I'd be all for it. I love football, and I love our football team, but nowhere near as much as our basketball team. And I don't even like basketball, I only watch SFA.

Nobody cares who won the FCS national championship unless it was your team. That being said, I don't think it's an either or thing. We simply need to get better at supporting athletics. That's the greatest marketing tool we have.

Maybe it looks like a PAC or something similar for promoting SFA and SFA athletics. We could raise a small ish amount of money to do things like lobby for more money at the gov, pull strings to get bigger donations, and do PR for SFA. Get us in local and national news for everything.

I'd guess we have 100k living alumni or so? We need to utilize them to promote the University.

There are also 2 million people withing 80-100 miles of SFA, with Tyler being the biggest town and next closest semi-large University. We should position ourselves as the University for East Texas. There's no reason we couldn't sell out every sporting event every time with the right marketing & school support. We have a market the size of many states, we need to use it as best we can.

After all, every game that we win at the Big Dance, the more the value of our degrees increase.

I brought this up years ago and got shouted down. I also agree. Football reigns over all budget decisions and frankly we could be a Gonzaga with more resources devoted to basketball and baseball. I know this isn't popular but I'd like to see SFA look into men's soccer..... good convo.

If this change would give men basketball and other program more money and a new facility then I'm totally for it. Like TallTexan said sfa has access to a large market. We are the only d1 school for about a 2 to 3 hour radius. We also don't have to compete with any pro teams. Athletic Success and marketing of that success can take us to a whole new level. Having a rich donate like Wichita state wouldn't hurt either

As much as I love SFA MBB (and I really, really, really love SFA MBB), SFA without a competitive football program on at least a FCS level just would not cut it for me -- ever. So, put me down as a big fat NO on this hypothetical.

Interesting idea, but I like having a football program.

As much as everyone is saying this would be a good idea, it's undeniable that football is by far our biggest source of income in athletics. We make more money with football than basketball(especially when we don't make the NCAA tournament).
Regardless of our lack of success recently just having a football team is huge in bringing in students and revenue.
Dropping it would be a massive mistake.

As much money as we spend in football, we make up for it during the year.
Not to mention its hard to be a college in Texas without football.

That would be a big NO for me as football is still king in Texas and still my preferred sport. Like Tall Texan I'm not really into basketball except for SFA BB and that started back in 76 when I arrived there....bad as the men's team was during my time there I seldom if ever missed a game.
That said, I would very much like to see SFA build a real baseball/softball complex and I fully believe that a real field would enhance us greatly in the SLC yearly race.
As for men's BB....I would like to see us become the next Gonzaga or Wichita St as much as anyone here....but I believe that we are still far away from those heights. The Underwood years were great and gave a glimpse of what that might be like but first SFA has to show that wasn't just a flash in the pan deal, we would have to start beating other D-1 schools on a regular basis....but the biggest drawback is location, location, location. Don't get me wrong, I like Nacogdoches just fine...but it is an island without easy access. Wichita and Spokane have real airports and opponents can travel there more realistically and easily than Nac. Quality D-1 schools are not going to fly to Houston and then ride a bus 3 more hours.....and SFA can't play every D-1 game on the road and score some of the big wins we would need to build up to the next level we want to reach. We could spend $$$$ millions of dollars on a new coliseum and practice facilities and locker rooms but without an airport the top level programs would still not come visiting.
Don't know much about the Nac airport or how many millions it would take to make it where other schools could fly in but I rather doubt that Nac has that kind of money lying around.

That's ultimately the biggest thing. We need an airport. Or at least we need a landing strip at the municipal airport that can take a charter flight.

Not having an airport is a big hold back, but that almost seems like a federal project. Maybe one of our esteemed senators could get us a hook up?

It would have to be done locally unfortunately. Literally the only justification for the airport would be so we could consistently get quality opponents in Nacogdoches for sports. Nacogdoches likes to call itself a tourist attraction but it's not a place people pick to visit. It's a place people stop on road trips. Definitely not enough money comes from tourism to justify building a new airport or runway. So it would have to be one our wealthy alumni.
It actually wouldn't be as expensive as it sounds to get a runway built, but it would absolutely have to be either alumni or university built.

Though expansion to the municipal airport could benefit SFA in other ways such as allowing students to fly in. I'm sure we'd attract plenty of out of state students if the were able to fly to love field in Dallas and get a connecting flight to Nac.

If we want to see real growth with our athletics, the athletic fee was our biggest hope. The examples of schools that don't play football, Gonzaga, Wichita state, VCU, they already have athletic fees so not having football isn't the reason they stay dominant. It's the fact that they are allowed to continue their dominance by their student body.

We do have an airport. The problem is having a runway and equipment that can handle a charter flight.

Definitely food for thought here, and I am one who enjoys MBB more than FB, but there is more to consider than just eliminating football...there is the band, dance/flag team, etc. I think football adds a lot to a school in terms of spirit because it is not just the game, it's the "entertainment" that goes with it as well. And considering that we have a strong emphasis in this area, I would hate to lose that.
It would be weird not having a homecoming game....

Txjack said:

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Definitely food for thought here, and I am one who enjoys MBB more than FB, but there is more to consider than just eliminating football...there is the band, dance/flag team, etc. I think football adds a lot to a school in terms of spirit because it is not just the game, it's the "entertainment" that goes with it as well. And considering that we have a strong emphasis in this area, I would hate to lose that.
It would be weird not having a homecoming game....

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That is an excellent point. Nac already has too few options for entertainment, why remove saturday's in the fall from that?

That being said, I still think we should prioritize basketball first and then everything else, unless we're planning on making a jump to FBS anytime soon, at which point the football team can play with the big boys and be on TV.

Let's add another hypothetical scenario to this current one. Would people be more willing to give up football if a move to basketball only would guarantee us a Wichita state or vcu level of success. Bc a basketball only move is useless if we suck or don't win.

They make that revenue without football because they have solid home games and because they have an athletic fee.
Dropping football still doesn't give us solid home games, only transportation to Nac gets us that.
I do agree that FCS football, even if we won a national title, is less impressive than a single NCAA tournament appearance(not won, appearance), but our 3000-4000 attendance basketball games still do not match anywhere near the revenue that we receive from football.
I think the ultimate goal should be to improve in all sports including football.
I also generally agree that while we did get a taste of national dominance in basketball, we only tasted that for 3 seasons.
Say we dropped football and then basketball goes back to being a second or third best team in the SLC consistently, SFA just lost potentially millions in sports revenue, lost a huge school tradition, and gained nothing.

sfa17 said:

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Let's add another hypothetical scenario to this current one. Would people be more willing to give up football if a move to basketball only would guarantee us a Wichita state or vcu level of success. Bc a basketball only move is useless if we suck or don't win.

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I believe that Lamar took that same route many years ago, with the same hopes. How did that work out for them?

It's Lamar, the only thing they're going to win is a humidity contest.

TallTexan said:

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It's Lamar, the only thing they're going to win is a humidity contest.

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ROFL!! Can't argue with that!

I kind of doubt our football team actually makes a profit. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

TallTexan said:

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I kind of doubt our football team actually makes a profit. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

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I was wondering about that too. I'm not saying it is something I would be for but I don't think football brings in millions net. Let's not forget that football is also the most expensive college sport. It is very difficult to tell looking at the annual financial reports but the budgeted expenses and revenue are pretty close.

The games the football team has against the Texas Tech's and most of P5 schools pretty much pays
for all the other sports programs to be able to compete through out the yr, your not gonna get that pay day
playing a basketball against another P5 school.

Those games pay 250-400k. I'd guess they don't even pay for all of the football team's operating expenses, much less paying for other sports.