Every year around this time, as another Enema U football season limps toward its inevitable “rebuilding phase,” a strange idea bubbles up in the minds of Aggie fans everywhere: Would it make more sense for Enema U to drop down a football division?
Spoiler Alert! We probably should and we definitely won’t.
For those unfamiliar with the alphabet soup of football:
FBS stands for the Football Bowl Subdivision: the top tier of college football, where teams dream of playing in fancy bowl games but often just dream of not losing by 50. Enema U is currently in the FBS.
FCS stands for the Football Championship Subdivision: the slightly smaller pond where schools can actually win games and compete for actual championships, a concept most Enema U fans have only read about in dusty history books or have seen in documentaries featuring teams not wearing crimson.
NIL, or Name, Image, and Likeness: the set of legal rights that now allows college athletes to earn money from endorsements, appearances, and other commercial uses of their personal identity while still retaining their eligibility. In some cases, they are paid more than the faculty.
Whenever the suggestion of dropping a division is floated, certain reactions follow: Boosters faint! Administrators gasp! And someone inevitably shouts, “We can’t drop divisions! We beat Fresno State during the Carter administration!”
And yet, here we are—still asking the question… Because deep down inside, in the quiet recesses of the desiccated Aggie heart, we all know something uncomfortable: Enema U football has almost no actual history of being good at the FBS level.
There. I said it. Let the hate mail begin. As usual, I’ll grade it and return it.
A Brief History of Enema U Football (or, The Desert Is Dry and So Is Our Win Column). Since Dwight Eisenhower was president, Enema U has had:
Only two bowl game victories (2017 and 2022, courtesy of Coach Jerry Kill, who must have made a deal with the football gods).
A 57-year streak without a bowl appearance.
Multiple seasons that can only be described as “character-building,” “challenging,” or “legally classified as cruel and unusual.”
Let’s put that another way (other than those miraculous wins under Coach Jerry Kill), the last time Enema U won a bowl game, most of today’s students’ grandparents had not yet met. That’s not hyperbole, I did the math.
Every few years, a new coach arrives and announces a “rebuilding year”—a phrase traditionally uttered by programs that once had something worth rebuilding. But rebuilding only makes sense when you actually once had a building. Enema U football, on the other hand, has spent decades rebuilding the same house, using the same bent nails and hoping this time the roof doesn’t fall in.
And like Sisyphus, it is unlikely that we are ever going to get that boulder all the way up the hill. This state simply can’t afford it. If you look at the top twenty FBS schools, they have something in common: a large tax base. For the top twenty schools, there are an average of 1.2 million taxpayers for each FBS school in that state, but for New Mexico, there are only 470,000. Sadly, the average income in those states is higher than in New Mexico, too. (To be fair, both Louisiana and Alabama are at the bottom of both categories, too, but let’s face it—those two states are batshit crazy.)
What would happen if the school dropped a division to FCS? Let’s talk logic, a substance rarely found in college athletics but one we should at least attempt to apply.
Coverage: Please stop laughing at us! As a FBS team, we make the news when someone makes a joke, such as in 1992 when Sports Illustrated put us on their cover as the worst football team in America.
But as a FCS team, national coverage would go up, which sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. ESPN, desperate for content, loves FCS playoff teams. And local media loves winners, so Enema U would get real coverage during playoff runs, respect for being competitive, and lot fewer late-night punchlines
But in the FCS world? Suddenly Enema U looks like a recruiting giant, a beacon of opportunity with actual scholarships and a stadium larger than a high school. We’d finally be the shiny object, not the afterthought. Our sales pitch to potential players is, “Want to win? Want to be in the playoffs? Want to play meaningful football in November?”
Suddenly, the average 2-star or lower 3-star kid says, “Oh! That sounds like an actual football experience and not a physics demonstration on impact force.” Transfers also take FCS contenders seriously—especially QBs and skill players looking for tape.
Facilities: Competitive in FCS, modest in FBS. Aggie Memorial Stadium is respectable, but the support infrastructure—weight rooms, nutrition programs, athletic budgets, and NIL funds—are all on the modest end of the FBS spectrum. In the FCS, we’d look like a well-resourced, big-time program. Everything that kills Enema U in FBS becomes a comparative advantage in FCS
Actual Winning: A foreign concept. In FBS, we measure victory by losing by fewer than three touchdowns or holding an opponent to under 50! If we were to drop to FCS, Enema U could regularly and consistently win games, making the playoffs most seasons.
An Enema U team with its current defensive talent, its current offensive flashes, and a slightly simplified system, would likely finish in the top 16–20 teams nationally, putting them squarely in the playoff bracket. Aggie fans seeing a postseason bracket would faint dead away.
Financial Reality: FCS is cheaper to play. Enema U football, like the vast majority of college football teams, currently regularly loses money—not because of mismanagement, but because the economics of being a small FBS school in the middle of the desert are inherently ridiculous.
An FBS program requires 85 scholarships, higher-paid coaches, higher travel costs, and higher costs of damn near everything. By comparison, an FCS program requires only 63 scholarships, fewer assistants, and smaller travel budgets.
Let’s talk about those scholarships for a minute. Currently, Enema U awards 85 scholarships for a team of 105 players. We can’t tell how many of those went to players from New Mexico, but in the entire roster, there are only six students from this state. Let’s be generous and say that 6% of those 85 scholarships went to students from this state. We have to do some fancy modeling which would take too long to explain, but I guesstimate that if we went to the FCS, 35% of the scholarships would go to New Mexico residents.
In the FCS, Enema U would spend less, lose less, and face fewer teams that treat us like tackling dummies wearing maroon.
So Why Don’t We Do It? There are several “minor” reasons, such as image and prestige. Universities hate moving down in division because it feels like giving up. Among university presidents, regents, and donors—none of them want to answer the question, “Why aren’t you big-time anymore?”
Never mind that we never really were big-time. Prestige is powerful—especially administrative prestige. And no university president was ever hired away by a larger university for taking a school down a division. Since most upper-level administrative jobs are filled following a costly national search, the only reason that most of our recent upper management hires came to the Harvard on the Rio Grande was to polish their resumes and continue moving upward, no administration is likely to admit reality.
But the REAL REASON Enema U will never drop a division is that we can’t afford it. Even a bad FBS team gets:
- Payouts from being clobbered by SEC schools (blood games)
- TV revenue from Conference USA
- A trickle of College Football Playoff money
- Attention and scheduling opportunities that FCS schools never see
It’s an odd business model, but for a university, LOSING in FBS pays better than winning in FCS. Once again, I don’t have the space here to show my financial modeling, but by my calculations, while our operating costs would drop dramatically, if Enema U dropped to FCS, the school would lose roughly $4 to $5.5 million per year by dropping to FCS.
The president of the NCAA gets paid over $3 million a year and runs an organization of 600 employees where the average pay is over $150,000 a year. I guarantee you that chief among their concerns is setting up a system where small schools can’t afford to economize.
Even if Enema U went 8–3 and made the playoffs. Even if the fans were happier. Even if players were safer. Even if the games were more fun.
Financially, it’s not remotely close. FBS is a money classification, not a competitive sport classification.
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