After an abysmal season, UMass Amherst's football program faces scrutiny

College football bowl season is underway, with wall-to-wall games on TV, packed stadiums and multi-million-dollar broadcasts dominated by a few dozen powerhouse programs.

In Amherst, Massachusetts, it's quiet.

The University of Massachusetts Minutemen just finished the 2025 season winless, the only team in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision to do so.

Their collapse has turned McGuirk Alumni Stadium into a concrete, empty symbol of a bigger problem: public universities pouring tens of millions into athletics just as American higher education is facing both a financial reckoning and a demographic enrollment cliff.

Over the past 13 seasons, since joining the FBS, UMass has stumbled to a stunning 26-130 record.

This fall marked a new low. In their final game, the Minutemen were blown out by Bowling Green 45-14, capping a 0-12 season — the worst in the nation. While bowl games kick off elsewhere, the football program here has become a campus punchline.

"I have patients come up to me all the time," said Daniel Bartholomew, a sophomore from Winchester who works in a hospital to help pay tuition. "When they hear I'm from UMass, they say, 'Oh, what's it like having the worst football team in the country?'"

First-year student Naimh Tavares from Amherst says the ridicule has exploded online.

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"On Yik Yak actually, they're making lots of memes," she said. "They're just like, 'Why is all the money going to the football team when we should have more seating in the dining halls?' We shouldn't be wasting all the money on the football teams."

National trends

The frustration reflects a broader reality.

Nationally, many collegiate athletics programs — even some of the country's top Division I football programs — are hemhorraging cash. Like other schools, UMass Amherst has consistently subsidized its athletics with campus support and student fees.

And the flagship campus isn't pinching pennies where that's concerned. Last year alone, UMass spent more than $50 million on sports, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. That marks a 32% increase compared to 2015 when UMass spent $37 million. By comparison, the median increase for FBS teams was 5%.

"Not very many people seem to understand that students and their families are paying for most of this," said Michael Cavanagh, an independent researcher and writer in Alexandria, Virginia.

Cavanagh says it's time to stop saddling students with the out-of-control costs of Division I sports. He believes these NCAA reported figures likely understate the real losses.

"It's a disastrous enterprise," said Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who has repeatedly used his weekly column to criticize UMass's investment in football. When teams like the Minutemen can't compete, he argues, pouring institutional dollars into football looks especially bad for a public university.

"We're sending these kids out there to take these beatings and to possibly get hurt and it's just not right," Shaughnessy said. "Don't blame the athletes when you see those scores because they shouldn't be put up against these teams."

To try to turn things around and rebuild, UMass hired first-year coach Joe Harasymiak. His salary rings in at $1.4 million. The university is also paying another $1.4 million to buy out his predecessor, Don Brown.

Nationwide, severance pay for fired football coaches has hit a record high. Public universities now owe more than $228 million in buyouts for just 15 fired head coaches, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

"It's just another clear symptom of a broken financial model in big-revenue football," said Amy Perko, CEO of the Knight Commission.

Perko said American audiences tend to misunderstand the inner workings of college sports.

"The public sees the programs on TV that are generating enormous amounts of revenue through their media contracts and in those full stadiums," she said. "That's only a very small, very small portion."

As higher education braces for an enrollment downturn and financial reckoning in 2026, Perko said universities need to ask a basic, existential question: What is the mission of their athletics programs?

Asked to define that mission at UMass, Athletics Director Ryan Bamford opted for boilerplate language.

"As the front porch of the institution," he said, athletics give student-athletes "an opportunity to combine their passion in the classroom with a Division I athletic experience."

Bamford said students from the northeast are increasingly flocking South. Schools with successful big-time sports, as The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported, are gaining an enrollment edge by selling "sunshine, football, and a particular vision of college life."

"We can't change the weather in Western Mass.," Bamford said. "But we can change the fact that we can have success in athletics. And that can drive both student engagement, student retention, and ultimately help us in the recruiting process for student athletes and general students to the campus."

Higher ed economist Catharine Hill, managing director at the research firm Ithaca S+R, is more skeptical. She said the college-age population is about to drop sharply by about two million students, intensifying competition and making big bets on college football even riskier.

"It's not exactly strengthening your academic program, which ultimately, I think, is the reason for the federal and state governments to be subsidizing higher education," Hill said.

She emphasized that if the priority of higher ed is to educate students, then school budgets need to reflect that.

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