And if UConn thinks it's going to sell lots of football tickets to see American games, it's crazy. The top few teams in that league are very good, but the rest of them are pretty weak and definitely not draws. Or, to put it another way, do you want to see the Huskies play football against East Carolina, or basketball against Villanova? Of course in the short run it's a risk, but a permanently mediocre football program which helps drag down basketball spells a very gloomy future.
This is a pure numbers game. The flaw in your logic is comparing one football game versus one basketball game without including the alternatives. So, let's put this question another way. Combined attendance, which is better? U-Conn/Villanova at 9800 sellout and ECU at 20,000, or the alternative- U-Conn/Cincy at 9,000 and Bucknell at 5,000? Take the whole football schedule to 5,000/game if you're going to be playing a Patriot League schedule of Lehigh, Fordham, Bucknell, Lafayette, Holy Cross and Georgetown. At best. U-Conn's football attendance this past season was an abysmal 20k/game, mostly based on bad performance over the last two or three years. Does that mean they drop football? Wouldn't it make more sense financially to invest in a proper coaching staff (which they have tried to do twice now) and let the better performance bring the attendance back into its more typical 35k-40k range rather than tanking football entirely? The TV money difference between the two conferences is not that much, so that's not a factor.
Second question, how much can we expect attendance and revenue to improve in men's basketball by shifting conferences? They averaged 8,500 out of 9,800+ this year even in a bad year, so they're not far from the ceiling there anyway. Is one game a year vs Villanova going to move the needle from a revenue standpoint? If so, schedule them OOC. Hurley will make that team competitive without having to move from a conference with 4 NCAA qualifiers to one with a whopping six. Again, does it really move the needle?
What really would move the needle for them would be for football to get strong again and to get an extra 100k fans a season into seats for football games, and that's not happening by moving down to the Patriot League. Instead they'll be kissing 100k fannies in seats goodbye.
It just makes no financial sense whatsoever. I don't really care what happens up in Storrs, and writing this post has made me think more about U-Conn sports than I have in the last three years combined, but so many ppl keep talking about them dropping football down that I've just kind of gotten tired of hearing this stuff. It's silly, and if you look at the numbers it just doesn't make any sense from a business perspective. None at all. Plus, it's all the same crap we've all heard a thousand times and bristled at when directed at our program.
