College Uncovered

College football bowl season is underway, with wall-to-wall games on TV, packed stadiums and multi-million-dollar broadcasts dominated by a few dozen powerhouse programs.

In Amherst, Massachusetts, it’s quiet. That’s because the University of Massachusetts Amherst Minutemen just finished the 2025 season without a single win, the only team in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision to do so. Over the past 13 seasons, since joining the FBS, UMass has stumbled to a stunning 26-130 record.

Their collapse has turned McGuirk Alumni Stadium into a concrete, empty symbol of a bigger problem: public universities pouring tens of millions into athletics just as American higher education is facing both a financial reckoning and a demographic enrollment cliff.

“It’s a disastrous enterprise,” saidBoston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who has repeatedly used his weekly column to criticize UMass’s investment in football. When teams like the Minutemen can’t compete, he argues, pouring institutional dollars into football looks especially bad for a public university.

“We’re sending these kids out there to take these beatings and to possibly get hurt and it’s just not right,” Shaughnessy said. “Don’t blame the athletes when you see those scores because they shouldn’t be put up against these teams.”

In this episode of College Uncovered, GBH’s Kirk Carapezza talks with Amy Perko, CEO of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which finds nationwide severance pay for fired football coaches has hit a record high. Public universities now owe more than $228 million in buyouts for just 15 fired head coaches.

Then economist James Koch, former president of Old Dominion University and the University of Montana, explains his new statistical analysis that argues big-time college sports don’t benefit students and graduates at all and may actually leave them worse off.

Links:

After an abysmal season, UMass Amherst’s football program faces scrutiny

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

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Credits:

Host and Producer: Kirk Carapezza 

Editors: Azita Ghahramani and Jenifer McKim

Executive Producer: Lee Hill  

Mixing and Sound Design: David Goodman & Gary Mott

Theme Song and original music: Left-Roman

Artwork: Matt Welch 

Project Manager: Isabel Hibbard

Consulting Producer and Head of GBH Podcasts: Devin Maverick Robins

"College Uncovered" is a production of GBH News