In fact, as this
study notes, these schools are pumping heavy subsidies to their athletic departments. They also ask their students to pay a much higher % of athletic department revenue than FBS schools (and the gap gets bigger the higher the FBS school's revenues are). My guess is that these FCS schools would spend more if they could, and are doing everything they can to keep up. Schools with FCS football programs have increased AD budgets by 48% in the 5 years studied, compared with 51% for FBS school average. For schools with athletic departments but no D-1 football, the spend increase has only been 39%. I'd hardly say they aren't trying to keep up. One could argue they're trying too hard given how much it is likely costing their general student population...
My take is that this decision is largely determined by money. TV revenue will continue to be a larger portion of any B1G school's total AD revenue as time moves on. You can only charge so much for tickets, parking, and t-shirts. AS the conference expands in geography (bleh), the footprint and brand increases allowing larger contracts. But they can extract even more if the average weekly matchup is not seen as a snore-fest for TV, even though a game against a more local FCS school might have better ticket sales and attendance figures than an FBS school from 4 states away (or much further as often happens). Furthermore, with a 10-game conference schedule and 2 NC games, it's reasonable to assume that a team COULD get 1 FBS under-level team and a home/home with another big conference opponent, making for an average of 6.5 home games a year (more if teams don't have a major on their schedule every single year). That's not too different than the 7 home games now, from a revenue perspective.
The second play is the strength of schedule argument. When the playoff comes around, 1, 2 losses won't be a big deal. In a possible (horrible) future of only 4 conferences where each conference champ gets an auto-bid (maybe 2-4 at large selections, who knows), anywhere from 2-3 losses would be totally acceptable. For said auto-bids and near-term playoff selection, the B1G recognizes that a win over an FCS team is more of a sure thing, but does far less for SoS.
What is likely to happen is 2 MAC-level opponents each year, some of them will demand a home and home (like UNLV, New Mexico St, etc), some won't and will be fine with the payouts and 2 away games. We won't get to see nearly as many interesting matchups, we won't have nearly as good of an idea as to which conference is better than another (because no one will be playing each other enough to let the computers work their magic), and we will be treated as fans to fewer home games each year in our beautiful $280M stadium. And some of those away games won't even be televised for your average cable viewer. Fun times.
