On September 5, Edward Waters University traveled to Jackson State and lost 14–66. That kind of score usually gets filed away as a bad Saturday for a small program that reached above its level. Instead, it became the occasion for one of the more direct pieces of financial reasoning a sitting HBCU president has ever laid out in public, and a window into a business model many schools Edward Waters’ size are quietly building around.

The day after the loss, President A. Zachary Faison Jr. posted a two-part statement on X apologizing to his players, taking personal responsibility for the scheduling decision, and announcing a policy change: “Going forward, Edward Waters University will not schedule Division I opposition in football except on terms this institution sets and that materially and substantially advance our program goals.”

What followed read less like a postgame statement and more like a line-item breakdown of what that Saturday actually cost the university, and what it should have paid.

The Math on One Road Trip

Edward Waters received a $65,000 guarantee to play Jackson State. Travel and related expenses ran roughly $30,000 to $35,000, leaving the program with about $30,000 net. What bothered Faison wasn’t the size of the number so much as how long it had sat there untouched. In a follow-up exchange with a fan who researched the payout history, he confirmed Edward Waters had received the same $65,000 figure from Jackson State in 2013 and again in 2022, with a $75,000 payout in 2014 in between. Adjusted for inflation, the 2013 payment would be worth roughly $91,000 today, meaning the guarantee’s real value has fallen by about 30 percent over 13 years while coaching salaries, travel costs and media deals have all moved the other direction.

As a Division II program, Edward Waters is capped at 36 scholarship equivalencies and fielded 29 against Jackson State. That gap is actually wider than the traditional FCS scholarship limit of 63 would suggest. Jackson State is one of 12 Southwestern Athletic Conference schools that opted into the House settlement, which replaced the old scholarship caps with a 105-player roster limit for football and lets every one of those roster spots carry a scholarship. That means Jackson State isn’t bound by the 63-scholarship FCS ceiling and can fund its program well past it if it chooses. Faison argued the resulting gap gets read by recruits as a quality gap rather than a structural one, and that a scoreboard result built on that kind of mismatch tells a young player one program is superior to another when the honest description is that they’re simply different levels, competing under different rules.

What Other HBCU Programs Are Collecting for the Same Role

Faison set that $65,000 figure against what other HBCU football programs are paid to play the same role this season: a guaranteed loss to a bigger program in exchange for a check. According to guarantee figures tracked by Hero Sports’ 2026 payout tracker, Florida A&M is set to collect $740,000 to play at Miami this season, Morgan State $600,000 at Arizona State, Tennessee State $600,000 at Georgia, Arkansas-Pine Bluff $550,000 at Missouri, and Howard a combined $1,000,000 across games at Indiana and Rutgers. A year earlier, Grambling State was paid $1,000,000 to play at Ohio State, per Hero Sports’ 2025 tracker, and lost 0–70.

Faison’s argument wasn’t that Tennessee State’s 3–63 loss to Georgia looked any better on a highlight reel than Edward Waters’ loss to Jackson State. It was that $600,000 converts into something real for a program, while $65,000 barely covers a bus and a hotel. “That is a defensible trade,” he wrote. “Ours was not.”

In a follow-up post, he set a new standard going forward: Edward Waters will not accept less than $100,000 net of travel costs for a Division I opponent, and won’t play one for less than 35 percent of what that program collects for its own guarantee game against a Power Four opponent. Below that line, he said, the conversation doesn’t start.

An Argument Faison Made Months Earlier

The Jackson State thread reads like a reaction to one bad Saturday, but Faison had already laid out the underlying financial philosophy four months earlier, in a guest column for HBCU Gameday titled “The Dream Economy.” That piece is where the real revenue story lives.

Faison’s central claim is that at a school like Edward Waters, athletics revenue doesn’t come from tickets, media rights, or merchandise the way it does at the sport’s biggest programs. It comes from enrollment. In his framing, a football scholarship works as a student recruitment cost rather than a budget expense, and the athlete who receives it is also a tuition-paying, room-and-board-paying, dining-hall-paying enrolled student.

The Numbers Behind the Roster

Run that logic through Edward Waters’ own figures and the picture sharpens. The football program targets a roster of 125 student-athletes. Under NCAA Division II rules, Edward Waters can fund a maximum of 36 scholarship equivalencies; the program is funded at 28, which the head coach spreads across the roster as partial awards rather than 28 full rides. Against Edward Waters’ published tuition of roughly $15,000 per student, a 125-player roster generates about $1.875 million in gross tuition revenue. Subtracting the discount created by that scholarship pool, roughly $420,000, leaves about $1.455 million in net tuition revenue tied to the football roster, before counting the additional room, board, and fee revenue those same students generate.

A fully staffed Division II football program at Edward Waters’ scale runs between $650,000 and $900,000 a year across coaching, recruiting, equipment, travel, and day-to-day operations. Net it against the tuition revenue, and the program produces roughly $550,000 to $800,000 a year for the university, money Faison says flows mostly into academic operations rather than back into the athletics department. In his HBCU Gameday column, he put it plainly: “Football is not a cost center subsidized by the institution. Football is an enrollment instrument that generates net revenue for the institution.”

How That Lines Up With the University’s Own Books

That estimate differs from what shows up in Edward Waters’ own federal athletics finance disclosure, and the difference is worth separating out. For the 2024-25 school year, the university reported football generating $1,137,062 in both revenue and expenses, the standard convention schools use when filing this particular federal disclosure. On that filing, football was still the single largest revenue-producing team in the department, ahead of men’s and women’s basketball combined at $1,015,367 and ahead of every other sport Edward Waters sponsors. The federal filing and Faison’s tuition-margin estimate are measuring two different things: one is the revenue-and-expense line a university reports under federal law, the other is his own accounting of what the roster nets the school once enrollment, not the filing, is treated as the product. Read together, they point in the same direction: at Edward Waters, football is the athletics department’s largest revenue producer.

That distinction matters more at Edward Waters than at a large public university, because the school already depends heavily on tuition. The most recent year of federal finance data available, covering the 2023-24 school year, shows tuition and fees supplying 55 percent of Edward Waters’ core operating revenue, with government grants and contracts, much of it tied to enrolled students’ financial aid, supplying another 33 percent. Private gifts and investment returns combined make up the remaining 12 percent. This is a school with little endowment cushion to fall back on, where most core revenue traces directly to enrollment. Edward Waters counted 1,177 total students as of fall 2024, including 1,020 full-time undergraduates. Against that base, a football roster of 122 to 125 players works out to more than one in ten full-time undergraduates on campus, all recruited and retained through a single program.

Betting the Capital Budget on the Same Idea

Edward Waters is backing this thinking with real construction money, not just accounting language. The university closed this summer on a $25 million transaction to build a new student residence hall and the school’s first on-campus track. Faison has been explicit that he doesn’t see this as an athletics facilities arms race. He frames it as enrollment infrastructure: a recruit choosing between Edward Waters and a competitor offering similar scholarship dollars will weigh the quality of the residential experience and whether the university appears invested in its students’ development. The track, he wrote, “is a recruiting tool, a retention asset, and a community engagement platform,” and the new residence hall “is the product that justifies the price point.”

A Model Faison Says Is Built for Schools Like His

Faison is careful to distinguish this from the financial model that dominates the sport’s biggest programs, and he says that distinction is the whole point. Penn State’s football program alone generated tens of millions of dollars in surplus in the 2024-25 season, enough to subsidize most of the rest of that athletics department. Edward Waters, and the large majority of HBCUs at every division level, will never have that kind of concentrated revenue engine. Faison argues too many small athletics departments still operate as if that kind of money is just around the corner, producing chronic deficits and leaving presidents defending athletics as a drain on the budget rather than an asset.

His column closed with a direct message to his fellow presidents running Division II and NAIA programs across conferences like the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the CIAA, Conference Carolinas and the Gulf South Conference, the same regional leagues Edward Waters says it will schedule within going forward rather than chasing Division I opponents. The big-budget model, he wrote, was never built for institutions their size, and the sooner presidents stop measuring their programs against a financial structure that requires a nine-figure football surplus to function, the sooner they can build something that works for their own campus.

He didn’t present the model as risk-free. He flagged two pressure points directly: growing competition for enrollable, athletically motivated recruits as name, image, and likeness money and the transfer portal pull talent upward even at the Division II level, and a six-year graduation rate that gets suppressed not because athletes are failing academically, but because the program’s own developmental success sends players transferring up to Division I schools, a pattern he argues gets misread by outside observers who aren’t built to interpret it.

A 52-point loss to Jackson State would normally be a forgettable line in a season. Instead, it became the occasion for Edward Waters’ president to make a public case for treating a football roster less like a scoreboard risk and more like the largest enrollment pipeline on campus, one he says a small, tuition-dependent university can no longer afford to lend out to Division I programs for $65,000 a Saturday.