When the NCAA introduced a new governance structure in August 2014, a component that included the likely approval of autonomy for the so-called Power Five conferences as well as full cost of attendance added to the costs of an existing athletic scholarship, dots began connecting in the minds of those who thought of these changes in the context of Indiana State’s athletic program, and especially, one of its flagship sports — football.
Full cost of attendance is a fiscal game-changer and football is the sport that was most vulnerable to its cost. Football grants far more scholarships than any other sport. At the Football Championship Subdivision level, the division in which ISU competes, there are 63 scholarships allocated to football.
Those connecting the dots began to do the math ... and it didn’t paint a good picture for ISU football. Already modestly budgeted even by FCS standards, the Sycamore football program faced the uncertainty of what full cost of attendance — and other measures nominally intended to provide a fuller experience for scholarship athletes — meant to the bottom line.
How far would ISU have to go to implement full cost of attendance? Would the Missouri Valley Football Conference put pressure on its members to do it? Would ISU opt in or opt out? Could the status quo be maintained?
ISU also plays at Memorial Stadium, a facility that, by nearly everyone’s measure, is in a poor location and that has fallen below the standards of its peers in the MVFC.
Cost uncertainty can morph into uncertainty in general. The Tribune-Star wrote about a potential doomsday scenario for football in August and rumors about ISU’s football future began to simmer around the same time as uncertainty about the future financial picture for the NCAA settled in.
That simmer came to a full boil in November when Indianapolis Star sports columnist Gregg Doyel surmised that ISU faced a “football free” future as part of an overriding theme to paint a bleak portrayal of the financial health of FCS football in general. Meanwhile, on the field, ISU was on its way to its first playoff season in 30 years.
Is ISU’s football program in jeopardy? Was it ever in jeopardy? The Tribune-Star obtained public records via the Indiana Access to Public Records Act from university administrators — emails and other documents from ISU President Daniel Bradley, ISU Director of Athletics Ron Prettyman and others — to shed light on those questions for the period from June to early December 2014.
Nothing in the documents provided indicated imminent “danger” to football at ISU, nor did they indicate any major investment, but they did express concern about the future financial picture.
On the other hand, in follow-up interviews after the records were obtained, ISU struck a positive, even a defiant, tone about the football program’s future. Last Friday, ISU signed coach Mike Sanford to a contract extension through 2019, another signal that ISU is committed to football.
“Long before I got here, people speculated that we’d drop football. Those rumors have been out there for many years. It’s hard on our student-athletes and coaches, I wish people could let us go about our business and do the best we can. It makes it hard on our recruiting. I have no interest in dropping a program, but I will say that all of our programs are evaluated consistently,” Prettyman said.
Nonetheless, there are still significant issues ISU football’s program — as well as its other athletic programs — must contend with to maintain a healthy future.
Full cost of attendance
The increase in cost of scholarships, otherwise known as full cost of attendance, for Division I was approved by a 79-1 NCAA vote in January.
It’s not binding. The vote only applies to the Power Five conferences, but non-power conferences are acutely aware that if they don’t opt in, they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Full cost of attendance is not only a matter of economics, it’s a matter of competition, and “keeping up with the Joneses.”
On the surface, full cost of attendance has the egalitarian goal of compensating athletes for the full cost of their college experience. Full cost of attendance is often portrayed in the national media as one way a student-athlete can be properly compensated for the massive increase in outside money Power Five universities have earned in the last decade. Not surprisingly, support for full cost of attendance has come from the Power Five conferences as their media rights deals continue to exponentially grow their bank accounts.
ISU is not in a Power Five conference and gets virtually no media rights fees, yet it is in a position where it has to play up to the same standard as the Division I monied schools.
There are many unanswered questions. What constitutes full cost of attendance is chief among them.
“I have not really seen any details in terms of what it would cost. Would it be available for all scholarships in all sports? Men’s and women’s sports? What exactly are the details? There’s really a lot missing,” said ISU President Bradley in a January interview with the Tribune-Star.
The concern for football, as it relates to full cost of attendance, is how much more expensive it would be in comparison to other sports given how many scholarships are offered. Football is already more costly in respect to other sports when it comes to treating athletes, feeding athletes and paying for travel to road contests.
“It’s a big scholarship issue. The fact that there are so many scholarships is one of the reasons football has struggled to maintain the number of institutions involved. It’s a Title IX problem. I don’t know if you can find three women’s sports added together that equal as many scholarships as football. You definitely can’t at the FCS level,” Bradley said.
Paying for full cost of attendance lock, stock and barrel at one time would be expensive. Prettyman estimated that full cost of attendance would add $2,500 to $5,000 per scholarship at ISU. For football, if ISU suddenly had to pony up $315,000 per year to fully pay for 63 football scholarships, it could be a significant increase for a football budget that Prettyman estimated at $2.2 million per year, about 20 percent of ISU’s overall athletic budget.
However, it isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Schools do have flexibility to choose which sports, or even which athletes, receive full cost of attendance.
“There are all kinds of things you can do with permissive legislation. I can give [full cost of attendance] to my quarterback or my center and not give it to anyone else. I could decide to give it to who I think are impact players and nobody else,” Prettyman said. “I don’t know that I would do that, but permissive legislation allows for all of those options. It wouldn’t be a ‘break-the-bank’ thing. It would be a ‘find some more money to get it done’ thing.”
Prettyman said full cost of attendance has created budgetary unknowns. He said he’s prepared three different budgets for the 2015-16 fiscal year. A budget that includes full cost of attendance (he characterized it as a “worst case scenario”), partial cost of attendance, and no cost of attendance stipends.
Aside from the monetary issues, there are other issues that exist with full cost of attendance. Bradley is concerned that the full cost of attendance number will be manipulated by universities to gain an advantage. For example, a school in a large city with a higher cost of living could offer a recruit more money and theoretically be at a competitive advantage. Bradley suggested that it’s not, and never has been, a hard-and-fast number to begin with.
“Full cost of attendance is a political number. Historically, people kept it high to justify greater financial aid for students. More recently, people have kept it low to make it look like they’re not too expensive. It’s conceivable to me that those conferences could add five-grand to cost of attendance simply to justify higher scholarships,” Bradley said.
“Take Boston College [the lone Division I school to vote against the measure]. You have an upper-class student body. Part of cost of attendance is spending money. If you take the average kid at Boston College, are they going to have more spending money than the average kid at Purdue or some other FBS school? What do you do? They’ve started us down a very slippery slope on how we run college athletics,” Bradley added.
ISU has been strident in its efforts to maintain the status quo. Prettyman has become something of a national voice against stipends and full cost of attendance. The documents the Tribune-Star received indicated that Bradley is of the same mind on the issue.
“Most of these issues are cloaked in athlete friendliness, but that’s not what it’s all about. It’s about [the Power Five] trying to protect their revenue streams basically. It’s about being able to pay coaches $5 million a year. It’s about having luxury boxes. It’s a mess and I don’t know how you back away from it,” Bradley said.
General costs
Full cost of attendance isn’t the only fiscal danger to football and other sports at ISU. The cost of business in college athletics has increased dramatically in the last decade. ISU’s own athletic expenses have gone up from $7,847,381 in 2007 to $11,783,017 in 2014. ISU has been able to afford that increase due to higher enrollment — and is at 13,183 for the 2014-15 school year — that has increased the student fees used to fund a significant portion of the athletic budget.
There are many drivers for the increase in athletic spending. Salaries for coaches continue to sky-rocket. There’s a continuing pressure to update or replace facilities. Conferences and fans are asking for more investment from schools in areas such as web streaming and paying for higher quality officiating.
That’s the money that’s spent. Then there’s the money that could be going away. A cloud over the head of ISU is the money that could be lost due to lack of progress in on-time graduation rates. State funding is performance-based, and Bradley said in September that ISU could face a budget cut of $3.9 million over two years if the Indiana General Assembly elects to make the cuts. That decision would come to pass in the legislative session that concludes this spring.
None of these issues makes it any easier to make a financial commitment to football. Bradley said it’s mindful to consider that while full cost of attendance might be the issue knocking on the door, there are plenty of others that increase costs too that go beyond the gridiron.
“I don’t know if it’s a fear factor [regarding full cost of attendance]. It’s just another issue. They want to go to 10 officials in football. They want instant replay. There’s a whole series of things out there that feed the arms race in athletics,” Bradley said. “Athletics has been an important part of the university for 100 years. It would be my hope that it continues to be that way. I worry a lot about the professionalization of the big five conferences that they’re basically trying to shove down everyone’s throats.”
Bradley said that ISU, in effect, does not have a budgetary contingency plan to deal with unknown costs coming down the pike. The nature of athletics is such that even in a “normal” year, costs fluctuate too much to make hard-and-fast future evaluations. Because of that, it’s hard to estimate what impact full cost of attendance could have on football and other sports.
“We don’t look at athletic budgeting more than a year in advance. In part because there’s so many imponderables. In part because it’s such a small enough piece of our overall budget that it’s not wagging the tail of our overall budgets. What we do in athletics doesn’t have an overriding impact on our budgets,” Bradley said.
ISU’s athletic budget comprises roughly 5 percent of ISU’s total operating budget. A solution that might be suggested ... why not just increase the athletic budget by increasing its percentage of the operating budget? Or, add to the operating budget? For many reasons, it’s not that simple.
“We’re under a lot of pressure from the legislature, from the federal government, to not grow costs faster than inflation, and if possible, slower than inflation. You can’t have pieces of your budget grow at double-digit rates or double inflationary rates for very long without that being a big problem,” Bradley said.
Bradley is committed to keeping ISU fiscally responsible when it comes to athletics.
“From an institutional, administrative point of view, if you told me costs would not exceed inflation and that we would be able to continue to grow at a reasonable rate our private support, there’s no difficulty in maintaining the athletic program as it is. The problem is going to be if athletic costs continue to go up significantly compared to our other costs without more private support,” Bradley said.
Bradley said measures put in place early in his administration regarding fundraising should help, but it’s a long process and there still isn’t a big payoff. Records provided by ISU indicated that in 2013, the last year that complete records were made available, the ISU Foundation contributed $332,505 to the athletic budget. In the 2015 projected budget, $268,000 was the amount listed.
“I think we have not done as good a job on athletic fundraising as we can do. With some changes we made a couple of years ago, we’re on track to improve that, but the proof is in the pudding,” Bradley said.
What will ISU’s peers do?
As it relates to all ISU sports, what its peers do in the Missouri Valley Conference and Missouri Valley Football Conference will have an influence on what ISU does within budgetary reason.
A concern for all ISU sports, but especially football, would be that full cost of attendance would be approved at the conference level and ISU would be forced to go along for the ride, whether it could afford to or not.
“I am sure there will be divided opinion. I’m sure the coaches feel that they need it in terms of, ‘everyone else has a nuclear bomb, we need one too,’” Bradley said.
MVFC commissioner Patty Viverito indicated Thursday that the MVFC for such matters does not make it such a draconian choice for league schools.
“The process part of this is that every single conference in the country will be permissive in terms of opting in [to full cost of attendance]. All that means is every institution will have big decisions about what they need to do and can afford to do. That’s how we’re advising people in the Missouri Valley Football Conference,” Viverito said. “The practical part of it is that, in FCS, there’s a general understanding nationwide that we don’t have the means to do full cost of attendance.”
Prettyman said that there’s been no formal vote at the MVFC level about what the conference might do regarding football. The league has meetings starting Thursday in Chicago and the issue will undoubtedly be addressed.
There have been informal votes in the MVC — five schools, including ISU, share membership in both leagues — about what might be done to accommodate full cost of attendance in its sports. Prettyman said that there is no consensus of support as far as what to do for any individual sport in the MVC except men’s basketball. Prettyman said the league’s athletic directors voted 10-0 to pay full cost of attendance in that sport, though it’s not a binding vote, and the league’s presidents will make the final call.
“What we’ll probably do is an opt in. You have the flexibility institution by institution to do whatever you can and whatever you choose to do,” said Prettyman, who did not indicate which ISU sports would opt in.
For football, the future is here. Since it was among the first sports affected by the new rules in its recruiting cycle, Viverito said MVFC schools were free to sign players with a full cost of attendance agreement for the 2015 class. Signing day for football was last Wednesday. ISU coach Mike Sanford indicated that none of the players the Sycamores signed did so with a full cost of attendance stipulation.
Sanford wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one school in the league might follow one standard that another won’t or can’t follow.
“I think a huge thing in any conference is having a level playing field. If there are varying degrees of a mixture of these things in our conference, to me, that would end up being difficult for the ones that do not decide to go with it,” Sanford said.
Which goes back to Viverito’s point about each institution making the final call.
“It’s very clear from what the courts are saying it would not be in our best interests to be restrictive. The financial constraints we face in FCS will dictate what schools do far more than a conference directive would be. We could say, ‘we want to be nationally competitive and we think you should all do cost of attendance across the board.’ That would be fine to say, but it’s not practical,” Viverito said.
ISU-related football issues
Besides the new issues that confront ISU football, there are the same old ones it’s had to deal with for the better part of three decades.
Low attendance, an increasingly decaying football stadium (see related story), a small market enclosed by larger Division I state schools that hinder the ability to build a fanbase, a donation base without many wealthy donors, and other issues loom as large as ever in ISU’s football future.
After many years of being a national embarrassment, ISU finally fixed the on-field problems. The Sycamores have had four winning seasons out of five, its best period of success in its Division I era, but the off-field issues remain.
“The problems we have, I think it’s true at most places, are not acute problems, but they’re chronic problems which means you have to deal with them, but you don’t have to deal with them today. We have time to think about what’s best for us, even if there are changes. That’s what I’ve promised our athletic staff and our athletes,” Bradley said.
Bradley was asked how viable it is to invest in football when fans have not come to Memorial Stadium in great numbers despite the winning product on the field. ISU’s peak average attendance since 2008 (the year when Bradley and former ISU football coach Trent Miles both arrived in Terre Haute), was 6,567 in 2011. During ISU’s recent playoff season, the Sycamores averaged 5,660 per game, the second-worst average in the MVFC. Average attendance in the MVFC in 2014 was 10,654.
ISU anticipates an increase in average attendance in 2015 after the playoff season. Bradley thinks there’s potential to draw more fans than ISU has drawn in decades, but there’s also a limit to what can be done here too.
“I love it when the stadium is full. I think we can get 10,000 people to a game. I think next year we could have seven or eight thousand per game. I don’t think we can get 20,000 to a game. In part because of Indiana’s [lack of] enthusiasm for [college] football, in part because of the size of our market, in part because everyone has 50 sports channels on their television,” Bradley said.
Bradley said the rumors of football’s demise in the fall were not only unfounded, but a sudden death sentence for football would have run counter to his management philosophy.
“We’re not going to do anything, ever, that’s unprofessional, and as much as possible, unkind. We’re not going to tell anybody, ‘your job ends tomorrow,’ or, ‘your scholarship ends tomorrow.’ I think we’re constantly evaluating budgets, but it’s every department and every division in the university and not just athletics,” Bradley said.
The bottom line that football fans want to hear is whether football is safe for the foreseeable future? Bradley was asked if he could guarantee football’s future, say, five years down the line.
“Nothing is safe five years from now, and by that, I mean academic programs, athletic programs. There’s too many intangibles,” Bradley said. “If we as an institution continue to prosper, that makes it easy. If we can continue to control costs, that makes it easier. If we continue to attract more support, in terms of fans and in dollars, it makes it easier, but five years is a long time. We’re taking everything a year at a time. Indiana budgets are on a two-year basis. That answer has nothing to do with football, it’s a reality of higher education.”