New Mexico to Miss Out on Huge Payday with USC

New Mexico needs money for its programs so losing a million bucks for the USC game being canceled is bad.

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New Mexico to Miss Out on Huge Payday with USC

Lobos will miss out on seven-figure.

Contact/Follow Josh Webb @FightOnTwist

The Mountain West’s New Mexico Lobos will miss out on a substantial payday with the USC Trojans as a result of the USC Trojans moving to a conference-only schedule for the upcoming 2020 football season.

Per Geoff Grammer of the Albuquerque Journal, the New Mexico Lobos will miss out on a $1,050,000 payday on September 19th, $100,000 of which was already paid to the Lobos to help out with previous budget shortfalls. That money was paid to the Lobos in 2016.

The Trojans and the Pac-12 were the latest to announce that they would be only playing conference games to reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure. The idea behind conference-only schedules is that it makes it easier for the school to do track and tracing should an athlete come down with the virus.

The loss of a substantial payday hitting the small Mountain West school is going to have a substantial effect on their ability to maintain the status quo in the athletic department. Numerous schools around the nation have had to trim their athletic department as a result of the budget shortfalls. 

The University of Stanford, an Ivy League West school with a massive endowment of $27.7 billion dollar endowment had to trim 11 varsity sports as a result of the Coronavirus. They’re hardly the only school to make trims and adjustments as a result of the pandemic.

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It’s hit smaller schools even harder. That $100,000 payday can mean the difference between another season of soccer and cutting the sport entirely. We’ve yet to see how this will actually affect Stanford, but we should know shortly enough. 

The Mountain West is already in a precarious position within the new larger framework of college sports in the modern environment. Though they are one of the larger Group of Five conferences, they still have schools struggling to make ends meet with sports finances.

These types of financial blows are unsustainable in the larger scheme of things, even if they can absorb a one-off. Here’s to hoping the Lobos and Trojans can make up this date at a later time so New Mexico doesn’t end up completely out of the money.

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