How important is football to a college? Look at what UMass just did
The Minutemen abandoning the Atlantic 10 for the MAC to try to lift up a hopeless football program is a disheartening peek into how the college sports machine works
Whenever it feels like the perpetually churning gears of conference realignment come to a merciful halt, they start right back up, often when you least expect them to do so.
On Monday, reports trickled out that UMass was moving to the Mid-American Conference for all sports, not just football, beginning with the 2025-26 academic year and, in the process, was leaving behind its longtime home, the Atlantic 10.
The move gives the Minutemen football program a home, as it had been competing as an independent for the past eight seasons after a four-year dalliance as a football-only member in the – you guessed it – MAC, from 2012-15.
UMass’ decision, seismic as it may seem, wasn’t a surprise to those involved in the process, especially given that it was the only member of the league that has an FBS football program. In the type of conference split that can often leave one side, if not both, harboring acrimony, things seemed oddly (and genuinely) congenial.
“Massachusetts has been very transparent with the Atlantic 10 in its search for an FBS conference affiliation,” A-10 commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade said in a statement after news of UMass’ decision broke. “In turn, the A-10 has been very respectful of this need and the environment needed surrounding FBS football.”
For whatever drama UMass’ exit lacked, its departure is telling. A school with no history as a successful program at the highest level of college football is preparing to sacrifice everything to try to be something it never has been.
UMass’ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad FBS football history
For whatever prestige or basic competency it lacks, UMass has a lengthy football history dating back to 1879, 10 years after Rutgers and Princeton played the first college football game.
The Minutemen found their footing in the back half of the 20th century and into the new millennium.
Between 1960 and 2007, they won 21 conference championships, most of which came in the now-defunct New England-based Yankee Conference. From 1998-2007, they made the NCAA playoffs five times. In 1998, they won the national title, the first and only in program history. As recently as 2006, they played for another national title, though they fell in that matchup to an Appalachian State program that, with many of the same players, would stun the college football world by winning at Michigan nine months later.
There’s one detail that was left out of that list of accomplishments – they all occurred at the Division I-AA level (what’s now known as the FCS).
In the second tier of Division I college football, UMass had found an enjoyable niche. It was a large state school that didn’t have the same resources or infrastructure of similarly positioned institutions in other states, but it had enough to field a competitive football team that could be a consistent, viable and sometimes championship-caliber threat against programs with similar football ambitions and capabilities.
In the spring of 2011, that changed, with UMass leadership announcing the program was making the jump to the FBS starting with the 2012 season.
“Playing at the top level of college football is consistent with our role as the flagship university of the commonwealth,” chancellor Robert Holub said at the time. “UMass-Amherst is the premier public research university in the state and in the region. It’s only fitting we should play in the premier division of college football. This move advances our aspiration to assume our rightful place in the upper echelon of national public research universities. Most such institutions compete at the FBS level.”
Given the day the announcement was made, April 20, you’d be forgiven for wondering if those in power were high when they made the decision.
The transition would have its quirks, namely that the Minutemen, whose on-campus stadium didn’t meet FBS standards at the time, would be playing their games at Gillette Stadium, the home of the NFL’s New England Patriots. The Foxborough stadium was 95 miles from UMass’ Amherst campus, the longest distance between any Division I football venue and the university itself.
For all the grandiose language the move was couched in by UMass leadership, others weren’t convinced it could work.
“I’m not sure they know what they’re getting into,” famed sports economist Andrew Zimbalist of nearby Smith College told the Daily Hampshire Gazette in 2011. “The drain on resources could be significant. It’s a problematic and risky bet.”
UMass architecture and history professor Max Page, also speaking to the Daily Hampshire Gazette after the announcement in 2011, was a little more blunt in his assessment.
“It’s a stupid idea,” he said. “We’ve seen numerous studies that show big-time college sports do not pay for themselves and end up shortchanging students, as well. A program like this will be a sinkhole.”
That skepticism, regardless of how it was phrased, proved to be warranted.
Since the move to FBS 12 years ago, UMass is 24-112, a ghastly 17.6% win percentage. In four seasons in the MAC, the league it’s excitedly set to rejoin, it went 8-40 overall and 7-25 in conference play. As an independent, it wasn’t exactly flourishing, either, with a 6-46 record since 2019.
In their time back in the FBS, the Minutemen have never won more than four games in a season. The only thing vaguely resembling sustained success were back-to-back 4-8 seasons in 2017 and 2018 in their second stint under coach Mark Whipple, who had guided them to the FCS national championship in 1998. After that 2018 season, though, Whipple and the university mutually agreed to part ways, with college football insider Bruce Feldman reporting Whipple had been fired. Three years later, Whipple was coaching a top-10 scoring offense at Pitt led by a Heisman Trophy finalist while his former employer went 1-11.
Whatever interest UMass hoped to arouse by playing “big-time” college football in an NFL stadium never transpired.
In their final year in the FCS in 2011, the Minutemen averaged 10,005 fans. In their first two years at Gillette Stadium, those averages jumped all the way to 10,901 in 2012 and 15,830 in 2013. Even when they managed to lure Power Five programs to Foxborough, they struggled to draw crowds. When they hosted Indiana in 2012, only 16,304 showed up. Two years later against Colorado, there was an announced attendance of 10,227. BYU, a program with a national fan base, drew only 14,802 in 2018 and just 8,204 fans in 2019. Even three games against the lone Power Five program in the region, Boston College, between 2014-21 never had a bigger audience than 30,479 – or 44.3% of the stadium’s capacity at the time.
By 2017, they were back on campus at a renovated, 17,000-seat McGuirk Alumni Stadium. Last season, they averaged 10,598 fans per game.
Who’s getting hurt in the quest for unrealistic football glory?
Having football dreams is understandable. For whatever thrill and competitive fulfillment success in other college sports can provide, nothing can compare to the emotional, psychological and, of course, financial high of a winning football program.
In UMass’ case, though, it’s potentially coming at the expense of virtually every other program at the school – and that’s with the very distinct possibility that things don’t improve for the Minutemen on the gridiron.
An important caveat is that the university’s most successful athletic offering won’t be affected by any of this. UMass’ men’s hockey program has recently become one of the country’s best after winning a national championship in 2021, making another Frozen Four in 2019 and producing notable players like Cale Makar, now a star defenseman for the Colorado Avalanche. The MAC doesn’t offer hockey, meaning UMass will remain in Hockey East, where it will compete against regional rivals that happen to be among the premier programs in the sport like Boston University, Boston College, Providence and Northeastern.
For everyone else, though? There’s reason to be apprehensive, if not outright scared, of what awaits.
Beyond the absurdity of the third-most eastern FBS member being in an otherwise midwestern conference, the move will present a myriad of hurdles, not only from a travel perspective, but with how programs recruit and forge a larger identity.
In a world of geographically nonsensical conferences, UMass will be one of the biggest outliers starting in 2025. Buffalo, which is 365 miles away, will be the closest MAC school to UMass. For the sake of comparison, four A-10 schools are within that distance of Amherst. The next-closest MAC member, Kent State, is 555 miles away. Ten of the A-10’s 14 other members are closer to UMass than that.
Simply put, it’s turning its back on a league where it fits both regionally and culturally for one in which there’s every reason to wonder exactly how all of this is going to work.
What impact will that have on the women’s lacrosse program, which has been to the NCAA Tournament 11 times since 2009 and finished last season No. 19 in the country? How’s it going to affect its field hockey team, which has won more A-10 tournaments (16) than the rest of the conference combined (15)? Or what about its men’s lacrosse team, a regular NCAA Tournament participant that made the national championship game in 2006? Or its men’s and women’s soccer teams, which have both consistently been among the top A-10 squads?
Then, of course, there’s the matter of its basketball programs.
Though they’ve cratered this season, with a 3-26 record in their first season since coach Tory Verdi left for Pitt, the Minutewomen went 89-33 in the previous four seasons, which included an NCAA Tournament berth in 2022.
The men’s program remains the sport by which UMass is still most closely associated. The Minutemen were a national powerhouse in the 1990s under a young John Calipari, going 146-26 in his final five seasons from 1991-96 and earning at least a No. 3 seed to the NCAA Tournament every year.
It’s unrealistic to expect them to ever be that again, with a single NCAA Tournament appearance since 1999 standing as proof. But it’s still a program that has shown it can be a competitive force in the A-10, with five 20-win seasons in the past 18 years, with a sixth likely on the way this year with the team at 18-10.
By leaving the A-10, the school’s basketball programs, like most of its other sports teams, will likely face a bigger challenge in recruiting. Previously, it could pitch prospects from across the Acela corridor with the promise of playing games close to home, with their friends and family regularly able to attend. In the MAC, its second-closest possible road game will be a nine-hour drive away.
Will men’s basketball coach Frank Martin, armed with a productive Power Five resume, stick around to be part of such an awkward marriage? Or, at 57 years old and with plenty of good years ostensibly ahead of him, will he look to get out?
Beyond that, they’re leaving one conference for a measurably worse one, at least in the non-football sport that matters the most, men’s basketball.
The A-10 has had two or more bids in 17 of the past 18 NCAA Tournaments and three or more in 11 of the past 15. Because of that, an A-10 program doesn’t have to hope to win a roll of the dice that is a single-elimination conference tournament to make it to the sport’s most desirable stage. The MAC hasn’t had more than one of its teams make the tournament field since 1999. As I type this, the A-10 is ranked eighth among the 33 Division I conferences by KenPom.com. The MAC is 24th.
Over the past several days, that last figure has helped craft the punchline to a pretty gutting joke. UMass will now be joining a league that is ranked three spots lower than the America East Conference, meaning that UMass-Lowell, not the system’s flagship Amherst campus, will be playing in the highest-rated conference of any public school in the commonwealth.
Does this make any sense at all for UMass?
While the powers-that-be at UMass clearly believe it is, it’s hard not to wonder if all of this is worth it.
The desires that fuel such a move are understandable.
When Holub said 13 years ago that most similar institutions to UMass compete at the FBS level, he was right. While four of the six New England states don’t have an FBS program, Massachusetts is by far the most populous of that sextet. Though plenty of other flagship state schools don’t play in the FBS – just look at where many of the top FCS programs are located – Massachusetts is the 16th-largest state in the country. The largest state without an FBS member, New Hampshire, is 42nd on that list.
Whether FBS membership has worked out for the Minutemen financially is debatable.
They’ve been able to command larger buy game payouts as an FBS school than they would as an FCS member, a fact they’ve certainly pounced on, especially as an independent in need of opponents to fill out their schedule. Last season, for example, they were paid $3.55 million to lose to Penn State and Auburn by a combined score of 122-14.
They’ve spent more, too, with their athletic department budget ballooning from $36.56 million in 2010 to $68.39 million in 2021. They spent more, but didn’t necessarily make more, as they had identical revenue figures, which, given the way the U.S. Department of Education data is submitted and presented, means they, at the very best, broke even. More likely than not, though, they were in the red each year (just how much in the red is unclear). They’ve had to beef up their financial offerings to the football program, from the stadium upgrades to an increase from 63 football scholarships to 85, along with adding scholarships to women’s programs to remain in compliance with Title IX.
Having a conference be its home for all non-hockey sports will entitle UMass to annual payouts from the MAC, money that largely comes from media rights deals. According to the most recent 990 tax filing from the league, its members got an average of $2.3 million. As an independent last year, the Minutemen were getting nothing.
Being an independent was clearly not a long-term option for UMass and of the FBS options they had, the MAC, even with its faults, was the more geographically logical option than the Sun Belt or Mountain West, was much more attainable than the American Athletic Conference and gave them something more stable than the amorphous mess of misfits that Conference USA has become.
Of course, there was another option for the Minutemen. They could have simply remained in the A-10 while dropping back down to the FCS for football, where it actually won games and put out a compelling product, even if it meant it didn’t make quite as much money.
The FBS move certainly hasn’t resulted in wins, as they’ve had an average of two victories a season since making the move. Whatever clout they thought they might gain with local recruits hasn’t panned out, either. Since 2012, there have been 121 high-school players out of Massachusetts who were at least three-star prospects, according to 247 Sports. Only 10 of them ended up committing to UMass. And that’s from a state that’s not exactly teeming with enough football players to regularly stock the state’s flagship school with the kind of talent and depth it needs annually. While those 121 three-star-or-better players from Massachusetts came over a 12-year period, Ohio, which is home to six of the MAC’s 12 existing members, had 93 in the 2023 class alone while Michigan, which has three of the conference’s six other schools, had 45.
UMass isn’t alone in continuing to wage the potentially fruitless fight of fielding an FBS program. Just to its south, UConn is doing the same and, as things stand now, will continue to toil as an independent. The Huskies, though, actually have a proverbial carrot to keep them going. From 2004-10, UConn made five bowls in seven seasons and won at least eight games in each of those campaigns. That run was capped off by a Fiesta Bowl appearance in 2010. Though their program has crumbled since then, the Huskies at least have evidence that better days are possible, unlikely as they are to ever return. The Minutemen don’t even have that.
As UMass announced its MAC move on Thursday, confirming reports from earlier in the week, the language surrounding the decision was remarkably similar to what it was when it unveiled its impending FBS jump 13 years earlier.
"As one of the nation's leading public research universities, with a rich tradition of intercollegiate athletics, UMass Amherst is well suited to join the similarly situated institutions of the Mid-American Conference," UMass chancellor Javier A. Reyes said in a statement. "We are aligned with the MAC in our institutional missions, our values, and the profound impact we have on our respective communities. We join the MAC with great enthusiasm knowing that this affiliation through athletics will elevate and extend the profile and exposure of both UMass Amherst and all members of the MAC's member institutions significantly."
Whether this transition goes better than that last one remains to be seen, but given what it’s likely squandering for all of its other sports, it sure as hell better.
Given the current state of things, it looks like UMass is stumbling into an easily avoidable trap.
Ambition can drive folks to greatness, but also delude them into thinking that a far-fetched dream is within reach. When you’re overhauling your entire athletic department to placate your football program with an FBS win percentage that could just barely get it into an R-rated movie, you’re not only acknowledging the laughably disproportionate role football plays in the broader college sports landscape, but you’ve probably lost the plot.
(Photos: College Gridiron, Associated Press, UMass Athletics, Auburn Daily)