UMass Mess: How Football Has Ruined Its Athletics

UMASS MESS: HOW FOOTBALL HAS RUINED ITS ATHLETICS – You might have missed it on Monday, but the University of Massachusetts announced the firing of football coach Don Brown, with the Minutemen sitting at 2-8 with two games to play.

The timing is, quite frankly, bizarre. UMass just played one of its best games of the season, nearly upsetting Liberty at home. At 2-8 with Georgia up next, it wasn’t ever going to sniff a bowl game. It’s known as one of the hardest jobs in the nation, as it’s never sniffed a bowl bid since moving up to FBS in 2013.

You get the idea.

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And yet, the Minutemen decided that now was the time to send Brown packing, citing his record of 6-28 in three seasons in Amherst. And yes, that’s bad. It’s a tough record to defend.

But could any coach have reasonably done better? The Minutemen almost seem set up to fail, and what’s worse, they’re set up to fail in a way that makes zero sense. It would be one thing if UMass was sending its football team out to get its brains beaten in every week for the good of its other sports, such as Kansas or Vanderbilt did until recently. But the Minutemen are going out to get killed every week in a way that harms their other sports. Here’s a dive.

Changing Conferences

This is the biggest head-scratcher: UMass opting to leave the Atlantic 10 for full membership in the MAC. Yes, conferences make no sense these days, and UMass already plays in a league that stretches from Rhode Island to Missouri. But leaving the Atlantic 10 makes little sense for the Minutemen.

The Atlantic 10 is, quite simply, a better all-sports conference than the MAC. The MAC works because it consists of nearby schools who all play FBS football. But it is not a great all-sports conference. It’s a league that focuses on football but is little more than an afterthought in many other sports. If a school has an up-and-coming coach, such as Nate Oats at Buffalo a few years ago, it can make a solid run in the NCAA tournament. But that’s about it.

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The MAC gives UMass a solid home for football and TV money that comes with it. But it means UMass sacrifices in its other sports. Playing Rhode Island is a game that people care about; not so much with playing Eastern Michigan. Frank Martin is a fine basketball coach, but he will find it even harder to recruit New England players to go play games in Ohio and Indiana in a lesser league than what they could find at Fordham or Rhode Island. Meanwhile, the Minutemen aren’t on the level of the MAC. They’ve gone 0-5 against that league this year.

Money Matters Most

Without question, the biggest reason UMass does this is the paychecks it can collect. FBS teams earn more money for non-conference games than FCS teams. And that’s because mid-tier schools all want to become bowl-eligible above all else. Six wins means a national TV game in December for the Minnesotas and Mississippi States of the world. And so they pay a premium to schools like UMass, because beating the Minutemen counts the same toward bowl eligibility as beating any other FBS school.

In some cases, teams would get a better and cheaper game from paying an FCS school half the price. But you can only count one win over an FCS school toward bowl eligibility. If UMass dropped to FCS, it would have to take less money to get creamed.

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The other side of that is that UMass also spends more money as an FBS team. Much has been made of James Madison spending like an FBS school for years. The Dukes actually spend right around as much as the Minutemen. Money isn’t necessarily the issue. If UMass wanted, it could join a conference that made sense at the FCS level (such as the CAA), cut some spending and make the numbers work. But it wants the prestige of saying it’s an FBS school, no matter the cost.

Lack of Identity and Reason

What does Massachusetts want to be? The Minutemen were once a solid FCS program. Since then, they’ve gone 24-112 at the FBS level. It’s been one-way traffic, season after season, and there appears to be no end in sight. They’re already set up to get bludgeoned at least twice in each of the next three years by Power 4 opponents. That’s common in the MAC, with Kent State the king of this ploy.

But Kent State does this for a reason. The Golden Flashes’ traditional opponents are all in the MAC. It rarely travels more than 300 miles for a conference game (only Northern Illinois and Central Michigan are further than that number, and the Flashes only play there once every four years), and it plays several opponents that can be reached in three hours or less by car.

The closest trip for UMass is Buffalo, at 383 miles. Again, the Minutemen are used to doing this in the Atlantic 10, but they have history with many of those schools. They have no history with Western Michigan or Ball State, which means fans aren’t going to care when those teams come to Amherst. Without any kind of identity, the Minutemen are a ship without a port…and the efforts aren’t even working.