FCS Jacksonville University Discontinuing Football...

[BlueDogs]

Bring him back home

To the “les miserables”

 

[ZooCougar]

I wonder what sort of ripple effects we will see outside of Jacksonville State’s concentric circles.

 

[ktuck911]

Anybody think Shields might be an option to take over the reigns of our offense as a TRUE OC? If not Rossomando,
Check out his resume. Looks like it kinda makes sense too:

Ian Shields - Head Coach - Football Coaches - Jacksonville University

Ian Shields enters his third season at the helm of the Jacksonville University football team in 2018.Tabbed as just the third head football coach in JU history in

judolphins.com

 

[kingdobbs]

scary that it has come to this. This is going to end with the snake eating itself - only time before this happens to G5s.

This is far from a new or notable trend in FCS football. There’s been a pretty steady trend line in the ending of football programs in what we would call Division I nowadays for basically decades.

In a nutshell, football is increasingly no longer the default “flagship sport” (ie the sport that drives the largest or most significant portion of its alumni, student, local and regional fan interest and financial support, and/or for which the school and its support base perceive the most prestige comes from) at many otherwise athletically-committed institutions. This starts to become the case essentially post WWII for a number of reasons: the NFL picking up steam, television as an important medium for exposure (which is a prime factor behind the beginning of a football arms race that continues to this day), basketball increasing in popularity, the Ivy League decision to go without scholarships (and thus making it more palatable for schools to also exit the burgeoning football arms race), and probably a few others.

It’s probably true that the arms race will start claiming some G5 casualties (other than Idaho dropping back to FCS) over the coming decades. But this is not some sudden thing that a lower tier FCS program (and a relatively young one at that) at a private school is pulling the plug on a football team that just isn’t capturing enough local interest to justify itself even at a non-scholarship level. That’s basically the story of BU and Evansville in 1997, or Hofstra and Northeastern in 2009. Or UVM, Wichita State, Xavier, St John’s, Providence, Seton Hall, Marquette, Denver, etc in decades prior.