Quote:Chicago State announced that the school’s board of trustees has approved a proposal to begin a public fundraising initiative to expand its number of sports teams.

You guys take announcements like this way too seriously.

"Poster CCD494 announced that he has approved a plan to begin playing the lottery to purchase a private jet."

Wake me up when they have the money.

(09-23-2023 07:43 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 05:17 PM)Scoochpooch1 Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 10:13 AM)bullet Wrote:  They can barely keep their doors open. They can barely support existing programs. Now they want to add the most expensive program?

Sounds like the Chicago St. president is auditioning for a spot as a Pac 12 president.

Exactly the first thing I thought too. Instead of increasing enrollment they want to play football with 25 players instead.

The idea is to add 50-100 students by offering the opportunity to keep playing football after high school. They have about 950 undergraduates, about 200 of them are athletes.

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details

I wonder if this is a survival move.
If they don't add football, they're not getting a conference invite.
IF they don't get a conference invite, they lose Division I status in a few years when the new rules kick in.
If they lose Division I status, maybe they lose half of those student-athletes. It's not like they're guaranteed a Division II or Division III landing spot.

It's not really about athletics. It's about whether Chicago State University should even be a university

Tail wagging the dog. If this is how you get students, maybe you should just close the doors.

Chicago St is attempting to pull off at the D1-non-scholarship level what a lot of D3 schools figured out how to do a long time ago:

Sell kids on the dream of keeping their football career alive while charging them tuition to do it (or in many cases, collecting financial aid from the feds).

(09-24-2023 01:27 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Chicago St is attempting to pull off at the D1-non-scholarship level what a lot of D3 schools figured out how to do a long time ago:

Sell kids on the dream of keeping their football career alive while charging them tuition to do it (or in many cases, collecting financial aid from the feds).

If their football program is non-scholarship, it's not going to make them more attractive to any multisport conferences.

(09-23-2023 07:43 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 05:17 PM)Scoochpooch1 Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 10:13 AM)bullet Wrote:  They can barely keep their doors open. They can barely support existing programs. Now they want to add the most expensive program?

Sounds like the Chicago St. president is auditioning for a spot as a Pac 12 president.

Exactly the first thing I thought too. Instead of increasing enrollment they want to play football with 25 players instead.

The idea is to add 50-100 students by offering the opportunity to keep playing football after high school. They have about 950 undergraduates, about 200 of them are athletes.

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details

I wonder if this is a survival move.
If they don't add football, they're not getting a conference invite.
IF they don't get a conference invite, they lose Division I status in a few years when the new rules kick in.
If they lose Division I status, maybe they lose half of those student-athletes. It's not like they're guaranteed a Division II or Division III landing spot.

It's not really about athletics. It's about whether Chicago State University should even be a university

It very much is part of the calculus. It’s not a question of spending $4 million on something other than football because the issue is that without $4 million being spent on football, the school itself may not survive at all. This is quite a common issue at a lot of Division III schools today (where athletics are integral for maintaining enrollment numbers). The fact that it’s happening at a Division I school to this degree is more unusual.

I get the outside perspective that maybe the school shouldn’t exist at all of it has these problems, but knowing local Chicago politics, they’re just not going to shut down this school. There is too much intertwined animosity with the long-time perception (and in some cases reality) that the South Side continuously gets passed over for the North Side in Chicago and shutting down Chicago State would be yet another marker on that front.

The big thing with Chicago State enrollment isn’t the traditional 4-year on-campus student (which has always been a smaller portion of the school), but drop in enrollment in upperclassmen transfers from community colleges.

(09-24-2023 01:39 PM)Nerdlinger Wrote:  

(09-24-2023 01:27 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Chicago St is attempting to pull off at the D1-non-scholarship level what a lot of D3 schools figured out how to do a long time ago:

Sell kids on the dream of keeping their football career alive while charging them tuition to do it (or in many cases, collecting financial aid from the feds).

If their football program is non-scholarship, it's not going to make them more attractive to any multisport conferences.

It is going to be a scholarship program.

More wasted money.

I don’t know where they’d go if they have scholarships. The MEAC? They definitely need help but they’re way out of the footprint.

The OVC makes sense geographically (and gives them a home for men’s soccer) but they have ten for football, although four are affiliates. It would get them to 12 for Olympics.

(09-24-2023 06:42 PM)AssKickingChicken Wrote:  I don’t know where they’d go if they have scholarships. The MEAC? They definitely need help but they’re way out of the footprint.

The OVC makes sense geographically (and gives them a home for men’s soccer) but they have ten for football, although four are affiliates. It would get them to 12 for Olympics.

It would give the OVC a second HBCU school. Tennessee State would like that.

(09-24-2023 07:25 PM)andybible1995 Wrote:  

(09-24-2023 06:42 PM)AssKickingChicken Wrote:  I don’t know where they’d go if they have scholarships. The MEAC? They definitely need help but they’re way out of the footprint.

The OVC makes sense geographically (and gives them a home for men’s soccer) but they have ten for football, although four are affiliates. It would get them to 12 for Olympics.

It would give the OVC a second HBCU school. Tennessee State would like that.

Yeah, I'm sure Tennessee State is dying to play Chicago State.

Also, CSU is not an HBCU.

(09-24-2023 07:25 PM)andybible1995 Wrote:  

(09-24-2023 06:42 PM)AssKickingChicken Wrote:  I don’t know where they’d go if they have scholarships. The MEAC? They definitely need help but they’re way out of the footprint.

The OVC makes sense geographically (and gives them a home for men’s soccer) but they have ten for football, although four are affiliates. It would get them to 12 for Olympics.

It would give the OVC a second HBCU school. Tennessee State would like that.

PBI (Predominantly Black Institution).

There was a time Chicago State was a predominantly white school. You'll find a lot of white teachers in their 60s now who attended Chicago State.

(09-24-2023 07:27 PM)Nerdlinger Wrote:  

(09-24-2023 07:25 PM)andybible1995 Wrote:  

(09-24-2023 06:42 PM)AssKickingChicken Wrote:  I don’t know where they’d go if they have scholarships. The MEAC? They definitely need help but they’re way out of the footprint.

The OVC makes sense geographically (and gives them a home for men’s soccer) but they have ten for football, although four are affiliates. It would get them to 12 for Olympics.

It would give the OVC a second HBCU school. Tennessee State would like that.

Yeah, I'm sure Tennessee State is dying to play Chicago State.

Also, CSU is not an HBCU.

Tennessee St is so dying to play CSU, they didn’t even schedule them this year!!! Chicago St is an independent and TSU didn’t agree to play them. LOL

SCSU, Delaware St, and Bethune Cookman scheduled CSU though.

Aren't there any Division 3 conferences that they can go to in the area?

(09-24-2023 01:42 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 07:43 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 05:17 PM)Scoochpooch1 Wrote:  

(09-23-2023 10:13 AM)bullet Wrote:  They can barely keep their doors open. They can barely support existing programs. Now they want to add the most expensive program?

Sounds like the Chicago St. president is auditioning for a spot as a Pac 12 president.

Exactly the first thing I thought too. Instead of increasing enrollment they want to play football with 25 players instead.

The idea is to add 50-100 students by offering the opportunity to keep playing football after high school. They have about 950 undergraduates, about 200 of them are athletes.

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details

I wonder if this is a survival move.
If they don't add football, they're not getting a conference invite.
IF they don't get a conference invite, they lose Division I status in a few years when the new rules kick in.
If they lose Division I status, maybe they lose half of those student-athletes. It's not like they're guaranteed a Division II or Division III landing spot.

It's not really about athletics. It's about whether Chicago State University should even be a university

It very much is part of the calculus. It’s not a question of spending $4 million on something other than football because the issue is that without $4 million being spent on football, the school itself may not survive at all. This is quite a common issue at a lot of Division III schools today (where athletics are integral for maintaining enrollment numbers). The fact that it’s happening at a Division I school to this degree is more unusual.

I get the outside perspective that maybe the school shouldn’t exist at all of it has these problems, but knowing local Chicago politics, they’re just not going to shut down this school. There is too much intertwined animosity with the long-time perception (and in some cases reality) that the South Side continuously gets passed over for the North Side in Chicago and shutting down Chicago State would be yet another marker on that front.

The big thing with Chicago State enrollment isn’t the traditional 4-year on-campus student (which has always been a smaller portion of the school), but drop in enrollment in upperclassmen transfers from community colleges.

^^^

Chicago St is a fascinating school to many of us. They're not going anywhere, and they at least have the potential to get the budget to start playing FCS football soon.

Never before this thread did I think Chicago State was so tiny. I thought it was a big urban public school like Temple, but it seems UIC is the Temple equivalent.

HBCU is an official federal designation that basically refers to schools founded at a time when blacks could not attend other colleges and universities due to their race. They are mostly in the South but there are a few others.

CSU evolved into mostly serving minorities due to the demographics of the area.

The OVC would seem to be the perfect landing spot.

(09-24-2023 10:22 PM)Transic_nyc Wrote:  Aren't there any Division 3 conferences that they can go to in the area?

That’s actually the problem: there’s a ton of D-III *competition* in the Chicago area. North Central College, in my hometown, has won 2 out of the last 3 D-III national championships. There are a lot of higher-ranked, better located, and/or more competitive D-III schools in the area - going down to that level wouldn’t work at all for what Chicago State needs. Being Division I is what distinguishes Chicago State and is their one competitive advantage.

At this point, for any school that not having football is a common talking point, if Chicago State can do it, they have no excuses.

Not sure where they will put the football players, in that CSU only has one on-campus dorm.

The school's latest published statistics are two years old, but FTE's are dwindling:

https://www.csu.edu/IER/student_statistics.htm