Disruption
to football season would be
very bad for all of college sports
(Note: This story
was pieced together. There's a possibility it was not re-pieced correctly or
some parts of it were inadvertently omitted.)
By
Will Hobson and Emily Giambalvo
Washington
Post
April
11th, 2020
As Iowa State Athletic Director
Jamie Pollard talked with peers and reporters about the novel coronavirus this
month, he used a weather-based analogy to describe how the pandemic could
affect his department’s finances.
If the crisis subsides soon, Pollard
said, it could be akin to a bad blizzard. If it delays the beginning of the
football season, it could be like a long, hard winter. And if the pandemic
forces the cancellation of the football season?
“It’s an ice age,” Pollard said in a
phone interview. “I don’t know how any of us, how the current NCAA model, could
survive if we’re not playing any football games.”
Just four weeks after the pandemic
forced the cancellation of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments
and other sports, athletic directors, conference commissioners and network
executives are turning their attention to the upcoming football season. In
interviews this week, several athletic directors and college sports officials
acknowledged a distressing reality: A canceled football season would cost the
industry billions, forcing athletic directors to consider layoffs, drastic pay
cuts and potentially canceling so-called Olympic or nonrevenue sports.
“Everything is on the table,”
Pollard said. “It’s hard today to wrap your head around how challenging that
would be if we can’t play any football games. . . . We’d essentially be
bankrupt.”
How long until sports can return?
You might not like the answer.
Iowa State’s annual athletics budget
hovers around $90 million, and about 75 percent of its revenue comes from
football, Pollard said. To deal with a $5 million drop in this school year’s
revenue created by the coronavirus-related cancellations, Pollard already has
instituted an across-the-board 10 percent pay cut for all coaches and athletic
department employees. But he said that wouldn’t come close to helping deal with
plummeting revenue in the 2020-21 school year if no football is played, which
is why hybrid season models are under discussion.
“There’s a lot of really smart
people out there who will do everything humanly possible to try to find a way
to play some or all of the football games,” Pollard said.
For the past few weeks, Tom
McMillen, chief executive of Lead1 — a nonprofit that represents the 130
schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision — has had regular virtual happy hours
with small groups of athletic directors, sipping wine and discussing how the
coronavirus might affect the football season.
They weighed the pros and cons of
options that included delaying the season into spring 2021 and relocating games
to regions of the country where the pandemic has been contained, as well as the
potential impact if the season is lost entirely.
“The optimistic view here is that we
will get this under control and this is not like the Great Depression that went
on and on,” McMillen said. “But there’s going to be some type of change or
impact, no question about it.”
Even if the season kicks off as
scheduled Aug. 29, McMillen said, many athletic directors expect some type of
effect on their bottom line because of fears of a resurgence.
Some experts have said it is
possible new coronavirus infections could taper off in the summer before
returning in the fall and winter, similar to the timeline of the 1918-1919 flu
pandemic. In Italy, a Feb. 19 professional soccer game in Milan was identified
as a potential “super spreader” event, helping ignite the coronavirus crisis in
that country.
“It’s probably going to take a while
for people to feel comfortable sitting close to each other in a stadium or
arena again,” McMillen said.
Ticket sales are just one of several
revenue streams that could be impacted by coronavirus concerns, McMillen and
others noted. A struggling economy probably would affect donations. Several
schools delayed deadlines for donations required to secure football season
tickets.
“It’s borderline immoral to be
soliciting money from people, given what some folks in our country are going
through,” said Tulane Athletic Director Troy Dannen, whose department normally
is ramping up its fundraising operations in April, May and June as people renew
season tickets.
Many athletic departments,
particularly those outside the wealthier Power Five conferences supported by
lucrative television contracts, depend on mandatory student fees that probably
would be waived if students aren’t on campus.
At the University of Central
Florida, a roughly $172 fee assessed to every full-time undergraduate student
on campus provides more than $23 million of the athletic department’s $68
million in annual revenue.
“The financial model of major
college athletics is built around the revenue we generate in those three
months,” said UCF Athletic Director Danny White, referring to the football
season. “There is no financial solution to solve that if [the football season]
doesn’t happen.”
Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy says his
team needs to play for benefit of state economy
A handful of the wealthiest programs
have substantial reserve funds saved that could help mitigate the financial
pain. Georgia’s athletic department has more than $100 million in a reserve
fund, a school spokesman said in an email.
But across the landscape of major
college sports — where athletic departments routinely spend every dollar they
earn, plowing income gains back into rising salaries for coaches or new
facilities to impress donors and recruits — few schools have rainy day funds at
all, let alone reserves as large as Georgia's.
“They typically don’t do a great job
creating a huge buffer of savings they can grab in times like these. . . . They
do typically make more money each year, but then they go right out and spend
it,” said Daniel Rascher, an economics professor at the University of San
Francisco and president of consulting firm SportsEconomics.
Some conferences also have reserve
funds, but the sums are not enough to mitigate the losses that would be felt at
each school in the event of a lost season. The SEC, for example, reported $25.4
million in savings and another $59.3 million in investments in its most recent
financial filing to the IRS. At Alabama, just one of the 14 SEC schools,
football generated $95.2 million of the athletic department’s $164.1 million of
revenue in 2019, school records show.
Spokespeople for the SEC, Pac-12,
Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 all declined to comment or did not respond to requests
to comment for this story.
“A situation with more questions
than answers right now,” wrote Herb Vincent, associate commissioner for
communications at the SEC, in an email declining an interview request.
Sporting events should be among the
final parts of everyday life to return, not the first.
While the football season is not
scheduled to begin for more than four months, social distancing mandates would
need to be relaxed well in advance for the season to begin on time.
Most teams begin preseason camp
around Aug. 1, and schools probably would need to know at least a few weeks in
advance, potentially as early as by July 1, whether they have the all-clear to
have their football players and coaches begin making arrangements to be on
campus.
Iowa State’s Pollard emphasized the
tremendous uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic at this point,
expressing hope the season would begin as scheduled while acknowledging the
possibility predicted by some experts that pro and college sports won’t return
until 2021.
He also noted that, in the grand
scheme of things, if college football can’t be played this fall and winter, it
probably means there are far more significant problems confronting the nation.
“If we’re not playing college
football … that probably means the economy in the United States is a lot worse
off than it is today,” Pollard said.
“So the pain we would feel in
college athletics may be minuscule compared to what our country would be
feeling.”
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