Lehigh Football Nation

One of the best pieces of data reporting, in regards to NCAA athletics, comes from USA Today Sports and a group of lawyers and reporters. It's called the NCAA Athletics Spending database, which details the amount of revenue and spending that every public school makes on athletics.  (By law, every public or partial-public school needs to disclose this information.) It also computes the amount that each school receives in "subsidy" , which is a combination of institutional support (a direct payment from the school to the athletic department), student fees (fees included in tuition that end up going to the athletic department), and taxpayer money. The full database is here , which is interesting in and of itself, but I wanted to break out the database to only include those schools with FCS football programs.  That's what I've done below.

If it's late May, it's magazine season. With the season still three months away - the official kickoff to the FCS football season, North Dakota State at Montana, will be happening on August 29th on ESPN - the big way to whittle away the time is to look at the many FCS Top 25's that are getting published in airport reading material such as Athlon and The Sporting News . Preseason Top 25's are not right or wrong - they're just one sportswriter's opinion on the top teams going into the season. So I figure, I've got as good as opinion as anyone else - so why don't I post my Top 25 here, and let people read that when they go on an airplane this summer and head to the beach, the lake, or wherever their hearts take them? So here we go: My preseason Top 25, from No. 25 to No. 1.  As a added, free bonus, you'll learn exactly why I put each team where I did.