The University of Arkansas at Little Rock will post a survey to its website today that will gauge the public interest in financially supporting a potential Trojans football program.
The 34-question survey is a key component in the university's $125,000 feasibility study with Texas-based Conventions, Sports & Leisure, which will report this spring the cost of reviving a UALR football program and whether there's enough community and financial support.
The questions range from whether an individual has a general interest in a UALR football program to whether an individual would make an annual donation to the Trojan Athletic Association.
UALR Athletic Director Chasse Conque said his department started sending out the survey Tuesday by email to a group of almost 90,000 people that included corporate sponsors, donors, alumni, and UALR staff and students.
"I think it's important that we identify people that have an interest," Conque said Wednesday. "We felt it was important we gave them an opportunity."
UALR Chancellor Andrew Rogerson said in December that there must be public financial support to proceed with a football program, and that "this is something the city and donors would have to get behind and want."
When UALR announced in July that it would study football, Rogerson said the university wouldn't proceed with the program if it came down to using state appropriations. He later said that he "can reassure people" that a football program "won't be on the back" of a "massive" student athletic fee -- which, at $21 per credit hour, is already the highest in Arkansas.
Research by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found that the average Sun Belt football program has an average expense of $7,049,545 -- according to the conference members' athletic budgets from Fiscal Year 2016 -- and that start-up costs range from $15 million to $40 million.
In a December interview, Jay Lenhardt -- the principal of Conventions, Sports & Leisure -- said the firm was "well versed in doing a survey process" and "translating it into what that might mean in the real world."
Conque said Wednesday that the ordering and formation decisions of the survey questions were "a combination between the firm and the work of our department staff."
The survey includes a specific payment strategy for the football program's top needs: a head coach, a football operations facility and "other general program needs" such as support staff, scholarships and travel.
Conque called those expenses the "major buckets" of a potential program, and the survey asks whether an individual would be interested in "capital contributions" for an "endowment" that would pay off football expenses with its interest dividends.
Conque said the interest would provide a 4.5 percent return, so donations toward such an endowment would have to be substantial.
The survey also asks whether an individual prefers that a potential Trojans football program competes in the Football Bowl Subdivision or the Football Championship Subdivision.
That section calls the FBS the "highest level of intercollegiate football" that "must average 15,000 attendees per home game," and it calls the FCS the "second-tier organization of intercollegiate football" that a UALR football program would eventually "remain a member of ... or reclassify to FBS depending on the team's competitiveness and long-term ... vision, budget, and priorities."
The FBS section, which is listed first, depicts examples of programs with logos from Arkansas State University, Louisiana-Monroe, North Texas and the University of Texas-San Antonio. A potential UALR football program would compete in the Sun Belt Conference, along with its other sports.
The FCS section, listed second, uses the logos of the University of Central Arkansas, Missouri State, Murray State, Jacksonville State and James Madison.
Conque said the examples were chosen with the help of Conventions, Sports & Leisure to provide recognizable examples.
Sports on 02/22/2018