The University of Massachusetts has a pretty persuasive trump card supporting its decision to move from the FCS to the FBS in 2012: Gillette Stadium. For free.
When the Minutemen join the Mid-American Conference, the team will play its “home” games 94 miles east of Amherst at the home of the New England Patriots, which holds close to 70,000 fans – 50,000 more than the team’s previous field, McGuirk Stadium.
And most importantly, UMass won’t pay a dime of rent to Patriots owner Robert Kraft for the first five years they play at Gillette.
The deal is seemingly a no-brainer for UMass athletic director John McCutcheon.
His team gets a slice of the MAC’s television deal with ESPN, as well as the conference’s revenue from bowl games, which will more than offset the money UMass will pay to increase its athletic scholarships from 65 to 83.
Plus, McCutcheon and UMass get an elite facility that a top-tier (or even a mid-tier) football program needs to stay competitive and financially sound.
But as great as the move may be for McCutcheon, UMass Chancellor Robert Holub and Kraft, the move hurts the most important group involved: the UMass students.
More than 13,000 fans came to McGuirk Stadium to watch a decidedly average Minutemen squad play every Saturday. How many of those 13,000 do you think were students?
It didn’t matter that UMass ended up 6-5 overall and 4-4 in the conference, students go to watch football on Saturday simply because it’s Saturday and that’s what students are supposed to do.
When UMass moves to Gillette, how many of those students will take the hour and a half bus ride to support a team that will almost certainly struggle in its first years in the FBS?
The diehards maybe. But not the fans that showed up to McGuirk on Saturday to yell and act foolish just because it was something to do.
In his Boston Herald column supporting UMass’s move, Steve Buckley chalked up the long trip for students as another sacrifice the school will make, like paying for more scholarships and traveling more miles to away games, that is outweighed by the benefits of the deal.
“Let’s not wring our hands over how this move is going to lessen the college experience for the students,” Buckley said. “It’s simple: Those who are hard-core fans will be bused from Amherst to Foxboro.”
But the 95-mile distance from campus to football stadium is more than just an inconvenience.
Alumni may make up the difference in attendance for a while. UMass says it has 120,000 alumni within a 30-minute drive from Foxboro, while the school’s total enrollment is just 27,000. But how many of those alumni will keep coming back when the team starts losing in the MAC?
The team was middling at best in the Colonial. In the MAC, UMass will take time to make it to the level of the rest of the competition.
The team needs to recruit top-shelf northeastern football talent that Boston College currently has a stranglehold on. Do you think those blue-chippers would rather play the University of Miami in Florida or Miami University in Ohio?
More than 30,000 fans came to see UMass play the University of New Hampshire at Gillette, but how many will return when the team starts losing to teams like Central Michigan University and Ball State University – more talented and established FBS teams that are anonymous to many here in the northeast.
My bet is that those Boston-area alumni get impatient and eventually stop showing up. My bet is that in a few years, UMass will be playing in front of a silent and empty Gillette Stadium barely recognizable as the place that hosts the Patriots. And that image will not endear UMass to recruits who see the cavernous and empty field on ESPN.
It’s hard to make a BU comparison in this case because our school scrapped football altogether. But the BU basketball program does have a gorgeous facility in Agganis Arena, a building that far surpasses any other America East school’s gym. But BU has historically had trouble filling up Agganis.
Until this spring’s America East championship game, the team struggled to draw even 700 people in the 6,000 seat stadium.
The mistake the UMass athletic department is making is a similar one to the one BU made. They are assuming that with the facility, the interest and the success will follow.
It won’t. At least not right away. And when there are tough times, the team starts to lose and attendance at Gillette starts to dwindle, where will UMass turn? It can’t rely on its students to keep coming back – they’ll be about 95 miles away.
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