All of those are probably accurate. If schools don't make these moves, the sport probably gets cut altogether. UCLA was over $100 million in debt with a very poor financial outlook. Which would cause more mental health? A long flight or them cutting your sport? This as much about survival as it is greed.
I don't disagree with that really but a deficit has at least 2 causes right? They spent too much and the product didn't sell! They didn't plan for the kind of reserve that would survive a pandemic or some crap years or a failed contract for gear with Under Armour (in the case of ucla). The more this goes on, the more I appreciate the Big East for actually scaling back and keeping the identify of their institutions. They didn't get drunk on football money. If I had an elite soccer daughter these days (that was not a NT pool player), I'd be looking at the Ivies, the Patriot, the WCC, or the Big East. Good academic schools that didn't get sucked into the football tv hurricane. I have lost any sympathy I may have had for the P5 and the chaos they have caused.
Good post. I will say that a few times throughout the NCAA's history there have been some major changes and the narrative was always that it was the end of the NCAA. This does feel pretty significant. I am a big NCAA sports fan in general and really hope that these changes end up being positive. The gap between the P5 (or really the super 2) and everyone else is going to huge. Will those schools use that money in a way that benefits the athletes or will they go into debt mismanaging it like UCLA? If they do, the gap may get even bigger than it already is.
If survival were the issue, fiscal responsibility would go a long way towards fixing that. 3.5 million for a coach who can’t get the team in the top half of the conference ……really? you can’t fill the seats in any conference with those results. They will be near the bottom of the B1G.
It might be huge in Football, but the Olympic sports gap isn’t so great. All that money just goes to more expenses in the Revenue sport. The truth is the majority of P5 schools lose money in football. If you don’t make a bowl you are fiscally toast for the year. It’s why UCLA and USC are losing money in the first place. If you win Natalional championships the TV money follows, as the SEC has shown. mismanaging your budget can’t be fixed no matter how much TV money you throw at it.
Sally Jenkins goes off in the Washington Post. Worth a read (you can use the 'reader' view to see through the paywall sometimes). Problem is all the folks who feel disappointed right now are not the one's holding all the cash. The one's with the cash feel just fine... College football was betrayed by the adults who were supposed to protect it Sally Jenkins The current state of college football is this: Across the nation, paunchy over-exalted ticket managers who title themselves athletic directors are racing in ungainly circles trying to find a padded, covering seat for their butts in a game of musical chairs. For years they cried that name, image and likeness payments to players would be a threat to the game’s tradition and uniqueness. It’s nothing compared to the destruction wrought by these administrative gluttons with their combination of treachery and ineptitude, who would give away a century to grab a television minute. @PostSports This “new landscape” of college football is not new at all but rather the black decay of a half century of totally unrestrained commercialization by the administrators. Sally Jenkins wapo.st/3yUGXPk
This is a lie perpetuated to not pay players and by academics that are upset by the vast amounts of money spent on athletics. These programs, especially P5 schools, are not losing money.
Well, as someone who worked at SC and knows the folks at UCLA fairly well, I can tell you these two schools’ athletics departments are badly mismanaged and amount of deficit they both have are quite excessive. In any case, they could not have shown how much they don’t value any sports other than football by making this move and I am disappointed to say the least.
I just read that UCLA has been averaging just over 45,000 fans at its home football games in the years since 2017. That's down by about 20,000 fans a game from the years 2010/12 (or so) to 2017. This suggests that a significant factor in UCLA's athletic budget deficit is the crappy state of its football program--which probably applies to USC as well. If your football program is in poor shape, your athletic department will be in bad shape, given that football generates the lion's share of every schools athletic revenue and pays the department's freight. SEC schools have double the attendance. That's a big revenue difference, not to mention the gap in broadcast rights contracts between SEC/Big 10 and Pac10. I think the Pac10 football generally has deteriorated, and particularly so at the southern California schools.
Well, UCLA just joined the BiG because of a well documented $100+ Million debt accumulated over just three years of budget deficit. https://frontofficesports.com/ucla-move-to-big-ten-might-save-sports-from-being-cut/ I’m betting they won’t be out of debt for long. Even Rutgers despite being in that conference last year went into debt for $35 million despite a $25 million loan from the university and increased in student activity fees.The median accumulated debt for Big Ten schools grew from $133.3 million in 2014 to $164.5 million in 2019 This is since the last round of conference realignments and masssive TV deals that was supposed to make the coffers of athletic departments richer than Croesus. And they aren’t alone https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2022/college-athletic-debt-soars-1234651231/
What is a lie? From 2019 a majority (40:65) of P5 athletic departments were in the red and all D1 programs outside of the P5 were. https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/a...on I includes 97,median loss of $14.4 million.
You forgot to add that the following conferences lost money in 2021 when there was an insatiable hunger for NFL & College Football: Big-10, Big-12, MAC, MW, Pac-12, & Sun Belt. Reference: Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database https://knightnewhousedata.org/fbs And this is before we start classifying college football athletes as employees of the universities and paying them salaries and benefits. The key question: How many of the 25 schools that aren't in the BIG or SEC Super-Conferences will remain profitable after 2024? This should have included this in previous posts: " In total, then, only 25 of the approximately 1,100 schools across 102 conferences in the NCAA made money on college sports last year. That's because the cost of running an entire athletics program, which can feature as many as 40 sports, almost always exceeds the revenue generated by the marquee attractions of football and basketball." Reference: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/a...I includes 97,median loss of $14.4 million???
Paying players has always been an absurd idea pitched by the usual activists, who always fail to mention the value of a free four/five year college education for players in the sport that the activists like to focus on--namely, football and basketball. It's the same activists who are always clamoring for people to be given things at no cost. Nearly all money generated by the revenue sports is used to subsidize all the non-revenue sports. You learn that if activists browbeat others long enough, they'll cave.