• Hi Guest, want to participate in the discussions, keep track of read/unread posts and more? Create your free account and increase the benefits of your eGriz.com experience today!

The State of FCS?

IdaGriz01

Well-known member
Fair warning: The crux of this thread is in the long post that follows, which you may or may not find interesting. People who are “allergic” to numbers are apt to find it boring. So I’ll state my conclusion right here and “non-numbers” people can skip the rest:

Due to NCAA rules and other factors, the overall strength of 1-AA/FCS football has steadily declined in the years since 1990.
 
The Numbers: Got to thinking about the long-term state of 1-AA/FCS football, based on recent comments on some other threads. The question became where to start. A little study pointed to a key period in the early 1990s, so I began with 1990 when there were 80 teams classified as 1-AA (not including the Ivy League). But in 1991, the NCAA ruled that Division I athletic programs must run all their sports at that level. The greatest impact was on football, where quite a few schools played at a lower level to reduced costs. These schools now had to upgrade their football programs or replace them with another sport. That decision proved, in retrospect, to be bad for 1-AA/FCS football.

When it all shook out in 1995, there were 111 non-Ivy 1-AA teams, even with the loss of four to the FBS level. That is, 35 teams were added in 1992-1995. By and large, these were not strong additions. Two-thirds of them still have cumulative losing records at the 1-AA/FCS level, and several never had a winning season before they dropped football altogether. (All told, nine of the add-ons have since dropped the sport … actually a good thing for the division.) Three of the add-ons did later move up to FBS.

Through the next ten years, the number of non-Ivy 1-AA teams increased by just two (to 113). This despite the loss of 16 teams from the 1995 list (9 moved up to FBS, while 7 dropped football). That was because 18 teams were added. While none of these additions moved to FBS later, the group did include four successful to very successful programs: SE Louisiana, SDSU, Coastal Carolina and NDSU. The rest were mediocre to dreadful. Again, nearly two thirds still have losing records at the FCS level, and four of the worst teams have one winning season between them.

During the 2006-2016 period, ten teams were lost from the 2005 list: 5 moving up to FBS, 5 dropping football. That was offset by the addition of 14 new teams. Unfortunately, with one exception (Central Arkansas), these additions further diminished the strength of the FCS. Twelve of the 14 have losing records since moving to the FCS level, and the seven worse teams have one winning season against D-I opponents between them.

Overall, from 1991 through 2016, 12 schools dropped 1-AA/FCS football and 18 FCS teams moved up to the FBS level. Most of the drops (10) had become FCS after 1990. Most of the move-up teams (15) had been FCS in 1990.

Thus, in 2016, there were 117 teams classed as FCS, not including the Ivy League. Of these, 63 were classed as 1-AA in 1990 – call them the “base” teams – while 54 had been added after that.

The key question is how those additions and subtractions impacted the strength of the FCS field. As suggested by the numbers above, the overall effect has been disastrous. First, only a third of the add-ons have cumulative winning records against D-I opponents, and many bad teams have yet to post a winning D-I season record. In contrast, nearly half of the base teams have winning cumulative records since 1990 and all have posted at least one winning season since then.

Playoff participation offers an even bigger point of departure. Of the 54 add-ons, over half have not yet made the playoffs. (This despite the expanded playoff field.) Another 13 that did make the playoffs have accumulated an 0-20 record. That’s nearly 80% of the add-ons that have not won a playoff game. And among the add-ons, only NDSU has won a national championship (several, of course).

In contrast, nearly 60% of the base teams have won at least one playoff game since 1990. Also, since that time, base teams have won 12 national championships.

The outstanding success for NDSU cannot begin to offset what the FCS has lost with strong teams moving up. At least three of the move-up teams used the 1-A/FCS level as a planned stepping stone to full FBS status and can be discounted (Buffalo, UAB and UCF). But the combined playoff records of the other 15 was 154-92 (63%). They accounted for 15 national championships (with Marshall, Appalachian State, and Georgia Southern as multiple title holders).

So what’s the state of FCS football? The numbers say it has steadily declined in strength.
 
IdaGriz01 said:
Fair warning: The crux of this thread is in the long post that follows, which you may or may not find interesting. People who are “allergic” to numbers are apt to find it boring. So I’ll state my conclusion right here and “non-numbers” people can skip the rest:

Due to NCAA rules and other factors, the overall strength of 1-AA/FCS football has steadily declined in the years since 1990.

Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).
 
PlayerRep said:
IdaGriz01 said:
Fair warning: The crux of this thread is in the long post that follows, which you may or may not find interesting. People who are “allergic” to numbers are apt to find it boring. So I’ll state my conclusion right here and “non-numbers” people can skip the rest:

Due to NCAA rules and other factors, the overall strength of 1-AA/FCS football has steadily declined in the years since 1990.

Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).
Numbers and facts can be stubborn things.
 
kemajic said:
PlayerRep said:
IdaGriz01 said:
Fair warning: The crux of this thread is in the long post that follows, which you may or may not find interesting. People who are “allergic” to numbers are apt to find it boring. So I’ll state my conclusion right here and “non-numbers” people can skip the rest:

Due to NCAA rules and other factors, the overall strength of 1-AA/FCS football has steadily declined in the years since 1990.

Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).
Numbers and facts can be stubborn things.

And they can also be largely irrelevant and meaningless, as they are in this discussion. Some people want to live in the past, and just keep repeating Idaho, Boise St, Nevada, App St. So what, there are scores more of good FCS schools competing now, than were in those old days.
 
IdaGriz01 said:
The Numbers: Got to thinking about the long-term state of 1-AA/FCS football, based on recent comments on some other threads. The question became where to start. A little study pointed to a key period in the early 1990s, so I began with 1990 when there were 80 teams classified as 1-AA (not including the Ivy League). But in 1991, the NCAA ruled that Division I athletic programs must run all their sports at that level. The greatest impact was on football, where quite a few schools played at a lower level to reduced costs. These schools now had to upgrade their football programs or replace them with another sport. That decision proved, in retrospect, to be bad for 1-AA/FCS football.

When it all shook out in 1995, there were 111 non-Ivy 1-AA teams, even with the loss of four to the FBS level. That is, 35 teams were added in 1992-1995. By and large, these were not strong additions. Two-thirds of them still have cumulative losing records at the 1-AA/FCS level, and several never had a winning season before they dropped football altogether. (All told, nine of the add-ons have since dropped the sport … actually a good thing for the division.) Three of the add-ons did later move up to FBS.

Through the next ten years, the number of non-Ivy 1-AA teams increased by just two (to 113). This despite the loss of 16 teams from the 1995 list (9 moved up to FBS, while 7 dropped football). That was because 18 teams were added. While none of these additions moved to FBS later, the group did include four successful to very successful programs: SE Louisiana, SDSU, Coastal Carolina and NDSU. The rest were mediocre to dreadful. Again, nearly two thirds still have losing records at the FCS level, and four of the worst teams have one winning season between them.

During the 2006-2016 period, ten teams were lost from the 2005 list: 5 moving up to FBS, 5 dropping football. That was offset by the addition of 14 new teams. Unfortunately, with one exception (Central Arkansas), these additions further diminished the strength of the FCS. Twelve of the 14 have losing records since moving to the FCS level, and the seven worse teams have one winning season against D-I opponents between them.

Overall, from 1991 through 2016, 12 schools dropped 1-AA/FCS football and 18 FCS teams moved up to the FBS level. Most of the drops (10) had become FCS after 1990. Most of the move-up teams (15) had been FCS in 1990.

Thus, in 2016, there were 117 teams classed as FCS, not including the Ivy League. Of these, 63 were classed as 1-AA in 1990 – call them the “base” teams – while 54 had been added after that.

The key question is how those additions and subtractions impacted the strength of the FCS field. As suggested by the numbers above, the overall effect has been disastrous. First, only a third of the add-ons have cumulative winning records against D-I opponents, and many bad teams have yet to post a winning D-I season record. In contrast, nearly half of the base teams have winning cumulative records since 1990 and all have posted at least one winning season since then.

Playoff participation offers an even bigger point of departure. Of the 54 add-ons, over half have not yet made the playoffs. (This despite the expanded playoff field.) Another 13 that did make the playoffs have accumulated an 0-20 record. That’s nearly 80% of the add-ons that have not won a playoff game. And among the add-ons, only NDSU has won a national championship (several, of course).

In contrast, nearly 60% of the base teams have won at least one playoff game since 1990. Also, since that time, base teams have won 12 national championships.

The outstanding success for NDSU cannot begin to offset what the FCS has lost with strong teams moving up. At least three of the move-up teams used the 1-A/FCS level as a planned stepping stone to full FBS status and can be discounted (Buffalo, UAB and UCF). But the combined playoff records of the other 15 was 154-92 (63%). They accounted for 15 national championships (with Marshall, Appalachian State, and Georgia Southern as multiple title holders).

So what’s the state of FCS football? The numbers say it has steadily declined in strength.

Your analysis and stats fail to address the most important factors, i.e. how many good teams are there competing in FCS, how many good conferences are there, etc.

Why don't you do an analysis of the MVC (i.e., its current teams) against what those teams were doing in 1990?

Another interesting analysis would be to compare the number of good teams then with the number of good teams now.

Personally, I think that NDSU is the best FCS program of all time. EWU is just about up to the level those top teams that left, and I think is as good/successful as Idaho, Nevada and Boise St. Montana became much better than it was in 1990.

Your numbers provide interesting background, but the quality of the teams and conferences is much more important to the analysis of the strength of FCS football.

I think it's odd that you exclude the Ivies. They play in FCS. They get ranked in the top 25. Various conferences don't compete in the playoffs.
 
PlayerRep said:
... Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).
Well, I go with the numbers. I don’t think we totally disagree, and it may be a matter of semantics. First: I totally agree that the upper tier of FCS is as good as it’s ever been, perhaps even better. But the reality of the records show the overall strength has declined. Between 1990 and 2016, 67 teams moved through the subdivision. Some fell by the wayside (dropped football) and some moved up. As of 2016, there were 54 FCS teams that had been added since 1990 -- that’s 46% of the subdivision outside the Ivy league.

In the 26 years since 1990, only one of the add-ons -- NDSU -- has won a national championship. Only one other even made it to the NC game (Jacksonville State in 2015). As the long epistle says, nearly 80% of the add-ons have never won a playoff game. Conversely, 60% teams that were part of the subdivision in 1990, and still were in 2016, have won at least one playoff game in 1990-2016, and 12 national championships.

So during the 26 years since 1990, the subdivision has changed drastically … with good teams leaving for FBS and the additions being largely uncompetitive. So the split between the haves and have-nots has grown, and that, IMO, says the overall strength of the division has gone down.
 
PlayerRep said:
... I think it's odd that you exclude the Ivies. They play in FCS. They get ranked in the top 25. Various conferences don't compete in the playoffs.
I didn't include the Ivies because I see them as more-or-less a constant within the 1-AA/FCS, so they do not impact the competitive balance (the point in question) one way or another. I will say that,overall, I think the Ivy has probably become stronger since 1990, but proving that would require a complete assessment of their OOC performances.
 
IdaGriz01 said:
PlayerRep said:
... Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).
Well, I go with the numbers. I don’t think we totally disagree, and it may be a matter of semantics. First: I totally agree that the upper tier of FCS is as good as it’s ever been, perhaps even better. But the reality of the records show the overall strength has declined. Between 1990 and 2016, 67 teams moved through the subdivision. Some fell by the wayside (dropped football) and some moved up. As of 2016, there were 54 FCS teams that had been added since 1990 -- that’s 46% of the subdivision outside the Ivy league.

In the 26 years since 1990, only one of the add-ons -- NDSU -- has won a national championship. Only one other even made it to the NC game (Jacksonville State in 2015). As the long epistle says, nearly 80% of the add-ons have never won a playoff game. Conversely, 60% teams that were part of the subdivision in 1990, and still were in 2016, have won at least one playoff game in 1990-2016, and 12 national championships.

So during the 26 years since 1990, the subdivision has changed drastically … with good teams leaving for FBS and the additions being largely uncompetitive. So the split between the haves and have-nots has grown, and that, IMO, says the overall strength of the division has gone down.

While I would have to look more, you may be right that alot of new teams have been lunch meat, or too many of them. However, I think the overall quality of the rest of the teams has improved generally. You and I may be measuring things differently. My measure is the number of good teams and conferences in FCS and over all strength of the better teams, not the percentage.

I appreciated your stats and work, by the way. Interesting and helpful.
 
PlayerRep said:
IdaGriz01 said:
Fair warning: The crux of this thread is in the long post that follows, which you may or may not find interesting. People who are “allergic” to numbers are apt to find it boring. So I’ll state my conclusion right here and “non-numbers” people can skip the rest:

Due to NCAA rules and other factors, the overall strength of 1-AA/FCS football has steadily declined in the years since 1990.

Without reading any further, I will disagree. While FCS doesn't have some of the old top teams, FCS is still very good and has alot of competition. Several of the top conferences are very strong and deep. Some of the lesser conferences now have more than one or two teams that are competitive. The Missouri Valley conference is very strong down to the below the middle. The Big Sky is not an easy conference to win these days. Idaho, Nevada and Boise St are gone, but EWU may be better than any of the 3 were, and schools like CP and North Dakota, and sometimes schools like MSU and NAU, are very competitive. I think the quality of the bottom of those conferences is now better than it once was.

Also, note that Geo. Southern had not been a power for a dozen or so years before it departed. Idaho is coming back, and I think they will be immediately competitive and could even become a power (but who knows).

You not read any further and have an opinion already? No way...
 
PlayerRep said:
... And they can also be largely irrelevant and meaningless, as they are in this discussion. Some people want to live in the past, and just keep repeating Idaho, Boise St, Nevada, App St. So what, there are scores more of good FCS schools competing now, than were in those old days.
PlayerRep said:
... Your analysis and stats fail to address the most important factors, i.e. how many good teams are there competing in FCS, how many good conferences are there, etc.
PlayerRep said:
While I would have to look more, you may be right that a lot of new teams have been lunch meat, or too many of them. However, I think the overall quality of the rest of the teams has improved generally. You and I may be measuring things differently. My measure is the number of good teams and conferences in FCS and over all strength of the better teams, not the percentage.

I appreciated your stats and work, by the way. Interesting and helpful.
As suggested before, I totally agree that the overall playing quality of the best teams has improved greatly ... think about how many more drop-downs there are now compared to past years. In my view, the problem is that the process has only made the good teams better and mostly done nothing for the weaker programs. (What kid would want to drop down to a crappy program?)

And, while I do use the "eye test" to judge a "quality" team, I prefer long-term numbers to judge the overall quality of a program. The mix of “good” teams obviously does change with time, but the cumulative W-L is still the best measure of overall program quality, IMO. After all, most programs go through some ups and downs.

And that makes for an interesting comparison. One might define two levels of program quality, say, 63% W-L over a period of time (a nice 7-4 season record, on average) or 54% (a steady 6-5 average winning season, even with ups and downs).

To me, the most meaningful comparison would be to 1995, after the big expansion to 111 programs forced by the NCAA. That year, there were 16 teams that would hold over 63% W-L during 1990-2016, and 47 maintaining over 54%.

In 2016, the number of teams with a 63% cumulative W-L record was 13, while there were 37 holding at over 54%. (Of course, those numbers are out of a pool of 117.)

Note that both numbers are down, suggesting that the number of "good" programs was in decline -- my original point. In my view, that's a product of two factors: many of the best programs moved up, and the very best programs that were left got even better (drop-downs and recruiting) while the have-nots stayed the same or regressed.
 
Interesting topic, as a whole I think it has probably declined. But I also think the top 25 could consistently compete in any G5 league, and the top 10 (that might be a bit gracious) could have decent records in P5 leagues (probably only a couple would be better than 50-50).
Teams like EWU, NDSU and JMU have shown they can compete with damn near anyone, and imagine if you just level the playing field with even scholarships... Those 3 could compete with anyone with extra scholarships and no extra budget. That's pretty impressive.
 
SeattleBobcat said:
Interesting topic, as a whole I think it has probably declined. But I also think the top 25 could consistently compete in any G5 league, and the top 10 (that might be a bit gracious) could have decent records in P5 leagues (probably only a couple would be better than 50-50).
Teams like EWU, NDSU and JMU have shown they can compete with damn near anyone, and imagine if you just level the playing field with even scholarships... Those 3 could compete with anyone with extra scholarships and no extra budget. That's pretty impressive.
Competitive … absolutely. Go for a national FBS title? Probably not. As for how far down in the “successful programs” list you go, you then do have to take into account the level of competition the teams faced.

Over the long haul, the top twenty-or-so W-L FCS teams include Dayton (Pioneer), Duquesne (NEC), Lehigh (Patriot), South Carolina State (MEAC), and Grambling (SWAC). Sorry guys, but you play a weak-ass conference schedule.

Eliminating those conferences from the list, we get
NDSU (135-36)
UM (263-85)
UNI (230-105)
McNeese (217-103)
Delaware (211-118)
Eastern Kentucky (200-114)
Central Arkansas (200-114) SL
New Hampshire (202-123)
Eastern Washington (198-122)
Jacksonville State (157-97)
Villanova (198-123)
James Madison (198-125)

Some might also question the strength of the Ohio Valley (Jacksonville State and Eastern Kentucky) and Delaware has been down lately. But I would venture to say all the other teams on the list would be at least competitive at the FBS level.
 
IdaGriz01 said:
SeattleBobcat said:
Interesting topic, as a whole I think it has probably declined. But I also think the top 25 could consistently compete in any G5 league, and the top 10 (that might be a bit gracious) could have decent records in P5 leagues (probably only a couple would be better than 50-50).
Teams like EWU, NDSU and JMU have shown they can compete with damn near anyone, and imagine if you just level the playing field with even scholarships... Those 3 could compete with anyone with extra scholarships and no extra budget. That's pretty impressive.
Competitive … absolutely. Go for a national FBS title? Probably not. As for how far down in the “successful programs” list you go, you then do have to take into account the level of competition the teams faced.

Over the long haul, the top twenty-or-so W-L FCS teams include Dayton (Pioneer), Duquesne (NEC), Lehigh (Patriot), South Carolina State (MEAC), and Grambling (SWAC). Sorry guys, but you play a weak-ass conference schedule.

Eliminating those conferences from the list, we get
NDSU (135-36)
UM (263-85)
UNI (230-105)
McNeese (217-103)
Delaware (211-118)
Eastern Kentucky (200-114)
Central Arkansas (200-114) SL
New Hampshire (202-123)
Eastern Washington (198-122)
Jacksonville State (157-97)
Villanova (198-123)
James Madison (198-125)

Some might also question the strength of the Ohio Valley (Jacksonville State and Eastern Kentucky) and Delaware has been down lately. But I would venture to say all the other teams on the list would be at least competitive at the FBS level.

South Carolina State has nearly as many (7) players in the pros than UM (9) with a fraction of the enrollment and budget.
 
GrizLA said:
... South Carolina State has nearly as many (7) players in the pros than UM (9) with a fraction of the enrollment and budget.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make. Certainly the HBCU schools are “over-represented” in the NFL. SC State can even point to three players (including Deacon Jones) in the NFL Hall of Fame. They were seeing quality drop-downs (many from the SEC) long before the rest of 1-AA/FCS started to see a lot. Might be based on playing time or academics. And the Bulldogs have parleyed that into an outstanding record, with seven MEAC championships or co-championships since 1994. That success has not held up outside the MEAC, however. From 2002 through 2016, SC State is 10-30 in out-of-conference games, including an 0-4 record in the FCS playoffs.
 
To bump the thread, I decided to show a glaring example of how some numbers can be misleading. The Dayton Flyers have the second-best W-L record (79%) for the 1990-2016 span of seasons. That puts them just ahead of the Griz and just behind NDSU, percentage-wise.

That number looks really, really good … until you dig beneath the surface. First off, they piled up those numbers in the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League, by far the weakest conference (as measured by calculators like the Football Power Index). And despite those impressive numbers, they have represented the League only once in the FCS playoffs. They lost 42-7 to Western Illinois in 2015.

The obvious alternative is to look at the OOC record. That too looks pretty good at 21-10 for the period 2002-2016. But wait: Dayton is 13-0 against Robert Morris of the NEC. Over that period, R-M has been generally ranked about #99 among all FCS teams (abt 122) … and the NEC has been about the third weakest conference in FCS (trailed only by the SWAC and Pioneer).

In fact, Dayton played most of its OOC games either against the NEC or the Patriot League (generally about the 4th or 5th weakest FCS conference). Their combined record against those two conference is 19-6. Dayton’s other two OOC wins were against Saint Peter’s (which discontinued football after 2006) and Kennesaw State (which started its football program with the 2015 season). They are 0-4 against their other OOC opponents (Western Illinois, Illinois State, Youngstown State and Yale).

Of course, one doesn't really need these numbers to know that Dayton could not compete consistently against top-level FCS teams, but it's nice to have them anyway. That's not to say they couldn't pull off an upset ... "on any given Saturday."
 
I think the FCS at this point is somewhat overbloated and a shadow of what it used to be. I know it's unpopular to some but I think we should be looking to FBS/G5 before long as I feel more of the top FCS Programs will start doing the same.
 
UTGrizFan said:
I think the FCS at this point is somewhat overbloated and a shadow of what it used to be. I know it's unpopular to some but I think we should be looking to FBS/G5 before long as I feel more of the top FCS Programs will start doing the same.
Please ... let's not turn this into yet another "move-up" thread. Myself, I am much more interested in the chances that more "no chance" FBS teams might drop down to FCS, like Idaho. I'd also think about schools that might drop football altogether ... except.

The “except” (which came as a surprise when I examined the numbers) were the fourteen teams that joined (or rejoined) the FCS level between 2006 and 2016. That was the period when we saw all the lamentation about the bad economics of “big time” college football. Yet these 14 schools either moved up (6), resurrected teams that had been dead for forty or more years, or started totally new football programs. (There was actually a 15th – East Tennessee State – that restarted a program suspended in 2004.)

As a matter of fact, five schools started football program basically “from scratch” just in the last three years. What’s up with that? From what I can tell, the answer (for Houston Baptist, Mercer, and so on) was that football -- even bad football -- provides a level of name recognition that no other advertising can match. I find that weird, but fascinating.
 
Sorry guys and gals, but I spent a lot of time collecting numbers for this thread, so I want to get some mileage out of it. Besides, I like to bump it up over the pissing contests that seem to proliferate when we don’t have some real football to talk about.

Anyway, while I like numbers when it comes to sports, most of us are (or should be) aware that they can be deceiving if you’re not careful. So here’s an interesting fact in the numbers: Alabama State (146-140 for 1990-2016) has a slightly better winning percentage than Stephen F. Austin (153-154).

Anybody care to suggest who might win a head-to-head matchup?

Actually, I had a small hope that the two had played each other (since 2002), but that did not happen. The various predictors suggest that SFA would be favored by two touchdowns … which I think is being charitable to Alabama State.
 
Gut feeling, but in terms of programs, the FCS has declined since the 90s. However, in terms of on-field performance, the FCS is much better.
 
Back
Top