Amid the Minutemen’s 0-3 start to the season, the head of UMass Amherst athletics says more resources will be committed to the school’s long-struggling football program to shore up 'deferred maintenance' as well as attract and retain talent.
“… and it's been 12-plus years of mediocrity-to-little success at times here…” said Director of Athletics Ryan Bamford during a recent press conference. “We're going to have to oversubscribe and overinvest to get ourselves out of it.”
Bamford offered some frank assessments of his university’s football team on Monday, Sept. 22, as it came out of a bye week. The AD made an appearance at what was billed as a routine press conference with the team’s head coach, Joe Harasymiak.
The Minutemen have been off to a sluggish start, going 0-3 while losing quarterback Brandon Rose to injury two games in. They most recently suffered a blowout loss in Iowa, 7-47, and this Saturday, they face a stiff challenge against No. 20 Missouri.
Bamford says the program is suffering from what he considers “deferred maintenance” after years without a conference, and that it’s in need of major investments he hopes to see rolled out in the near-future.
“We've had sort of deferred maintenance of this program for more than a decade, and it means that you have to invest more than maybe some others do to get out of it, and the only way out is up,” he said. “And so, we're focused on making sure that we put the key investments in the right places…”
It was after the 2015 season that UMass left the Mid-American Conference, struggling ever since it made the leap to the Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision in 2012. Bamford himself was named the Director of Athletics in 2015.
According to the Boston Globe, the team’s gone 28-133 since joining the FBS.
This year, the program is back in the MAC, and the university’s AD says significant investments are on the horizon after years as an FBS Independent. He also says they’re blowing up a multi-year plan his program had initially put together.
“… we had a two or three year plan - I talked about it when we hired [Harasymiak] - candidly, I've blown that up, and we're going to invest even more than we anticipated,” he said.
“… we're not content with what the plan was, even six months ago,” Bamford later added. “We're going into overdrive and we're going to drive this forward. We have to pull this program out of losing and it's going to take a lot to do that.”
That includes significant investments in the team’s stadium, McGuirk. The complex seats 17,000 and saw renovations as the team transitioned to FBS play, but upgrades to what Bamford calls the “fan experience” are called for, and will "be prepared for the 2026 season," with more structural changes to follow – likely to cost $25-30 million.
Financing the multi-phase plan will include private funding and “creative” funding models involving the university and trustees – models that will allow the university to “take on some debt service that we … can service pretty well over the next 20-30 years,” the AD says.
Bamford offered few specifics on stadium changes, noting that a plan is likely to be finalized later in the year.
There’s also the on-field product. Bamford expressed confidence in Coach Harasymiak, who was brought on for the team’s return to the MAC. The AD acknowledged the rocky opening schedule and said better recruitment and player retention are top priorities.
“We want to retain the talented kids that we have in the program now, we want to bring in ones that we can develop and so, we have worked extensively on that over the last nine months with Joe and staff, [asking] ‘What does that look like? What does that mean we're going to need to do from an aid, additional benefits, NIL standpoint?’ and, candidly, we're going to have to overinvest…”
After Missouri, UMass will play its first conference opponent, Western Michigan, on Saturday, Oct. 4.
The entire press conference involving Ryan Bamford can be found here.
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This piece originally aired on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025.
