Appalachian State

[EduBull]

As an Appalachian State alum and donor, and a USF alum and donor, below is my treatise on this topic. 

Believe it or not, there are actually colleges that don't want to get bigger, have been the way they are for a hundred years, and don't want to have Div 1-A football programs. 

Appalachian is a fairly small public liberal arts college in a small college town.  There is no large city or metropolitan area that drives its growth.  It's enrollment is (I think) about 15k, and that's probably about as big as it ever wants to get.  It's primary focus is on providing a well-rounded undergraduate experience and a few graduate programs, and athletics exists to support that and nothing else. They could have gone the Div 1A route years ago but didn't.  They've got long-standing rivalries with other colleges like themselves, such as Western Carolina University, who they play in "the battle for the old mountain jug" every year (which Appalachian usually dominates).  To a great extent Appalachian football is everything college football is supposed to be, and it's far ahead of USF's football program in many ways.  Moving to Div 1A wouldn't improve what it already has.

There are other larger colleges in NC with Div 1A football (Carolina, NC State, Duke, Wake Forest, East Carolina). Plus, with no large city to claim Appalachian as its own there is no regional fan base.  It's all about the students and alumni.

Also, the big college sport in NC is basketball.  It's hard for people in Florida to believe, but if you go to college in NC it's the basketball team everyone watches.  UNC-Charlotte, which is more similar to USF (about the same age, serves a large metropolitan area, lots of commuters) put together a basketball program as soon as they possibly could (and went to the final four when I was a kid), but still don't have a football team, and probably never will.  This is why the two largest universities in the state, Carolina and NC State, have WAY more successful basketball programs than football.

So the moral of the story is this.  The world needs large metropolitan research institutions with a hundred PhD programs like USF, but it also needs smaller colleges focused on undergraduate education like Appalachian State.  And Appalachian State has no desire to become USF.