(10-29-2014 01:01 PM)arkstfan Wrote: I don't understand why people think adding football is so darn easy.
To play FBS you are going to spend about $3 million a year. Not all of it will be charged to football but the costs are there even if placed in a different category.
Between coaches, trainers, additional administrative support, additional academic counselors, video support staff you are going to have to hire 24 to 28 new people. That doesn't count non-full-time people like GA's, tutors, and such.
You need at a minimum a practice field, preferably two and ideally least one with a different surface than your home field. (ie. a field turf practice field if you have grass in the stadium or grass if you have field turf).
You need to buy at least 120 helmets, 240 jerseys, 120 pants, 120 seats of pads (that's for a "boring" one home look one road look uniform) but you also need some place large enough to store all that gear and 120 is hoping you only have a couple failures per year. You also need some way to get that gear from your campus to road games.
The school has to have a facility large enough for 105 players to lift weights and do aerobic conditioning and all the associated equipment.
You need at a minimum 15 computers capable of handling large amounts of high resolution video with the capacity to mark plays, annotate them pull the clips and re-sort the clips based on a variety of data points with large displays as well as several projection sets for team meetings, plus similarly equipped laptops for time on the road. Ideally you are also outfitting another dozen or so with tablets.
You have to add another dozen or so people to your school cell phone and cellular data plans because they are either staffers who travel frequently or they are people who need to be reachable after hours.
You need a significant travel budget. Not just chartering busses or airplanes and renting hotels with meeting rooms and the capacity to feed 70-80 people at least two meals, you also have to have money for coaches to fly around the country looking at prospects and staying in hotels and renting cars and for closer trips, you quickly learn paying mileage and such is a major paperwork hassle and it is easier administratively and cost effective to just provide them with a vehicle and cover the fuel and upkeep because the last thing you want is to waste a recruiting trip when some low paid assistant is driving an old beater car that breaks down on Friday night 100 miles from campus and fifty miles from where that linebacker prospect is playing.
Three million bucks will get you in the game as lower end G5 but you better have an administrative staff that can monitor not just compliance with the NCAA rules but also how the money is spent because if your head coach sends nine guys out on the road and all of them are flying commercial and a couple of the bigger guys have to rent SUV's because 6-3 275 former football players don't fit well in economy rental cars and they skip the free breakfast at the hotel for one that doesn't have crappy reheated scrambled eggs, you can blow your recruiting budget the first weekend of visits.
Hire the wrong charter company or pick the wrong hotels and that $1 million road trip isn't as profitable. I know of a case where a bus company had a bus run out of fuel 200 miles out from where they were going and 100 miles from home base. The owner wouldn't pay for a truck service company deliver fuel and they waited three hours for a truck with fuel to arrive from their own garage. I know of a case where the bus driver pulled into a truck stop refuel and none of the companies credit cards would work because they were either maxed or suspended for non-payment and the coach had to put the fuel on his school issued credit card. I know of a school that played a road game arrived at the airport and their charter plane wasn't there. It had blown a tire while making another run and was grounded for inspection three states over delaying departure by five hours. So you have to get people with real experience to deal with your travel.
It's not just buy some uniforms and footballs and you have a team.
That is a very weak argument.
1. KSU already has an athletic department with a compliance officer. They have their own buses and charters already lined up to transport 6 foot 5 basketball and volley ball players.
2. KSU has over 25,000 students which would make it third in the Sun Belt behind Texas State and Georgia State excluding UTA which means:
3. KSU probably graduates about 4,000 every year which means 4,000 new supporters entering the work force.
4. If the average graduation is 3,000 over the last 10 years then that is 30,000 alumni mainly in the Atlanta Metro.
5. 50,000 nearby alumni means economic and some political power which means money for KSU athletics.
6. This means KSU gets more money for scholarships, equipment, facilities, fields and stadiums.
7. Using your $3 million minimum, KSU could get 50 percent from students and 50 percent from business donation.
That works out to an increase of $20 per semester for each student and donations of $750,000 donations from Coca Cola and Delta. Guess who gets the concession deal at the all the ball games? Guess which airline benefits from all those Sun Belt travelers?
There are probably a few more but I think this handles the money situation.