The cash cow is going dry

The days of Jackrabbits sacking Nebraska quarterbacks could be numbered.

If you have been closely watching the tea leaves of college football, I guess you could figure this day was coming.

On Tuesday, Wisconsin athletic director and Rose Bowl football coach moonlighter Barry Alvarez said the Big Ten Conference has decided to stop scheduling FCS football games. Closer to home, North Dakota State athletic director Gene Taylor said he knows not every athletic director in the Big Ten is fully aboard.

A lot of teams have a bunch of FCS games scheduled out for the next five seasons or so. You can check out the Missouri Valley's list on the right side of this page or click here.

With the addition of Maryland and Rutgers and the near inevitability of the conference to go to nine or 10 games of Big Ten play, we should not be surprised by this move.

The games are somewhat beneficial for Big Ten teams because they provide an extra home game and a 98 percent chance of winning. What more do you want, Purdue?

But the reality is that outside of die-hard fans of the Wolverines and Hawkeyes and the fans of the FCS schools playing in the game, nobody cares about these games. Everyone is always complaining about how every SEC team plays an inept SWAC team in early November and it's not because people don't like Alabama State, another great institution of higher education in America. It's because Alabama State sucks. (Tavaris Jackson too.)

At the same time, there is a good reason why the games are played from the FCS end. These games are often times a serious way for schools to fund their athletic programs. Savannah State made $860,000 last year to get its proverbial butts kicked at Florida State and Oklahoma State. That can be worth it, if it pays for tennis, soccer and softball. Missouri State has been known to come out well financially from these games and perennial power Northern Iowa played at Iowa and Wisconsin last year to help the bottomline.

If you win, even better. We all know about Appalachian State because of their ability to knock off Michigan in the Big House to open the 2007 season. North Dakota State has regularly won these games but that's not the norm. SDSU's 13-10 loss at Minnesota in 2009 and 17-3 loss at Nebraska in 2010 represents the good in the recent "money games." They don't celebrate the 55-0 rear kicking at Illinois in 2011 and for good reason.

Plus, the games provide some much needed visibility for recruiting and otherwise. South Dakota has played at Central Florida, Air Force and Northwestern in recent years and those three states -- Florida, Colorado and Illinois -- have high school talent that the Coyotes would love to have. The same can be said for when Montana opened the season at Tennessee in 2011. That's tremendous visibility, both nationally and for local recruits to connect the team on the field with the colorful stationary that pops up in their mailboxes every day.

This post at footballscoop.com raises some pretty good points in favor of FCS but I think there's a chance the lower-level schools benefit some from this. Because there will be no incentive to pay D-II or NAIA schools to come play, it could force teams to play other FCS teams, which can only help for competition and selections come playoff time. For SDSU, it might open up more teams that could come up to Brookings for a September game, much like UC Davis last year.

Speaking of the Jackrabbits, they could get some money out of Minnesota if the Gophers and the Big Ten have to buy out their scheduled opponents past 2016, which is believed to be the start date of this new policy. I would rather see the two teams on the field but I guess that can't be the case.

What I do know is this: The large schools usually get what they want and the SEC has some pull. I could see those teams playing FCS opponents going forward because their conference is so good. The Big Ten doesn't always have that particular luxury. They're going to need better non-conference scheduling to make the new playoff system. In that instance, they can't afford to play the Indiana Teachers Colleges of the world.

If the Big Ten is out, that's bad news for the Missouri Valley Football Conference and more importantly, its school's budgets.