Likely, yes, if this year's team played in the MAC, we would have probably done a little better. In fact, based on the Sagarin rankings by conference (who breaks out conference divisions as separate listings in the ranking...so, for example, SEC West is #1, but SEC East is #3), the MVFC is better than both Conference USA divisions, both MAC divisions, the Mountain West Conference - West Division, the AAC, and the Sun Belt.
That being said, we don't have the attendance, support, and most importantly...$, to be considered to be "on par" with nearly any FBS team at this point. There was a good discussion over on AnyGivenSaturday.com talking about North Dakota State and if they really are an FBS team masquerading as an FCS, where one of the UNI guys put together a review of the G5 (what used to be the non-BCS FBS conferences...AAC, CUSA, MAC, MWC, SB):
http://www.anygivensaturday.com/showthr ... BS-compare
The Sun Belt, for example, has an average stadium capacity of 27k, average student enrollment of 19k, and average athletics budget of $20M.
Western, for comparison, has a stadium capacity of 17k, roughly 12k students, and an athletics budget of $12.6M. The closest Sun Belt team that we are to size is Idaho, who has about the same size stadium (dome) and same amount of students, but spends ~$7.5M more than we do on athletics and, despite their lack of success on the football field, enjoys fairly good financial support from alumni considering a school of their size.
Another thing people were talking about in the thread (and in similar threads) was that maybe NDSU could find a way to get more $ for athletics, build a larger stadium, and go FBS (if they had an invite from a conference), but would they really be able to support it long-term? Another argument was that currently, the Fargodome can only hold so many people (19k), and they sell out nearly every game. This means that Bison football tickets are a hot commodity, and are in demand...which actually drives higher attendance. Some of the NDSU people were saying that if they were to have a larger stadium...say 25k-30k, they could probably get 22k-24k at each game, but the fact that people could pretty much always get seats would actually decrease interest from some groups and eventually lower attendance overall.
The general consensus for them, and I think it applies to us as well is that if we completely "max out" our student interest, financial support, and alumni involvement, we're still below the bottom rung of FBS teams. Personally, I'd much rather aim to be at the top of the FCS (we've been #2 before, we can do it again), win occasional games against FBS teams when we can get them, sell out (or nearly sell out) our 17k seat stadium, and be a perennial FCS playoff team.
In terms of TV exposure, the NDSU/Coastal Carolina game got 1.447 million viewers, which is actually on-par with many of the lower bowls...Heart of Dallas, Beef 'O' Brady's, GoDaddy, etc. (from last year). If we make it deep into the playoffs, get games on ESPN2 or possibly even ESPN (depending on opponent and game time), then we'd be having just as many eyeballs watching Leatherneck Football as watched the Camellia Bowl, Bahamas Bowl, or Boca Raton Bowl.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin