Colleges starting to eliminate sports from their programs
wendy,
how does this impact your son's baseball career? i was meaning to ask you how things were with him missing out on the season, was he training, etc.
When I saw the Bowling Green announcement, I got worried. I sincerely hope his program stays in tact. It's a D3 and I'm not sure if that has any bearing. He was sent home mid-March and has been training at home, with the help of an online training program. It's been helpful for his sanity as it gives him a schedule and structure and he's stuck to it. He's going to Massachusetts in June to train for two months with another program assuming Mass stays on track for re-opening. He was angry over losing his season because he worked his ass off during the off-season. I felt bad for the seniors whose season and baseball careers abruptly ended with no fanfare. At least my son has two more seasons, with a possible third as a grad transfer. Thanks for asking, ExtraM.
i appreciate your sharing and hope the best for your boy. we have some similar issues in our house, and the oldest son is chomping at the bit to get back to his college football team and train with them.
if you think of it, i'm sure i'm not the only one interested in how your son is doing and the 'vibe' from his team and college. if you feel comfortable, please share as time and circumstance allow. good luck.
Impact is happening on all levels. Owens Community College (just a few miles from BGSU) just announced all fall & winter sports for 20-21 academic year are canceled.
I can imagine how difficult it is to go solo if your sport is football. You need the guys around you in your position group, or if you're a qb or receiver, you need your partner. You need the peoples around you. My son would love to be able to throw off a mound and have a real catcher, but other than that he's used to working alone. My husband's hand is blue from long toss, and the other day I was deemed, "Not able to generate a competitive enough environment" when I volunteered to put the gun on his pitches. Ha! I wish your son the best, too. I totally understand his predicament.
well, he actually gets football practice at home with his 4 brothers who play. we go through stretching, warm ups, agility, footwork, drills, the whole bit (i have coached them all through the years). and the next brother in line is getting offers to play and is faster, a bit bigger, and pretty darn good, so when they go one on one, its competitive. that has helped.
I think D3 is different to an extent. The D3 athletes are non-scholarship, so they are forking out money to their schools (as I'm sure I don't have to remind you, Wendy).
Adrian College, for example, added men's and women's hockey and men's and women's lacrosse over the last decade. Yes, that's a massive expense, but the expense probably comes close to paying for itself--they now have 100 more students than they would have had without those teams, each of them paying whatever tuition is at Adrian. I'm sure that after the money pays for the few coaches that they have to hire and keeping the ice frozen at their rink, there's plenty left over for the college.
When you take that into account, there's a good chance that your kid's college is making money on their baseball team, or at least coming a lot closer to breaking even than Bowling Green was.
A lot of the players, mine included, got a partial academic scholarship, but it's still crazy expensive even with that help. Parents on the team who can help financially have stepped up in the past couple of years to help fund the spring training trip and travel expenses during the regular season. It's sort of like glorified high school in that respect. The fund raising efforts have been excellent. But I worry about paying the salaries of the coaches. One teaches a class at the university but it's only one class. He has outside revenue sources -- he's very into public and motivational speaking. During the past two months, he's brought in MLB players, coaches and GM's to talk to the players on a weekly basis via Zoom meetings. What a fantastic experience for them. I love this program and the coaches and they do a great job with the players off the field, too. A very worthwhile part of the college experience.
I have family that played, coached and AD'd at Adrian in the 70's-80's. Not sure if anyone in Adrian knew what hockey was back then. From what I can tell by online info and the every 5-10 year drive by AC had a growth spurt.
AC has had a major growth spurt in last 7-10 years. Add in a new president and lots of connections. Campus is beautiful and is really up to date
Why would they have 100 extra students? Wouldn’t they just have taken more non-athletes?
Depending on who you trust, their acceptance rate is somewhere between 60% and 65% so they likely could have found another 100 students.
While it’s obviously true that D3 student-athletes are non scholarship athletically, I wouldn’t say the sports almost pay for themselves. Many D3 schools find ways to get athletes money if they are recruiting them heavily. One of my sons is a D3 football player out of state at a school that costs about $44,000 per year. We pay $8000 a year because they wanted him badly. He gets academic money and a bunch of grants. I know many successful D3 schools do the same thing.
So tough!!! My heart breaks for all the Seniors that got robbed of the last 3+ min the of high school. Those are some of the fondest months of my life. Can’t imagine realizing you didn’t have the chance soak in your last sporting event (playing or watching) and last day of school. Such a shame.
In this indicative of no football this fall at these universities?
I think these schools are assuming there's no football this Fall. These schools are all the ones that rely on that one bloodbath game that gets them their half million dollar payday and gets the school's AD fully funded for the year. Akron was going to play Clemson, and Bowling Green was going to play OSU. Those games were going to be big payouts, and no game = no department funding. I'm guessing even if the game is played, no fans in the stands probably = a smaller payout (I assume), and as such, the schools have to decide which sports are most expendable.
These bodybag games might be huge for FCS teams but they don't have the same massive impact on a G5. In some of the stories about Eastern Michigan cutting 4 sports last year, they were showing they were taking between 23-27 Million annually from the school to fund athletics. A $1 million payout from Michigan to play Eastern helps, but it's nothing compared to student fees.
Yeah but without the body-bag games and with the potential for no fans at home games the financial equation definitely moves even more in favor of not playing for G5 schools. The Big 10 will be able to manage due to the television money they receive (if there are no fans) but Eastern Michigan doesn't have that revenue stream and probably can't afford to play football.
Theoretically, Eastern can't afford to play football anyway. Hell in that story I referenced before they were showing ticket sales of $671k and a travel budget of $692k. If you can't even cover football travel with ticket sales, you're going to have a bad time.
https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2018/03/eastern_michigan_pays_23m_1000.html
My point was more that schools cutting sports is not an indictment on a potential football season in 2020. It's more that these school's athletic departments were already on shaky ground and now the potential lost revenue from student fees is going to kill some sports and possibly entire departments.
100% agree and many football programs do not generate revenue to fund the athletic department budget. I see your point about the reduction in student fees but ultimately I think that will sink the lower tier sports first. A school will cut cross country first and football last. In reality the programs that produce more revenue get to spend more. If EMU football loses its body-bag revenue and its ticket sales (do they sell tickets?) revenue can they justify the bloat they carry on the department this year?
Don't think a season with no fans won't hurt Michigan as ticket sales and PSD fees for football account for nearly $70,000,000 of revenue each year. The budget for the athletic department is nearly $185,000,000. This will hurt all P5 schools. It is a very serious problem for all schools.
As someone who went to Toledo it's absolutely ridiculous to me at this point that the MAC is considered FCS/Division I in football and basketball. The schools are not competing for the same thing as Power 5 schools. Drop down to FCS and play teams like Youngstown State and have more of a chance at a national championship.
MAC schools have been faring better and better against P5 competition in football over the past few decades (and football is the hardest sport to play competitively against stronger programs). Basketball offers much more parity since the resource requirements to field a team and rum a program are much less demanding, relatively speaking.
Good MAC teams seem to be roughly the equivalent to bad Big ten teams. Sure they pull an upset every other year or so lately against Maryland, Rutgers, Illinois, Northwestern or Purdue, but the best MAC teams in the last 10 years (2012 Northern Illinois and 2016 Western Michigan) both lost their bowls to Florida State and Wisconsin respectively.
It could also be due to declining revenues for the schools in general. Most schools' athletic departments aren't profitable and need to be subsidized by their general fund.
The economic shutdowns are going to hit governments hard in the wallet. Appropriations to education are going to go down in most, if not all, states.
There is also the possibility that enrollment will be down. If I'm an incoming freshman and I won't have any in-person classes, is it worth enrolling at all, when I could take those classes for less at a community college?
Cincinnati eliminated it's men's soccer program about a month ago.
For schools that don't have big Michigan-sized budgets to begin with, and who also rely on their football teams to go play bluebloods and get their asses kicked for a half million dollar paycheck that funds the AD for the rest of the year, yes, this will be extending far beyond these two schools.
I don't think you'll see anyone in the Big Ten dropping sports (at least not yet) because they all have serious financial backing, but your Akrons, San Jose States, Florida A&Ms, Coastal Carolinas, I won't be surprised to see schools of those sizes dropping sports. Football will be the last to go, but men's water polo, women's field hockey, golf, tennis, anything that doesn't drive some kind of revenue, they are all in danger of going bye-bye.
Hope all these players are offered the chance to transfer without penalty.
Most of these small schools don't draw from football they draw from student fees (parent of a MAC kid...) As much as 70-75% of their funding comes from the student financial pool. We received a letter verifying it...discussing the issues with returning tuition and fees as students came home.
And if you think BIG schools are safe see Northwestern:men's track circa 1989
Page nine here has some info on sources of revenue for athletic departments:
https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Academic-Spending-vs-Athletic-Spending.pdf
Data from 2014 ... notice Michigan's good position at the end of the chart:
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/ncaa-subsidies-main#id=table_2014
Eastern Michigan? Not so much.
MLive on Michigan schools:
https://www.mlive.com/news/page/michigans_mac_colleges_subsidi.html
This is horrible...it's going to continue to domino until resources are available. My daughter attends a MAC school...70% of the sports budget comes from student fees.
I heard OSU is eliminating football.
No, you misread the press release. They are keeping football but eliminating school.
excellent humor
That press release is from 2 years ago, nobody really noticed at the time.
Well we did that 20 years ago
And replacing it with Money Ball.
I thought the headline was they were eliminating amatuer football.
We may not be at risk but the sport of college men’s gymnastics as a whole is in serious danger if other schools start dropping their teams.
Illinois-Chicago axed their program recently so now there are only 15 teams in the country. In 1969, there were 234.
The sport was being cut everywhere when Title IX was passed and it was the first one to go once cuts had to be made at various schools.
Michigan’s program was even on its way to being cut in the 90s before Kurt Golder saved the program.
Why can't the NCAA give up some of that pot of gold they're sitting on to keep these programs afloat for a year?
Uh, are you familiar with the kind of organization the NCAA is?
"The NCAA" (the organization in Indianapolis) has nothing at all like a pot of gold.
They make a good deal of money every year, almost all of it from selling the TV rights to the Division I men's basketball tournament, spend most of it putting on money-losing tournaments in other sports and other divisions, and distribute the rest to the schools in all divisions according to a formula approved by those schools. They certainly don't have a massive cash reserve.
The masses of money in college sports never get touched by the NCAA--the really big money is from football TV contracts, which are signed by conferences and not the NCAA, and distributed by the conferences to their conference schools.
No, the pot of gold in college sports was melted down and turned into gold-plated waterfalls in power 5 football locker rooms.
I agreed with everything until the end. The gold was melted down and mostly paid out to coaches and administrators.
Alternative solution (or perhaps combined with NCAA stopping the hoarding of money and the bloated administrative salaries/overheads within the universities and ADs): have the schools stop paying students to play sports (via paying for tuition, room, board, books, tutors, etc.) The savings would be significant (keep in mind this is ALL athletic scholarships, not just revenue sports). Title IX is still satisfied (since no one is getting any preferred benefits). The schools can still offer scholarships based upon economic need (if a poor kid wants to come to school, he or she should not have to hope for an athletic scholarship to do it), but there is no fair justification for giving a student a full ride just for being good at sports (which has absolutely nothing to do with classroom performance and scholarly aptitude).
People forget that reason colleges even began offering athletic scholarships (back in the early 20th century) was essentially a way to bring in football "ringers" that otherwise would not attend the universities.
Penny- you do realize the NCAA gives back 95% of their revenue to the schools don’t you?
Say it with me “It’s the price we must pay for keeping everyone safe. Lockdowns must continue until there’s a vaccine. We are all in this together”
The bottom line is that almost all college sports are a luxury for their schools. They take up a decent amount of resources, bring in very little revenue and produce hardly any professional level players.
In normal times the big schools could support them with almost solely with their football/basketball revenue, while smaller schools could do so with a combination of NCAA money, tuition, donor support and other various resources.
There isn’t a single funding source that isn’t going to be significant impacted by everything that’s happened. The schools are going to be faced with some serious financial issues and, just like with the rest of us, luxuries are the first things that are going to have to go when the $ just isn’t there anymore.
Even schools like Michigan are going to lose at least some of their sports, many other schools are going to cut a majority, and it wouldn’t be surprised to see some smaller schools eliminate sports all together.
does a bear shit in the woods?
Does the tin-man have a sheet metal cock?
Is the pope catholic?
Is a frog's ass water tight?
Does Grizzly Adams have a beard?
Does a one legged duck swim in circles?
Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?
Am ominous glimpse into the future if TV revenues take a permanent dip down. All these ADs have gotten so used to the abundance of money pouring in that when a slight blip will be like the guy keeping with the Joneses who can barely keep his head above water with McMansion payments, car payments, etc. A permanent dip in income for a lot of these places is going to be a bloodbath for small sports
Some people don't ever pay attention to non-revenue sports at schools not named Michigan, and it's really showing in this thread.
Teams get cut every year, all across the nation. Schools just get to use a different excuse this time around.
Absolutely. EMU (and CMU and WMU) have been absolute tire fires from a budgetary perspective for years now. That's why EMU tried to cut in 2018 four sports (it didn't really occur for Title IX and other reasons). Each school loses $15-$25 million a year (which they pull from the general fund; this is pre-virus).
To show how delusional these schools are, I give you this quote from the EMU Athletic Director:
"If you are going to drop down to Division II, is that the reputation we want? We compare ourselves to a Western Michigan, a Central Michigan, a Toledo and Bowling Green. Do we want to all of a sudden compare ourselves to Oakland (Division I), Saginaw Valley or Grand Valley?"
https://www.mlive.com/eagles/2018/03/no_plans_to_cut_football_at_ea.html
This idiot seriously thinks EMU (or CMU, WMU, etc)--for students applying to school--is not compared to Grand Valley or Oakland?
Outside of UM and MSU, Grand Valley is the most successful public university in the state from a budgetary and student enrollment perspective; Oakland is in the Top 5. EMU/WMU/CMU have been bleeding students for years, yet the University President and Board think it is worth the "prestige" of Division 1A sports, esp football.
It's pathetic. EMU/WMU/CMU need to figure out a way to save at least $10 million (and this was pre-COVID-19), and cutting wrestling or track isn't going to get them there.