About that $5M, you need to consider the extra 22 football scholarships and many schools use out of state tuition charges so if a full year of out of state costs $50K, the school earns $1.1M and that is not counting possible extra scholarships if said school was before was below the FBS minimum of sports offered. That might earn the school $500K to another million. That would mean the school has recouped about half of that $5M fee.
That also does not include the increase in the value of media rights with the new athletic conference they join, higher ticket revenue, increased contributions, etc.
$5M is nothing in that regard when it comes to FCS going up to FBS. Kennesaw State who will be in CUSA next year only would need to charge an extra $10 per credit hour for its 43,000 students to get to that $5M figure.
That’s why that fee really needs to go up if you want to slow things down. A high majority of those schools will not have difficulties finding $5M to bring in new exposure to the school and even if it leads to a increase by just 500 students in the student body at $25,000 per academic year, that’s a gain of $12.5M for the school.
Maybe you are thinking more about the difference between a D2 school and FBS. There are very few D2 schools with student bodies above 10K and getting that extra $5M would be much more difficult as a result.