re: It's Official: UAB Discontinues Football

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Doubt it. With the autonomity for the P5 there will be a P5 division, a G5 division then FCS within 10 years.

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That's possible, and if it happens then some of those other programs might survive but the plain fact is that a lot won't make it. Here's a USA Today report on the financial situation of college athletic departments. It is pretty neat in that you can sort it by columns.

In the report, UAB has a budget of $28 million with $18 mil of that (64%) being subsidized. 124 programs had subsidy percentages higher than UAB's and a whole lot of them are D-1 programs.

Tuition is going up at a tremendous rate all across the country and at some point in the very near future, schools are going to start looking at where the money's going. Places that are funding 70-80% of the athletic budget to a tune of $20 Mil+ a year with the vast majority of that going to football are going to start saying enough.

It isn't like this hasn't happened before. In 1977, there were 146 Division 1A football programs. In 1986, there were 105. In a mere decade, 41 schools either dropped football entirely or dropped down a division or more in their level of participation.