home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers), which seats 65,857. Next biggest is East Carolina, which seats 50,000 at an on-campus stadium.
JMU is currently seeking proposals to expand its stadium to 30,000 seats, which would put it on a par with Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Tulane and Tulsa. More seats equals more revenue opportunities. JMU is looking to expand another revenue opportunity: students.
JMU wants to grow enrollment, which means more potential athletic revenue
JMU this fall has a record 23,167 students. It’s also laid out a plan to grow to 26,000 by 2032 and 30,000 by 2040. There are some state policy questions there: In an era of declining enrollment, more students at one school means fewer students at another. The difference between the current number and the 2032 goal is 2,833, or about twice the size of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The difference between the current number and the 2040 goal is 6,877, or not quite the size of Radford University (and more than Christopher Newport University, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia State University and the University of Mary Washington). Will there be enough students to go around 14 years from now? That needs to be a topic for another day.
For our athletic purposes today, each of those additional students represents an additional revenue source for JMU to assess a mandatory student fee to support its athletic goals.
Normally, I write about politics and economics, although there’s plenty of both in college sports. For more conventional political news, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out every Friday. This week I’ll be taking another looking at the early voting trends.
