A JMU Football fan decided to pick a dumb fight with me in the comments section on a YouTube video that I’d posted last week on UVA Football’s poor ticket sales, and regular readers know how I take to people picking dumb fights with me.
Does not play well with others, would be the note to my mom from the teacher.
The dumb fight was over a throwaway comment that I’d made in the video, and in the story that I’d written for AFP, about how the JMU-UVA game drew more than 56,000 people to Scott Stadium for the 2023 home opener.
The throwaway line:
“The 2023 home opener with JMU drew 56,508, thanks in part to JMU Nation making the trek to the big-boy stadium.”
Which, yep, considering JMU didn’t even sell out its 2024 home opener this past weekend, checks out.
If you can’t even get capacity in a stadium that doesn’t hold 25,000, don’t talk smack, would seem to be the message here.
At the risk of elevating an interwebs tough guy with literally no followers, he goaded me into feeling it necessary to put my SEO and Google magic into pointing out the obvious inconvenient truth about JMU Football – that it’s a massive money-loser.
Per data from Sportico, the JMU Football program reported $4.5 million in football-related revenues in 2022-2023, the last year for which a full accounting is available.
The bulk of that, $3.0 million, was from ticket sales.
The program’s 2022-2023 expenses: $11.5 million.
Which means: JMU Football lost $7 million in 2022-2023.
And here I was, complaining about UVA Football not filling up the stadium on Saturdays.
Again, using Sportico, UVA Football reported $51.2 million in revenues in 2022-2023, and $31.1 million in expenses, meaning, UVA Football made more than $20 million in 2022-2023.
My issue with the 20,000-plus empties in the stadium on Saturdays is that UVA Football isn’t making even more money.
UVA Football ticket sales, according to the Sportico data, were at $7.7 million in 2022-2023, and just looking down the road at Virginia Tech, which like Virginia won three games that season, Tech still reported $15.0 million in football ticket sales, close to double the figure with UVA.
To me, there’s no reason why the AD at Virginia, Carla Williams, who’s been on the job for seven years, can’t have as her top priority figuring out ways to get more people into the stands for home football games, but here we are.
Meanwhile, there’s JMU, which made the jump from FCS to FBS in 2022.
With football losing $7 million in that first year, and men’s basketball losing a cool $3 million – for reference, UVA’s men’s basketball program ran a $4.4 million operating surplus in 2022-2023 – JMU has to turn to its students to fund its athletics program.
Per Sportico, JMU is far and away the leader nationally in the use of student activity fees to fund its athletics budget – $53.3 million, $23 million more than second-place ODU.
And for more context: the entire JMU Athletics budget for 2022-2023 was $68.0 million.
Meaning: 78.4 percent of the money for athletics at JMU comes from these student-activity fees.
These student-activity fees, for those out of the loop, are dollars that get tacked onto the bills and student loans of JMU students, which many will be paying back for years, if not decades, all so JMU can pretend to play “big-boy football.”
And here, again, I get myself torqued every summer over UVA using student-activity fees – UVA reported assessing $16.1 million in student-activity fees to balance its $138.2 million overall athletics budget in 2022-2023 – that I write a lathered-up column blasting the people in charge on Grounds for having the gall to do that.
I’m of the mindset that the Virginia General Assembly needs to ban the use of student-activity fees by college athletics programs.
There’s no reason students should be required to balance athletics budgets with money that they have to borrow to be able to pay tuition, fees and room and board.
If that means UVA has to go somewhere else to find another $16.1 million to fund its athletics budget, that Virginia Tech has to find another $13.6 million, et cetera, so be it.
For the likes of JMU, yeah, it would be fatal, because the reality is, JMU is a member of a conference with a nothing TV deal, it doesn’t make money playing home games, and it doesn’t have a donor base with deep pockets.
The reality of that 2023 UVA-JMU game was, it was infinitely more important to JMU Athletics that it got the $550,000 check from UVA to play the game than it was that the football team actually won the game.
Because maybe that check, after it cleared, means JMU Football will only lose in the range of $6 million in the 2023-2024 fiscal year when the numbers come out.
The J in JMU Football stands for JV.
It’s OK to admit it.
Video: JMU Football loses a ton of money
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Chris Graham
