Three days later, it was Northland Community & Technical College in Thief River Falls.

On Tuesday, Minnesota Crookston and St. Cloud State met the same fate.

In less than a month, four colleges less than seven hours apart in North Dakota and Minnesota decided to drop football.

So why now? And why here?

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Ultimately, the cross-section of the higher education climate and the rising cost to be competitive in college football is reaching a tipping point.

For most, enrollment and attendance are down, meaning less revenue from student athletic fees and ticket sales. Yet expenses on scholarships, facilities and salaries are on the rise.

The best example of this is St. Cloud, where the St. Cloud Times reported that the Huskies’ football program was down to a measly 58 season ticket holders.

Even juggernaut North Dakota State has seen an attendance dip during this year’s FCS playoff run, while UND, although finishing 6-0 at home in 2019, failed to have a home game draw more than 9,000 for the first time since the Alerus Center opened in 2001.

So athletic departments, already hurting from a drop in ticket sale revenue, are additionally vulnerable when experiencing a drop in enrollment (and the athletic fees associated with each student). At St. Cloud, the school boasted more than 18,000 students in 2010 but that figure has fallen by almost 6,000 in the decade since.

So, really, with that obvious conflicting math, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by the closing of four area programs. We should probably be surprised it isn’t happening more often. Perhaps this little pocket of schools in North Dakota and Minnesota are the tip of the iceberg.

These four schools share challenges, yet they’re very different, too. For some, Title IX can be a murky juggle. Others have cited graduation and academic issues.

And for the two schools in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference, the timing comes on the heels of a league rule change in which members were no longer required to sponsor football to be part of the conference.

In that rule change, the NSIC could see the shifting tide of football budget realities.

Dakota College and Northland come as a lesser surprise of the four cut programs. They were predictably on shakier ground as probably all junior college football programs operate under the assumption of losing money.

There’s some precedence elsewhere, as well. All seven junior college football programs in Arizona were eliminated last season, bringing to light a growing financial issue in the classification.

But as Division II programs go, St. Cloud and Crookston are unique in dropping football.

In 2019, there were 167 NCAA Division II college football programs. That’s the exact same number as in 2018.

In Division I, the number of college football teams has grown by 16 in the past decade, including a jump from 118 to 125 in the FCS classification.

At Division I, more college administrators tout football’s reach to donors and the sport’s ability to attract future students -- although the merits of those arguments may be up to interpretation.

But in colleges in Crookston, St. Cloud, Bottineau and Thief River Falls, the budget math no longer adds up.

Financially, you can’t dip your toes in the waters of college football and be successful. With resources, you have to be prepared to completely dive in.

Now, how many more college football programs are going to find it impossible to swim?