# NY state college football?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-state-college-football/80298>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 7, 2001, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-state-college-football/80298 "2001-09-07T21:24:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![HubZilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ccd318/32.png) [@HubZilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HubZilla)\
**Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-state-college-football/80298/1 "2001-09-07T21:24:18Z")

</div>

How come New York universities field so few Division I-A college football teams? Off the top of my head, I can only think of Syracuse, Army, and Buffalo (only recently). As the 2nd most populated state with NYC, I figured it would be a recruiting hotbed. The nearest DI-A school to NYC is Rutgers, although I’m not sure that counts that as Division I 😉

None of the SUNY schools have DI-A teams, either. Why is that?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![BobT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e8cbc/32.png) [@BobT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobT)\
**Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-state-college-football/80298/2 "2001-09-07T21:39:49Z")

</div>

The SUNYs just don’t have the budgets to afford D-IA football. It’s very expensive to run and you need a stadium of a certain size to qualify.

And since there is little tradition of college football in the NYC metro area aside from Army, I doubt you could get crowds to go to college football games there.

The Kickoff Classic this year at the Meadowlands drew poorly despite Syracuse’s presence.