FBS or FCS? Idaho, New Mexico State Offer Competing Lessons

On October 31, 2015, 1-7 New Mexico State defeated 3-5 Idaho, 55-48, in a thrilling overtime game that seemed entirely beside the point.

The pertinent action transpired earlier that day at an IHOP in Las Cruces, N.M., where the two schools’ presidents and athletic directors gathered over breakfast to discuss their mutual, endangered fates.

Though an official decision was still months away, the writing was already on the wall that the schools’ future in the Sun Belt Conference was imperiled. The league wanted to go from 12 teams to 10, and the Aggies and Vandals, its newest football-only members, were also its most obvious candidates for exile. (The official sacking would come the following spring.)

Low-resourced and soon to be displaced, the question before the schools was whether—and if so, how—they should continue floating among the dregs of the NCAA’s top-tiered Football Bowl Subdivision.

Idaho president Chuck Staben wanted out. If he had his druthers, it would have been altogether out of intercollegiate football, which he felt was neither financially prudent for his school nor medically justifiable for any school. If the pigskin couldn’t be shed, Staben supported dropping the athletic department to the second-tiered Football Championship Subdivision, which the program had previously competed in 20 years earlier.

Staben believed he had a like-minded partner in New Mexico State president Garey Carruthers, whose house he was staying in that weekend and who had indicated to him and others an inclination for NMSU to transition to FCS. However, whereas Staben took a leading role in what was to come for Vandals athletics, Carruthers maintained a more neutral posture, entrusting the Aggies’ decision to a committee of school officials and alumni. They decided against it.

So, in the end, Idaho made the self-relegation move all alone, officially rejoining its erstwhile FCS league, the Big Sky Conference, in 2018. Staben lost his president’s job the following year, in no small part because of the controversy that arose over the move.

Since then, not a single other FBS school has joined the bandwagon. Rather, five other former FCS schools—Coastal Carolina, Liberty, James Madison, Sam Houston and Jacksonville State—have jumped up to FBS over that span. Meanwhile, FCS member Delaware confirmed this week its plans to join New Mexico state’s current league, Conference USA, for the 2025-26 academic year, becoming the first school to pay the NCAA’s new $5 million FBS entrance fee. (Prior to an NCAA Division I rule change last month, made effective immediately, it cost schools only $5,000.)

“I anticipated that there were going to be a few more schools that would go from FBS to FCS—New Mexico State being the primary one,” Staben said in a recent telephone interview.

Needless to say, New Mexico State is feeling vindication these days, with its 10-1 football program under second-year coach Jerry Kill having its best season since 1960. NMSU plays for the Conference USA title on Friday against 20th-ranked Liberty. Though Carruthers retired in 2018, the Aggies’ current athletic director, Mario Moccia, was in attendance at that IHOP breakfast session eight years ago.

“If we were to drop our football down a level, my argument was the perception of the institution would go down,” said Moccia, who previously served as AD at Southern Illinois, an FCS school. “There are 133 teams in the FBS. The only more exclusive club is the United States Senate and we’ve got this thing in Las Cruces. Let’s embrace that. Giving that up is difficult. I think you want to stay on as long as possible.”

Though surprised others haven’t followed along—at least thus far—Staben finds easy vindication these days in Idaho’s controversial decision at the time. Despite certain doom-and-gloom prognostications, the school’s athletic department continues to operate fully funded. And its football program, after a few losing seasons in the Big Sky, has returned to its long-ago winning ways. Idaho sold out its final two home games of the season, something it had not accomplished since the early 90s. On Saturday, the 8-5 Vandals are scheduled to play Southern Illinois in an ESPN2-televised, FCS playoffs second-round game.

Like Staben, former Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson says he also figured another school would have followed Idaho’s lead, although he would have put his money on Louisiana-Monroe, a Sun Belt bottom-feeder that spent the least of any public FBS athletic department in 2021-22.

Sure enough, at a press conference earlier this week, the question about dropping down was put to ULM athletic director John Hartwell, following the school’s decision to fire football coach Terry Bowden after a 2-10 season. To be precise, a reporter was midway through asking the question before Hartwell quickly interjected to avow that FCS was “not an option” for the Warhawks.

College sports Russell Wright is all too familiar with this reaction.

Prior to Idaho’s transition, Staben had enlisted Wright’s firm, Collegiate Consulting, to conduct an operational study of the tradeoffs involved in moving to FCS. Since then, Wright says he has pitched doing similar studies for other similarly positioned FBS schools, including Louisiana-Monroe, but found no takers.

Aside from prestige and ego, Russell says the primary reason why schools aren’t interested in diving deeper into the matter is because of the presumed revenue consequences in giving up the chase: donor support, conference television revenue, College Football Playoff distributions and football buy-games.

Moccia said that the value of buy-games alone can make all the difference. Earlier this month, New Mexico State beat Auburn, which had paid NMSU $1.85 million for what was supposed to be an easy victory. Had NMSU been an FCS school, Moccia said, it would have been lucky to have made a quarter of that purse.

Tom Wistrcill, the Big Sky commissioner, says FBS school leaders are typically much less interested in pondering the other side of the ledger.

“The additional revenue in some of those FBS conferences gets eaten up so quickly by coach salaries and travel,” said Wistrcill, who served as AD at Akron from 2009 to 2015. “It gets lost in the shuffle the fact that expenses are going to rise and you are going to be expected to come up with more and your donors are going to have to come up with more money.”

(Idaho, for example, budgeted $3.22 million for football this fiscal year, less than half of what Akron, the lowest-spending FBS school, spent on the sport in 2021-22.)

To be sure, a school cannot simply downgrade its football program with finger snaps. 

“You can’t do it autonomously, you can’t do it on an island, because it impacts all of your sports programs, especially if that existing conference says you have to play all of our existing sports in our conference,” said Wright.

Moccia says one of New Mexico State’s biggest concerns with dropping down was that there was no other FCS school within a drivable distance.

“It wasn’t like we were going to save money,” Moccia said. “We were still going to fly everywhere.”

Rob Spear, the former Idaho athletic director, argues its FCS success story was neither predictable at the time nor is it replicable now. For one, Spear notes, it was critical that Idaho already had FCS history, along with geographic rivalries with existing Big Sky members like Montana and Montana State.

“Idaho is a unicorn,” said Spear, who opposed the transition to FCS and had a falling out with Staben over their competing views. (Spear was fired in 2018 over his handling of a sexual assault complaint made against a football player.) Once Idaho’s fate with the Sun Belt became clear, Spear advocated for the university to help form a new FBS conference of land-grant schools west of the Mississippi; he recalled broaching the idea at the 2015 IHOP gathering.

In this current era of realignment, will it even matter whether a school is at the bottom of FBS or at the top of FCS?

“I feel that the window is closing, whether the NCAA is going to put even more strict measures on what (schools) would have to pay and do,” said Moccia. “It is like the Raiders of the Lost Arc when Indiana Jones slides under the door and reaches his hand back to get his hat. That hat is the FBS.”

For Staben, the more apt FBS analogy might be the giant boulder that threatens to steamroll Indiana Jones. This is why he finds the recent FCS-to-FBS converts especially “shortsighted.”

Whatever the future of college sports, he says, “the big boys are going to take as much revenue as they can and Group of Five will look a lot more like FCS programs than they even look today. You are stupid to transition to something that will look like where you just came from.”

Eventually, Staben remains convinced, the FBS bottom-feeders will be compelled to face the gravity of big-time college football and make some kind of drop.

“I actually think the smarter move and correct tactical move would be to eliminate football,” said Staben. “And I think that is what is going to happen.”