{"id":7823,"date":"2015-07-15T07:14:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T11:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jmusportsblog.com\/?p=7823"},"modified":"2015-07-15T09:31:35","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T13:31:35","slug":"fear-not-fans-jmu-is-monitoring-cost-of-attendance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jmusportsblog.com\/?p=7823","title":{"rendered":"Fear Not Fans, JMU is “Monitoring” Cost of Attendance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bridgeforth<\/a>As we mentioned last week, JMU’s CAA league mates, College of Charleston and Towson, announced that they’ll begin providing scholarship athletes with cost of attendance (COA) stipends. The DNR’s Matt Jones reached out to JMU Athletic Director Jeff Bourne yesterday to get his thoughts and some insight into how JMU will handle the situation<\/a>. Bourne said that “at this point we\u2019re better off monitoring and watching what happens at a national level with cost of attendance through this fall.” Yes, he said “monitoring.” I can’t decide if he just talks that way or if he’s openly trolling message board folks now.<\/p>\n

COA is a sticky issue. It’s one thing when P5 programs generate multi-million dollar surpluses from athletics and decide to spread the wealth. It’s another thing with schools that have athletic programs not operating in the red and generating the overwhelming majority of their athletic revenues directly from student fees. In that situation, paying COA is essentially like having students write checks to their classmates.<\/p>\n

Bourne notes that many conferences haven’t decided what to do about COA and that justifies JMU taking its time. He’s not completely wrong. However, with Towson and CofC biting the bullet, and UNCW seeminly poised to join them, it looks like paying COA is inevitable. JMU can probably only kick the can down the road for so long. Eventually, the price of doing business is just going to go up and they’ll have to get on board. Failing to do so while other CAA teams up the ante, will put JMU at a competitive disadvantage.<\/p>\n

JMU estimates that COA stipends will amount to about $4,180 per athlete. That’s a grand total of about $900K\/year. That doesn’t seem like too much compared to the millions JMU has spent, and wants to continue to spend, on facilities. The Dukes already spend $37 million a year on athletics, the most of any FCS program. That’s both staggering and sort of depressing.<\/p>\n

At a certain point, this spending just becomes unreasonable for an athletic program of JMU’s stature. The school needs to find a way to seriously boost revenue or start being a little more judicious with the spending. Obviously, a lot of fans will immediately pull the “Go FBS” card. That might be a solution. There needs to be a back-up plan though. JMU simply can’t afford (literally) to spend like this while patiently waiting for an FBS opportunity to present itself. Adding more costs to an already swelled budget, without creating new revenue streams is just unwise. JMU is probably going to have pay COA eventually. Ducking the issue in the press with political speak is fine, provided of course, that there is a real plan to fund things being developed in the background. This is one issue the school can’t just monitor.<\/p>\n