College football is one the most exciting sports in the nation. Just look at this year, with an upset virtually every week. This got me to thinking, why doesn’t Marquette have a football team?
Marquette decided to cut the football team after the 1960 season since the team had not had a winning season since 1953 and the University was losing money putting the team out on the field.
At the time, the move could have seemed reasonable. Now, though, college football is a major source of income for universities. According to a 2007 report by CNN, only 15 out of 64 teams in the Football Bowl System (FBS) division (formally Division I-A) that went to a bowl game lost money during the 2006-2007 season.
The 2006-2007 season Florida alone made $32.4 million. Now they are in the SEC and are going to fill seats with a winning team; but that is still an extraordinary amount of money.
According to an NCAA news release from 1996, the average profit for a FBS division school in 1995 was $1.2 million, and I would suspect that since then, it has only gone up.
One big question is where would a Marquette team play? You can rule out Valley Fields. Even if they tore it down, it just doesn’t have the land capacity to house a stadium of the size needed, since the casino is next door and isn’t moving anytime soon.
A stadium would have to be built somewhere in Milwaukee or a suburb close by. Just like the basketball games, Marquette could bus students to the stadium. The cost of a stadium that holds around 50,000 to 60,000 should cost around $140 million, unless Marquette wants to have one of the most state-of-the-art stadiums.
To fund the stadium Marquette could make a deal with the state of Wisconsin that could be like the deal made between the University of Minnesota and the taxpayers of Minnesota. The University comes up with 52% of the funds and the state pays the other 48%.
Marquette could get the money from alumni donations, selling the name rights of the stadium, parking fees and putting in an athletic fee in tuition to raise it an additional $50. This was also a strategy used by the University of South Florida, which started their football program in 1997.
USF has gone 24-14 since joining the Big East football conference in 2003. In a matter of eight years the school was in a BCS conference, and 10 years after the team was founded, they were ranked No. 2 at one point during last season. This proves that a team can start from scratch and quickly rise to a great level of play.
The team did have to spend its first four seasons in the Football Championship System (FCS) conference (formally Division II-A) but now is in the FBS. So Marquette could take a similar path, start a team, play a few years in the FCS to get a team started and then move up.
Since Marquette is already in the Big East for basketball, maybe the conference would let us in for football, which would mean that we would already be in a BCS conference. I’m not saying that it would be easy to bring a football team to Marquette, but it is something worth looking into by the University.
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