The UMass Amherst football team finished this season with a 1 and 11 record. UMass has been playing in the highest level of college football – the Football Bowl Subdivision – since 2012, and it's been a rough ride.
UMass lost its conference a few years back and has to put together a schedule from scratch. The school is paid sometimes huge sums of money in exchange for playing successful programs like Notre Dame. That also means some huge losses on the field. Since UMass jumped to the FBS, it's racked up 19 wins and 77 losses.
Dan Shaughnessy, a columnist and associate editor at the Boston Globe, wrote about UMass football recently and called it “an embarrassment.”
Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe: I think it's important to take this off the backs of the players. I mean, the players are certainly worthy student athletes and doing the best they can with what they have to work with, and with the schedule that's put in front of them and with the football backgrounds that they have. I just think that we're setting it up for failure, that the players are being put in a position where they can't compete.
That's evident from my distance in Boston, just seeing the scores on a weekly basis. And some of the opponents they're playing -- big-time Division 1 football is a major, major enterprise. And when you're wading into places like Notre Dame and Auburn and Georgia, it's unlikely that you're going to show well. And I don't think it's good for the UMass brand; I think it's pouring a lot of money into something [editor’s note: football expenses/revenue on page 28] that is not good for the state university's brand.
Carrie Healy, NEPR: Well, UMass finished 4-8 in 2017 and 2018. Surely that's not an embarrassing record given this level of competition.
Right. And this year, they only won one game, but they gave up more points than anyone in the history of FBS football. The scores are, you know, it's like 67 to 7, and regularly 40-point underdogs. You could schedule a couple of easier games, which they've done. But as independents, they're going around and taking these enormous beatings and there's not a lot of interest in it.
I mean, it's not like they're packing the stadium. They don't get money from a conference where they can, sort of, support that by the other teams in the conference. So I see them as kind of alone and throwing a lot of money into this. And I just don't see it as good for them.
UMass Amherst athletic director Ryan Bamford complained that you called the head of the UMass system, Marty Meehan, about the program. But Meehan is the big boss. In your column, he sounded far from a defender of the football program. What did he tell you?
Marty is a football guy. I know Marty because he really likes the Patriots, and we see him all the time, and I see him regularly during the football season. And I know he's a he's a fan of the sport and I know he's president the university. And I just thought, 'Well, this is kind of under his purview and it's happening on his watch. And what does he think?'
Yes, I mean, he sounded like a guy who's not really got both feet in this and it was not enacted on his watch. It's going on on his watch now, and I would wonder what the future of it is, because he did not seem too warm to the idea. And...he's out there trying to spread the brand and talking about them being 24th ranked best state school, and that this isn't really in alignment with the kind of branding that they're interested in doing.
When the football program began, lots of faculty called for UMass to scale it back. They were worried about the money that was being invested. But there's a lot of national exposure that comes from this kind of game and maybe getting applicants that they wouldn't get had they been in the prior conference. Isn't that kind of exposure in some way worth it?
I don't believe that. I think that just going in there and being a tomato can for the University of Georgia or Notre Dame or something like that, is not necessarily good for the brand. I don't see where this is the kind of exposure that you're looking for when you go in to Army and you lose, you know, 65 to 7 or whatever it was [63 to 7] and that they're regularly stomped upon.
I mean, they were behind 45 to nothing in the first half [49 to nothing at the half, with game ending 56-24] against Brigham Young just a couple days ago. They're not competitive games. There's not a lot of it fans going to them or watching them on TV. It looks to me like a giant loss leader, a money pit.
Well, as an independent and without a conference, UMass has to set their schedule in advance. And the schedule is set for the next year. I think it's set for most of the following. Do you actually see that a change could come?
I'm looking at the next two or three years, I think they'll pull the plug on this. This is just a bad idea, but that's just my opinion.
NEPR asked UMass if athletic director Ryan Bamford had any comment on Shaughnessy's prediction. He did not, but a spokesman said the school is "fully committed to staying at the FBS level" of college football.
