Utah State doesn’t want its football program to get left behind. Here’s one thing the Aggies say needs to happen.

Months before the college football season kicked off, Utah State University President Elizabeth Cantwell was thinking about the gridiron.

For years, the Aggies have survived — and sometimes thrived — in the Mountain West, part of the Group of 5 that sits a tier below the sport’s Power Four conferences. USU often enough found the right mix of keeping up with the Joneses and staying within their means to win games.

But Cantwell knew that delicate balance was about to be obliterated.

Athletic departments around the country are now gearing up to pay players, as soon as the proposed House v. NCAA settlement is approved by the courts. Television contracts for college football’s elite are ballooning. And the divide between the Power Four and everyone else grows even larger.

For a program like Utah State, even staying within arms reach of those schools in football will require a massive increase in investment.

And Cantwell has long said football and athletics are important to her university.

“I have run the numbers, and trained in the Pac-12 system,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune in February. “And what happens if you have not just winning teams, but if you have a really well-viewed D-I set of athletics, what it does for everyone else is incredible.

“I would leave if I lost that for USU.”

While some Group of Five teams see it as a bridge too far — unwilling or unable to eventually fund the $22 million salary cap the House settlement is expected to create — Utah State is preparing to opt in.

“Absolutely, we will get there,” USU Athletic Director Diana Sabau told The Tribune. “I think we will get [to revenue sharing] perhaps a little bit slower, or a more thought out process, than the Power [Four]. It would be easy for them to dip into some coffers to get it started. We don’t have a lot of reserves. We don’t have that financial fund just ready to go. And so every day we eat what we can kill, and we have to do a better job of having more reserves.”

The theory behind the decision to revenue share is simple: The financial gain of winning in football is too important for a university to give up.

What comes next is about to test that theory in Logan.

National powerhouse Alabama brought in nearly $200 million in revenue last year. West Virginia, a middle-tier Power Four school, grossed $105 million in revenue. San Diego State, a Mountain West school that is reportedly looking to join a rebuild Pac-12 Conference, brought in $67 million.

The Aggies athletic department hauled in just over $51 million in revenue in FY23. That would mean hitting the full cap would be over 40% of the school’s athletic revenue.

Some Group of Five schools will likely abandon hope for creating winning football programs — or perhaps abandon football entirely — perhaps shifting their focus to basketball where smaller rosters make recruiting more affordable.

To an economist, that makes plenty of sense.

“If you wanted to be financially responsible, then you would just field the lower-quality team,” University of Utah economist Stephen Maisch said. “Just cede it to Alabama [football] and just let Alabama win all the time, right? Spend less money, and maybe take some of that money and put it in something else.”

“The short answer is, football teams having more wins and making more revenue are really just good for the football team. The universities and the colleges don’t really benefit too much from it,” he added.

But USU’s leaders disagree. Cantwell and Sabau believe football is worth fighting for.

More than any other sport, when a school’s football team wins it drives donations, advertising, ticket sales and more. One study on Temple’s winning football season back in 2017 estimated it was worth $38 million in advertising every time the team was on ESPN.

While the USU football program made only $15.3 million last year, USU officials argue that the sport has more wide-ranging financial benefits for the university. Even a strong basketball program doesn’t have the same rewards.

“The financial loss to us would be more than I’m willing to tolerate,” Cantwell has said of maintaining a high-caliber football program.

Added Sabau: “Are we each quietly strategizing on how to maximize [basketball] even further? Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. Of course we are. ... But football is very, very important to us.”

And the Aggies AD believes if Utah State doesn’t revenue share, it will have no chance of football success. It won’t be able to recruit at a high level. It won’t be able to retain coaches.

Recruits are “comparing who’s going to give them more resources. When you talk about revenue sharing, it’s going to be here’s your compensation package. It’s your cost of attendance, your NIL, your revenue sharing, your Alston money. It’s our total compensation package now. That’s what people are driving for,” she said.

If she doesn’t help football succeed, she feels she will have let the institution down.

“If we don’t do our due diligence in athletics, then we’re going to let the community down and I’m going to let the institution down. We have to be at a price point,” the AD continued.

David Berri, a Southern Utah University professor who studies sports finances, understands the thinking.

“There’s no other way to advertise your university as effectively as athletics does, because athletics gets on television, gets in newspapers, way more often than anything your professors do,” he said. “So they should pitch this to say, ‘We’re going to increase our athletic spending, not because we think it’s going to make us money, because it’s not.’ It is ‘We’re advertising.’”

He also contended that football, perhaps more than anything else, is a way to connect donors.

“It’s not a very big deal financially [with revenue]. It is a big deal in terms of how you connect with people,” he said. “It does make sense to do it to make your boosters, donors happy.”

Utah State basketball coach Jerrod Calhoun sees it the same way. He takes over a program that has been to the NCAA Tournament for the last two years. The team sells out some games at the Spectrum. USU could easily opt-out of revenue sharing for football and hone in on basketball, where it could afford to compete with the big schools without spending as much money.

But the financial gain of winning in basketball still doesn’t measure up to football for a university, he thinks.

“It’s an interesting thought,” he said. “I do think football drives it still. I think football is a big part of it.”

Calhoun has studied some leagues, like the Big East, that have already gone down the path of specializing in basketball. Many of those schools are smaller, have smaller budgets, and can’t afford to keep pace in football. But even when they win, they don’t have the top-end payoff.

Look at a school like Villanova, a Big East stalwart that has won multiple national championships in basketball since 2016. Its athletic revenue hovered around $62 million last year. Compare that with even an average football school, like West Virginia, that brought in more than $100 million.

“I think it’s got to be what each institution, collectively, those athletic directors and those presidents, really want to do. I think you can have both [basketball and football at USU],” Calhoun said. “I was in Cincinnati and I was at West Virginia. And those things went hand-in-hand. West Virginia basketball, West Virginia football were really, really good.”

Still, USU will have to figure out how to pay for revenue sharing. Sabau believes USU’s model is flexible enough to afford it.

USU only carries 16 sports. That is fewer than some other Mountain West schools. For example, San Diego State and Fresno State carry 17.

Because of that, she thinks USU can siphon off some athletic revenue to pay players directly. Other Group of 5 schools, and even some Power Four schools, might have to cut sports if they opted into revenue sharing.

“We don’t have to look at perhaps some drastic measures that other institutions, or Power Fives or even Group of Fives, are looking at right now,” Sabau said. “We’ve been appropriately sized.”

USU women’s soccer coach Manny Martins said there is always a fear that sports will get cut. But for now he is confident Olympic sports on the women’s side will stay as USU chases football success.

“Title IX, I think, is there to make sure that there’s protection you’re going to be taken care of,” he said. “Again, there’ll be changes. Absolutely.”

Berri and Maisch think USU can afford to revenue share, too. Maisch believes that USU can start cutting some administrative costs and put that into revenue sharing. It might not get to $22 million right away, but it could help.

“They don’t have to pay $20 million right? They only have to pay $20 million if they want to get a better player from Boise State or what have you,” he said.

Berri speculated the university might be able to subsidize the athletic department’s increased spending.

Even if USU tripled its investment in football, he said, it would still be able to afford it easily.

“If Utah State wants to be competitive, they’re going to have to triple their football budget,” he said. “Now you may say, ‘Well, that’s a ridiculous expense.’ But again, they have $700 million in revenue. So if that’s really what they want to spend their money on, they have the money to do that.”

Sabau acknowledged USU is behind in football revenue. It has the second-fewest individual donors in the Mountain West, she said. This year, Sabau and USU kicked off a $125 million capital campaign to help close the gap.

“We need help in football. We need to have our fan base realize the importance of football globally, nationally,” she said.

It hasn’t helped that the football program has underachieved recently, or that the offseason was marred by controversy as the university fired former head coach Blake Anderson and some longtime Aggie athletic officials.

“We have to get somewhere where a .500 record is not acceptable, right?” she said. “We have to make sure that we’re growing each year with progress so that we’re sending more guys to the [NFL] combine to fight for a career on Sunday and it’s really working out [for them]. We have to be in the upper tier of bowl games.”

Will it all be worth it in the end?

Depending on who you ask, the answer is different.

“I think it’s just an ego boost to the wealthy alumni and to the administration up high,” Maisch said. “If they just stopped spending so much money on football and fielded a worse team, how much would they actually lose? And they really wouldn’t lose very much at all. They’re not going to lose much out of the fan base. They’re still going to come to games even if they don’t win. They are alumni, this isn’t professional sports.”

But USU leaders think football is too valuable to overlook.

“I deeply believe that athletics is the lifeblood of an institution of community,” Sabau said. “Like we create those legacies of memories. We create your photo album on your phone. We create those pictures that you’re most prideful of.”

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.