New beginnings for Charlotte 49ers football with higher stakes on and off the field

State of play: The 49ers fired head coach Will Healy on Sunday, Oct. 23. Healy joined the program in December 2018 and took the team to their first and only winning season and first bowl game in 2019.

• The young coach preached about making the program relevant, and Charlotte produced flashes of being just that. Now they’re preparing to leave Conference USA for the American Athletic Conference, which comes with a bigger stage and bigger stakes.
• “This is where you have to right the ship,” 49ers athletics director Mike Hill said during a press conference on Monday. “When you’re trying to expand a football stadium and invest in the program the way you need to, you’ve got to have a competitive product, and we’ve just not been competitive enough the last long stretch here and that was why in the end, we felt like we needed to make a move.”

Why it matters: College football is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Charlotte’s next steps won’t just be about the head coach they hire, but the overall coaching staff they build — and every choice impacts the bottom line.

• Moving to the AAC provides Charlotte with something C-USA does not offer at the same level: exposure. The AAC has a 12-year $1 billion deal with ESPN. 
• “Charlotte’s figured out a way to move up the ladder in college football in terms of competition and exposure,” Wake Forest sports economist Todd McFall tells Axios.
• Media rights are “everything for conferences right now,” McFall said. Very little of Charlotte’s revenue, 6.6%, comes from NCAA/conference distributions, media rights, per Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.

By the numbers: Charlotte spent less than $2.5 million on coaching salaries for the entire staff in 2021, per the Knight-Newhouse data, which was less than both the FBS median of $6 million and the $2.7 million C-USA median. 

• Healy made more than $800,000 annually, but head coach salaries above $1 million are common in college football, McFall tells Axios. 
• The median coaching salaries in the AAC are $6.38 million, per Knight-Newhouse data. Keep in mind, this is for the entire coaching staff.
• East Carolina head coach Mike Houston, for instance, was offered the Charlotte job before Healy in 2018, but ultimately wound up in Greenville in the AAC where he recently signed a contract extension for $2.3 million per year, ESPN reported.

Yes, but: It’s not like Charlotte isn’t spending money on football. They spent $11.3 million in 2021, per Knight-Newhouse data, which was higher than several fellow C-USA schools, but their future competition is spending more across the board.

• “We’re not going to jump to the top of the list [in terms of spending] in the American just because we joined it, but I do think that it was critical for us to make a move so that we can capitalize on moving into this new league from a business perspective,” Hill said.

Between the lines: Charlotte currently has the smallest stadium in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS, which also includes schools like Georgia and Alabama).

• The EverGreen Athletics Facilities Master Vision— a multiphase and multimillion-dollar plan the university unveiled in May, includes expanding the football stadium in Phase I, a $102 million plan, from less than 16,000 seats to more than 30,000.
• “You cannot do every single thing at once,” Hill said.

Zoom out: Hill admires how the University of Central Florida’s program has grown. He’s fairly familiar with the program, having spent 25 years at Florida before taking the job in Charlotte in 2018. There are similarities between UCF’s growth and Charlotte, he said.

• UCF is in Orlando, which like Charlotte, isn’t your typical college football town. It has to compete with Disney World and other theme park, plus its noisy neighbors in the Swamp, but it does give Charlotte something to aspire to — from stadium size (48,000 seats) to program spending ($23.7 million in 2021) to coaches salaries ($7.56 million in 2021).
• They’ll depart the AAC after this season, along with Houston and Cincinnati, for the Big 12.

Big-check games: It’s typical in college football for a more dominant college program to play a team like Charlotte and offer them a check. Charlotte played Clemson in 2019, which was a $1 million check for Charlotte, for instance. And Charlotte will play at Florida next season and at Georgia in 2025.

• “There are huge benefits, and the check that we receive is deposited quickly,” Hill said with a laugh.
• The goal is to play one of those games a year, which provides not only financial incentives but exposure and experience. Hill said they’re working on future deals with other schools as well.
• “Let’s go playing some of the cathedrals of college football,” he said.

What’s next: Charlotte plays at Rice on Oct. 29 at 2pm.