Thanks for the updates on Berry. Hendrix's stadium design has been out since Veterans Day, but a link wasn't posted here. As of today, the additional turf field looks nearly complete, and they've begun the foundation for the stands.

http://www.hendrixwarriors.com/news/2012/11/13/FB_1113124342.aspx?path=football

An interview with the Hendrix president appears in the Conway paper:

http://thecabin.net/sports/college/2011-06-08/hendrix-president-discusses-move-new-conference

I initially assumed that this discussion started getting serious when University of Dallas was invited instead of Berry, but the article suggests that the discussion started with the admission of Austin and Colorado into the conference. In retrospect, maybe the selection of University of Dallas was so that the remaining schools would be a bit closer to critical mass.

It also mentions a couple of possible membership requirements for the new conference. Coach salaries would be "in line with" professor salaries. More interestingly, each member would be required to sponsor at least 18 sports. This seems to be talking specifically about Austin, with 12 sports. (Colorado also has 12 represented in the SCAC All-Sports trophy, though you might include the two D1 teams and the two lacrosse teams to bring its total to 16.) The Hendrix president says that sponsoring fewer sports means that you can dedicate resources to gain an unfair advantage in other sports - though Austin's performance is hardly a good example of that.

Among the new conference, Oglethorpe currently sponsors 16 sports, so presumably they'd be adding two sports to reach 18. Berry seems to sponsor 18 - if you count women's equestrian even though I doubt it would be a conference sport. The other 6 seem to already be at 18.

That's a neat article - thanks for posting the link. For them to seek the ASC would be natural. They mention that "a couple of the conference's members are looking to leave the ASC." Anybody speculation about what this particularly refers to?

Yeah, as I was reading up for my previous response, I looked back at the old news release about adding football, and I was surprised at how definite it sounded. That said, even there the key sentence included a caveat: "Trustees directed the college's administration to begin these sports contingent on raising start-up costs from external sources." That was in May 2008. I don't know whether Hendrix had any good leads then on what those external sources might be, but the market crash in October 2008 surely dried any up. As it is, Hendrix had to scramble to find donors for their "Student Life Center" which they had already started building. I suspect if the market had held up for another year, the picture would have been different.

Ron, about the prospects for football at Hendrix... I've seen no substantive movement - no starts toward hiring coaches, no planning for the major athletic facility changes football would need. So I don't think it can possibly happen in 2011 (when do schools set their game schedules anyway?), and I'd be very surprised to see it for 2012. It seems the market problems came at exactly the wrong time - just as they got into a position to seek donors to fund the construction costs, it became much harder to find donors.

I'm beginning to suspect that it's a dead issue. One thing I'll be watching: In the coming year, Hendrix will plan and probably start building its new tennis facility, slated for the last bit of space in Hendrix's athletic complex. (All other sports have received completely new facilities in this complex since 2005 - well, except cross-country and golf, which aren't getting on-campus facilities.) In the football discussions, they proposed that this would be the place for a football practice field and the building where they would place football coaches' offices. I'll be watching to see whether there's even a hint that they're trying to maintain that expansion possibility. I'm not holding my breath.

Addressing it purely as a business proposition (which I think Ralph was doing), of course we studied football pretty closely at Hendrix a few years back, including the financial case. I wasn't closely involved, but from the report at the end my basic conclusion is that football is financially something of a wash: You don't stand to make money from the extra students, but you probably don't lose much either. And I think the current state of affairs is pretty strong that the financial case would be strong one way or the other: If it were obvious, you wouldn't have a lot of schools with football and a lot without, nor would you have some schools adding or dropping football programs.

Looking specifically at Ralph's numbers, I saw somewhere that Birmingham-Southern actually nets about $10,300 in tuition per student. That may seem low - but remember that their problem is exactly that they've been awarding too much financial aid to students. I imagine it excludes room and board - though that's not really something that you should include since students literally eat that money up anyway.

You might say that that means 100 extra students brings in an extra $1,030,000 dollars that you wouldn't have otherwise - but those students also bring in extra costs. For one thing, most SCAC schools are pretty serious about preserving their faculty-student ratios, so if you bring in 100 students, you need to hire 8 professors - and if their total compensation averages $70K, you have to take $560,000 of that money right off the top. (Admittedly, having 8 extra professors allows you to add new programs that might bring in even more students.) It's harder to quantify the other expenses, but there are other expenses with taking care of those extra students, outside athletics.

Anyway, I don't remember all the costs that went into Hendrix's analysis - they talked a lot with other SCAC schools to see the actual expenses of a football program. But listening to the report, my conclusion was that the financial case wasn't compelling either way. Actually, if you include the startup cost of building the stadium and practice facilities, it looked very expensive. But Hendrix didn't include that in their financial analysis - they wanted to know about the cost of sustaining the program after they had found a donor to handle the startup costs.

That's not to say there aren't good reasons. Ron has several good points. The one about attracting men is a major one: Most small liberal arts colleges like the SCAC schools want to keep some gender balance, but in fact they skew female. A similar issue is racial diversity - whether having football helps to improve African-American representation is something that's controversial but at least possible.