*”completely”
Reale?
You're "covfefe" momente?
Cincinnati Men’s Soccer
Old Dominion Wrestling
Akron Women’s Tennis
Akron Men’s Golf
Akron Men’s Cross Country
Bowling Green Baseball
Central Michigan Mens Track & Field
Furman baseball and men's lacrosse
Furman??? That's a racist name!
One of my son's classmates was committed to Furman for lacrosse. I overheard on his Zoom class another classmate saying, "That sucks for you. You spent the last year coasting in school because you knew you were going to Furman and now you need to find another school with those grades".
I hope the athletes affected by this are immediately eligible to transfer to whatever school would have them, and they don't have to sit out a year. I would imagine in an extreme scenario like this that they would be, but I'd never put it past the NCAA to still make kids sit out a year.
They are, that’s how it’s been for many years regarding players whose teams get cut.
Do you know if, in the event the athlete can't find another team to go to, if CMU still has to honor their scholarship until graduation and re-classify it as an academic scholarship?
In normal times I imagine finding another school wouldn't be a problem, but I imagine these won't be the last schools to start cutting sports programs, and for those programs that do stay afloat, there's only so many of them out there with open spots anyway. And with more and more schools dropping certain sports, its going to be a free-for-all scramble for affected athletes to even just find a place to go.
It'd be an extremely shitty situation to not only shut down the athletic program, but essentially take kid's scholarships away when they can't find a school and force them to foot the bill until graduation.
former athlete of mine had a scholarship at EMU...they closed the program prior to entering his freshman year, they honored his scholarship if he chose to stay. He like most athletes wanted to compete...and at that point the scholarships for other schools were dried up, so it was take a free ride and end your career or pray some school allows you to walk on.
Upside, if you earned a D-1 scholarship, odds of walking on somewhere are reasonable but knowing the family very well...it was a nightmare for them.
Unfortunately there is nothing in the NCAA rules saying that they have to do that. Most schools, when they drop sports, will also announce that they are going to honor scholarships for anybody who chooses not to transfer--just to keep the PR damage to a minimum.
It would be pretty awful of the school to not honor a scholarship, but it's not like schools are prevented from doing awful things.
EDIT: Central is doing the right thing and honoring the scholarships for the track team.
In a twisted way, the bright side here is that the CMU track teams probably distributed very little scholarship money. (I do realize every little bit helps.) Non-revenue sports are typically divvying up a few scholarships among many athletes (half-rides, quarter-rides, etc. as a fraction of whatever tuition is).
If you hear someone saying "S/he got a full ride to swim at University of <whatever>" they probably have incomplete information.
Men's track and cross country combined are allowed 12.6 scholarships.
Men's cross country by itself is allowed 5 scholarships.
Central Michigan has cut exactly 7.6 scholarships by going from cross country and track to just cross country.
Interesting, thanks. Best wishes to the athletes at the short end of this.
That ratio (track:CC) seems a little imbalanced at 7.6:5. I'd guess the track team is much larger than the CC team.
You're right, except that all of those CC runners (or almost all of them) also run track, so in most cases track really has 13.6 because they don't have to give scholarships to the CC guys on the track team.
That's assuming there are spots open on other teams. My son plays D3 baseball and a couple of guys transfer or leave the team every year but if teams start taking more transfers than normal, it'll cut down on how many freshman they take. It could get a lot more competitive out there. Musical chairs.
Unfortunately for them, it may be extremely difficult to find transfer spots at this point. With all spring sports being cancelled and some schools allowing seniors to return for another year (if they so choose) as well as the incoming freshmen rosters are already spread really thin. I wish them a lot of luck in finding a new landing place.
I believe the only sports you ever had to sit out for were football and basketball to begin with.
That’s a pretty major sport to get cut...
I’m probably just biased though!
This absolutely has to be WDs alt account ....
Men's only?
Nope.
Members only.
Dude looked like a lady!
I wonder why this is happening??
/s
Hole cow!
I don't think CMU, WMU and EMU (to name three) get it: they cannot afford to be Div-I sports schools, and haven't been able to afford it for quite a long time (i.e., before COVID-19; it is just making it worse). Cutting a sport or three is not going to be enough.
There is no justification to spend $15-$25 million, every year, from a school's general fund to fund sports. Students' tuition should not be going towards track, swimming, football, etc; staff, faculty and lecturers shouldn't be cut (as they have for years) because "we don't have the money" when $10-plus million is going every year to the black hole that is the "prestige" of being in the MAC.
These schools need to drop down a level or two -- whatever is sustainable. But nibbling around the edges is not going to cut it.
At least at some sports most Michigan schools need to drop down a level or cut programs.
WMU, EMU, and CMU average about $1,000 per all students on campus every year in tuition being used to prop up their sports program. This is unethical when many kids feel priced out of college as is. If you go to EMU for 5 years you will pay $6,000 in extra tuition to prop up their sports programs...and with interest if it is on student loans. Absurd. WMU, CMU, GVSU, etc...all have similar numbers.
I think WMU and CMU could keep at Division 1 football probably. But other sports should be cut or down graded. It stinks, but the sports revenue math isn't there and it stinks worse to dump all of the burden on all of the students, many of which can barely afford it.
You can't keep Division I football and downgrade other sports. All sports must play Division I if your football & basketball teams are Division I.
What they could do, obviously, is stay in Division I but move to FCS. I think this might be the best approach for Eastern, for example. The only problem is that there is no viable conference membership option for an FCS team in this part of the country.
My understanding is that schools can be D-1 at one sport and different levels for other sports. They can't have more than 1 D-1 sport at the mens or womens level though or then they have to be D-1 across the board.
Keep it for football, which makes the most and bite the bullet on the rest.
How is it fair for all of those Michigan public schools to charge each kid on campus, most of which have nothing to do with sports, $1,000 a year - every year - so that they can prop up a sports program that can't otherwise exist without taking from all.
Both major parties agree that college costs are out of hand...well...one quick partial step is to require sports programs to be self-funding.
No, that's not quite right. Schools can "play up" in any sport except for football, basketball, and (I think) women's volleyball. If you choose to play football at the D-I level, or basketball, then everything has to be D-I.
But you can "play up" in minor sports, like lacrosse (Johns Hopkins) or hockey (Michigan Tech) or wrestling (Lock Haven), for example.
The reason they made this rule goes back to the '80s, when Dayton won multiple Division III football championships despite being a quite good D-I program in basketball. That's when the NCAA decided to ban the practice of playing up in money-making sports, because Dayton had the natural advantage of their TV & NCAA tournament money from D-I basketball.
And I still hate Dayton to this day for that!
Go Wittenberg Tigers!!!
I think it's always tricky because you could say "students shouldn't be propping up X" for a lot of different aspects of school life. Many schools have gone through massive building booms where they are constantly upgrading dorms, student recreational facilities, labs, etc. that may have limited to no impact on many students on a day-to-day basis but are part of the "fabric" of a school. Lots of departments at universities are net-losses for them from a purely economic standpoint, yet schools should and do keep them around because that's part of a school's educational mission. Now, I think the incentives and economics of trying to stay a G5 doesn't make sense for a place like EMU (I'm not sure about CMU or WMU) because they've never been able to draw enough from the revenue sports to offset expenses. But most college athletes don't play basketball or football, and simply "cutting" them so that the two sports people on this blog like to follow doesn't feel particularly fair.
A "college" paying more to make a dorm or a science lab makes sense for a school. Making kids pay $1,000 a year every year for mens wrestling and tennis kind of is more of a stretch.
It comes down to what you consider part of the college experience and what a university offers. If the goal is "pure" education that's fine, but then I'd push back at the need for dorms (most students reside off-campus anyway, and they aren't "free" to incoming students as much as part of their tuition), student workout facilities (you can join a gym), and various other "amenities" that could debatably be considered part of a school's educational mission.
Also, where does this $1k number for athletics comes from? I looked at CMU's breakdown of their tuition and I see 9% of their tuition goes to funding "activities and services to enhance your college experience, including health services (such as the campus clinic), IT support, athletics and university recreation." So assuming about $12k/year in tuition plus student service fees (which again go to a variety of sources not just athletics), we're talking about $1k total for all of those services above, not just athletics. I don't know the breakdown within the grouping but even if it's half we're talking about $500-ish dollars out of $12k. Obviously people should draw the line for these services where they want, but I'm just pushing back a bit.
This is an older article from MLive using 2014 Numbers for "per-student cost for each university's institutional support for athletics":
LSSU $1,284.60
EMU $1,219.14
WMU $1,080.53
MTU $979.15
NMU $941.76
CMU $722.07
SVSU $692.19
Oakland $557.60
GVSU $486.12
WSU $440.48
Ferris State $403.23
MSU $14.02
UofM $6.04
If a stadium/arena at CMU needs work done, they don't take it out of the athletic dept's revenue stream, they take it out of the general fund for the school.
Students are funding the sports programs. Is this right?
GVSU admits in the article that they have to charge ALL students more to prop up sports, but are proud that they charge ~half of what the MAC schools do to their students.
MAC schools take money that the State of Michigan gives them that is flexible for "education" but without earmarks and spends it on their sports programs. Is that right?
If CMU required their sports program to be self-funding they could in fact lower tuition for their students by $722 a year as they could put the funds and resources they ship from non-sports sources to education.
"It's an issue at Western, too, where, according to federal figures, 66 percent of undergraduates borrow an average of $7,566 per year. Its faculty also is raising concerns.
"Every time resources are diverted away from instruction, whether it's for athletics or for anything else, it becomes more challenging for faculty and staff to find ways to continue to honor the university's academic mission," Minnick said.
"... I think the biggest concern for faculty is the extent to which the financial burden for subsidizing the football program is shouldered by our students," she said. "What are the ethics of passing these costs on to students?""
If they held a public vote at a school like WMU with only 2 options...(A) Continue on the same path or (B) force sports to be self-funding and that might mean teams get cut or downgraded a division to allow tuition to drop $1,000 a year per students... I'd bet money option B would win.
I don't think it's tricky at all. As you said, the purpose of a university is an education; thus you can have a great university without any scholarship sports. Having a yearly, multi-million dollar loss for scholarship athletics at a university is deeply wrong.
I would need evidence that sports would be any less part of the fabric of the school if the track team (or swimming or baseball etc) was Division III. I don't see how Hope or Adrian or Olivet are harmed in anyway, fabric-wise, by having their sports at that level compared to WMU/EMU/CMU thinking they "need" to have their sports be DivI.
And regarding fairness: my entire point is that this is more than just swimming or track -- EMU et al needed to completely re-think athletics. Go to FCS, DivII, DivIII -- it all should be on the table. But stop spending $15 million a year (or more) on scholarship sports.
The justification, at least for football and basketball, is that college sports makes for effective marketing. Where we see MACtion as a Tuesday night time killer, CMU sees a four-hour national commercial.
It's an older article, but there's correlations between sports success and an increase in undergraduate applications:
... which increases the quantity and and quality of the student body. Now, whether that marketing campaign needs to be tied to student fees to be successful, that's a question I can't answer.
But there are many fine academic institutions that don't get their sports teams on TV ever. Maybe is these schools focus on being better at school they would be just as attractive to HS students.
Per the MLive article, schools like the MAC will take money from the State of Michigan government for education that have no strings attached and dump it into their sports programs.
UofM and MSU do not do this. I find it unethical that this happens at the other public universities.
Thing is we have a couple colleges that could make the leap from D2 to 1AA if only there were schools near them. Drop the directionals a level jump Wayne Grand Valley Saginaw Valley and find a couple more and you have a conference right there.
Don’t forget the 2016 football season. Record against Big Ten:
MSU: 1-8
WMU: 2-0
WMU lost to Wisconsin in their bowl game that year.
The point is math.
MSU sports funds MSU sports.
Every WMU student pays over $1,000 in extra tuition every year to fund WMU sports while college costs soar.
Yes, men's only.... Scholarships will be honored not only for current students, but incoming recruits as well. Immediate transfers will be allowed.
https://cmuchippewas.com/news/2020/5/19/general-cmu-athletics-announces-program-changes.aspx
This is very sad. CMU has produced a lot of national class and near olympic type runners over the decades. It will no doubt weaken the MAC conference. I hope that when things eventually get back normal, perhaps 2021-22 school year, T&F will get reinstated.
Sad to see many colleges are trimming certain other sports from their athletic programs.
Soon there will be no athletic scholarships. Players of the revenue sports will get paid and deservedly so.
They should just cut all women's sports
They should just cut all women's sports