Re: College Football V: Bowls Are Done; Carry On My Wayward Sons
Eh, maybe one or 2 games a year at Gillette perhaps. I don't think you wanna make it that hard to get your students to a game. But having at least one or more games a year at Gillette would be a good barganing chip. Playing a game there might make it a little more interesting for other teams to give UMASS a home game in Boston. That, and one would have to figure that there might soon be some pressure put on BC to play UMASS in Football as well. That just sweetens the turd sandwich that BC will think that is.
They're using Gillette to insulate themselves against the attendance requirements of FBS. Even if they get a sell out at McGuirk for every game, that's only 17,000. Transferring one to Gillette that might sell 40,000 tickets (like, say, against BC or UConn), means they can increase the average to the other five home games by about four or five thousand in the overall tally. That, in and of itself, will protect them against non-sellouts that average less than the NCAA requirement of 15,000.
Never got the impression that New England was a college football hotbed and this seems like a terrible waste of money. The program will be inferior to BC in every way for some time if not forever and isn't Gillette something of a drive from Amherst?
It's all about seeing the writing on the wall. It's the same reason Villanova was trying to take the Big East up on its "standing offer" of joining the football conference.
I-AA/FCS is, in my estimation, a few years from starting to split at the seams, and the Colonial conference is showing the evidence of this. The schools that can't hack it have left, or have dropped football entirely (and it's no coincidence that it's in the generally-CFB unfriendly Northeast that these schools lived), further isolating long-time partners. UMass has three options, the first two of which are complete crap: 1) Stay with the Colonial, and be further geographically isolated, thus increasing travel demands beyond a reasonable amount; 2) Leave the Colonial, and follow URI to the NEC, with favorable geography but absolute bottom of the barrel football, or be independent, which has basically the same problem; 3) upgrade to FBS ball, where they can sell themselves out for more than one guarantee game a year, including rather attractive regional games at Gillette with BC or UConn.
If you've got three options and you know two of them will suck massive donkey bollocks, might as well go with the third.
