Some faculty members see the upgrade as financial quicksand for years to come.
UMass chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy has lately voiced support for the FBS program, but knows the challenges are severe.
Last month, the University of Massachusetts Faculty Senate gave a pretty good going-over to the school's fledgling Football Bowl Subdivision program, whose debut season was, by all objective standards, lousy.
That was a warmup to what may happen Thursday, when the group reconvenes. Some Senate members want the school to reverse course and withdraw from the FBS, member Max Page said last week.
They see this as an epic case of misplaced academic priorities. They also foresee UMass sinking into FBS-driven financial quicksand for years to come.
Perhaps as a preemptive response, UMass chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy voiced support for the program. He inherited this situation from predecessor Robert Holub, who rammed this through but left before the bills arrived.
I always marvel when the most brilliant academic minds in America are reduced to the role of team general manager or head cheerleader. Subbaswamy is a physicist running a university, and he presumably has more on his plate than assuring some wavering high school recruits that UMass is serious about football.
Having made statements that recognized the immense challenge facing UMass football, Subbaswamy has lately altered his tenor to sound all-in. He referred to UMass "having successfully completed our transitional first (FBS) season,'' which cast a poorly attended 1-11 campaign in a rather flattering light.
Now, he said, it's time to gear up for the "first bowl-eligible season.'' Let the Rose Bowl committee take notice.
The FBS dissidents can already claim one victory. According to Page, the Faculty Senate rules committee has placed the withdrawal motion on Thursday's agenda, after which naysayers hope to convince the administration to deliver a withdrawal plan by April, he said.
It sounds like a quixotic battle to me. I think there's a better chance UMass could beat Alabama.
Even before Subbaswamy began waving his maroon-and-white pompoms, it looked evident to me that the school, having saddled itself with this program before he arrived, must now put its energies into somehow making it work.
My own gripe has been the habit of FBS proponents to paint the transition in best-case-scenario terms. That was probably the only way to sell it, but it's a flawed, unrealistic way to plan a project.
What fascinates me most, though, is that this is a classic battle of jocks versus nerds. If the Minutemen's football games had been as entertaining, they would have drawn better crowds.
The jocks will win, especially if Subbaswamy is on board. But as you can tell, I have substantial empathy for the nerds, whose weakness is not that they are wrong, only that they are late.
Within the sports world I travel, they are sometimes portrayed as pointy-headed, out-of-touch, intellectual eggheads. But they are not the crowd that expected first-year home attendance to be twice as much as the 11,963 per game the team wound up drawing, which contributed to the projected $692,000 shortfall reported to the Faculty Senate in late 2012.
Their concerns about deepening fiscal problems are not out of line either. Building a quality FBS program requires not just 22 additional scholarships but an across-the-board commitment, including a major upgrade of McGuirk Alumni Stadium, whether it serves as a home field or just a practice facility.
The jocks are saying any high-quality university should field a top-level football team, and UMass only needs a little time to get it right.
Their support has been based partly on one very real concern. Staying in the Football Championship Subdivision came with the risk they could have been left stranded if the money-losing FCS level collapsed and vanished someday soon.
The nerds are usually drowned out in these debates, and they will be until the media covers the science and history departments with the same zeal it reserves for sports.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as just taking money earmarked for football and redirecting it to better labs and books. But the nerds are right about something else, too.
The FBS upgrade has come with costs either unexpected or not directly related to football. Keeping UMass in line with gender equity rules, for example, tacks on another $260,000, according to figures released last month.
As the excitement of moving up is replaced by the challenge of succeeding and paying the bills, the small, resolute band of critics won't go away quietly. I don't think they will reverse the FBS move, but they may force some accountability.
The UMass athletic department has always pledged transparency, so it won't mind giving honest answers to tough questions. At the very least, before more millions are spent, the Faculty Senate and taxpayers are entitled to those answers, considering it's the jocks and not the nerds who badly underestimated how much this project would cost.