#MACtion might get a little less exciting.
Students and faculty at Eastern Michigan are pleading for the football team to drop out of Division I and find a different league for the rest of its sports, says a report presented to the EMU Board of Regents on Friday.
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"Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint," faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. "It is a losing proposition — always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane."
Eastern Michigan spent $33.9 million on athletics last year, according to data from USA Today, $27 million of which was subsidized by institutional support — which consists of state aid and student tuition — one of the highest subsidies in the Mid-American Conference. Of that support, students pay almost $1,000 per year for athletics through tuition.
The Eagles tried selling beer at home games in 2015 to raise attendance, but attendance averaged around 4,000. Eastern Michigan also hasn't seen a winning football season since 1995 when it went 6-5.
“We are chasing that money in an athletic arms race we can’t win,” Bunsis said. “We are throwing money down the drain.”
With the Power 5 spending spree just getting started, Eastern Michigan could be the poster boy for mid-major schools losing out to the big spenders. Could we see more non-Power 5 schools drop from Division I to save the institutions and students money? That's one way to lessen student debt.
