College Football: Why aren’t there more Catholic D-I FBS programs?

1. Cost and mission

At the end of the day, maintaining a college football program has become prohibitively expensive for many colleges and universities.

It may be simple cost-cutting measures that prevent Catholic schools, which are reliant on private funds and donations, from competing with the large land-grant institutions at the top level of college football.

If many Catholic university administrators believe that they can complete their school’s mission without a multimillion-dollar football coach (and the facilities, the travel, and the equipment to boot), they’ll be hard-pressed to defend the growing cost of suiting up and staffing a 100-player team.

Catholic universities have been shutting down their football programs for more than a century now. Schools like Canisius (Buffalo, N.Y.), St. John’s (Queens), and Siena are all New York-based programs that halted play in the 1990s or 2000s. Modern-day Catholic basketball powers, too, once fielded football teams: Seton Hall until 1981, Xavier until 1973, and even Gonzaga until 1942.

Something that may reverse these trends is the success of Catholic universities in the “Sun Corridor” of the United States, namely in populous states such as Arizona, Texas, or Florida.

A school like Incarnate Word in San Antonio, which has a burgeoning football program, not even two decades old with an NFL owner-funded stadium and facilities, could reverse the trend of Catholic schools shuttering their Division I football programs.

Another example could be St. Leo of the Tampa, Fla. metro area, as a school that competes at the D-II level already and has an enrollment of nearly 5,000 on-campus students.

Time will tell if schools like these will ever make the move to Division I, but they’re at least proving that Catholic universities can still field a football team in the 21st century.