I tend to agree, but why should there be a minimum attendance? If a team is competitive by the rest of the rules, why should we care how much they draw? This should be about competition. Not attendance. Not profit. It's the same arguments that are used against TCU (We don't sell out; we don't have the DFW TV market; etc)
The minimum attendance issue (which the NCAA did have for a short time a decade ago) is so that small schools (read Sun Belt and others of their ilk) are competing in the same level as schools with similar support.
One of the most significant criticism of the Wetzel plan is that it would give every FBS conference champion at spot in the playoff, thereby hurting schools which played much harder schedules in much harder conferences. A way around this would be to reduce the number of FBS schools.
Teams that don't average 25k are mostly cupcakes and guaranteed wins. This is why the Big Ten, SEC, etc. load up on these games. They know these programs make their budgets by being the tomato can of the week. And since only 5 FBS wins are required for bowl eligibility (plus 1 FCS win), a team in a 8-team conference (read Big East pre TCU) can literally play 5 OOC games versus teams worse than most FCS schools and still back into a bowl game with just 1 conference win. A 8-game conference schedule means 4 bought wins and 2 conference wins --- hardly worthy of a bowl game or recognition.
Are there exceptions? Sure, but Idaho with its 15k stadium should be competing at the FCS level --- it makes a lot more sense.
82 teams averaged over 25k. Only 1 AQ school, Washington State, averaged under 25k (and barely did so). Of the MWC schools, UNLV, Colorado State, NM, and Wyoming all averaged below 25k (but all above 20k), which shows these schools, even in down years (or down decades for some) still have decent support.
No teams from the Sun Belt, MAC, or future WAC (after the departures to the MWC) averaged 25k and only just over half of CUSA did (Houston, ECU, UCF, Southern Miss, UTEP, Rice, and Marshall)
If you draw the line at 20k, every MWC is included (and all the new ones except Nevada at just under 20k), and most of CUSA makes it, but only two MAC schools (Central Michigan and Temple, both coming off great seasons) and 1 Sun Belt team makes the cut, but no schools in the new WAC.
So, in the end, there is a big difference between non-AQs between quality non-AQs deserving of inclusion into the system and junk non-AQs which are really uncompetitive at the FBS level. Attendance is just one measure of this. Significantly, the teams that make the cut were almost all members of CFA prior to its destruction (outside of the Big Ten/Pac-10 of course).
The BCS made a huge mistake by excluding the teams of the MWC and CUSA, given that these schools were most all among the top tier of college football prior to the BCS....
