This is a question more out of ingnorance, but how do most schools afford to field an FCS team? Surely most FCS football programs are not profitable, are they? I can see NDSU maybe, plus I have heard they get lots of donor cash. Obviously lots of schools get paid to play the big boys, but I'm not sure how stable that is going forward.
That's a really good question.
At the higher levels of FCS Football (Missouri Valley, CAA, Big Sky) its a real problem for schools. Football is hurting budgets AND vital to continuing the athletic department as a whole as football, MBB and, to an extent, volleyball are the only revenue sports.
Schools deal with it differently. For example, James Madison takes something like $50M in general fund and student fee money and has one of the smallest 'booster clubs' in the country and the university has decided that that is how they are going to fund it. NDSU gets big money from corporate sponsors (Sanford Health, Scheels, Gate City Bank) and has the highest ticket prices in the country. They've also put football ahead of all other sports and its really the only sport they are any good at at this point. Most schools use a hybrid system.
Its certainly something that schools are going to have to address going forward. UNI is raising record amounts of cash ($2.4 Million last year), doing better with big sponsorships (Casey's, Martin Brothers, VGM) and trying to rely less and less on state funds (down to $3.8M last year, by far the least in the Valley). Its going to be fascinating to watch going forward. I think its your bad G5 teams that are the ones that are really going to have to make some hard choices as they're getting FCS results while spending FBS money.
