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Message: [QUOTE="NJCuse97, post: 3892711, member: 5058"] I think there is a ton of merit to the OP question. As recently as about 3 years ago, Princeton was considering dropping football. Not a division, but the sport. Between CTE and pay for play, it was losing the mission of the school and the appeal of true amateur athletics. It is not really a revenue generator for them, and maintenance of their academic integrity is far more valuable to them. They needed room for campus expansion, and the spot where the current stadium is continues to be appealing, mostly because it is on the somewhat land locked campus. The prospect of wasting money on a new stadium that nobody would attend seemed to be throwing good money at bad. It is my understanding they continue to debate this and if they were to build new, they would likely build much smaller. This from the second team to ever play the game. I don’t think it is a question of governance. It is a question of mission and model. Academic institutions are not in the business of running professional sports franchises. Big time college athletics is headed there faster every day. Bigger revenues begets bigger budgets and financial demands (risks) and makes it harder for schools to allocate funds to the academic mission. This forces them to look harder at alternative revenue streams like research grants and medical schools (sound familiar Cuse fans?). This is why the BigTen is so robust with engineering research, and many of the ACC schools have academic medical centers. SU has little to none of both comparatively. Once schools have that, the athletics are secondary, or stand alone. As a stand alone, many schools will lose interest in trying to maintain their program if it takes financial and administrative attention away from their new revenue streams. Look at Duke, WF, or even BC as schools that seem to have already bumped into this. Duke and Wake both have large and rapidly expanding medical research programs, but no new stadium expansion in sight. BC has recently committed money and real estate to athletics, because I don’t think they see much room for any other substantive building expansion and the academic medical/research market is already saturated in Boston with Tufts, MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, etc. but they value their academic reputation above athletics. Pitt has an enormous med/research program, and has minimized their spending by partnering with the Steelers organization for facilities. Notre Dame seems to agree that it is about mission by turning down higher football revenue and maintaining their independence. In other conferences, I look at Purdue or more so Northwestern as examples and I’ll wait to see it first, but I believe the resident of Michigan said they would drop football before paying players. In my opinion, if we can’t turn it around, and Syverud gets his wish for a genuine med school, SU is just as likely to abandon big time football as it is to double down on it in the next 10-20 years. [/QUOTE]

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